SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything-Chapter 16: Mana Poisoning

Claire didn’t answer him, despite him asking it twice.

But at an intersection she stopped walking and turned to face him. That alone said a lot... but she didn’t say anything.

"How is she?" Hide changed the question in response. His voice quitter and sturdier now.

Claire gave him a simple nod. "Come with me."

She took him deeper into the hospital than he expected.

Past the main ward. Past the recovery wing. Through a set of security doors that required her badge twice, and then once more at a checkpoint where a guard checked her face and said nothing.

The corridor beyond was different than anything Hide had ever seen.

The walls were reinforced and stronger, he could tell by the thickness of the frames. The air had a faint medical ting to it, low and constant, like the building itself was breathing. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

On both sides of the long hall, glass-fronted cells lined the walls, each one sealed, each one lit from the inside with pale clinical white.

In every cell, there was a person, surrounded by machines.

He walked slowly, his bare feet silent against the floor, and looked through each window as he passed. All of the patients were unconscious, like they were in coma and all of them had the same thing spreading across their skin — dark lines, like cracks in old porcelain, running up necks and along jaws and across temples.

He stopped reading the numbers on the cells after a while.

Claire stopped in front of cell 78.

He looked at the number first and then hesitantly, through the glass.

His chest dropped somewhere he couldn’t name.

Risa lay in a hospital bed surrounded by a ring of machines, each one connected to her by a different cable or wire. Her head was wrapped in white bandages. Along the left side of her face, dark veins rose from beneath the skin... branching and spreading, reaching toward her cheekbone and her ear like something trying to climb out of her.

He couldn’t tell if she was breathing properly. The machines said she was. He stared at the machines for a while instead of her face because it was easier.

"What is that?" he asked.

His voice came out flat.

Claire stood beside him with her arms at her sides.

"Mana poisoning," she explained. "Her body never underwent an awakening. That means it has no natural resistance to mana, and no capacity to process or channel it. When the gate opened, the wild mana that flooded the zone — it found a way in. Through the head injury she sustained in the accident." She paused. "It forced itself inside a body that wasn’t built to hold it."

Hide stared at the dark veins on Risa’s face and asked. "And the cure? How long will it take to heal her?"

The matter of fact. This was like the fourth time he had heard the term mana poisoning, It was like a devils name and no one wanted to speak it. And it was something closely monitored by government and everything related to the disease was a highly qualified information.

It was a stroke of luck, maybe that he was being told about it first hand. well, it was for a reason.

Claire worked at the Geo Ford Extermination Agency and it was a government affiliated place. So, it all made sense. They wanted to keep Hide, for their benefit and monitoring him.

And what could be a better shackle than a classified information.

Claire was quiet for a moment, then she sighed and started.

"There isn’t one," she said. "Not yet. Humanity hasn’t developed a treatment for full mana poisoning at this stage. All we can do is keep her isolated from any further mana exposure to slow the spread. Keep the environment clean. Monitor the progression." She exhaled. "It buys time, but doesn’t reverse or cure it."

Hide didn’t say anything.

He stood at the glass for a long moment. Long enough that Claire stopped watching him and looked at the floor instead, giving him something close to privacy.

Risa actually belonged to a great family of Exterminators with her grandfather being an S rank prodigy who once fought against the Higher Calamity beast that surfaced long ago.

She was a VIP, if they looked at it like that. But her family had always neglected her after she failed to awaken.

Hide pushed these thoughts away, then turned and walked away without a word.

Maybe Kai had done the same thing.

Walked in, looked through the glass, and then walked out because there was nothing else a person could do.

That thought followed him all the way to the exit.

He collected his things from the counter — a small sealed plastic bag. His phone, that was cracked entirely down the center and dead. He pressed the power button once out of reflex. Nothing. He pocketed it anyway.

The hospital had left clothes for him at the counter. Plain white t-shirt and grey pants. He changed in the small room beside the counter and came out looking like a person again, at least on the surface.

He walked out the front doors alone.

The outside cool, evening air hit him, then he started walking.

He made it half a block before his jaw locked.

He gritted his teeth so hard that the tendons in his neck pulled taut and the veins on his forehead rose against the skin. His fist closed at his side — tight, tighter, until the knuckles went white and the pressure climbed up his forearm.

The scales subconsciously surfaced.

Just barely, as a flicker along the back of his hand, dark and quiet, and then retreated back.

’Those Calamity Beasts’.

The thought moved through him like a current, slow and total.

’I will kill them all. I will find every single beast that has ever crawled out of a gate and I will make them suffer the way they have made the people around me suffer. Every one of them.’

It wasn’t a decision exactly. It was closer to a fact he was only now recognizing. Something that had already been true for a while, just waiting for the right moment to be said clearly, even if only in his own head.

He unclenched his fist slowly and kept moving.

He checked his pockets at the next intersection. He had his

Exterminator Ring on his right hand.

And two cards. He pulled out the one Kai had given him and looked at it.

Gate Training Facility 7, Area 17

General Access Permit — Two-time Entry

He stood at the intersection and looked at the card for a while.

At first he had thought about going home.

He pocketed the card and asked instead.

’Hey system... Do you have a cure for mana Poisoning?’

The screen appeared at the edge of his vision.

[System Store — Search: Mana Poisoning Treatment]

[1 result found.]

[Mana Purification Catalyst — Rank A Consumable]

Clears mana contamination from non-Awakened biological tissue. Full reversal if administered within 180 days of initial exposure.

[Unlock Requirement: Player Level 50]

[Current Level: 1]

He stared at the screen with a dazed look and then closed it.

Level 50.

He didn’t know how far that was. He didn’t know how long it would take. He didn’t know if 180 days was enough time or nowhere near enough.

He started walking again.

The Gate Training Facility 7 was a forty-minute walk from the hospital at a normal pace. He didn’t feel like a normal pace.

He walked faster and entered the perimeter of the facility. The buildings here were completely empty, if you don’t count the robots and automatic guns hidden in them.

Then the dome came into view.

It was larger than he expected. A wide, low structure built like a stadium that had decided it wanted to be a bunker instead with thick outer walls, reinforced paneling along the lower half, blast-rated glass in the upper observation rings.

Safety equipment lined the exterior in careful intervals: mana dampeners, emergency seal units, three separate monitoring stations each staffed by someone he could see even from this distance.

Drones circled the upper rim in slow, overlapping patterns. Cameras tracked the entrance from all angles. A sign above the main gate listed access protocols in small, serious text.

The whole thing hummed with the kind of institutional caution, that had no space left for anything to go wrong.

Hide looked at it, then he looked at the card in his hand.

He shook his head, dismissed the last of whatever he’d been carrying since the hospital, and walked toward the entrance.

He had forty-nine levels to climb.

He wasn’t going home first.