The howling winds seemed to freeze for a fraction of a second.

Hide stood perfectly still, his glowing blue eyes looking down at the grey-haired girl pinned against the mountain wall. His statement hung in the freezing air, utterly devoid of mockery or malice.

A few feet away, Sora’s eyes widened. She quickly slapped both hands over her mouth, aggressively turning her head to the side, but she couldn’t suppress the loud snicker that escaped her lips. Her shoulders shook as she desperately tried to hold back her laughter.

The grey-haired girl’s face went completely blank. She looked down at her own chest, buried under the thick, durable Kevlar of her tactical vest, then looked back up at Hide’s completely apathetic expression.

In an instant, her pale face flushed a furious, vibrant shade of crimson.

"You—!" she stammered, her voice cracking as shame and rage flooded her system. "Get off me, you absolute creep!"

With a frantic surge of physical strength, she forcefully shoved Hide’s chest, ripping her shoulder out of his grip. She stumbled backward, her boots slipping slightly on the wet stone, completely intent on turning around and bolting right back into the storm just to get away from the humiliation.

Hide let her go, raising an eyebrow at the overreaction, but before the girl could even take her second step, the atmosphere shifted.

Hide’s True Sight flared blindingly bright. The ambient mana in the air around them didn’t spike; it completely inverted.

"Move!" Hide roared.

He didn’t think and lunged forward, his hands snapping out like steel vices. His right hand clamped securely around Sora’s wrist, while his left hand violently seized the unknown girl’s arm. With a brutal exertion of his enhanced Agility and Strength, Hide yanked both of them backward.

A millisecond later, the sky flashed an apocalyptic, blinding white.

BOOOOOOOOM!

A jagged streak of blue lightning struck the exact spot where the three of them had been standing just a heartbeat ago. The magical force of the strike was devastating. The bedrock was completely pulverized into fine, smoking dust. A deafening crack echoed through the storm as a massive fissure rapidly spider-webbed across the stone.

The structural integrity of the edge they were standing on vanished. The entire massive chunk of the mountain they were standing on simply severed from the cliff face.

The world tilted violently. The feeling of gravity vanished, replaced by the stomach-churning sensation of freefall.

They were plummeting down. Hide’s eyes darted frantically through the torrential hail. His very first, absolute instinct was to call out Petra. The colossal Pteranodon could easily catch all three of them mid-air and fly them to safety.

But Hide bit his tongue, forcefully suppressing the urge. He couldn’t do it. Summoning a massive shadow beast of corrupted mana right in front of a complete stranger was out of the question. He had no idea who this scrappy girl was, what agency she belonged to, or who she worked for. Revealing his unique talents to an outsider in the middle of the World Ranking Tournament was a fatal error.

They were falling fast. Through the sheets of freezing rain, Hide saw the jagged, sloping face of the lower mountain rapidly approaching. If they hit the rocks at this velocity, even his Abyssal Scale Carapace might not save his internal organs, and the two girls would undoubtedly be crushed into paste.

Hide gulped hard, his mind racing at the speed of light. He violently pulled both girls toward him, wrapping his strong, scaled arms tightly around their waists to keep them from flailing away in the violent wind.

"Let go of me, you bastard!" the new girl struggled frantically against his grip, her hands weakly hitting his armored chest as she screamed a string of colorful curses into the howling wind.

Sora, on the other hand, said absolutely nothing. The wind-attribute assassin simply tucked her head against his shoulder, entirely trusting his judgment.

For a fleeting, highly tempting second, Hide seriously considered just dropping the screaming, thrashing girlie into the abyss. It would solve his immediate headache. But he gritted his teeth, his blue eyes narrowing against the hail, and decided against it.

Through his True Sight, Hide spotted a massive, gaping hole in the cliff face rapidly approaching on their left trajectory. A natural cavern.

Hide commanded internally. "Abyssal Slime!"

A thick, dark-translucent glob of incredibly dense liquid shot out from his wrist, it obeyed Hide’s flawless spatial calculations, it shot across the twenty-yard gap in mid-air, splitting into two thick, highly elastic tendrils. The ends of the slime tugged into the stalagmites on either side of the cave entrance, anchoring themselves with an unbreakable grip.

The main body of the slime stretched back, wrapping securely around Hide’s torso from behind like the sling of a massive catapult.

The moment the slime pulled taut, their downward momentum was agonizingly arrested. The G-force was excruciating. The highly elastic slime stretched to its absolute breaking point, groaning under the weight of three humans, before violently snapping back.

Like a stone fired from a slingshot, the three of them were forcefully hurled through the air directly into the gaping maw of the dark cave.

Hide released his grip on their waists the moment they cleared the threshold. He spun mid-air, orienting his boots toward the ground. He landed heavily, the dark scales on his legs absorbing the shock. His hands slammed into the stone floor, his fingers extending into razor-sharp black talons that violently dug into the bedrock, carving deep, screeching furrows into the stone to aggressively brake his forward momentum.

Sora hit the ground a moment later, executing a flawless, wind-cushioned combat roll and coming up gracefully on one knee.

The new girl was not so elegant. She hit the cave floor completely off-balance, tumbling across the rough stone and slamming shoulder-first into the wall.

"Ahhhhh!" she let out a sharp, piercing shriek of pain as she hit the rock.

"Shut the hell up," Hide hissed, as he instantly shot up from his crouch.

But it was already too late. The shriek had echoed deep into the cavernous darkness.

Hide’s blue eyes pierced the gloom. Deep within the shadows of the cave, a massive silhouette slowly stopped moving. It was a Mountain Roller—one of the heavily armored, spherical terrestrial beasts they had fought earlier. It was currently hunched over the mangled corpse of a low-tier Gror, a scrawny, rat-like scavenger beast, violently tearing chunks of meat from its bones.

But the moment the Mountain Roller heard the girl’s scream, it stopped chewing. It slowly turned its massive, calcified head toward the cave entrance. When its beady, dark eyes locked onto the three humans, the dim intelligence in its gaze vanished, entirely replaced by an otherworldly, gluttonous greed. Human meat was a delicacy rich in refined mana.

The beast casually tossed the mangled Gror corpse aside. It let out a low, grinding rumble, its thick stone-plated muscles bunching as it prepared to curl into a boulder and crush them against the cave walls.

Hide gritted his teeth, his hand instinctively hovering over his inventory. He couldn’t summon Aegis here. The phantom was simply too large and possessed too much physical mass. If Aegis started throwing punches inside this confined, structurally unstable tunnel, the entire cave system would collapse and bury them alive.

Hide stepped forward, taking a low stance to summon his blades.

But before the Mountain Roller could take a single step forward—it suddenly froze.

The colossal beast’s eyes rolled back into its rocky skull. A sickening, wet squelch echoed through the quiet cave, followed by the sound of heavy stone collapsing. The beast’s massive body went entirely limp, crashing heavily onto the cavern floor. Dead.

Hide blinked, his combat stance faltering in pure surprise.

Through his True Sight, Hide saw it. It wasn’t a projectile or a spell. It was a thread. An impossibly thin, almost microscopic string of deep, crackling azure mana was pulled taut directly through the microscopic gaps in the beast’s calcified neck armor. The thread had cleanly severed the creature’s spinal cord and crushed its core from the inside in a single, imperceptible motion.

Hide’s eyes tracked the glowing azure thread backward through the dark air.

The line connected directly to the fingertips of the grey-haired girl sitting on the floor.

She wasn’t crying or shrieking anymore. She slowly pulled her hand back, the azure thread dissolving into ambient particles. She looked at the dead beast, then slowly licked her lips, a dangerous, feral glint replacing the embarrassment in her eyes.

She pushed herself up from the floor, dusting off her Kevlar vest. She looked at Hide, her jaw setting into a stubborn line as she gritted her teeth.

"We’re even," she stated, her raspy voice echoing in the cave. "That was for saving me from the fall."

Without waiting for a response, she turned her back on them and started walking briskly toward the howling exit of the cave, clearly intending to brave the storm alone rather than stay in their company.

"Stop right there," Hide’s cold voice cut through the air, completely halting her in her tracks.

The girl froze, looking over her shoulder.

"I never said you could go," Hide continued, his expression flat and unbothered as he crossed his arms over his chest. "And I certainly never asked you to kill that thing. I could kill a beast like that on my own with my eyes closed. You owe me a life, and a stolen kill doesn’t balance the ledger."

The sheer audacity of the words took her entirely by surprise. She fully turned around, her eyes wide as she shot him a look of disbelief, followed by a harsh, defensive wince.

"Are you insane?" she snapped, aggressively pointing a finger at him. "Just let me go then, you pervert! Why the hell are you trying to keep me here in the dark with you?"

Before Hide could even formulate a deadpan reply to the accusation, a blur of motion stepped between them.

Sora stood squarely in front of Hide, her twin daggers gleaming menacingly in the dim light. Her dark eyes narrowed into lethal, hateful slits as she glared at the scrappy stranger.

"Watch your mouth," Sora hissed, her voice dripping with aristocratic venom. "Hide is a gentleman. He just saved your pathetic life twice in the span of five minutes. If you call him a pervert one more time, I will personally cut your tongue out and feed it to the scavengers."

The grey-haired girl didn’t back down. She scoffed loudly, stepping forward to meet Sora’s glare, entirely unintimidated by the daggers.

"Oh, look at the pampered little princess defending her master," the girl mocked, her azure mana faintly sparking around her fingertips. "He groped me against a wall and stared at my chest! If that’s what constitutes a ’gentleman’ in whatever high-society mansion you crawled out of, you both need a reality check!"

"He was only restraining you!" Sora yelled back, the wind pressure around her body violently picking up. "And maybe if you didn’t dress like a malnourished boy and act like a feral animal, people wouldn’t make those errors!"

"Who are you calling malnourished, you stuck-up bitch?!"

Hide stood behind them, completely ignoring the escalating, deadly hostility in the cave. He simply raised a hand, pinching the bridge of his nose as he let out a long, deeply exhausted sigh. He closed his eyes.

Yes, Hide thought dryly, listening to the shrill, echoing argument bouncing off the cave walls. They are definitely both girls.

Suddenly, the argument was violently interrupted.

A sound tore through the atmosphere—a sound so unimaginably loud, so agonizing and pure, that it transcended physical noise. It was the dying scream.

The psychic wail reverberated through the very bedrock of the cavern, vibrating Hide’s teeth and forcing Sora and the unknown girl to clamp their hands over their ears.

A massive, catastrophic earthquake immediately followed. The entire mountain violently shuddered, shaking loose dust and small rocks from the cavern ceiling.

Hide didn’t wait. He pushed past the two stunned girls, sprinting directly toward the jagged lip of the cave entrance. He grabbed the stone frame, leaning out into the chaotic, freezing storm.

His blue eyes widened in pure shock.

High above the central typhoon, the bruised-purple clouds were parting. Plummeting from the heavens, its luminescent, lightning-filled scales flickering and dying, the majestic blue dragon was falling from the sky.