The SSS-rank Guide Doesn't Need Saving

Several minutes later, the path had become a slaughterhouse.

Zeke’s fist moved without pause, each strike landing with the force of a collapsing mountain. Their bones made a crunching sound as the carapace covering their bodies split open like an apple.

Purple-black ichor sprayed widely across the frozen ground in ugly arcs, only to be vacated and filled in a heartbeat by another creature, and another, and another. The path had become a living wall of gnashing teeth and glowing fins, an endless tide that showed no sign of thinning no matter how many he cut down.

He had actually fought worse than this. Zeke remembered facing a corrupted behemoth three times his height, its hide so dense that even his gravity-warping strikes had barely scratched the surface, and he had won that fight alone. He had also cut through packs of lesser monsters numbering in the dozens without breaking a sweat. Their strength and size had never been what worried him.

But this wasn’t about their strength or size.

The creatures in the tunnel-like path numbered beyond what a human being could count, a swarm that behaved like insects boiling out of a disturbed nest—aggressive, mindless, and utterly without fear of death.

It didn’t matter how many he crushed. More of them kept coming, climbing over the corpses of their own kind just to reach him.

As for the Type 4 miasma coating their teeth, that wasn’t what concerned him either. So long as their jaws never found purchase in his flesh, the miasma was nothing more than an unpleasant parasite lurking around. He had endured far worse exposure than this and walked away unscathed.

An hour passed. Maybe more. Time had a way of losing its meaning in a place like this.

And that was when Zeke realized something was wrong.

He had been moving forward, expecting at any moment to find an opening that would allow him some breather and possibly meet his missing squad members or a survivor. But an hour of fighting and weaving through the dark had brought him somewhere else.

Instead, a wide, hollowed chamber ringed with smaller tunnels branching off in every direction, dozens of them, packed close together like the cells of a honeycomb appeared before him.

Zeke stopped in the center of the chamber. His eyes swept over each opening in turn, counting them and measuring the distance between one and the next.

Then, a frown finally settled over his features.

Anyone else standing where he stood, surrounded by a warren of unknown tunnels with no clear path back, might have felt cold stirrings of panic. It was the kind of place designed to make a person question every step they’d taken to get there and wonder if they were already lost beyond recovery.

But Zeke felt none of that.

His expression remained as composed as it had been the moment he stepped into the annexed zone, the same steady calm that had carried him through Gwen’s death, and the same coldness that witnessed Galithe’s demise. It was the same composure that made him fit to lead.

Behind him, the swarm that had been chasing him through the tunnel finally caught up, spilling into the chamber in a wave of midnight-purple bodies. With the large space in the chamber, he didn’t have to worry about having no space to fight in.

However... what worried him was the sound that followed them.

From every one of those honeycomb tunnels, a chittering and scraping noise rose in unison. Low at first, before it swelled into a chorus that bounced off the ice walls from all sides at once.

Zeke’s jaw tightened.

These things weren’t slow. He’d already seen how they moved, covering distance in explosive leaps. If even one of those tunnels emptied out at once, he would be surrounded within seconds with nowhere left to retreat.

There was no time to think of another way. He had to seal them in before they could reach him.

Zeke’s power surged outward, gravity bending around each tunnel mouth in rapid succession. Translucent walls of warped space snapped into place one after another, folding the air itself into barriers dense enough to stop a charging monster from coming out.

He moved with brutal efficiency. His focus split a dozen different ways at once, sealing one opening then another. His control stretched taut like a bowstring pulled to its very limit.

For a moment, it looked as though it might actually work.

Then the swarm surged.

Not from one tunnel, but from several at once. They were too fast and too many, packed too close together for even his precision to catch every single gap in time. Hundreds of creatures slipped through the seams before the walls could fully close, their bodies twisting through the narrowing space.

Zeke narrowed his eyes.

He crushed the nearest creature to slip past his guard, crawling beneath his boot. He stomped his foot down, a wet, splitting crunch echoing through the chamber as it burst under the weight of his heel. At the same time, another wall of gravity rose around his own body.

With this, it could buy him time before he dealt with the rest.

But then—

A sudden, searing pain lanced through his chest. Violent and sharp enough to steal the air from his lungs. Zeke lurched forward, one hand flying instinctively to grip at the fabric over his chest.

For the first time, his composure had formed a crack since he had entered the zone.

He could feel the miasma blocking crystal churning inside him.

But there was no time to think about that, because the creatures were already crashing against the barriers he had erected everywhere.

His hand flew back to hold them in place, his focus returning to the tunnels that were now drenched in midnight-purple that occasionally glowed. The tunnels had now been filled with these creatures.

Zeke couldn’t afford to lose his focus now.

But it was harder to keep using his power now.

Because he was showing signs of Rampage.