100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 388 - Escape

Just then—

A handful of children spotted Lucien.

They skidded across the street, sandals scraping, eyes wide like he was a story that had climbed out of a bedtime tale.

"It’s here! The fairy is here!"

"Quick, catch him and let’s make a wish!"

Tiny hands reached.

Lucien froze for half a heartbeat, caught off guard by innocence arriving at the worst possible time. In this split body, even a child’s palm looked like a wall.

He smiled anyway.

He lifted himself into the air with a gentle pulse of will and drifted backward, out of reach.

The children gasped, then groaned in immediate heartbreak.

"Awww! He’s running!"

"He does not want us!"

"Fairy, we only want your help!"

Lucien rose higher, refusing to let their disappointment tug him down.

He flew toward the tallest building in the shell-city. He perched beneath a ledge and looked down.

Now he could see the truth behind the noise.

The adults were anxious.

Not loud-anxious but worse than that.

They were the kind of quiet that came from people who had begged before, believed before, and been punished for it.

Worry sat on their faces like ash. Some clutched bundles that were too small to be luggage and too tight to be comfort. Some stood guard over injured relatives with a stiffness that said they had learned to expect cruelty even in safe rooms.

There were wounds, bruises shaped like restraint, and rope burns.

Several humans flinched at sudden movement, even when it was just another refugee walking past with water.

Lucien’s smile faded, becoming something sharper.

Then a tremor rolled through the shell-city.

The stone beneath him vibrated. People below looked up with the same synchronized fear, as if their bodies had memorized what trembling meant.

Lucien opened the connection.

[Uncle Morveth. What is happening outside?]

The answer came delayed.

[Retreating.] Morveth’s voice was deep and controlled, but it carried the weight of distance being crossed quickly. [There are too many enemies. The mantis girl is holding them back. Little Whale is injured.]

Lucien went still.

Aerolith injured.

Kira holding back "too many."

Morveth retreating.

Those words did not belong together.

His mind tried to fit it into his understanding of their strength, and for a moment it refused.

Then a colder thought surfaced.

’This might be a butterfly effect... or is it?’

If he had followed Fate’s expected line, he should have been here with them. He should have been present at the first contact.

Instead, he had stayed in Starforge and rewritten the war.

He did not know what the world had done in response.

But Aerolith bleeding was proof that the response was not small.

Lucien moved.

The shell-city blurred as he blinked outward, slipping through Morveth’s shell-space and onto the world beyond it.

Wind hit him immediately.

Open air.

Morveth was in human form. His shoulders were squared with effort. In his arms, Aerolith lay unconscious.

Her skin was pale. Blood streaked down her side in bright, stubborn lines. It glittered faintly, as if her body refused to accept that it could leak.

Lucien’s split body hovered near her face, a tiny presence beside a wound that made his chest tighten even in miniature.

Morveth glanced down, eyes shifting just enough to acknowledge him.

Behind them, far back across broken terrain, Kira fought while moving.

She was in her Ironweave Mantis form.

And her Law of Metamorphosis surged.

She fought like someone who refused to offer the same target twice.

Her body shifted between "forms" without fully committing, turning each change into a weapon.

One moment her forelimbs were scythes.

The next moment they were hooked shields.

Then they were segmented whips that caught an incoming strike and redirected it into the dirt like a thrown spear.

She redirected intent.

She used metamorphosis to break prediction.

A pursuer lunged, certain he had her angle.

Kira’s torso folded a fraction. Her joints reconfigured mid-step, and the strike passed through the space she had vacated by becoming "not shaped for that strike" at the last possible instant.

She answered with a flick of her mandible and a burst of needle-thin iron threads that flashed out like woven lightning. The threads wrapped around the enemy’s wrist.

His grip failed.

His weapon fell.

Kira’s scythe-limb took advantage of that single beat and carved a line across his chest.

It’s not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to make him cautious.

She was not trying to win.

She was buying distance with precision.

Then Lucien saw what was chasing them.

His split body hovered in place for a fraction too long.

Eternals. Five of them.

Their Laws flickered around them like personal weather.

Lucien felt his throat tighten.

Five.

"How are there so many," he thought.

Morveth answered before Lucien asked.

"The Mantis girl said that they had been hiding, and only emerged now that the world has fallen into turmoil," Morveth said aloud. "Ten millennia is enough time to breed many Eternals."

Lucien watched Kira again.

She baited an Eternal forward by presenting a vulnerable flank, then turned that vulnerability into a trap by shifting her center of mass sideways in mid-air. The Eternal’s strike landed where her heart should have been.

But her heart was not there anymore.

Metamorphosis made anatomy negotiable.

Her counter came from below, where a moment ago she had no limb.

A spear of woven iron shot up from her abdomen, puncturing the Eternal’s guard and forcing him to recoil.

Lucien’s split body drifted closer to Morveth’s ear.

"Uncle," Lucien said, and even his small voice carried edge. "Tell me what happened earlier."

Morveth’s eyes stayed forward. His steps did not slow.

"We did not rescue them all," Morveth sighed.

The words were simple.

He continued.

"We saved just a fraction of the captive humans. We reached a camp. We thought we would pull them out and vanish before anyone with authority noticed."

A pause.

"They were waiting."

Lucien’s instincts tightened.

An ambush.

Morveth’s voice grew heavier.

"There were dozens back at the camp. These five are only the ones chasing. Little Whale protected the humans from stray attacks. Without her, many would have died on the first exchange."

Lucien’s gaze flicked to Aerolith’s blood again, and the anger in his chest sharpened into something clean and dangerous.

Then Morveth spoke the part that made Lucien’s blood boil.

"They spoke of humans as commodities," Morveth said.

He did not say it with disgust.

He said it with the cold neutrality of someone repeating a threat that needs to be remembered exactly.

"Good genes," Morveth continued. "Good vessels. They used those words the way a butcher speaks of livestock."

Lucien’s split body trembled once.

Morveth’s jaw tightened.

"But there is a deeper reason," he said.

He hesitated, as if measuring whether the information was too heavy to drop while running.

Then he dropped it anyway.

"I heard something I did not recognize."

Morveth’s voice lowered.

"Incarnation of a Primordial."

Lucien’s breath hitched.

The air around him seemed to sharpen.

His mind immediately pulled up "Severance," the presence they had encountered before, the way that being had felt like an ending wearing a face.

And then Morveth added more.

"They spoke of a human girl who holds a fragment," Morveth said. "They spoke as if she was already claimed, only not yet caught."

Lucien’s thoughts snapped into alignment.

Origin Core fragment.

Liberator. The girl with the cheat. The one who split the small world open.

Morveth’s voice continued.

"They tortured people," he said simply.

Lucien’s chest tightened.

Morveth did not describe gore for drama. He described it because it mattered.

"They asked about her. They asked who she was. How she did it. Where she went."

Morveth’s eyes darkened.

"Those who knew nothing were killed."

Lucien’s fingers curled.

Morveth’s next sentence came like a blade sliding out of a sheath.

"They said the Incarnation needs a new vessel."

Lucien’s heartbeat thumped once, hard.

"A vessel capable of enduring a Primordial’s power. And the girl they seek is the perfect fit," Morveth finished.

For a moment, Lucien heard nothing but wind and the distant clash of Kira’s retreat.

Then his mind caught up.

If a Primordial wore the skin of a Liberator, it would not be a simple incarnation anymore.

It would be an extinction-grade calamity with a cheat-built foundation.

Something that could exceed the current limits.

Lucien’s instincts screamed.

He needed to find her first.

He needed to reach the Liberator before anyone else did.

Morveth’s voice pushed forward again.

"When I stole the first batch," he said, "they became frantic."

Morveth’s mouth tightened.

"I heard them say they would be killed if they were all taken. So they attacked with desperate aggression."

Morveth kept moving, carrying Aerolith, while Kira bled time out of immortals behind them.

"Another thing, the small world split-open site is guarded," Morveth said.

Lucien exhaled once through his teeth.

A clue was right there.

And it was blocked by enemies.

He wanted to curse.

Instead, he swallowed it down.

He forced his thoughts to become cold and usable.

Kira’s voice carried faintly across the distance, sharp and controlled even while retreating.

"Do not slow," she called. "If you slow, they stop pretending."

One of the Eternals lunged again.

Kira shifted into a form with longer hind limbs and a narrower torso, turning into something built for one thing only.

Escape.

Then she became something else mid-leap.

Her body thickened into plated armor just long enough to take the edge of the strike, then thinned again into speed before the impact could fully settle.

She was turning metamorphosis into a rhythm that refused to be punished.

Lucien watched and understood.

She was not only retreating.

She was teaching the enemy that chasing had a cost.

Every exchange left a scratch.

Every scratch left a memory.

Eternals did not fear wounds.

But they respected inconvenience.

And Kira was making herself inconvenient enough to survive.

Still, the enemy’s pursuit did not slow.

Lucien’s mind turned.

This was not Fate’s correction.

This was the beginning of the bill coming due.

His eyes narrowed.

’If a Primordial Incarnation was truly hunting a Liberator for a vessel...’

Then Lucien could not afford to be late.

Not even once.