"Move into formation. If he tries to run, break his legs. The Envoy definitely wouldn't care, so long as his body is recovered."
They reached the plateau. The entrance to the Perch yawned before them like a black mouth.
Inside his calcified tomb, Soren's panic spiked.
He tried to move his fingers, but nothing happened.
He tried to blink. Nothing.
The Skeletal Internalization was not finished, and he had now become a prisoner in his own molting body.
Through his porous skin, he felt the air pressure at the entrance of the cave suddenly spike. Three massive bodies had stepped into the threshold, blocking the wind.
Soren couldn't see them, but his new Hematite-Silt skin was already feeding him data.
The Hematite-Silt was more than skin; it was a sensory array that turned the entire mountain into an extension of his own nervous system.
The pores in his skin acted like a million tiny ears, detecting the displacement of air as the hunters neared the entrance.
The Seismic Sensitivity was overwhelming; he could feel the exact weight of Korg's boots hitting the gravel outside.
The slight tremor in the second hunter's wary and alert muscles.
He felt the rhythmic, frantic thrumming of a tiny heartbeat up in the stone rafters, pacing in the dark.
The frantic, high-pitched hum of the Resonance Stone.
He was still encased in a brittle, gray-green shell—the "crust" of his old, vacated skin—but beneath it, he was a coiled spring of matte-red muscle and jade-reinforced bone.
~Shing! Shing! Shing!~
The metallic vibrations of swords being unsheathed from their scabbards suddenly rippled into Soren's senses.
Korg stepped inside, the white-hot Resonance Stone illuminating the room like a miniature sun.
He saw the "statue" of Soren sitting in the center of the floor—a brittle, jade-colored husk that looked dead and preserved.
"Look at that," a gruff voice echoed, the sound waves pressing against Soren's new skin like physical shoves.
Heavy boots approached. The heat of the Resonance Stone washed over Soren's paralyzed form like an open furnace.
"Cultivation deviation," Korg said, standing directly over Soren.
"The rat tried to temper his body with something beyond his grade. He turned himself into a rock. He's dead."
"Is that it?" the third hunter laughed, stepping forward. "He turned to stone? The brat couldn't even handle the first shedding."
"Saves us the trouble of killing him," the second hunter laughed.
As Soren lay paralyzed and twitching amidst three oblivious Iron-Skin hunters, a shadow suddenly detached itself from the pitch-black rafters directly above them.
Then the second hunter stepped past Soren's statue-like body, his heavy iron-skinned hand reaching out toward the Courier's Vault resting on the floor.
"I'll grab the vault. You both, grab the brat so we can leave this wretched—"
There was no roar. No warning hiss.
The Chimera Cub simply dropped like an anvil of rusted wire and predatory malice.
It didn't aim for the heavily armored torso or the iron-hard skull. The Cub possessed the insidious intelligence of its parents' bestial instincts.
It landed squarely on the guard's outstretched arm.
Its claws—no longer soft down, but hardened, oxidized needles—sank deeply into the only vulnerable joints of the Iron Skin: the unprotected ligaments of the wrist and the soft tissue of the inner elbow.
The hunter shrieked, a sound of pure, unadulterated shock as the Cub's fangs clamped down on his radial artery.
The Iron Skin defenses held against blunt force, but the Chimera's bite carried a corrosive friction that tore the skin like wet paper.
"Get it off him!" Korg roared, dropping the Resonance Stone and drawing a jagged hunting knife.
The third guard lunged forward, raising his broadsword to cleave the Cub in half.
The sudden, violent influx of killing intent in the room, the scent of the guard's blood, and the primal danger to his bonded beast hit Soren's Master Builder Gene like a lightning strike.
The biological threshold was breached, and the shedding was forcibly concluded.
Before the third guard could swing his sword, a sound like a small explosion rocked the cavern.
~CRACK~
Korg froze. The guard with the sword froze. And then the gray-green statue in the center of the room detonated violently.
~BOOM~.
Shards of thick, calcified jade erupted outward like shrapnel, slicing through the air and gouging the stone walls.
From the center of the settling dust, a figure stood up.
It was a boy, but he looked like a demon dragged from the deep earth. His skin was a deep, matte-red—the color of clotted blood and volcanic silt.
He seemed to lack presence, and because they could see him created a massive dissonance in their minds that severely unnerved them.
He made no sound. His breathing was entirely silent, absorbed by the porous nature of his new flesh.
There was no Body Tempering Stage that should give the sort of abilities. At least they had never heard of it.
In his right hand, gripped with terrifying, absolute stillness, was a serrated dagger carved from the horn of a Mountain Goat.
Soren slowly turned his head toward Korg, his dark eyes devoid of any human panic.
He didn't just see the Iron Skin experts. Through the Hematite-Silt, he could feel the exact rhythm of their terrified, erratic heartbeats.
The dust from the shattered jade shell hung in the still air of the cavern, illuminated only by the blinding, white-hot pulse of the Resonance Stone lying abandoned on the floor.
While the sudden explosion was disorienting to the three Iron Skin experts. To Soren, the world had slowed to a crystalline, tactical crawl.
His new Hematite-Silt skin did not merely feel the environment; it devoured it.
Every matte-red pore was open, drinking in the seismic tremors of the heavy boots on the stone, the frantic air currents kicked up by the flailing men, and the rapid, terrified thumping of their accelerating hearts.
He didn't need eyes to see the broadsword descending toward him; he felt the wedge of compressed air pushing against his cheek a full second before the steel arrived.
The third guard brought his massive blade down in a sweeping, two-handed arc designed to cleave the boy in half.
Soren didn't block. He simply vanished from the blade's path.
He moved with a liquidity that defied his seven-year-old frame, his new Jade-Alloy skeleton providing an impossibly dense, perfectly balanced anchor for his muscles.
As the broadsword slammed uselessly into the stone floor, sending a shower of sparks into the dark, Soren stepped entirely inside the guard's guard.
There was no battle cry. There was no sound of exertion. The porous skin absorbed even the friction of his own movements, turning him into a phantom of the High Wastes.
Soren drove the Goat-Horn Khukuri upward.
The Iron Skin technique was formidable against blunt force and common iron, but the guard's grayish, tempered skin was utterly unprepared for the sheer density and serrated malice of a Chimera-bone weapon.
Soren aimed for the hollow beneath the guard's jaw—the exact spot where the Iron Skin tempering was thinnest to allow the neck to articulate.
The serrated horn punched through the flesh and grated against the cervical spine. Soren twisted his wrist, severing the spinal cord with a wet crunch.
The third guard's eyes rolled back, his massive bulk collapsing backward like a felled tree.
"Rurik!" Korg roared, his voice cracking with a sudden, icy terror.
But the cavern was already dissolving into chaos.
Ten yards away, the second guard was still screaming, spinning in wild circles as he tried to dislodge the Chimera Cub.
The Cub's rusted, needle-like bristles scraped agonizingly against the man's face, while its fangs remained locked deep into the ligaments of his inner elbow.
The guard finally managed to smash his arm against the cavern wall. The Cub let out a sharp hiss and dropped to the floor, instantly melting back into the shadows.
But its work was done.
The Iron Skin around the guard's arm was no longer a dull, impenetrable gray. The corrosive, oxidizing nature of the Cub's Hematite bite had caused the tempered flesh to quite literally "rust."
The skin was flaking, weeping a sickly, blackened blood, the structural integrity of the technique completely shattered in that area.
The guard gasped, clutching his ruined arm, turning his frantic gaze toward Soren.
"What is this... what are you?!"
Soren however, still couldn't respond, even if he wanted to.
He felt the shift in the guard's balance, the weakness in his knees, and he lunged.
He didn't use the Khukuri this time. As he closed the distance, he flicked his left wrist.
The spring-loaded mechanism strapped to his forearm snapped forward.
The Cobra-Fangs—two hollow, needle-sharp bone spikes—shot out from beneath his sleeve.
They pierced the flaking, "rusted" flesh of the guard's throat with zero resistance.
Soren ripped them back, tearing his arteries open.
The second guard hit the ground, drowning in his own blood before he could even draw a breath.
Two elites. Dead in less than ten seconds.
A deafening silence pervaded the entire cavern, broken only by the heavy, ragged breathing of the last man standing.
Korg backed away, his hunting knife trembling in his grip. The arrogant, booming border guard who had marched up the mountain expecting a dying child was completely gone.
He was looking at a four-foot-tall nightmare—a boy painted in matte-red silt, standing amidst the slaughtered bodies of men three times his size, his face completely devoid of human empathy.
"You're not a sacrifice," Korg whispered, his mind fracturing as he tried to comprehend the aura of primal death radiating from the boy. "You're a demon."
Korg let out a desperate, guttural scream and charged, thrusting his knife forward in a wild, do-or-die lunge.
Soren stood perfectly still. His sensory skin tracked the exact trajectory of the blade. At the last microsecond, he leaned his torso back just an inch.
The knife sliced through the empty air directly in front of his chest.
Before Korg could retract his arm, Soren reached out and clamped his small, red hand around Korg's thick wrist.
The Iron Skin technique should have made Korg's arm feel like a solid iron bar. But Soren's grip—powered by the crushing density of his internalized Jade-Alloy bones—was like a hydraulic vise.
~CRACK~
Korg's wrist bones pulverized under the pressure. The knife clattered to the floor.
Korg dropped to his knees, clutching his mangled arm, his Iron Skin failing entirely under the overwhelming pain. He looked up, right into Soren's dark, fathomless eyes with despair.
But Soren didn't hesitate. He brought the pommel of the Goat-Horn Khukuri down in a brutal, precise arc, crushing Korg's temple.
The leader of the First Wave slumped forward, dead before his face hit the stone.
The Hunter's Perch fell still once more.
Soren exhaled a long, silent breath. The adrenaline in his blood began to recede, but the Master Builder Gene hummed with a dark satisfaction. It had been tested, and it had survived.
From the shadows, the Chimera Cub crept out, its golden eyes gleaming in the dim light.
It nudged the second guard's corpse with its snout, then trotted over to Soren, rubbing its bristly, rusted head against Soren's shin in a show of predatory solidarity.
Soren bent down and picked up the bone-white Resonance Stone from where Korg had dropped it.
It was still warm, but as Soren held it, he noticed it was no longer blindingly white. It had dimmed to a dull, pulsing amber.
He looked over at the Courier's Vault resting against the wall. He moved the stone closer to the box.
Instantly, the stone flared white-hot again, searing the Hematite-Silt skin of his palm.
Soren narrowed his eyes. His eidetic memory pieced the puzzle together instantly.
The Ignis Tribe hadn't found him by tracking his footprints. They weren't looking for him at all. They were looking for the box. And as long as he had it, he was carrying a beacon.
He looked down at the bodies of the three elite guards. He knew the Ignis Tribe. They won't stop. If three men did not return, they would send five. If five did not return, they would send an army.
Soren sheathed his Khukuri. He grabbed the Courier's Vault and strapped it tightly to his back.
He couldn't stay at the Perch. It was time to use his new skin, the mountain's terrain, and the Tranquil Poison to turn the entirety of the High Wastes into a slaughterhouse.