SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

”It’s still in an F-rank dungeon, on the F-rank level. So the dungeon is grading it as F-rank. But the body is at the very top of F. Like the flame-mane alpha was.”

Theron looked at the archway. ”Can we take it?”

Bruce thought.

The spine-roller’s defensive form had been nearly invulnerable when it rolled. The vulnerability was in the transition. A creature this much larger would have a longer transition time, more mass to reorient, but it would also be much faster in the rolling phase, with more momentum. The impact of being hit by a creature that size would be lethal to any of them. Avoiding the roll would require timing and space.

This chamber had space.

”We can take it,” Bruce said. ”But carefully. The strategy is the same as the small roller, just at a different scale. We do not let it hit us during the roll. We strike during the transition. The roll cycle will probably be longer for a body this size, five seconds, maybe six. We have to use that window.”

”How do we make it roll the first time?” Theron asked.

”It’ll roll on its own once it sees us. Spine-rollers are aggressive. The alpha will be worse.”

”And once it uncurls,”

”Kael’s fire-lance to the underside of the neck. Mine to the eye-slits. Theron, when it starts to recurl for a second roll, you’re the one who can interrupt. The scythe at the base of the skull during the recurl will prevent the spines from sealing.”

”Got it.”

”On my signal.”

They moved.

The alpha was, when they came around the arch, even larger than the impression had suggested.

It stood in the middle of the wider chamber on four heavy legs, easily three times the size of a regular spine-roller, with spines that were not just curved barbs but flat dark blades, each as long as Bruce’s forearm. Its eye-sockets were not slits but full glowing ovals of deep orange, and the head was wider, with what looked like the suggestion of a snout, a hint of an actual face, where the smaller rollers had been almost faceless. It was, Bruce noted with the part of his mind that was always cataloguing, evolving toward a more complex form. A creature that had been advancing for a long time within the F-rank ceiling, accumulating essence from its own kills of crab and roller until it was nearly something else.

It saw them.

It made a sound that was not the grinding of the regular rollers but a deeper, slower groan, the sound of something heavy taking offense.

Then it curled.

The curl was slower than the small rollers’ but more total, it didn’t just retract its legs, it folded its entire body into a tight sphere, the spines locking together into a continuous outer armor with no visible gaps. The whole sphere was nearly the height of Theron and probably weighed more than the three of them combined.

It launched.

The roll came at them across the chamber faster than Bruce had braced for, the alpha had not just more mass but more efficient locomotion, the long spines somehow propelling the rotation in a way the smaller ones could not. Bruce sidestepped almost too late, feeling the wind of the thing pass close enough to his side that he could hear the spines whistling. Kael went the other way. Theron, the furthest back, dove into the gap behind a column.

The alpha hit the far wall.

The impact was much, much louder than the small roller’s had been. The wall cracked, actually cracked, a fissure spreading from the impact point, and a small shower of stone fragments fell to the floor. The alpha bounced off and rolled into a slow stop, beginning the uncurl.

Five seconds.

Bruce counted them, watching the uncurling sphere. He shaped his ink.

When the alpha’s head emerged at the second second of the uncurl, Bruce was ready. He fired, not bullets this time, but the new technique he had been developing in the back of his mind for two days. He drew his finger sharply through the air and wrote a single sharp line of ink, the line condensed and committed into a hardened shaft, and launched the shaft through the air like a spear. The shaft drove into the alpha’s right eye-socket and emerged through the other side.

The alpha groaned.

Kael was already in position. The fire-lance lanced out, narrow and white-hot, and drove into the underside of the neck just as the legs began to unfold. The alpha’s body spasmed. The fire continued through, Kael was pouring more energy into this single shot than Bruce had seen him use before, the ambient stone-cold doing nothing to slow his flame, his demon’s connection to fire deeper than the environment’s resistance.

The alpha began to recurl in defensive panic, the spines drawing in.

Theron came in from the back.

His scythe entered the recurling motion at the only window the alpha had left, the narrow gap at the base of the skull where the head was retracting into the body. The scythe found the right angle without Theron consciously choosing it. The cut was clean and exact. The alpha’s head, partially retracted, separated cleanly from the body. The recurl stopped halfway.

The alpha collapsed.

The chamber was very quiet.

The essence that came out of the roller alpha was the densest thing Bruce had felt in this realm.

It hit him in a slow rolling wave, not a sharp pulse like the flame-mane alpha but a long sustained pressure, pouring into him over perhaps fifteen seconds. The depth-essence of the stone dungeon, concentrated into a single creature’s accumulated lifetime of advancement, settling into his soul-body’s foundation layer by layer.

When it finally stopped, Bruce was breathing slightly heavier than he had been at the end of the fight.

He looked at his hands.

Something had changed.

His soul-body’s glow looked the same, but underneath the glow, the substance, he could feel a difference. A weight. A density that had not been there an hour ago. He clenched his fist, opened it. Made a small ink-shape in his other hand. The shape came faster than it usually did. More stable. Less effort to maintain.

”I think,” he said carefully, ”I just advanced again. Inside F. Possibly to peak.”

Kael was staring at his own hands too, and grinning. ”Same. I felt it. Strong version.”

Theron looked between them, hopeful.

”Did you?” Bruce asked him.

Theron paused. He flexed his hands. He summoned his scythe, it came faster than it had two minutes ago, and dispelled it, and summoned it again.

”Yes,” he said quietly. ”I think so.”

”Then that,” Kael said, ”is two of us at peak-F and one of us close behind. Which means within a few more good hunts,”

”E-rank,” Bruce said.

The word landed in the cavern’s quiet.

E-rank meant new portals would open to them. E-rank meant access to E-rank beasts. E-rank meant a real step on the long climb from F to SSS, not just intra-rank gains, but the first genuine threshold crossing.

It also meant they would need new equipment. The spatial ring. Better gear. Better food, probably, from the old soul who could prepare meat that fed an E-rank’s needs. They were about to outgrow the corner of Xiltra they had been working in for three days, and Bruce found, looking at the carcass of the spine-roller alpha at his feet, that he was ready for it.

”We butcher this one carefully,” he said. ”All of it. The cores from the alpha alone will pay for the spatial ring.”

”Truly?” Theron asked.

”Truly. An F-peak alpha core graded high enough to push toward E will sell for several hundred points on its own. Possibly more than the flame-mane alpha gave us.”

”Then,”

”Then today is the day,” Bruce said simply.

Kael let out a small triumphant sound, not a shout, just a satisfied breath through his teeth, and crouched to begin the butchering.

The butchering of the spine-roller alpha took the rest of the time they had budgeted for the day.

The creature was enormous. Kael did the primary work; Bruce assisted; Theron handled the cores, of which there were two, a large primary core in the chest and a smaller secondary core in the lower belly. Bruce had not encountered a two-core beast yet. Theron extracted both with care.

”Two cores,” Kael said when he saw them. ”Genuinely transitioning toward E. A creature that develops a second core is one step from rank advancement. We caught it right before it would have crossed.”

”Lucky,” Theron said.

”Skilled,” Bruce corrected, but with a slight smile.

They removed the long spine-blades, those would sell at the weapon stalls, Kael was certain, as raw material for crafted weapons. They took the meat in great rough sections, more than they could comfortably carry, packing it into the hide sacks and the carrying frames until every storage option was full. The remaining meat they left, with the cleanest face turned upward in case other hunters wandered through.