Read Novel Full Chapter 761: Hell-Mode Quest Begins
Chapter 761: Hell-Mode Quest Begins
"Destroy our decks?" Noah nearly choked on his drink. "For what?"
"I think I get it." Maya looked at Natalia, working it through out loud. "We finished all five of our decks already. That door’s closed. The only way to put real hardship on ourselves again, the kind that pushes past a limit, is to go backward first. Destroy all five. Start from nothing."
"That’s right." Natalia’s eyes narrowed, and something resolute burned behind them. "We let the four of them go first. Then we do it. We ask John to point us at the worst trial, cave, or dungeon he knows, and we start over from the bottom. We have the resources to climb fast. We just need the will to go past where we stopped."
"I like it." Kira smiled, slow and certain. "I’m in."
Jian, Kayla, Emma, and Julian arrived at the table right as she said it.
"And were you going to tell the rest of us about this, or not?" Emma asked, pouting.
"I like it too, Nats." Julian’s fist clenched on the table. "I never reached X-rank, no matter how hard I pushed. This might be the only door left for people like me."
Nobody at the table disagreed. Nobody even tried.
---
Ten days passed the way rest always did, too quickly for the people enjoying it and exactly on schedule for the world that had granted it.
The counter over the gathering ground reached its final hour while the family was still scattered across the Gilded Horizon, and every one of them felt the change land at once, gentle as a hand on the shoulder and just as impossible to ignore.
Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen were together when it happened, sharing a last quiet drink on the terrace above the falls.
None of them got to finish it.
[Hell-Mode Quest: Rumble in Resort]
[Participants: 183 X-rankers | Tier-40 and below.]
In one second, all one hundred and eighty-three of them vanished, wherever in the layer they happened to be standing.
In the next second, all of them landed together in a white expanse that had no walls, no floor anyone could name, and no horizon at all.
[Welcome, X-rankers. The souls who carry the smallest chance of ascension toward the truth.]
The voice arrived inside every skull at once, and with it came a screen only each listener could see.
[If you win this event, you may elevate yourself, and everyone in your Kingdom, to Tier-40.]
[Event Details: All 183 of you will be placed inside a resort. Each area of the resort follows its own rules. Hidden within those rules are traps leading into separate dimensions, home to monsters ranked Normal Tier-100 through Epic Tier-100. Each dimension holds one Rumble Coin. The resort holds one hundred areas in total, and one hundred coins to be claimed. Compete with each other while obeying the rules of wherever you stand. Collect coins. When all coins are claimed, whoever holds the most will be declared the winner.]
[Once again: death within this event is final. Nothing will revive you. The only way to leave alive without dying is to withdraw.]
[All the best.]
A ten-second countdown lit the white above them, and then the expanse folded open like a curtain drawn back, and the resort swallowed all one hundred and eighty-three of them whole.
---
They landed together in an entrance hall built from warm gold light and marble that had no visible seams, four familiar faces among a crowd of strangers who were, for the length of this quest, also rivals.
"No walls dividing this part, at least," Rudra said, reading the space the way he read every battlefield he’d ever stood in. "That won’t last."
"It won’t," Almond agreed. "A hundred areas means a hundred doors somewhere close by. We’ll find them faster split up than crowded together."
Lily was already watching the strangers scattering in every direction, her expression unreadable. "Then we split the way we always do."
"Almond and Lily," Rudra said. "Ainen and I."
Nobody argued the pairing. It had worked for a year and a lifetime already, and none of them saw a reason to fix what wasn’t broken on the first day of the deadliest thing they’d ever entered.
"First coin," Ainen said, already moving toward a doorway on the far side of the hall. "Whoever finds theirs first buys the next round when we’re all old and boring."
"You’ll lose that bet," Rudra said, following him.
"I usually do."
---
The door Rudra and Ainen chose opened onto a banquet hall with no visible end, a single table running the length of it, set with more dishes than any kingdom could eat in a year.
A plaque stood at the threshold, engraved in careful gold script.
*No dish leaves this table unfinished. No guest leaves this table unfed.*
"Simple enough," Ainen said, though his eyes had already gone sharp and professional, scanning the endless spread the way he scanned any kitchen he walked into for the first time. "Every dish here is real. Whoever built this room understood food."
"Which means the trap isn’t in the food," Rudra said.
"No." Ainen moved down the table slowly, tasting nothing, touching nothing, reading instead with the same careful attention Almond brought to essence and Ainen brought to everything that could be eaten. "It’s in what isn’t food."
He found it four tables down, a single silver dome sitting among a dozen identical ones, lids that should have held roasted birds or glazed fruit or any of the dozen honest things surrounding it.
This one held nothing. Not empty in the ordinary sense. Empty the way a held breath was empty, waiting for something to fill it.
"There," Ainen said quietly. "That’s not a dish. That’s a door wearing a dish’s shape."
Rudra’s hand rested near his blade without quite drawing it. "Only one way to find out if you’re right."
Ainen lifted the dome, and the whole banquet hall folded away into gold light behind them.
---
The door Almond and Lily chose opened onto a sitting room smaller than the banquet hall but no less strange, dozens of low tables spread with porcelain cups, steam curling faint and endless from every one of them.
A plaque stood here too, the same careful gold script.
*Guests of this room speak only when spoken to, and touch only what has been finished.*
"Polite, and precise," Lily murmured, already reading the room the way she read everything, listening for the note under its silence. "Every cup is full. Every cup is steaming. Nothing here looks finished at all."
"Then something here is lying," Almond said.
He moved through the tables slowly, the way he’d once moved through a hundred regions of a Legendary cave, reading each cup down to the single truth sitting at its core. Most of them were exactly what they appeared to be, tea steeping toward a flavor it would never quite reach, endlessly warm, endlessly full.
Near the room’s far wall, at a table set for one, he found a cup that wasn’t lying about anything.
It sat cool and dry at the bottom, no steam rising from it at all, drained down to the last honest drop by someone or something that had finished it a long time ago.
"This one’s actually empty," Almond said quietly. "Everything else in this room is pretending. This is the only cup telling the truth."
Lily’s eyes had gone sharp and interested. "That’s the rule, then. Finished, not full. The room hides its one honest object among a hundred beautiful lies."
"Only one way to find out if I’m right," Almond said, echoing words he didn’t know Rudra had spoken in a different room at the exact same moment, and reached out and closed his hand around the empty cup.
The porcelain was warm despite the cold tea inside it, warm the way a held door is warm from the hand about to open it, and the moment his fingers closed fully around the cup, the whole sitting room folded away into gold light.
Lily didn’t hesitate. She crossed the space in two steps and closed her own hand over his on the same cup before the light could finish swallowing him whole.
She was not the only one who moved fast.
Three strangers at the far tables had been paying attention to others as well, patient in the particular way only fellow X-rankers understood, and the instant the cup began to glow, all three broke into a dead run toward the same small, cooling piece of porcelain.
"Company," Lily said, feeling them close the distance behind her.
"Then we’d better not be slow," Almond said.
The light took all five of them together, cup and hands and running strangers alike, and the sitting room, the resort, and the last quiet corner of a stolen vacation vanished behind them all at once.