Read Novel Full Chapter 767: What’s Left When Cards Are Gone
Chapter 767: What’s Left When Cards Are Gone
The pocket world welcomed them home with light instead of noise, gold washing over the gathering ground the instant Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen stepped back through its border.
[Hell-Mode Quest Complete: Rumble in Resort]
[1st Place Reward: All members of Ananta Regalon Kingdom elevated to Tier-40 lifeform.]
Four hundred people felt it land at once, the same held-breath weight from the ocean’s own reward, deeper this time, settling into bone and blood like something that intended to stay.
Big D was already at the border to meet them, arms crossed, and for once his gruff face didn’t bother hiding the relief underneath it.
"Forty-four coins," he said. "Heard the number before you finished walking through the gate. Whole ground’s been buzzing since."
"We’re glad to be back," Almond said, and meant it more than the words let on.
It took less than a minute for the good feeling to crack.
"Where’s Natalia?" Lily asked, scanning the gathered crowd out of habit, and found the question answered by an absence rather than a face.
Marcus wasn’t there either. Neither were Maya, Kayla, Jian, Julian, Noah, Kira, or Emma.
Silvester stepped forward, and the easy grin he usually wore had gone thin and careful.
"They’re gone," he said. "Ten days ago, near enough. Destroyed their decks. All five slots, all nine of them, right down to nothing." He glanced away, then back. "They call themselves the Grim Breakers now. Said it was the only door left if they wanted a real shot at what you four have."
"Gone where?" Rudra asked, voice gone flat and careful.
"Nobody knows but John," Silvester said. "They asked him to point them at the worst place he could find, and he did, and none of us have heard a word since."
Almond’s jaw tightened. "We need to talk to him."
"He said he’d explain when they were ready to be found," Silvester said. "Not before. Said it wasn’t his story to tell early."
The gathering ground, so full of victory a minute earlier, went quiet with a different kind of weight instead.
---
Two days earlier, and a world away from any pocket the family had ever built, Natalia opened her eyes in a cave that smelled of char and old blood, and did not for a moment mistake it for anything gentle.
The Bloodroot Wilds did not have a sky so much as a wound. Black clouds hung low and constant, lit from beneath by veins of red light bleeding up out of cracked, ash-colored ground, and the forest beyond the cave’s mouth grew in shapes no living tree should have managed, roots the color of drying wounds threading through soil that pulsed, faint and slow, like something enormous and half-asleep beneath it.
Everything out there wanted to eat something. Most of it had already tried to eat them.
"Two days," Marcus said, crouched near the cave’s low fire, turning a strip of dark meat over open flame. "Feels longer."
"Feels like it should feel longer," Maya said, sitting nearby with a spear across her knees, its edge notched from use. "We haven’t slept properly since we got here."
Natalia sat apart from the fire, sharpening a blade that had been a fine, ordinary sword back home and was now the only weapon she owned. No card had made it. No deck had summoned it. She had found the ore herself, on the first brutal day, and beaten it into shape with her own two hands because John’s parting words had been simple and merciless.
*You wanted hardship. This is what hardship actually looks like.*
"Meat’s ready," Julian called from the fire, pulling another strip free. Whatever the creature had been that morning, it had come at them fast and wrong-jointed, and it had taken all nine of them working together to bring it down without cards, without decks, without anything but raw Constitution and a year of habits none of them had realized how much they’d leaned on until those habits were gone.
Kayla passed portions around without needing to be asked, the same quiet caretaking she’d always done, just with rougher hands and no lattice of light to make the work easier.
Kira ate in silence beside Noah, both of them wearing the particular exhaustion of people who had started this with excitement and found, within a day, exactly how much excitement cost.
"I miss my deck," Noah admitted, low, mostly to his food. "I didn’t think I would this much."
"None of us thought we would," Jian said. He’d said little since arriving, one of the ten Generals reduced to the same starting line as everyone else, and the quiet suited him. "That’s probably the point."
Emma sat closest to the fire, knees drawn up, watching the cave mouth the way she’d watched it every hour since they’d arrived. "Something’s out there," she said suddenly.
Everyone went still.
---
It came through the cave mouth like the wilderness itself had decided to stop pretending to be scenery.
Bone-plated and ash-black, taller than the cave’s own ceiling should have allowed, the Gravemaw dragged itself in on limbs too many and too wrong, jaws unhinging wider than any living thing had a right to open, drawn by the smell of blood and cooked meat still hanging in the air.
"Up!" Natalia shouted, already moving, blade in hand. "Formation, now!"
There was no deck to call. No summon to shield them. Nine bodies and whatever training they’d carried into this place stood between that jaw and the back of the cave, and every one of them understood, in the same cold instant, exactly what dying here would actually mean.
"Remember what John said," Marcus called, circling wide with a spear of his own. "No Geneline reaches this place. If we go down here, we stay down."
"Then we don’t go down," Natalia said, and threw herself at the first swinging claw.
The fight that followed had none of the practiced grace any of them had once carried into battle with cards behind them. It was ugly, and honest, and entirely their own.
Maya’s spear found a gap between bone plates and did not go deep enough, and the Gravemaw’s tail caught her across the ribs and threw her hard into stone, breath leaving her in one ragged burst.
Jian dragged her clear a half second before a second strike would have finished what the first started, taking a shallow gash across his own forearm for the trouble.
Julian pressed in reckless and furious, driven by the same hunger for X-rank that had brought him here in the first place, and traded a burn across his shoulder for a solid strike that finally cracked one heavy plate along the beast’s flank.
"There!" Kira shouted, spotting the crack. "Aim there!"
Kayla worked the wounded from the edges of the fight, no lattice to lean on now, just steady hands and old field training, packing a wound on Maya’s side while Noah covered them both with a stance he’d drilled a thousand times and never once had to use without a card’s help behind it.
Natalia took the worst of it directly, ducking under a claw that opened a long line across her upper arm, answering with a strike of her own that bit deep into the same cracked plate Julian had already weakened.
The Gravemaw screamed, a sound like grinding stone, and turned the full weight of its fury on her alone.
---
She was still bleeding, still standing, still nowhere near done, when the change hit all nine of them at once.
It arrived like a held breath finally let go, the same feeling the rest of the kingdom had felt on the gathering ground at that exact same moment, four hundred kilometers or four hundred worlds away, none of them able to say which.
[Kingdom Reward Received: Ananta Regalon Kingdom elevated to Tier-40 lifeform.]
[Lifeform: Perishable | Tier-40]
— Pulse: 40,000/40,000
— Constitution: 4,000
— Arihanta: 4,000
— Will: 4,000
Natalia felt it settle into her like a second heartbeat, strength flooding into arms that had been shaking with fatigue a breath earlier, and the world around her seemed to slow just enough to matter.
"They won," she said, half a laugh breaking through the exhaustion. "They actually won."
"Then let’s not waste what they just handed us," Marcus said, already moving with new speed behind old, familiar movements.
It was not an easy victory, even with the boost. The Gravemaw was Tier-50, older and crueler and built to survive exactly this kind of desperate surge in its prey, and it fought harder the more it bled, cornered fury replacing whatever patience it had started with.
Natalia drove her blade into the cracked plate Julian and the beast’s own fury had already weakened, and this time the strength behind the strike came from somewhere new, somewhere that hadn’t existed in her an hour before.
The plate shattered.
The Gravemaw’s scream cut off into something smaller, and Jian’s spear found the opening a half second later, and between the two of them, and Maya’s last desperate spear-thrust from the ground she hadn’t fully risen from, the beast finally, brutally, went still.
Nobody cheered. Nine people stood or knelt or sat in the wreckage of a fight that had cost every one of them blood, and for a long moment the cave held nothing but ragged breathing.
"Barely," Marcus said finally, sinking down against the wall. "We barely had that."
"Barely’s still a win," Natalia said, though her voice shook with something that wasn’t quite triumph.
---
They ate what the Gravemaw left behind, because in the Bloodroot Wilds nothing that died went to waste, and cooked it over the same low fire in a silence that had nothing playful left in it.
Kayla worked her way around the group afterward, tending each wound with whatever the wilderness had given them to work with, and nobody complained about the rough bandaging or the sting of the wash beforehand.
"That’s the difference," Julian said quietly, watching Kayla wrap a strip of cloth around his burned shoulder. "Before, a fight like that would have been dangerous. Here, it was almost the end. All nine of us, gone, for good, over one monster."
"And we still won," Jian said. "Barely. But we did."
Natalia sat by the fire longest after that, turning her newly steadied hands over in the firelight, feeling the fresh weight of Tier-40 settled into muscle and bone that had earned every part of it the hard way.
"We came here with nothing," she said finally, to the whole quiet group. "We’re leaving that part behind tonight."
She looked around at eight tired, wounded, unbroken faces, and felt something settle into place that had nothing to do with stats at all.
"Everyone ready?" she asked.
One by one, they nodded.
And in the low red light of a cave in a world built to kill them, nine empty hands rose together, and nine new decks began, at last, to take their first shape.