Luke laughed, a hint of surprise in his voice.

  “Well now, Hunter Ashwell, and you’re planning on staying?”

  Shane leaned back against a rusted steel support beam, crossing one boot over the other. He didn’t look at Luke, focusing instead on the broken blade of his sword.

  “Sure.”

  That one indifferent syllable acted like a spark in a room full of gasoline.

  A hand slammed down onto a nearby metal workbench with a deafening CLANG, making half the hunters jump out of their skins.

  “Th-that’s enough, Ashwell!”

  It was Whitley. The older hunter’s movement was jerky and uncoordinated as he stumbled into the center of the room, his chest heaving.

  Shane didn’t move, but the corner of his mouth twitched upward into a faint smirk.

  Luke had just spent precious minutes delicately constructing a logical, face-saving escape route for everyone.

  But Whitley’s over-the-top reaction, which, on the surface, supported Luke’s argument, was actually undermining the persuasiveness of it.

  Luke half-raised a placating hand, opening his mouth to calm Whitley down, but Whitley thrust a trembling finger toward Shane’s face, seemingly forgetting anyone else was there.

  “If you say that... if you stay, what does that make us? The cowards who ran while the great Shane Ashwell held the line?”

  He took another aggressive step forward toward Shane.

  “Y-you’re a high-ranker, so maybe you’re confident you’ll survive, but it’s different for us!”

  Whitley swept his shaking arm wildly at the silent, huddled group behind him, trying to draft them into his personal grievance.

  “You just want to play the hero and get the rest of us killed!”

  Whitley’s accusations echoed slightly in the cavernous factory space, vibrating with raw, unfiltered panic.

  Shane looked at the older hunter.

  Beneath the bluster and the spit-flecked rage, Whitley... was terrified. He desperately wanted to run. To be precise, they all did.

  Shane decided to let them go.

  He pushed off the support beam he’d been leaning against, his voice cutting through Whitley’s heavy breathing.

  “Of course you can go. I’ll help.”

  “What?”

  The hunters stared, dumbfounded. Confused, they didn’t seem to be able to process what he just said.

  Shane was offering to help them escape while he stayed behind to fight.

  He didn’t bother explaining. To make it easier for them to leave, he decided a demonstration was in order.

  He extended his senses beyond the thick metal shutter.

  Out on the street, blood was everywhere. A chaotic mess of red and blue soaking the cracked asphalt and staining the debris.

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  He drew upon it all.

  [The Broken Oath resonates with its master’s command.]

  [Skill, Bloodcraft(B-) drinks all the blood in the battlefield to slake its thirst.]

  He reached out with his hidden skill, latching onto the spilled life force.

  The thick crimson of the Paladins, the blue ichor of the Roses, the blood spilled from the retreating hunters earlier—he even tapped into the hot blood streaming from the hole in his shoulder.

  Outside, the puddles of gore evaporated, converting instantly from physical carnage into pure mana.

  The mana came in like a flood, a staggering amount of power that crashed through his veins and blew right past his normal mana capacity.

  [Skill: Bloodcraft]

  Rank: B–

  Source: Broken Oath (exclusive)

  Effect: Converts nearby blood into Mana. The relic-bearer’s own blood yields the highest conversion.

  Overflow: Mana gained from Bloodcraft can exceed your Max Mana, creating a temporary Overflow bar. Overflow is spent first and persists even after the skill ends. When Overflow hits zero, your mana cap returns to normal.

  His breath hitched. Gathering this much blood on his own would have been impossible; it required a battlefield’s worth of open wounds to fuel it. It took the collective bloodshed of the desperate hunters and a horde of monsters to build this tide.

  The sheer density made his [Mana Hypersensitivity] scream in protest, but he shoved the dizziness aside.

  Reaching out with his mind, he marked a dozen points of ignition directly on the bodies of the B-rank monsters prowling just outside.

  He then willed a dozen [Fireballs] to manifest, but instead of letting them expand into roaring spheres of flame, he compressed them. He squeezed the volatile skill down, tighter and tighter, until they were impossible small, blindingly dense points of pure heat vibrating against the exposed throats of the Paladins and the fragile stems of the Roses.

  With a flick of his wrist, he gave the final command.

  A massive explosion tore through the street outside.

  The metal shutter rattled violently, dust raining down from the high ceiling.

  With a shaky step, Josh slowly opened the metal shutter, revealing the outside world.

  Only drifting smoke and scattered ash remained where a squad of B-rank monsters had stood seconds ago.

  Whitley’s jaw dropped, his previous rage evaporating into sheer disbelief. Luke’s eyes also went wide.

  Ignoring the stares, Shane pulled out a mana potion from his inventory.

  It was a small glass vial with a long, thin neck. He hooked his thumb under the fragile neck and snapped it clean off. The moment it broke, the bottle and the glowing blue liquid inside dissolved into a swirl of tiny digital particles. The glowing blue particles flowed right into his hand and vanished.

  Shane felt an instant jolt as his mana pools flooded back to full.

  He looked at the stunned group.

  “Now run.”

  For a moment, nobody moved.

  The hunters looked from Shane’s bored face to the light outside the shutter, unable to reconcile the two.

  Then, the room erupted.

  “H-holy shit! Did he... did he kill them all?”

  “No way…”

  But the evidence was undeniable.

  The suffocating pressure of the B-rank monsters was gone. The heavy footsteps, the metallic clank of armor had all been replaced by the crackling sound of cooling embers.

  The street beyond was suddenly, impossibly clear.

  The despair that had been crushing them into the concrete floor lifted. Hope began to dawn in the eyes of the hunters, regardless of their rank.

  It didn’t matter how Shane had done it.

  It didn’t matter it made no sense.

  The path was open.

  Shane knew they couldn’t just run out into a meat grinder, so he had carved out a breathing room for them. He had handed them a lifeline, and now, their survival instincts were finally overriding their shock.

  They all started to get to their feet, boots scraping against the grit, not wanting to miss their chance.

  That’s when Shane coughed. A heavy spray of dark blood splattered onto his palm and the gray concrete floor.

  Shit.

  He squeezed one eye shut for a second. He never could get used to the [Mana Hypersensitivity]. His insides burned like hell as usual, a searing heat that radiated from his heart out to his fingertips.

  He took a heavy breath and looked up.

  The movement in the room had stopped.

  The hunters, who had been second away from bolting, were frozen again.

  Shane raised an eyebrow. He straightened up slowly, fighting the tremors in his legs, and wiped the blood from his lips with the back of his hand.

  What were they waiting for?

  He gestured vaguely toward the open door with his bloody hand.

  He’d done his part. He’d cleared the path, had literally handed them their lives on a silver platter.

  He was not going to also fucking walk them out.

  Luke stared at him, a million questions in his eyes, but he swallowed them all and managed to ask just one.

  “Do you…”

  He hesitated, his voice tight.

  “Do you really think there’s a chance?”

  Shane turned his head to the side and spat the rest of the copper-tasting blood onto the ground.

  “I fight to win.”