For a second, the detached coldness in her expression softened. A genuine, warm smile touched her elegant lips.

"But..." Elyndra continued, tilting her head slightly. "Since you were so brave just now. Stepping up so heroically to help me, even knowing that you were absolutely no match for that cutie. Honestly, it was so cool. I can’t even remember the last time someone stepped up to save me."

She let out a soft, musical giggle that felt entirely out of place in a slaughterhouse ravine.

"I have decided!" she declared brightly. "I will take care of that sleepy cutie in the deep rot before I go. Consider it my thanks for your chivalry."

Sol’s mind struggled to catch up. Sleepy cutie? He remembered her words from before. The stirring in the depths. Pushing the bigger cuties out. She was talking about the calamity. The massive, horrifying, unknown entity that was waking up deep inside the Great Orrath. The thing that had caused the massive beast tide in the first place by simply stirring in its sleep. The thing that Veylara and Zephyra were completely unaware of. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Elyndra was just going to go "take care" of it. Like taking out the trash.

"You are an anomaly," Elyndra said. The playful tone vanished, replaced by a heavy, resonant seriousness. Her voice started to echo, bouncing off the trees from all directions at once as her physical form began to dissolve. She was turning into thousands of shimmering, floating silver particles.

"You possess a uniquely volatile foundation and an utterly ruthless drive to survive," Elyndra echoed. "Do not waste it by getting comfortable in this puddle. This world is much, much bigger than you can even imagine. There are horrors and wonders out there that would shatter your mind."

Her body was almost entirely gone, leaving only the outline of her floating silhouette of stars and shadow.

"If you do not wish to be erased when the real threats arrive..." her voice vibrated in his very bones. "...you must get stronger."

"Wait," Sol demanded. He forced his leaden legs to move, stepping forward and reaching out a desperate hand toward the fading particles. "How? How do I get to that level?"

Elyndra’s form was almost completely gone, nothing but a floating silhouette of stars and shadow.

"Consume," her harmonic voice echoed in the empty ravine, fading rapidly into the wind. "Consume the essence of the world. Break your limits again. Or die in the mud."

With a final, silent flash of violet light, Elyndra completely vanished.

The heavy, oppressive silence of the Great Orrath rushed back in to fill the void. The ambient temperature returned to its normal, sweltering humidity.

Sol was left standing entirely alone in the blood-soaked ravine.

He didn’t move for a long time. He just stood there, the heavy bone-spear gripped in his right hand, his breathing slow and ragged.

He slowly turned his head to the left.

Lying in the mud was the mangled, pulverized corpse of the Layer 3 Stone-Back Boar. Its skull was caved in, utterly destroyed by the raw kinetic force of his Layer 2 punch. Ten minutes ago, looking at that corpse had made him feel like an untouchable king. It was proof of his dominance, proof that he had begun conquering the brutal mechanics of this savage world.

He slowly turned his head to the right.

There was the massive, perfectly smooth crater spanning fifty feet across. It was a flawless testament to absolute, unadulterated erasure. A Layer 4 Apex predator, a creature of nightmare and legend, had simply been deleted. It hadn’t been fought. It hadn’t been conquered. It had just been casually removed from reality by a girl who thought it was a mild nuisance.

Sol looked down at his free hand.

He flexed his fingers, watching the tendons shift under his pale skin. He could feel the golden liquid of his Sun Core roaring through his veins. He could feel the heavy, dense tectonic anchor of the Great Badger and the crackling, lightning-fast tension of the Dreadwing.

It was power. Real, tangible power.

But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even close to being enough.

Elyndra’s words echoed relentlessly in his skull.

You are still standing at the bottom of the hill, boy. Consume the essence of the world. Break your limits again. Or die in the mud. A slow, dark, hungry smirk crept across Sol’s face.

The sheer terror he had felt looking at that giant spider, and the sickening awe he had felt watching Elyndra erase it, didn’t break him. It didn’t make him want to curl up and hide behind the Veynar walls.

It did the exact opposite.

It lit a fire in his gut that made his Sun Core feel like a flickering candle. The complacency, the satisfaction of hitting Layer 2 and sleeping with the High Shaman, was completely burned away.

There was a ceiling above him. A massive, unimaginable ceiling of power that defied physics and reality itself. And Sol knew, with absolute, terrifying certainty, that he wasn’t going to stop until he shattered it.

He didn’t want to be the guy who threw a suicidal punch to protect someone. He wanted to be the guy who casually erased the threat with a snap of his fingers.

"Consume," Sol whispered into the quiet jungle, testing the weight of the word on his tongue.

He tightened his grip on his spear and turned his back on the smooth crater. He began the trek back through the dense undergrowth, heading toward the petrified walls of the Veynar settlement.

The beast tide was over. The immediate threat of the waking calamity was apparently going to be handled by a violet-eyed traveler.

But Sol was done playing defense. He was done waiting for the jungle to throw things at him.

If he needed to consume the essence of the world to get to the next level, then the Great Orrath was no longer just a rotting nightmare he had to survive.

It was an all-you-can-eat buffet. And he was absolutely starving.