The crackling of the campfire was the only sound in the ruined valley as Claire pushed herself up onto her elbows.

Her red eyes fluttered open, immediately snapping to the fire, and then to Hide and Elara.

"You’re awake," Hide waved.

Claire sat all the way up, rubbing her temples. The jagged gash on her forehead was entirely gone, completely healed. She looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers.

They felt a little... strong? heavy? She didn’t know the actual feeling but she knew she had made it.

After years of being an Exterminator. She had finally reached the final stage of Evolution... she was an S-Ranker now. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Maddox’s face when he will know of it.

But as her memory caught up to the present, her eyes drifted past the fire, landing on the fresh mound of dirt marked by the stone slab with Garret’s name.

A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the camp.

Elara, who had been sitting with her knees pulled tightly to her chest, suddenly shifted. She looked at Claire, her face pale and her eyes shining with unshed tears.

"I’m sorry," She whispered, her voice cracking.

Claire turned her head, her dark eyebrows knitting together. "For what?"

"For being so weak," Elara muttered, looking down at her lap. "When the Flock Master surrounded Garret... I just stood there. I froze. I ran out of mana, and I couldn’t cast a single spell to help him. I just... I watched him die. If I had been stronger, maybe he would still be here."

Claire’s expression softened instantly. She shifted closer, reaching out and placing a firm, warm hand over Elara’s trembling fingers.

"Elara, look at me," Claire said, her voice gentle.

Elara sniffled, slowly raising her head.

"It was not your mistake," Claire said. "You are just a mage, its normal for mages to run out of mana. You survived this completely unpredictable situation... that’s a great feat."

A tear slipped down Elara’s cheek.

"Garret died because the enemy was an absolute anomaly," Claire continued, her voice dropping into a somber, respectful register. "He threw himself into that swarm because it was his job as a Warrior to protect the backline. He made his choice. Don’t disrespect his sacrifice by carrying his death as your failure. Carry it as your reason to get stronger."

Elara wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve, taking a shaky breath, and nodded slowly. "I will."

Claire smiled faintly, leaning back. "Besides, if we’re measuring ourselves against Hide right now, we’re all going to feel weak."

Elara let out a short, watery laugh. "He really is something else, isn’t he?"

Hide clicked his tongue, he didn’t like where this convo was going at all.

"He’s a monster," Claire agreed, turning to look at Hide with profound respect. "To think under pressure like that... to realize the core was detached while your arm was literally inside her liquid torso. It takes a terrifying kind of instinct to pull that off. You saved all our lives, Hide. Thank you."

Hide poked the fire with a stick, again. ’Well fuck that, I needed to survive as well.’

After some contemplation he finally answered in his usual tone. "We all did our part. But the job isn’t done. The Calamity lord didn’t leave that anchor or something for moving this gate?"

"I know," Claire sighed, her expression hardening. "A Calamity Lord can’t be the Gatekeeper of a loop gate. Calamity lords are not like normal beasts, they do not regenerate, if they did humanity would be fucking dead by now."

Behind them, the tall grass rustled.

Rol groaned. The assassin pushed himself up, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked around the camp, his grey eyes sweeping over Elara and Claire, and finally landing on Garret’s grave.

He didn’t even look at Hide.

Rol stared at the stone slab for a long, silent moment. His face remained entirely expressionless. The cold, detached demeanor of an assassin didn’t allow for tears.

He simply grumbled something completely unintelligible under his breath, turned his back to the camp, and walked deeper into the dead woods, pulling a metal flask of alcohol from his spatial storage device.

Evelyn woke up shortly after, and Claire quietly explained the situation to her. The analyst wept silently for Garret, but the reality of Estopia allowed little time for extended grief.

Reminded of that, Hide asked Claire what Estopia was, only to find out that she didn’t have any idea about that either.

They rested through the remainder of the night, waiting until the artificial, grey light of the gate’s dawn began to bleed over the jagged horizon, even though there was no visible sun.

There were three beast attacks which were handled by Zenith before they even reached their camp and that helped the phantom level up once.

When morning finally broke, the hunt began as they have to kill each and every beast in this gate and find the new gate keeper as well.

It took them four hours.

With Claire operating at S-Rank capacity and Hide completely unburdened by fatigue, the sweep was straight up brutal. They scoured the ruined city blocks, exterminating every lingering F-Rank and E-Rank creature hiding in the rubble.

Hide’s system chimed steadily as the experience points stacked up, finally pushing him over the threshold.

[Level Up]

Level: 20 → 21

Exp: 120 / 4500

Level Up reward has been added to inventory.

Finally, near the edge of a collapsed skyscraper on the top of a mountain, they found it.

The Gatekeeper.

It was a D-Rank flying beast, a massive, mutated variant of a gargoyle with jagged, metallic wings. It was ferocious, but compared to the horrors they had fought the night before, it felt almost trivial.

That kill went to Elara, who killed the monster with a massive, condensed spear of pale blue ice, perfectly impaling the gargoyle through the chest. It shrieked once before crashing to the pavement, dead.

The space above the beast’s corpse shimmered.

A perfectly smooth, transparent white sphere materialized in the air, glowing with a soft, pulsing light.

The spatial anchor.

Beside it, the metallic D-Rank core of the beast dropped into the dirt.

Elara walked forward, picking up the core. She turned and walked directly back to Hide, holding the crystal out to him.

"Here," Elara said.

Hide blinked, surprised. "You killed it. That belongs to you."

"Well... I have no use of it. I heard that you need these for your talent to work."

Hide’s eyes twitched. Who the fuck was spreading that rumor. But there was no one to!

That meant she devised that on her own. ’How clever.’

Hide looked at the core, then at Elara. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"Alright," Hide took the core, slipping the core into his inventory. "I’ll accept it. Which means you don’t have to pay me back for the potions."

Elara stared at him for a second before bursting into laughter.

Hide smiled, but as he looked at the transparent white anchor hovering in the air, and a gate that was forming for them to finally go out.

’Wait... I think I am forgetting something? Well, if I don’t remember that its not important enough’

Meanwhile, in Area 5.

The luxury hotel room was incredibly quiet.

Fuu was sitting perfectly still on the edge of the very comfortable, memory-foam bed. He was staring directly at the thick, reinforced wooden door of the hotel room.

He had not moved from this spot in almost twenty-four hours.

To say Fuu was scared would be a catastrophic understatement. Fuu was currently experiencing a psychological state that transcended fear.

Before Hide had left yesterday morning, he had looked at Fuu with those terrifying, dead blue eyes and delivered a single, simple instruction:

If you open this door, you’re dead.

Tears almost escaped Fuu’s eyes. "Where the hell did he go... after saying he was just going to buy some cloths!"