He found the gap on the second attempt and pushed through it with both hands behind the blade, holding on through the thrashing that followed until the movement stopped.

He straightened up and rolled his shoulder, confirming it was functional, and looked at Magnar who had positioned himself to cut off the creature’s retreat angle and had taken a glancing blow from the tail in the process, a scrape along his left shoulder that was superficial but would need watching.

"How is that?" Neil asked, nodding at the shoulder.

Magnar turned his head, inspected the scrape, and made a sound that indicated it was not worth the inquiry.

"Good." Neil said, and they moved on.

The Silver class required real attention where the Bronze class had required only method, and the distinction was exactly what he had come looking for.

Each encounter demanded genuine presence, actual engagement with the specific creature in front of him rather than the application of a formula that worked every time, and his body responded to that demand in the way it always responded to real pressure, pushing into the work rather than managing it from a distance.

He stopped twice in the Silver class territory to drink potions, the essence expenditure climbing to a level that required active management rather than passive regeneration, and he adjusted his approach each time based on what he had learned in the previous encounters, refining the sequence of Magnar’s breath work and his own blade positioning until the Silver class fights became, if not easy, then at least consistently manageable.

Fourteen Silver class Stone Crawlers.

The gene material from them was noticeably richer than the Bronze class yield, Nemo confirming the accumulation with quiet satisfaction.

He pushed deeper.

The Gold class territory was not a gradual transition but an immediate one, the creatures that appeared in it carrying a quality that was different in kind rather than just degree.

The plating had undergone a structural change at this tier, denser and more mineral-pure, the gaps between plates reduced to seams that required specific angles of approach to exploit and the skull ridge that had been his primary target was nearly closed, the articulation point at the back of the neck the only remaining reliable access.

Their vibration tracking was comprehensive and multi-layered in a way that made deception significantly more difficult, picking up inputs he had not expected them to detect and adjusting to counter-measures he had used successfully at lower tiers with an adaptability that suggested something closer to tactical intelligence than simple instinct.

The first Gold class encounter told him clearly that the approaches that had worked before needed meaningful modification here, not wholesale replacement but genuine adaptation, and he spent the first two encounters building that understanding before committing to a consistent sequence.

Magnar earned his presence in the Gold class territory in a way that went beyond useful and into necessary. His size and heat output gave the creatures a second major threat to account for, dividing their tracking attention and creating the half-second windows in their defensive response that Neil needed to exploit the neck seam.

Without that division of attention, the Gold class Stone Crawlers were patient enough and fast enough in their defensive repositioning to close the window before he could use it.

Together, they worked.

Magnar took two solid hits in the Gold class section, the first a mid-body limb strike that sent him sliding three metres across the stone ground and left a bruised line along his left flank, the second a tail impact that caught him across the chest when a creature reversed direction faster than either of them had anticipated.

Neither was serious in the way of a fight-ending injury but both were reminders that even Magnar’s endurance had limits and that managing those limits carefully was part of Neil’s job in here.

He kept Magnar further back after the second hit, using his breath attacks at range and directing the Gold class creatures’ attention from a distance rather than from engagement range, accepting the trade in coordination efficiency for the trade in familiar safety.

The Gold class fights were the longest and the most costly in essence and potion consumption, each one requiring the full version of his attention rather than the partial version that had been sufficient in the lower tiers.

But each one also produced gene material of a quality that the Bronze and Silver class could not match, and the accumulation was building toward the threshold he needed with a speed that justified the investment being made to reach it.

By the time he had cleared the portion of Gold class territory he had set as his target, his potion supply was reduced by more than half, his essence reserves were running on active management rather than comfortable surplus, and Magnar was carrying three separate scrapes and the bruised flank that needed actual rest and attention.

Neil sat down on a flat section of stone in the quiet after the last Gold class kill, drank the better part of a potion in one go, and looked at the gene material accumulated in the collection containers Nemo was managing.

’Where are we?’ He asked.

Nemo ran the count and reported back with the particular precision she reserved for numbers that mattered.

The Bronze class gene points had filled completely, well past the threshold. The Silver class was full. The Gold class was full, the hundred units he needed accumulated across the kills of this session and several previous ones.

And the Diamond class remained at zero, which was expected because he had not pushed into Diamond class territory today and had not planned to.

For Magnar the picture was similar, the Bronze and Silver and Gold class thresholds met, Diamond still outstanding.

He looked at the containers and began to work through the gene potions methodically, drinking them in the correct sequence the way Nemo had mapped out for him based on his body’s absorption rate, the process taking several minutes of quiet work rather than a single dramatic moment.

The potions themselves were dense and not particularly pleasant, the taste of concentrated biological material from creatures built out of stone, but he had drunk worse things for less return.

The effect built gradually rather than arriving all at once, the accumulated gene material integrating into his physical structure in the layered way that gene enhancement worked, each tier’s contribution adding to the one beneath it.

The Bronze class improvement was a baseline refinement, the Silver class a clearer step, and the Gold class a meaningful one, his body registering the change in the way it registered genuine development rather than incremental progress, a qualitative shift in the foundation rather than just more of what was already there.

He sat with it for a moment, letting his body settle into the new baseline.

Magnar went through his own portion of the potions with considerably less ceremony, consuming them with the straightforward efficiency of a familiar who understood what they were for and had no objections to the process, then sat down and began the methodical self-maintenance routine he always performed after a serious outing, working through each injury site systematically.

’The Diamond class will make the real difference.’ Neil thought, looking into the deeper interior where the stone formations grew larger and the luminescence was denser in concentrated patches that suggested higher-tier territory.

’This was the foundation. The Diamond class is the structure on top of it.’

He was not going into Diamond class territory today.

That was a decision made from arithmetic rather than reluctance, the available resources against the unknown variables of a tier he had not yet mapped, and arithmetic done honestly said not today.

But the Diamond class section of this Realm was going to get very familiar with him in the near future.

He looked at Magnar, who had finished his maintenance and was sitting with his weight settled and his amber eyes on Neil with the patient and uncomplicated readiness of a familiar who was prepared for whatever came next and was simply waiting to find out what that was.

"We are done for today." Neil told him.

Magnar made a sound that was not disappointment and not relief but something neutral and accepting, the sound of a creature that trusted the person making the call and did not feel the need to second-guess it.

Neil stood, rolled his neck once to release the tension that had built up across his shoulders during the Gold class encounters, checked that everything was secured and accounted for, and turned back toward the boundary line.

"Let’s go home." He said.

They walked back through the Stone Crawler territory at a pace that was easy and unhurried, the creatures in the sections they passed through having apparently received enough information through the vibration network to treat this particular source of vibrations as something to avoid rather than investigate.

The Realm stayed quiet around them as they moved, the pale luminescent growth on the formations casting its sideways light across the stone ground, the canopy overhead dark and interlocked and permanent.

Neil walked through it with his hands in his pockets and his mind already on the next visit, mapping what he knew now against what the Diamond class section would require, thinking through which approaches would need to be rebuilt from scratch and which would carry over with modification.

The boundary line appeared ahead of them and the outside air came through it, lighter and more straightforward than the Realm’s interior pressure.

He stepped through without stopping, Magnar beside him, and the teleportation marker was waiting exactly where Randy had said it would be.

❖❖❖

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