I Level Up by Killing Gods-Chapter 45: Cheap Steel

At a second glance at the Void Breach...

It was less a tear—and more a sigh. A faint distortion in the air, like heat rising off Blight-rotten asphalt. Lira crouches beside it, squinting.

"This is it? This pissant flicker?"

Kael says nothing. Aether’valis hums in his grip, its cracks pulsing faintly. The blade feels lighter these days, hungrier.

She tosses a pebble into the Breach. It vanishes with a wet pop.

"E-Rank. Should’ve known. The Pact’s maps are older than my boots."

"You said it was untagged."

"Untagged *and* worthless, apparently. Let’s go."

He steps through first.

---

The Breach’s interior is a cavern of jagged black stone, the walls weeping oily fluid that reeks of burnt hair. Ravager nests cling to the ceiling, pustulent sacs throbbing with larval forms.

The floor crunches underfoot—bones, but small ones. Rodents. Insects. Nothing human.

Lira groans. "Gods, it’s a nursery. They’re not even full-grown."

A skittering sound. From the shadows, a Ravager emerges—dog-sized, its carapace soft and translucent. It hisses, mandibles clicking.

Kael swings.

Aether’valis cleaves the creature in half before it can screech. The blade leaves a trail of blue embers in its wake. Two more skitter forward. He pivots, decapitates one, impales the other. Their cores, when he digs them out, are pea-sized and murky.

"E-Rank cores," Lira mutters, pocketing them. "Worth less than spit."

They press deeper.

The Ravagers come in twos and threes, sluggish and unformed. Kael butchers them methodically: a downward chop splitting a spine, a backhand slash gutting a leaper mid-air. The blade drinks in the violence, its glow intensifying.

Lira watches, arms crossed. "You’re overqualified for this."

"You chose the Breach."

"I thought the map was lying about the rank, not the location!"

He kicks a Ravager corpse off his boot. "How many cores?"

"Seventeen. Garbage grade."

"We need twenty."

She kicks a stone. "They’re molting. Look—" She points to a half-shed carapace. "Juveniles. Their cores haven’t matured. Even if we hit twenty, we’ll be lucky to get two shards."

Aether’valis flickers. Kael stares into the Breach’s pulsating heart.

"Then we find more."

---

They don’t.

The Breach collapses an hour later, its energy spent. The exit dumps them back into the alley, dawn bleeding into the sky. Lira spills the cores onto a rusted grate—twenty-three tiny, malformed stones.

"Blight-touched hells," she mutters. "The market’ll laugh us out."

Kael sheathes Aether’valis into nothing, it dissappears.

"We go anyway."

---

The Market Quarter at dawn is a different beast. The night’s drunkards have staggered home; now it’s all sharp-eyed vendors and hungover guards.

Lira leads him to a stall draped in ratty velvet, its counter stacked with Ravager cores in glass jars. The merchant is a gaunt woman with ink-stained fingers.

"E-Rank," Lira declares, dumping the cores. "Fresh harvest."

The woman pokes one with a nail. "Blight-rotten. Half these are pre-molt."

"They’re intact! Look at the—hey!"

The merchant sweeps the cores into a tin bucket. "One shard."

Lira slams her palms on the counter.

"One? These are twenty-three cores!"

"Twenty-three pebbles. I’m doing you a favor."

"Three shards."

"Two."

"Two and a half."

"Two."

Lira snarls a curse in a language Kael doesn’t recognize. The merchant slides two Etherite shards across the counter—jagged blue crystals, faintly luminous. freewёbnoνel-com

Lira pockets them, teeth bared. "May your children inherit your generosity."

The woman smiles. "May yours inherit your taste in partners."

---

Outside, Lira kicks a cart wheel. "Two shards. TWO. You know what that buys us? A cup of gutter gin and a slap."

Kael stares at the shards in her palm.

"We need twenty."

"Yeah, no shit." She paces, her coat flapping. "Alright. Time for honesty. You’re broke. I’m broke. Sanctus doesn’t care about honest work."

He watches her. "So?"

She stops. Grins. Her silver tooth catches the light.

"So we stop being honest."

---

They sit on the roof of a burnt-out smithy, sharing a stolen bottle of something that tastes like turpentine. Lira outlines her plan between coughs.

"Option one: We hit a guild caravan. The Vanguard ships cores to the westward weekly. Guards are thick, but the payout’s fat."

"Suicide," Kael says, broken memories of the Vanguard enough to know that much.

"Option two: The Shroud Market. Sell that fancy blade of yours to a collector."

"No."

"Option three—" She leans close, her breath sharp with liquor. "We cheat."

He raises an eyebrow.

"The Second Reach’s arena. Fighters bet on themselves. You’d win. We rig the odds, take the pot."

"They’ll notice."

"Not if you lose the first round. Then, when the bets pile against you—"

"I don’t lose."

Kael didn’t just say that to sound cool, it was in his nature truly. Just like the spar back at Black Haven Academy, when it came down to it, if his opponent was bloodlusted Kael would stop at nothing to win...regardless of weather he wanted to or not.

She throws her hands up. "Fine. Option four: We rob the innkeeper. He’s got a safe. Probably full of shards."

Kael considers this. "When?"

"Tonight. While he’s dice-drunk."

"You know the layout?"

"I know everything."

He stands. "Then we rob him."

Lira blinks. "Wait—you’re serious?"

"You’re scared?"

She laughs, sudden and bright.

"Scared? I’ve been waiting to gut that Blight-sucker since he threatened my spleen!" She leaps up, swaying slightly. "But we’ll need tools. And bait. And—"

A shout cuts through the air.

"There! The freelancers!"

They turn. Three Iron Pact mercenaries stalk toward the smithy, daggers drawn. The leader—a woman with a shaved scalp and a nose ring—points at Lira.

"You. The thief. You stole from our vault."

Lira freezes. "Uh. Define ’stole’—"

"The map. Hand it over. And your cores."

Kael steps forward. Aether’valis materializes.

The mercenary snorts. "You’re outnumbered, prettyboy."

"Am I?"

The fight is short. Brutal.

Kael breaks the first mercenary’s knee, disarms the second with a wrist snap, and slams the third’s head into the smithy wall. Lira watches, wide-eyed, until it’s over.

"You’ve done this before," she says.

He wipes blood from his knuckles. "We need to move."

She hesitates, staring at the unconscious mercenaries. Then she kneels, rifling through their pockets.

"What are you doing?"

"Honest work," she says, pocketing a handful of shards. "Now let’s go rob a bastard."

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