Chapter 219: 219 | Four Minutes of Godhood

We ran.

Roots and stones blurred beneath my feet. Water splashed with every step. Behind us, the crawlers surged forward in a wave of chitin and clicking mandibles.

I could hear them gaining. The splash of too many legs churning through water. The hungry clicks growing louder.

"Almost there!" Belle’s voice carried a note of desperation.

Twenty meters to the portal. Fifteen. Ten.

Something grabbed my ankle. I looked down to see a pale tendril wrapped around my boot, yanking me backward.

"Fuck!" I twisted, trying to keep my balance. Wave Motion erupted from my palm, blasting the tendril to pieces. I stumbled forward, nearly falling.

"Jace!" Naomi reached back, grabbing my hand. She pulled, helping me regain momentum.

The crawlers were right behind us now. I could smell them—a nauseating mix of rot and chemicals.

Five meters.

"Go!" Misato shoved Jordan through the portal first. He disappeared with a yelp. Belle followed, clutching our core haul to her chest. Naomi hesitated.

"Go!" I pushed her toward the portal. She stumbled through, vanishing in a flash of purple light.

I turned back to see Misato surrounded by three crawlers, their mandibles snapping at her as she fought them off with her spear.

"Misato!"

"Go!" she shouted. "I’ll be right behind you!"

Like hell. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

I charged back toward her, ignoring the screaming exhaustion in my muscles. Wave Motion wouldn’t work—I was almost tapped out. So I did the next best thing.

I jumped onto the nearest crawler’s back.

The creature bucked, trying to throw me off. I held on, driving my spear down between its armored plates. It shrieked, a high-pitched sound that hurt my ears. The other two crawlers turned, momentarily distracted from Misato.

"Run!" The word came out hoarse, my throat already raw from the swamp air. "Get to the portal!"

Misato looked back at me for half a heartbeat. Then she ran. No arguments, no protests. She understood what I’d done, why I’d done it. She was gone in seconds, her boots splashing through the shallow water.

The injured crawler writhed beneath me. I rolled off its back, landing hard in the muck. My boots sank ankle-deep. All three creatures pivoted toward me, their mandibles clicking in a rhythm that sounded almost eager.

Wave Motion was done. My stamina felt like someone had scraped out the bottom of an empty barrel. I had nothing left.

Almost nothing.

I pulled the glass from my inventory. Silver-tier essence from Naomi, vanilla-caramel sweetness visible through the container. I’d told myself this was for emergencies only. Life or death situations.

Pretty sure this counted.

"Overclock." I said it quietly, like a prayer or a curse. The glass touched my lips and I drank it all. The taste hit my tongue—rich, warm, almost comforting.

Then the power came.

Wave Motion exploded from Copper to Silver in the space between breaths. My vision clarified, every detail of the swamp suddenly sharp and bright. The burning in my muscles vanished like someone had flipped a switch.

Four minutes. That’s what Copper-rank Overclock bought me. Four minutes of playing god with borrowed strength.

I could work with that.

The first crawler lunged. I sidestepped with newfound speed, my movements fluid and quick in a way they hadn’t been seconds ago. Wave Motion erupted from both hands, twin golden spirals that punched through the creature’s armored head like it was made of paper.

The other two attacked simultaneously, coming at me from opposite sides. I jumped, higher than should have been possible, letting them crash into each other beneath me. As I came down, I fired Wave Motion directly at the point where they intersected.

The explosion scattered crawler pieces across the dark water. Yellow blood spread out in oily streaks, already starting to dissipate in the murky swamp current.

I touched down on a moss-covered rock and ran. The portal called to me from twenty meters ahead, its purple light cutting through the humid gloom like a beacon of civilization.

Behind me, more crawlers emerged from the deeper water. Their chittering intensified, taking on an aggressive edge. I’d killed their pack mates. They weren’t happy about it.

Fifteen meters to the portal. Ten. Five.

I dove through headfirst.

The dimensional boundary seized me immediately, crushing inward from all sides like an invisible hand. My bones compressed. My organs shifted. My eardrums popped from pressure that had no physical source.

Then I was through, rolling onto hard-packed California dirt under a sun that suddenly felt too bright. I stayed on my hands and knees for a moment, letting my body remember how gravity worked in the real world.

"Final extraction complete," the FGRA handler announced, barely looking up from his laptop. His fingers moved across the keyboard with practiced efficiency. "Clear time: seventy-two minutes, eighteen seconds. Full team accounted for. Proceeding to scoring phase."

My team waited a few meters away. Belle clutched our core haul to her chest like a mother protecting her children. Jordan sat on the ground, looking shell-shocked. Naomi rushed forward, wrapping her arms around my waist in a tight hug.

"You made it," she whispered against my chest.

I patted her back awkwardly. "Said I would, didn’t I?"

Misato approached, her expression unreadable. "What did you do back there? You were surrounded."

I shrugged. "Got lucky."

She studied my face, clearly not believing me. But she didn’t press. Instead, she turned to the handler. "Official core count?"

The man consulted his screen. "Twenty common tier. One Silver-tier boss. Total value: twenty-seven thousand four hundred credits with completion bonus."

Belle grinned, a predatory smile that reminded me why we called ourselves the Foxes. "And our competitors? Obsidian Elite? Any word on their performance?"

The handler checked something else. "Completed approximately twenty minutes ago. Clear time: fifty-four minutes. Core count: fourteen common tier, one Silver-tier boss."

I did quick mental math. "That’s..."

"Twenty-four thousand nine hundred," Belle supplied instantly. "We beat them by two thousand five hundred credits."

The implications sank in. We’d done it. We’d outperformed Blair’s team of elite guild-trained students.

"Which means," Misato said, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips, "the Midnight Foxes are now ranked first in Obsidian House."