"Huuuuu—"

Rohan sucked in a deep breath of dirty, sooty air. Despite the pain his lungs felt inhaling such contaminated air, his brain was screaming at him for some oxygen by that point.

"Cough... cough... cough..."

He looked down. Right underneath him was Elane, completely unconscious and bleeding and bruised all over. Thankfully, she still took in a shallow breath every now and then, letting him know that she was still alive.

His own ribs groaned, and his spine felt like it might snap under any more pressure. But the weight kept coming anyway.

Somewhere under the middle of all that suffocating, crushing darkness, a message flashed though his vision.

[You have killed an E rank (Elite) Firestone King Ant.]

’So I guessed right. The first one really wasn’t the queen of this place.’

Wonderful. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

But completely fucking irrelevant right now.

His attention was a lot more preoccupied with being buried alive, and trying to manage what came closest to a mountain bearing down on him while making sure not to collapse onto Elane any further proved to be quite the challenge.

Creak.

Groan.

But to his immense relief, the worst of it seemed to have passed, and the tons of rocks and dirt bearing down in him settled in their new place.

Rohan first decided to test the waters by trying to shimmy his back to the side, just by a fraction of an inch. Any more than that and he’d risk undoing all his work of surviving that catastrophic explosion.

’It works! Thank god. I was worried the rubble around us was too soft to settle in place.’

But then it made sense to him that it did — it was the cave walls and ceiling which were already notorious for their toughness and harness that fell on top of him first, after all.

’Though it’s safe to assume that Rudith also died in that explosion. She was quite literally the reason it was so much more powerful — and if it was able to take out the Ant King, then there’s no way in hell she could have survived it too.’

Then came the next problem he faced.

How the hell was he supposed to get out of there now? He was stuck in place in his current position, and there was very little room to manoeuvre, so he was essentially limited to staying like that unless he opted for a quick death.

’Elane has more room than me, since I’m the one shielding all of the rubble from reaching her. She might be able to dig us a way out.’

Though, there was a slight issue with that...

She had still yet to wake up. Not to mention that her injuries looked quite serious as well.

Would she even be able to dig through dozens of tons of rock and dirt in her current state.

’Oh well, there’s no use thinking about that now. The real question is if I can keep holding on until she does wake up.’

***

Rohan kept his body in place and waited patiently for Elane to awake from her concussed state, worried that the longer he waited, he might run out of energy to keep sustaining his Firestone Skin.

But that worry soon came to pass, as Elane showed signs of waking after a further 15 minutes.

"Argh..."

The pained groan that slipped out of her mouth was weak and vulnerable, but far more pleasant on Rohan’s ears than it ever needed to be.

He nearly laughed from relief.

Instead, all that came out was a strained greeting.

"Morning, sleepyhead. Did you have a good rest?" He asked jokingly, just trying to lift their spirits about their current situation.

She didn’t respond straight away, and from her lack of reaction to his joke, it seemed she didn’t even register his presence just yet.

Her body shifted faintly beneath him, just enough for him to realise how bad her condition still was. Every tiny movement made her flinch, and her breathing turned ragged for a second, resulting in her sucking in a sharp breath of that stale, contaminated air through clenched teeth, which only served to make things worse.

Then she opened her eyes.

To near complete darkness.

She was able to make out a faint, orange-red light coming in through the cracks around them to light up the extremely tight space they occupied, but other than that, she barely made out the faint, hot breath from Rohan falling down on her.

The fact that Rohan was draped over her like some very heavy, very battered stone blanket startled her a little.

"What... the hell..." she croaked out.

Rohan let out a humourless huff.

"We’ve been buried alive. Try not to move too much."

That woke her up faster than any cold water ever could.

Elane wasn’t exactly a claustrophobic person, but being buried alive was an innate fear that almost every human felt. But thankfully, Rohan and Elane were there together, keeping each other company in this unfortunate situation.

If they were alone, they would have probably suffered panic attacks already.

Elane went still beneath him, and for a second, she didn’t even breathe. Though Rohan put that down to her not liking the feeling of dust and sharp rocks entering her lungs with every breath.

"The good news is the other E rank Elite is also dead now. It turns out they were a pair, a King and a Queen."

Rohan immediately spoke again, keeping his voice steady despite the pain he felt with every word.

"Are you hurt?" Elane whispered.

She swallowed hard in the dark, fighting down the instinctive terror of being trapped under a mountain of collapsed dirt and stones.

Rohan almost let out an involuntary laugh.

What kind of question even was that?

Of course he was hurt. He’d have to be indestructible to not be after what they’d just gone through.

His whole body felt like it had been used to stop a freight train at full speed.

Still, he understood that Elane was just worried about him.

"I’ll manage. But we have bigger problems to worry about right now."

Elane’s face turned bleak. She understood exactly what Rohan meant.

They now faced the difficult task of figuring a way out of this predicament.