Rohan allowed himself to fall.

The sensation of weightlessness did not alarm him. As the high stone platform splintered into a million jagged pieces of shale and granite, he simply let go. He allowed his knees to buckle and his arms to flail, permitting gravity to claim him.

To anyone watching, he was merely a fragile liability being swept away by the catastrophic wake of a Superior Dangerous Beast. Internally, however, Rohan’s mind was cold, calculating the velocity of their descent and the trajectory of the falling debris.

The mountain was screaming.

The secondary shockwave from Zul’Kharath’s awakening had sheared off the entire northern face of the ridge. Millions of tons of loose gravel, massive boulders, and uprooted ancient trees descended in an avalanche of grey stone.

Above Rohan, Eric was screaming, his limbs windmilling uselessly as he was tossed around by the turbulent air currents. But Priscilla was different. Even while falling through a cascading sea of stone, her sharp eyes remained fixed on the terrain below, and her hand never left the hilt of her black sword.

’She really is a monster in her own right,’ Rohan thought, his red eyes narrowing beneath his hood as he tracked her movements.

"Brace yourselves!" Priscilla’s voice pierced through the roar of the rockslide, carrying a chilling, resonant weight.

She realized within seconds that they wouldn’t survive the impact if they hit the forested floor at this speed, especially with a mountain of granite chasing them from behind. She needed to halt their momentum and create a buffer against the avalanche.

Priscilla immediately drew her sword. The air around the blade froze instantly.

’How many skills does she have? She never runs out.’ Rohan scowled.

Priscilla drove the tip of her blade directly into a massive, protruding pillar of granite as they fell past it. The moment the metal bit into the stone, a torrential wave of pale blue ice erupted from the point of impact. The frost spread exponentially, chasing the falling debris and encasing the loose shale in a thick, reinforced shell of glacial ice.

She swung her body using the momentum, her free hand snapping out to grab Eric by the collar of his stiff leather gear. In the same breath, her boots found a foothold on the rapidly forming ice ramp. She didn’t look back for Rohan, but the expanding wave of frost naturally swept beneath his feet, creating a slick, steep slide that redirected their vertical plunge into a horizontal trajectory.

"Down!" Priscilla barked.

The avalanche of stone slammed into the upper roof of her glacial barrier. The sound was like a sequence of thunderclaps as the massive boulders cracked against the reinforced ice.

The pressure was immense, threatening to shatter her construct, but the ice held just long enough. The momentum propelled the three of them forward, skidding wildly down the frozen incline at a terrifying speed, directly toward the jagged face of the forested peaks.

A dark, gaping maw appeared in the cliffside ahead—a hidden cavern entrance obscured by the giant roots of the swamp trees. With a final, desperate surge of her essence, Priscilla detonated the ice ramp behind them.

The resulting localized blast threw them forward, launching them through the air and directly into the mouth of the dark cave. A split second later, the massive rockslide reached the base of the peak, completely burying the entrance under a mountain of impenetrable granite.

The light of the First Jianghu was instantly extinguished.

Silence settled over the dark interior, broken only by the sound of ragged breathing and the distant, muffled thuds of the ongoing rockslide outside.

"Is everyone... alive?" Eric groaned, his voice shaking as he pushed himself up from the cold, damp floor of the cavern. His armor was scuffed and dented, but he had survived without any broken bones, thanks to Priscilla’s quick intervention.

Priscilla didn’t answer immediately. She stood near the collapsed entrance, her sword still drawn, its faint icy glow providing the only source of illumination in the pitch-black cave. Her breathing was controlled, but the slight tremor in her fingers betrayed the massive toll that the ice manifestation had taken on her stamina.

Her eyes immediately swept across the darkness, locking onto Rohan.

Rohan was huddled against the stone wall, clutching his Ironhide Vest and shivering violently. He made sure his breath came in short, panicked gasps, his red eyes wide with simulated terror. "Barry and Dominion... they’re just gone..."

*’Shit! My plans are wasted. Why did that fucking beast have to kill them?’*

Priscilla observed him for a long, quiet moment. "Stand up, Rohan," she said coldly. "Panicking won’t dig us out of here. Barry and Dominion underestimated the Frontier. That was their choice. Ours is to survive."

"We’re trapped," Eric said, his voice rising in panic as he ran his hands over the solid wall of collapsed stone blocking the entrance. "The rockslide completely sealed the mouth. I am out of essence, so I think we should be safe here for a while until I can use my Strength Rune to break us out."

"Safe?" Priscilla’s voice was dangerously quiet, cutting through the heavy, damp darkness of the cavern. The faint blue luminescence radiating from her blade cast sharp, dancing shadows across her pale face. "Eric, we are in an unmapped cavern inside a forested peak, with an active Superior Dangerous Beast roaming the surface. We are many things right now. Safe is not one of them. Do you know what we’ve caused for the high ranks of the First Jianghu?"

Eric flinched, pulling his hands back from the solid wall of collapsed granite that had sealed the entrance. He slumped against the stone, his shoulders sagging heavily. "I know, I know... I just mean nothing can get through that rockslide from the outside. Not immediately. We have a moment to catch our breath."

Rohan, still pulled tightly into a ball against the far wall, let out a well-timed, ragged wheeze. He pulled his Ironhide Vest closer to his chest, his shoulders trembling as he buried his face in his hands.

’She’s pushing her essence past its limits,’ Rohan noted internally, his mind entirely detached from the terrified theater he was putting on. Through the gaps in his fingers, his red eyes subtly scanned the ambient energy in the cave. ’The frost on her blade is thinning. She is low on essence, but she’s refusing to show it to Eric. Smart. If the leader panics, the dead weight breaks.’

Priscilla didn’t sheathe her sword. Instead, she leaned her back against a damp pillar of stone, her sharp gaze never wavering from Rohan’s shivering form.

"How did you know?" Priscilla asked suddenly.

Eric looked up, blinking in confusion. "Huh? Know what, Priscilla?"

"Not you. Him," she said, tilting her chin slightly toward Rohan. "Back on the platform. Before Barry touched the Anchor Point, you screamed at us to stop. You said it wasn’t an Anchor Point. How did a Common Class hunter with a low perception stat notice?"

Rohan forced his heart rate to spike, which was a simple trick of blood-flow manipulation he’d mastered a lifetime ago. He looked up, his eyes wide, watery, and brimming with the frantic, disjointed energy of a survivor on the edge of a breakdown.

"I—I didn’t see anything!" Rohan stammered, his voice cracking perfectly. "I just had a bad feeling about it!"

"Seriously? That’s your excuse?" Priscilla scoffed.

"Uhm, Priscilla, I don’t think I like the way Rohan is being treated," Eric said, frustrated. "For one thing, you forced us into this hunt in the first place. In fact, you were extremely nice and polite to us beforehand. All of a sudden, you’ve become cold and started using different skills. I think that’s a very bad attitude, if you ask me."

Priscilla’s eyes snapped toward Eric. "An attitude?" she repeated, her voice dripping with an icy, dangerous calm that made Eric instinctively step back. "You think this is a matter of disposition, Eric? Look around you. Two members of our party were erased from existence in the span of three seconds. We are sealed inside a subterranean fault line. I don’t have the luxury of being ’polite’ to you anymore."

Eric’s face flushed with a mix of anger and fear, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. "That doesn’t mean you interrogate the kid! He’s a Common Class auxiliary. He just told you it was a gut feeling. Instead of acting like we’re your enemies, why don’t you tell us why you suddenly have an arsenal of high-tier ice skills you never mentioned before we started hunting?"

From his spot against the wall, Rohan watched the exchange through the curtain of his hair, his face still twisted into an expression of pathetic, wide-eyed terror. Internally, however, a dark amusement flickered through his thoughts.

’Keep pushing her, Eric,’ Rohan thought, keeping his breathing shallow and erratic. ’Force her to defend her secrets. The more she focuses on defending her hidden identity, the less time she has to pick apart my story.’

Priscilla didn’t flinch at Eric’s question. Her gaze remained entirely unreadable. "My skills are my own business, registered under standard guild privacy protocols. They kept you from being flattened into paste by a million tons of falling granite. If you want to question my methods, do it when we are back at the pavilion. Until then, my word is absolute."

She turned her back on Eric, effectively ending the argument, and faced the absolute darkness of the tunnel stretching deeper into the mountain. The faint blue light of her sword could only pierce a few meters into the heavy gloom before being swallowed completely by the shadows.

"We have seven minutes left of our rest," Priscilla stated coldly, her voice echoing down the empty stone path. "Eric, use your time to cycle whatever residual energy you have left. Rohan, stop shaking and check your gear. If your ’instincts’ flare up again, you speak immediately. Am I clear?"

Rohan let out a weak, submissive nod, pulling his boots closer to his chest. "C-clear..." he muttered, lowering his head back onto his knees.

Eric walked up to him, frowning, and whispered, "I don’t know why you’re hiding your actual Class, but I won’t say anything."