Noah stood over the dead creature and looked at it for a moment.

It was face down on the cracked stone floor. Its massive body was burned across most of the back and shoulders from Damien’s final attack, the white oily skin charred and split in places, the green veins beneath it no longer visible.

The five horns on its head were partially melted at the tips. The two curved ones at its jaw had broken off entirely somewhere during the explosion. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

It looked smaller dead than it had alive.

"Man," Noah muttered to himself. "Even after taking a attack like that, it was still standing and trying to finish him off."

He shook his head slowly.

The desire to kill Damien specifically had been something separate from simple monster aggression.

He had seen that clearly in those final moments. Whatever intelligence had been speaking through the creature, whatever had been piloting it from somewhere else, it had wanted Damien dead with a focus that went beyond instinct.

’Must be related to the main story. Which means this whole dungeon trip just became a plot point whether I wanted it to or not.’

He filed that away and crouched down beside the body.

There had to be a core somewhere inside it. Every monster had one. It was where the mana concentrated, the densest physical expression of what a creature was.

Finding it on something this unusual was going to take some work but Noah was not leaving without at least checking.

"Hey."

Damien’s voice came from a few meters away where he was laying on ground. His voice was tired and flat. "What are you doing. Come and help me."

"Rest for a bit," Noah said without looking up. "You earned it. I’m just checking where the core might be."

A short pause.

"Tch." The sound of Damien clicking his tongue echoed off the stone. "Caring about a monster core more than your injured friend."

"You’re a man," Noah said simply, walking around the body to assess the best angle. "You’ll be fine. If you were a beautiful woman I would definitely have come to help you first."

"Fuck you, you bastard."

Noah blinked and looked over at him.

Damien, the top ranked student, the protagonist with the easy smile and the natural charisma that made everyone around him want to follow him, was sitting against a cracked dungeon wall looking genuinely annoyed and cursing at him with complete sincerity.

Noah stared for a second.

Then he turned back to the body.

’The hero curses when he’s tired and hurt. Good to know, its very humanizing.’

---

The creature was face down and getting it onto its back was not a simple task. It weighed significantly more than it looked like it should.

Noah put his shoulder into it and pushed and the body rolled over slowly with the reluctance of something that had no intention of cooperating even in death.

It settled onto its back with a heavy thud.

Noah looked at the front of it for the first time since the fight had started. The chest and stomach were burned worse than the back in places, the skin split and blackened from where the golden light had detonated outward from inside the wound.

The wide mouth was frozen half open, the rows of teeth catching the crystal light from the walls.

He summoned a dagger from his storage ring and got to work.

He checked the stomach first. Made an incision and worked through the internal structure methodically, trying not to think too much about what he was doing or what any of it looked like.

No core there.

He moved to the chest.

The heart was immediately visible when he opened it. Black in color, roughly the size of a human head, completely unlike anything he had seen in any creature they had fought today.

He reached in and pulled it free. Green blood covered his hand up to the wrist and dripped steadily onto the stone floor but he had passed the point of being bothered by things like that approximately two hours ago.

He turned the heart over in his hands.

There it was.

Embedded inside the black tissue, visible through the outer surface as a faint pulsing glow. He worked it free carefully and held it up.

A core. Fist-sized, roughly. Red with a depth of color that wasn’t quite natural, the glow inside it rhythmic and slow like something still breathing.

’D rank, probably. Maybe D plus given the size.’

He reached out and touched it with his fingertip.

"ARGH—"

He pulled his hand back immediately, dropping the core, shaking his hand hard few times like he was trying to dislodge something from his fingers.

A sharp burning sensation had shot up from the point of contact and spread into his palm, not heat exactly, more like something crawling under his skin with a burning quality to it, an energy that felt deeply wrong in a way he couldn’t articulate beyond that.

"Noah." Damien’s voice was sharper now, more alert. "What happened. Are you alright?"

"Yeah." Noah stared at his hand. The burning was fading but slowly. "Yeah I’m fine. This core is just." He looked at the glowing red thing on the stone floor where it had dropped. "It’s very unusual."

He did not pick it up again. He put his hand on the body, trying to store it in his ring. But it was not pulled inside.

Noah frowned at this. Something was really wrong.

He straightened and walked over to Damien, who looked up at him with an expression that had moved from annoyed to genuinely concerned.

"The core is untouchable," Noah said simply. "Something in it. Corrupted energy or something similar. The moment I made contact it felt like it was trying to get inside me."

Damien looked at it on the floor. "We can’t take it?"

"We shouldn’t. Not without knowing what it is." Noah crouched down and got his shoulder under Damien’s arm to help him up. "The guild needs to know about this whole room. The ritual circle, the summoning, the bodies, that thing." He tilted his head toward the core without looking at it directly. "All of it."

Currently Noah couldn’t do anything about this. So leaving this to higher ups was better option.

’We both might be summoned by them if this thing was dangerous and something entirely different. They will asked us about what happened here.’

Damien got to his feet slowly. His ribs were clearly giving him trouble, his movement careful and deliberate, but he was standing and moving under his own ability which was more than Noah had been certain of twenty minutes ago.

"Agreed," Damien said.