Light Bringer: New World[LitRPG, Fantasy, a very crazy idea]

The pungent smell of burn ointment hung over the entire living room.

Dante sat cross-legged on the felt rug, propped against the iron bookshelf to avoid putting pressure on his right collarbone. His right arm was pinned against his chest by four tight coils of elastic bandage, his hand tucked into the opening of his loose shirt to keep it from jostling.

His health bar ticked up at a crawl.

[Health Points: 14/34.]

[Status: Bone Trauma Recovery underway.]

[Estimated time to full consolidation: 18 hours.]

Resting before him on a thick rubber mat to spare the hardwood floor sat the Primordial Iron Core. The thirty-five-pound sphere maintained a freezing chill, exuding a near-invisible wisp of cold air that condensed the moisture on the floorboards around its base.

Beside the core, Dante had arranged his tools: a heavy brass mortar and pestle, an industrial diamond-grit steel rasp, the three vials of basilisk sap, and the cloth pouch filled with reddish conductive copper dust.

Using his left hand, he held the rasp and scraped the dark iron surface with short, steady strokes.

The friction kicked up a low metallic grating. With every pass of the tool, a fine black dust settled into the brass mortar. The shavings carried no sheen, appearing to swallow the overhead lamplight, gathering at the bottom of the bowl like the dead ashes of an old hearth.

Across the room, sprawled full-length along the four-seater leather couch, Maria didn’t even attempt to sit up.

She took up almost the entire length of the sofa. Her long legs stretched out over the padded wooden armrest, shins mottled with purple bruises where shrapnel from the Guardian’s plating had struck home. Over her ribs, she clamped a blue ice pack against her black tank top, pressing the vinyl with her left hand to dull the throbbing of the massive bruise purpling her flank.

Her health bar filled at a far swifter clip, powered by her twenty-eight Constitution.

[Maria’s Health Points: 68/115.]

[Status: Accelerated Regeneration Active.]

She stared up at the plaster ceiling, feeling exhaustion drag at every muscle fiber in her shoulders and back.

The memory of that moment inside the central boiler remained stark in her mind.

The sight of that steel vice maw descending on Dante’s throat. The arid terror catching in her chest. And then... that sudden, violent fracture deep within her core.

Maria lifted her right hand before her eyes, curling and uncurling her fingers slowly.

The skin across her knuckles was clean now, but she could still recall the sensation of her blood running impossibly hot through her veins. It wasn’t standard combat adrenaline from a street scrap or a wasteland hunt. It was a thick, crushing heat welling up from the marrow of her bones, laced with the taste of sulfur and smoke that had coated her tongue before she brought the greatsword crashing down.

And the interface alert she had caught out of the corner of her eye before collapsing from exhaustion:

Hidden Resonance activated.

She knitted her brows, brown eyes tracing the calloused creases of her palm.

What the hell was that?

She had never experienced that manner of blind savagery before. Maria was practical to a fault: strike where it hurts most, leverage the mass of the iron or the sword, and keep both boots cemented with [Unshakable Stance]. But during those ten seconds inside the Black Smelter, form had vanished. She had wanted only to dismantle that colossus until not a single cog remained intact on the deck.

And the air puffing from her teeth had carried genuine smoke.

She cut a sideways glance toward Dante.

The boy remained absorbed in his work, working the diamond rasp against the cold iron orb with his left hand, brows furrowing whenever his torso tilted an inch too far and pulled on his right shoulder. He had been far too busy fighting off unconsciousness to notice the tint of her irises or the steam hissing between her teeth in the heat of the strike.

Maria exhaled sharply through her nose, lifting the ice pack from her ribs for a moment before pressing it back down with a sharp intake of breath against the bite of the cold.

This book was originally published on NovelPhoenix. Check it out there for the real experience.

Overthinking only breeds headaches.

If the system had handed her that surge of brute leverage to yank the boy from certain death, so be it. What mattered was that the machine lay dead, the scrap core sat on the living room floor, and neither of them had ended up dumped into an ore ditch in the First Great Continent.

She reached her long arm toward the coffee table, grabbed the black TV remote, and clicked the red button.

The large flatscreen on the wall flared to life with the noisy jingle of a detergent commercial.

Maria flicked through three channels with her thumb until she landed on a cooking contest where four amateur chefs were sweating over slabs of pork within a thirty-minute countdown while two foreign-accented judges shouted in their faces.

”Are you going to spend the whole day watching people scorch meat on television?” Dante asked without pausing his steady rasp against the iron.

”Yes, I am,” she answered, nesting her head deeper into the leather cushion. ”Both my lungs were almost turned to jelly by a two-ton sledgehammer four hours ago. I have the god-given right to watch people overcook steak until six in the evening.”

”We have twenty-four days to assemble the matrix.”

”We have twenty-four days, and you can barely lift a medicine spoon with that shattered arm,” she pointed the remote at his chest. ”Keep quiet and scrape that black stone. I ordered three large pizzas through the delivery app on your phone.”

Dante paused his file for a beat, an eyebrow arching. ”Three large pizzas?”

”Two meat-lovers with extra cheese for me, one chicken for you.” She redirected her gaze to the screen, where a contestant just clattered a saucepan of reduction onto the stainless steel floor. ”Billed it to your card on the account. You have more than enough cash idling in that downtown bank.”

Dante let out a brief snort through his nose, cutting it short with a wince as the movement pulled on his collarbone.

”You have zero shame.”

”None at all,” she affirmed casually. ”People with shame either starve or wait for permission before saving somebody’s life.”

The rasping of iron persisted as the sole constant hum in the room, trading off against the bombastic score of the televised cook-off.

Half an hour later, Dante had two heaping tablespoons of black primordial iron dust settled inside the brass mortar.

He laid the file down, picked up the green vial containing distilled basilisk sap, and pulled the wax cork with his teeth, spitting the seal onto the rug. With his left hand, he measured out thirty drops of the viscous fluid over the metallic powder.

The reaction was immediate.

The green sap did not pool or wet the filings. The dark dust drew the liquid in like parched earth, emitting tiny pops of static friction and a wispy steam smelling of slaked lime. Dante introduced a pinch of reddish conductive copper and worked the brass pestle in slow, rhythmic circles.

The compound congealed into a dense, ash-gray paste, its matte finish refusing to reflect the ambient lighting.

[Alchemical Containment Matrix initiated.]

[Compound Purity Level: 92%.]

[Primary Property: Absorption and Dissipation of Etheric Radiation.]

Dante inspected the sludge inside the mortar.

”The synthesis held,” he said, a rare note of genuine relief coloring his voice. ”With this base, I can scribe the sealing runes directly into a slab of beast bone. Once the plate is secured between the lines along my shoulder blades, the primordial iron will vacuum up any flicker of light the feathers bleed.”

Maria didn’t turn her head to check. She kept her eyes trained on the TV screen, where a judge hurled an underbaked apple tart into a prop garbage bin.

”Terrific, bighead,” she said, shifting the melting ice pack across her tank top. ”That way you stop looking like a procession angel and go back to being just a pale runt who needs more beans in his diet.”

The intercom buzzer chimed from the kitchen.

Maria started to push herself off the couch, but a sharp stab in her ribs pulled a muffled groan from her throat and she sank back into the leather.

”Your turn,” she ordered, flicking her chin toward the hall. ”My legs are dead.”

Dante pushed off the floor gingerly, planting his left hand on the bookshelf to manage his center of gravity with his bound arm. He shuffled over to the kitchen intercom, tapped the buzzer button, and cleared the delivery driver through the lobby.

When he returned hauling three large cardboard boxes tied with twine, the aroma of baked dough, melted cheese, and oregano overwhelmed the lingering fumes of basilisk sap and burn salve.

He dropped two boxes beside Maria’s sofa and settled onto the rug with the third in his lap, prying open the cardboard with his good hand.

Maria hauled the top box carefully onto her stomach, flipped the lid open, and seized a slice trailing long strings of mozzarella. She tore off half the slice in one bite, chewing with her eyes closed for three full seconds.

”Hot food is the greatest thing on this planet,” she declared around a mouthful.

”You eat like a steam shovel,” Dante remarked, lifting a modest slice with his left hand.

”I need calories to knit these puncture wounds, runt,” she retorted, already reaching for a second slice before swallowing the first. ”And you clean out that whole pie if you want your wing bone mending before the month runs out.”

Dante chewed his slice in silence, watching the dark iron core resting motionless on the rubber mat in the center of the rug.

The throb in his collarbone echoed with every pulse, and the memory of that five-ton hammer falling toward his skull wouldn’t be fading anytime soon. Yet here, in the quiet expanse of their apartment, with mindless television chatter in the background and the smell of roasted crust in the air, the perils of the Plain of Iron Souls felt distant enough that they could simply draw breath.

At least so long as the Containment Matrix held.