The Extra is a Hero?-Chapter 281: STEEL AND BONE

Chapter 276: Steel and Bone

​The air inside the carriage didn’t smell like ozone or burning mana anymore. It smelled of wet fur, stale blood, and the piercing, chemical stench of fear.

​The Snow Stalker landed on the floorboards with a heavy, wet thud, its claws carving deep gouges into the expensive mahogany. It was a nightmare of pale muscle and tension, its eyeless head twitching violently as it triangulated the frantic heartbeats surrounding it.

​"Leon, move!" I shouted.

​The command was physical, not magical. Without the [Commander’s Voice] skill to compel obedience, my words were just sound waves. But Leon, conditioned by months of hellish training, reacted on instinct.

​He stepped forward, placing himself between the beast and the cowering students. He raised his greatsword—a heavy slab of enchanted mythril that usually hummed with holy light. Now, it was just a hundred pounds of dead weight.

​The Stalker shrieked, a sound that felt like a drill pressing into my eardrum, and lunged.

​It didn’t use a skill. There was no [Pounce] notification, no red telegraph on the floor. It was just physics. Four hundred pounds of predator accelerating at sixty kilometers an hour.

​BOOM.

​The impact was sickening.

​The Stalker’s shoulder slammed into the flat of Leon’s blade. In the game, Leon would have activated [Holy Fortress] and stood like an immovable object. The beast would have bounced off, stunned.

​In reality, without mana reinforcement, Leon was just a boy in armor.

​He was lifted off his feet. He flew backward, crashing through a row of seats, the metal frames twisting around him. He hit the far wall with a groan that sounded like cracking ribs.

​"Leon!" Aiden screamed, scrambling backward over the seats.

​The beast didn’t pause. It whipped its head around, the flaring nostrils locking onto the sound of Aiden’s scream. It reared up, raising a claw that looked capable of disemboweling a horse.

​It was fast. Much faster than a human eye should be able to track without [Perception Enhancement].

​But I wasn’t normal.

​My stats were passive. They were written into the fiber of my muscles, the density of my bones.

​[Agility: A]

[Strength: A-]

​The world didn’t slow down for me—that was a time-dilation effect of active mana—but my brain processed the visual data with cold, mathematical precision.

​Target: Snow Stalker (Alpha Variant).

Armor Class: Heavy (Hide).

Weakness: C1-C2 Vertebrae Connection. The unarmored gap behind the skull.

​I didn’t run. I sprinted.

​Three steps covered the distance. I didn’t shout a battle cry; that would only give away my position. I moved in silence, the soles of my boots absorbing the impact on the carpet.

​As the beast brought its claw down toward Aiden, I slid.

​Like a baseball player stealing home, I dropped to my hip, sliding under the arc of the descending claw. The wind of the strike ruffled my hair. I felt the chill of the beast’s body heat—or lack thereof—as I passed underneath it.

​I gripped the hilt of my steel sword with both hands.

​Strike.

​I didn’t slash. Slashing against that hide would be like trying to cut a tire with a butter knife. I thrust.

​I drove the point of the sword upward, aiming for the soft, pale underbelly where the ribcage met the groin.

​SHKLUNK.

​The sensation was gruesome. There was no clean resistance of mana shields. Just the gritty friction of steel pushing through tough skin, muscle, and intestine.

​The Stalker screamed—a gurgling, high-pitched wail. It abandoned Aiden and thrashed wildly, spinning to find the source of the pain.

​The movement wrenched the sword from my grip. I rolled away, coming to a crouch near the broken window.

​"It’s bleeding!" Chris yelled, pointing at the black ichor pooling on the floor. "It can bleed!"

​"Shut up and find a weapon!" I roared at him, my eyes never leaving the beast.

​The Stalker was enraged now. The sword was still stuck in its gut, handle protruding like a grotesque piercing. It wasn’t a fatal wound—these things had vitality stats that rivaled trolls—but it slowed it down.

​It turned its eyeless face toward me. It hissed, steam blasting from its nostrils.

​It knew who hurt it.

​"Michael!" Leon’s voice came from the debris pile. He pulled himself up, swaying. His helmet was dented, and blood streamed from his nose, but he picked up his heavy sword again. "Flank it!"

​"No mana, Leon!" I yelled back, watching the beast’s muscles coil. "Don’t try to block it! Dodge!"

​The beast charged me.

​This time, I didn’t have the element of surprise.

​I side-stepped to the left, but the beast anticipated the move. Its long tail whipped out like a lash.

​CRACK.

​It hit me in the ribs.

​The pain was blinding. I was thrown sideways, slamming into the metal table I had used for the inventory check. The breath was knocked out of me instantly. My vision swam with black spots.

​If I had my [Mana Barrier], that hit would have been a scratch. Without it, I felt a rib crack.

​Damn it.

​I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the fire in my side. The beast was already turning for a follow-up.

​I had no weapon. My sword was in its stomach.

​I looked around frantically. A broken metal pipe from the ceiling? A seat cushion? Nothing that could penetrate that hide.

​Then I saw it.

​Eric William’s "useless" spatial ring. He had dropped a dagger earlier—an ornamental piece, silver with a gem-encrusted hilt. It was lying near his unconscious body.

​I dove for it.

​The Stalker pounced. Its claws tore through the carpet where I had been a millisecond before.

​I grabbed the dagger. It was light. Too light. Probably made of silver alloy for conducting mana, not high-carbon steel for durability. It would break on impact with bone.

​I have one shot.

​The beast loomed over me, drool dripping from its jaws. It reared up for the killing blow.

​"Hey! Ugly!"

​Leon threw a piece of luggage. It hit the beast in the side of the head.

​The Stalker flinched, turning its head toward the distraction.

​That was the window.

​I didn’t lunge. I exploded upward. I channeled every ounce of my A-rank Strength into my legs. I jumped, not away, but onto the beast.

​My left hand grabbed the thick, leathery fold of skin on its shoulder. I hauled myself up as it thrashed, riding it like a bucking bronco.

​It roared, snapping its jaws backward, trying to crush my arm.

​"Die," I grunted through gritted teeth. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

​I wrapped my legs around its torso, locking my ankles. I raised the silver dagger.

​Anatomy check.

​The neck. Just below the base of the skull. There was a gap in the spinal ridge to allow the head to swivel.

​I didn’t stab blindly. I placed the tip of the dagger against the skin, feeling for the groove.

​Found it.

​I slammed the pommel of the dagger with my other hand, driving it in like a hammer striking a nail.

​CRUNCH.

​The silver blade punched through the skin, slipped between the vertebrae, and severed the spinal cord.

​The effect was instantaneous.

​The beast didn’t scream. It just turned off.

​Like a puppet with its strings cut, the massive creature collapsed. We fell together, hitting the floor with a bone-jarring crash. The heavy body pinned my leg, dead weight pressing me into the blood-soaked carpet.

​Silence returned to the carriage.

​For a long moment, the only sound was my own ragged breathing and the wind whistling through the hole in the roof.

​I pushed the heavy carcass off my leg and rolled onto my back, staring up at the jagged metal tear in the ceiling. Snowflakes drifted down, landing on my face. They didn’t melt immediately. My skin was cold.

​"Is it... is it dead?" Lyra whispered from behind a seat.

​I sat up, wincing as my cracked rib protested. I wiped the black blood from my face. "It’s dead."

​Leon limped over. He looked terrible. His armor was scraped, and he was holding his left arm at an awkward angle. But his eyes were clear.

​He looked at the beast, then at the small, ornamental dagger buried in its neck.

​"You took down a Level 45 Alpha," Leon said, his voice raspy. "With a letter opener."

​"Physics," I wheezed, standing up. "It’s just biology, Leon. Sever the connection between the brain and the body, and it stops moving. No magic required."

​I walked over to the carcass and retrieved my steel sword from its gut. I wiped the blade on the beast’s fur.

​"Everyone alright?" I asked, looking around.

​The students were emerging from their hiding spots. They were pale, shaking, and looking at me with a mix of fear and awe. Before today, I was just Michael, the quiet guy who somehow kept up with the top rankers.

​Now, covered in black blood, holding a sword in a room where magic had died, I was something else.

​"Eric is out cold," Maria said. She had crawled out of the medical bay when the fighting started, clutching a scalpel. She was checking Eric’s pulse. "Head trauma. He’s breathing, but shallow."

​"Bind his wounds," I ordered. "Use the tablecloths if you have to."

​I walked to the window. The fight had taken less than two minutes, but it felt like an hour. My adrenaline was fading, and the cold was seeping back in, sharper than before.

​"Michael," Leon said, coming up beside me. "That thing... it was a scout, wasn’t it?"

​I looked at the corpse. A solitary hunter? In a blizzard this thick?

​"Snow Stalkers are pack animals," I said quietly. "They send the fast ones ahead to test the prey. If the prey fights back..."

​I stopped.

​Outside, the wind changed pitch.

​It wasn’t just the wind.

​Awoooooooo.

​The sound rose from the darkness, haunting and mournful. It started low, a deep bass rumble, and climbed into a shrieking crescendo that harmonized with the gale.

​Then another joined it. And another.

​From the left. From the right. From the tracks behind us.

​The howl of the pack.

​"They call the rest," I finished.

​I looked out the window. In the swirling white void, I saw them. Not one. Not two.

​Dozens of pale, hunched shapes were moving in the blizzard, their thermal signatures barely registering against the snow, but their intent burning hot. They were circling the train.

​"Block the windows," I said, my voice dropping an octave. "Barricade the doors. Put everything heavy against the walls."

​"How many?" Leon asked, gripping his sword until his knuckles turned white.

​I turned back to the terrified group of students.

​"Enough to bury us," I said. "This wasn’t a hunt. It was a dinner bell."

​I looked at the hole in the roof.

​"Leon, get that table up there. Block the hole. Now."

​As the students scrambled into a frenzy of activity, dragging seats and luggage to fortify our metal coffin, I checked my status window one last time.

​[Status: Fatigue]

[Health: 82%]

[Mana: SEALED]

​I tightened my grip on the sword.

​Welcome to the Iron Wilderness.