Kael strutted over to the Blood Stalker's corpse with all the swagger of a man pretending he hadn't nearly soiled himself mid-battle.
Kael strutted over to the Blood Stalker's corpse with all the swagger of a man pretending he hadn't nearly soiled himself mid-battle. His heart thumped against his ribs—not with fear, for once, but anticipation. This was a first for him. A real kill. Not the bottom-of-the-barrel fodder like infernal imps, marsh wolves, or those twitchy little bastards known as vex mice. No, this was something with fangs, tendrils, acid spit, and a body count.
And he had killed it.
Standing before the grotesque, rubbery corpse, Kael suddenly felt small again. The type of small that made your skin crawl. Just the thought of being devoured by this oversized mutant venus flytrap sent a pleasant shiver racing down his spine. That could've been him, melted into goo, digested slowly over several days. Yay, existential horror.
He opened his dimensional pocket with a flick of his wrist and pulled out his heavy-duty gloves—the kind that could survive acid, fire, or an angry girlfriend. Then came the glass vials. One by one, he filled them with the Blood Stalker's bile-like acid, careful not to let even a droplet touch his skin. Stuff like this was liquid gold: used in poisons, high-tier healing serums, and even stripping rust off corroded ship hulls. Gotta love versatility.
Next came the blood—dark, thick, and sludgy. Kael filled a few more vials, then moved on to the teeth and vines. Each snip and cut felt weirdly satisfying, like carving a trophy out of trauma.
He was just about to perform the final extraction when a voice exploded in his mind.
"Congratulations on slaying your first high-level monster."
Kael let out a shriek worthy of a horror movie extra and almost slipped on a twitching vine. He spun around with wide eyes, heart pounding against his ribcage like it was trying to escape his body.
"What the—Eva! You nearly made me piss my pants!" he hissed, finding no one behind him.
A soft giggle echoed through his head. "Sorry for scaring you like that, but I didn't want to interrupt your heroic moment back there."
Kael muttered something unsavory under his breath. Of course, his AI companion was a sadistic little gremlin. That tracked.
Still crouched low, he scanned the ruined street. Broken cars, scorched pavement, and death. Classic ambiance. He wasn't being paranoid—okay, he was, but that didn't mean he was wrong. Hunters got jumped all the time for their loot. Kael was no exception. He'd just gotten too swept up in the high of victory to remember that little survival tip.
Eva's unexpected call-in had proven that point nicely.
"It's fine," he muttered as he rose, stuffing his harvested goods back into his dimensional pocket. "I should've been more careful... Wait, how are you even talking to me right now?"
"We're linked, Kael. That mark on the back of your hand? It lets the forge's influence bleed into this world. So, yeah—we've got a mental hotline now. Just try not to talk out loud too much. People will think you're insane."
Kael groaned. Great. An omnipresent AI hitchhiker with no volume control. Exactly what his mental health needed. Still, he turned back to the corpse, now twitching less violently. With a sigh, he placed his gloved hand on the creature's hide—rubbery, slimy, and just barely warm.
"Cultivate," he commanded.
The Blood Stalker shimmered, its form breaking apart into motes of pale blue light like dissolving fireflies. Glittering particles swirled, coalescing into a bright orb—but then something unexpected happened. The energy split.
One orb was gold. Familiar. The creature's core, no doubt. But the other... the other was a deep, metallic red, slightly pulsing, almost alive.
"Huh," Kael muttered. "That's new."
"That's Bloodsteel Iron," Eva supplied. "A byproduct of vampiric-type enemies. They absorb iron from their victims' blood, fuse it with their own essence, and voilà—you get this little freak of metallurgy."
Kael's eyes widened. "Is it rare?"
"Uncommon. Not super rare, but valuable. Bloodsteel is used to forge weapons that siphon life from enemies and get stronger the more they feed. Also provides mild health regen to the user."
So... bloodthirsty metal that liked to drink. Cute.
Kael felt a pinch of disappointment. He'd hoped for something legendary, maybe even a material that would scream when you hit it. But no—this was still good. Very good. Better than the dime-store alloys he'd used over the years.
He reached out and grasped the orb. It was cold—unnaturally so. A chill sank into his bones as soon as his fingers wrapped around it. Then came the bite.
[Warning: Life-Leeching Detected! HP: 1529/1530]
Kael flinched. "Ow! Okay, okay—I get it. You're hungry."
He squinted at the orb, which pulsed slightly in his hand like a tiny, angry heart. Of course it leeches health. Why wouldn't it? Bloodsteel, after all. It wasn't called Friendsteel.
Kael quickly stuffed the bloodsucking metal orb into his dimensional pocket before it could drain any more of his life juice. The thing was practically purring with hunger. One day, he'd figure out how to beat it into something useful—preferably something sharp and pointy.
He turned his attention to the real prize. The Blood Stalker's core.
Bigger than anything he'd pulled from the usual trash mobs he hunted, the core pulsed faintly in his gloved hand—a pale crimson crystal, cool to the touch and completely flawless. Not a single crack. No fractures. No sad spider-web lines running through it like all the other broken hand-me-down cores he'd collected over the years. This one practically sparkled.
Kael stared at it like it had just offered him a mortgage-free house and a stable income. "Well, slap my ass and call me blessed."
"That's because your cultivation ability was dormant before your evolution," Eva chimed in, voice smug in that know-it-all way only an AI could perfect. "Now that your power is fully active, you'll have a higher chance of extracting intact cores and discovering rare metals during each cultivation."
Kael couldn't help the slow, shit-eating grin that spread across his face. His reflection danced in the core's smooth surface. This thing was worth more than everything he'd sold in the past two years combined—and it wasn't even the rarest kind. The fact he could get something rarer now made his pessimistic little heart stutter with something dangerously close to hope.
Maybe, just maybe, his life wouldn't be a steaming pile of misery forever.
The core would fetch a decent price on the market. Hell, it'd probably even get him a roof with plumbing and food that didn't come in dehydrated packets. But selling it felt... wrong. No—he needed this one. He'd use it to forge his first construct. Something strong. Something that didn't disintegrate the moment things got dicey.
He looked back toward where the Blood Stalker's corpse had been just moments ago. Now, only a wide, gaping hole remained—the result of its root system burrowing deep through the earth. The cultivation process had atomized the body, leaving nothing behind but dirt and regret.
Kael frowned.
"So... if I cultivate a monster, I lose the body," he muttered. "But if I want the corpse intact for forging constructs, I have to drag the damn thing back manually and give up on harvesting the core and metals." He sighed, already imagining the back pain.
"Correct," Eva confirmed. "Power has its price, Kael. You'll need to weigh each kill carefully."
"Fantastic," he grumbled, pocketing the core with a reluctant sigh. "Decisions. My favorite."
He took one last look at the crater, then turned away and made his way out of the crumbling ruins. The air was thick with the smell of charred vegetation and acid, but the streets were silent. Still, he moved cautiously. The last thing he needed was another hunter showing up with stars in their eyes and a knife in their back pocket.
As he walked, Kael rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. Yeah, he'd suffer a bit. He'd lug bodies and fight parasites and maybe bleed a little (or a lot). But the payoff was coming. He could feel it. No more scraping by. From now on, he was building monsters.
And he'd make damn sure they were scarier than the ones he killed.
🐺⚙️"༒ The Howl of the Forsaken ༒"⚙️🐺
Kael rushed through the empty streets of the derelict city at four times his usual speed, vaulting over rubble and overturned cars like a man with a purpose—and maybe a death wish. The wind howled between the decaying towers, rattling rusted steel girders and whispering secrets best left unheard. Spores pulsed ominously on the sides of buildings, their sickly green glow barely visible in the dull, overcast light. Spore pods. He gave them a wide berth, knowing full well what happened to the last fool, who got curious. Spoiler: he melted. Messily.
The streets were eerily quiet. Most of the Hunters had already made their way to the nearest rifts, disappearing in clusters like moths to an eldritch flame. Only a complete idiot would go into a rift alone. Kael, however, wasn't just any idiot—he was a well-trained, pessimistic one. Lucky for him, he hadn't been suicidal enough to try soloing a rift before now. Not that anyone had ever invited him. Being a defective half-breed with a curse and a past was apparently the fastest way to get ghosted by every Hunter squad in the city.
But things had changed. Not anymore, he thought with a bitter smirk. Let them laugh now.
Of course, rifts were also creature magnets. Beasts, aberrations, the occasional acid-spitting drake—they all gathered around the dimensional tears, drawn by the raw energy bleeding from the fabric of space.
Rifts came in flavors, each more horrific than the last: white, green, yellow, orange, red, purple, and black. White was your standard E-rank pocket dimension—baby's first dungeon, if you will. The term "dungeon" was a joke. There were no treasure chests or sword-wielding skeletons. These were otherworldly hellholes temporarily tethered to their world via reality's worst glitch.
The ARC Division—those charming bureaucrats with guns and zero sense of humor—handled inspections and slapped ratings on rifts before anyone could legally enter. And by "legally," they meant "without getting vaporized by a Rift Reaper patrol."
Oh, and killing the boss monster inside a rift? It didn't close the rift. Yeah, that was another lie they sold rookies. The ARC Division monitored the energy bleed, waiting for the rift to destabilize naturally. Until then, it was just a gaping wound in space-time, waiting to spew nightmares.
[Warning! Rift space detected. Proceed with caution.]
Kael skidded to a halt at the edge of an ancient trapezoidal channel, once a waterway, now just another scar on the earth. The bridges had long since crumbled into the depths, reduced to jagged concrete teeth jutting from the slope.
There it was.
At the base of the channel, nestled like a cancerous pearl, shimmered the rift. A jagged tear in the fabric of reality, swirling with iridescent hues that made Kael's skin crawl just by looking at it. A horde of creatures loitered near its edges, some pacing, others twitching like addicts waiting for their next fix.
Kael ducked behind a broken concrete wall and crouched, eyes narrowing. The stench hit him immediately—rancid meat, sulfur, and something that reminded him of burned plastic. Filthy. Just filthy.
Infernal imps roamed the area, little demonic rat-goblins with jagged teeth and a shared brain cell between them. They waved crude bone clubs, chattering and yipping at each other as they fought over scraps or territory. Cannibalistic, too. He'd seen it before—one would get a little too cocky, get knocked out, and then suddenly everyone else decided he looked delicious. One spark, and it was a full-on blood frenzy.
Kael grimaced. Idiots, all of them. He settled in and began forming a plan. He wasn't going in blind. Not this time. And if things went to hell, well... he could always improvise. Like always.