I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 8: The Purple Core

- Kyle Valtier’s POV -

Rain washed over Elysium, but it wasn’t nearly enough to wash its sins — nor the blood I was leaving behind like a trail of crumbs for the raven of death.

Each step I took down that dark alley was a clash of wills against the inevitability of ruin.

My boots made a sick, viscous squelch with every scrape on the wet asphalt — not just from the muck, but because my right shoe was filling with my own blood.

I pressed my trembling left hand to my stomach. Or rather, to the burning hole the sniper’s round had left. My tactical coat was shredded; the flesh underneath was a charred, torn mass pulsing with pain beyond reason.

It wasn’t an ordinary gunshot. The magical intelligence round had been saturated with a searing red Eitra — engineered to crawl into the bloodstream and eat living cells like a ravenous acid. I could feel it creeping beneath my skin, burning the nerve endings, twisting my entrails like dying serpents.

"Damn... damn the FBI... damn that black-haired bitch..." I muttered in ragged breath, my voice a death rattle. My breaths steamed in the frozen air and dispersed as quickly as my life seemed to be.

I leaned my right shoulder against a rough brick wall, leaving a dark smear. I dropped to my knees into a puddle of foul water.

My muscles wouldn’t answer me anymore.

It was cold — bone-cold — but I sweat like a furnace, and a black haze crawled from the edges of my vision toward the center.

"Am I going to die here?" I whispered, the rain on the metal trash cans sounding like slow funeral drums. "After seeing the end of the world... after getting that legendary skill... end up as a rotting corpse in a nameless alley?"

I laughed — weak and broken — and a violent cough forced a clot of black, congealed blood onto the asphalt.

In that absolute ruin, my right hand moved — the hand I’d been clenching the whole time. I opened my fingers slowly, as if rusty.

There, in the middle of my palm, crusted with mud and blood, lay the only spoil I’d taken from Tears of Diamond.

A monster core.

It was about the size of a walnut, glowing with a dark, sickly purple pulse.

The core wasn’t cold like a stone; it was warm, beating with some hidden rhythm like a tiny heart freshly ripped from a nightmare beast.

I stared at it. The faint purple light reflected in my dying eyes.

"I can’t fall here... not for a single stone," I said to the core as if it were a living thing.

Suddenly a primitive, terrifying impulse swept over me. It wasn’t a System message, not a blue or red screen. It was a raw animal instinct — the deepest survival urge buried in my DNA. A hiss in my mind like snakes: "Swallow it."

Monster cores were not food. They were condensed packets of pure energy — poisonous to humans unless chemically processed in guild factories, converted into potions, or fused into weapons. Swallowing a raw core was like swallowing a tiny leaking nuclear battery. Ninety-nine percent of people who tried it burned from the inside or exploded under biological rejection.

But I had nothing left to lose.

I was already dead, in effect. The bleeding wouldn’t stop; the sniper’s Eitra would reach my heart in minutes.

"If I’m going to hell..." I muttered, lifting my shaking hand to my mouth, "...I’ll go full of power."

I didn’t hesitate. I shoved the purple core into my mouth.

It was hard and rough, tasting like old copper and ash. I couldn’t chew it, so I swallowed it whole.

It slid down my dry throat and lodged in my shattered stomach.

For a second... nothing. Just cold rain spattering my tilted face.

Then hell erupted inside me.

"AAARGGGHHH!"

A scream ripped whatever remained of my vocal cords. It wasn’t ordinary pain — it felt like thousands of knives igniting and being driven through my bloodstream. The raw purple Eitra detonated in my gut and slammed into the red Eitra the sniper had left in the wound.

I fell onto my back and writhed in the mud and black water like a fish thrown on a burning coals. My spine arched grotesquely; the veins in my neck bulged until they seemed about to burst, glowing purple as they crawled beneath my skin like a web of poisonous spiders.

I was dying. I was burning from inside out. The core rejected my human flesh — my body was too weak to contain it.

But amid that blinding torment, the System flickered at the edge of my consciousness.

[WARNING! Lethal bio-energy interference.]

[Ingested core: Core (Renewing Shadow Ghoul) — Rank C.]

[Host is on the verge of cellular collapse.]

[Emergency activation of skill (Blood Doubling) in reverse... attempting to suppress core energy to save host.]

I didn’t fully understand the lines; pain shredded my mind. But I felt a change.

The tearing agony began to mutate into a furious itch — insane and deep — inside my flesh and bone.

Through my blurred vision I looked down at my belly. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Oh God — the sight was both nightmarish and awe-striking.

From the edges of the gunshot wound, fine threads of black and purple flesh began to grow, visibly and fast.

The torn muscles writhed and braided together like worms building a nest. The tissue knit itself not in human tones, but in darkened, hardened shade — absorbing the sniper’s red Eitra and expelling it as black smoke from the wound.

I heard my bones click as they rebuilt themselves.

I wept; tears mixed with rain on my face.

It wasn’t merciful healing. It was monstrous, brutal, forced — insane pain stretched into regeneration. The core I’d swallowed had a regenerative property, and the System was integrating it into my body to patch the crater in my belly.

By the time the black smoke stopped rising, I lay on the ground gasping like a hunted dog.

I put my hand to my abdomen. There was no hole.

My tactical coat was still torn, but the flesh beneath had been flattened, hardened, bearing a huge, dark scar that pulsed purple for an instant before settling.

It worked. I hadn’t died.

I sat up slowly in the filthy alley, leaning against the wall. Rain still fell, washing blood off my face and the broken mask I’d tossed beside me.

The city was silent around me, unaware that a G-rank rat had cheated death twice and stolen a little dignity from the intelligence beasts.

I lifted my head to Elysium’s dark sky and laughed — a deep, exhausted laugh carrying a new kind of madness.

"I survived... you cursed city. I survived."

...

...

...

- One week later -

Elysium Live sat for me like everything I hate about this world — and everything I couldn’t afford at the same time.

It’s in the silver district, the neighborhood of the rich and high-rank guild members.

The floor was polished white marble reflecting the warm golden lights. Magic chandeliers hanging from the ceiling hummed soft notes with every draft.

The air itself smelled of vanilla, slow-roasted coffee brewed over pure Eitra, and pastries that cost a month’s rent.

I was sitting on a blue velvet chair, dressed very plainly and a little shabby (my old gray hoodie with the hood up, faded jeans). I looked like a stain of mud on a pristine wedding dress in that place.

But I wasn’t paying the bill, so I didn’t care.

"I can’t believe you finally agreed to come out of your hole, man!" Zack said opposite me, sipping his iced coffee (five shots of concentrated espresso in it).

He wore an oversized checked shirt; the dark circles under his eyes were still deep, he was fidgety, and his left eye twitched as usual.

"I’ve been... sick," I lied flatly, staring at the hot cup in front of me.

"Bad flu. I stayed in bed all week."

It wasn’t a week of rest. It was a week of physical and mental hell.

The wound in my belly had healed, but the purple core I swallowed left its mark. I felt a weird, dark energy moving in my veins — it made me see the world differently. I could trace faint Eitra flows in the air and sense other people’s heartbeats. My physical rank hadn’t risen (still G), but my body had gotten... tougher.

I hadn’t left the apartment all week. I hid, watched the news, and waited for the FBI to kick my door in. They didn’t. I’d slipped right through their fingers.

"Sick?" Zack laughed loudly, ignoring the disgusted looks from rich customers around us.

"You waste half your life sleeping, Kyle! But anyway — did you follow the deep-web threads while you were out? The world’s upside down!"

I took a sip of coffee. It tasted offensively good.

"Let me guess — another conspiracy about the government putting magic chips in the water?"

"Don’t be sarcastic!" Zack leaned in, lowering his voice. "Alpha Team — the unit the press fawns over — took two catastrophic hits in one week!"

My face went still for a moment, but I kept calm. "Really?"

"Yeah! First was the scandal of the Black Joker escaping right from under them. The genius thief cleaned out the diamond shop. And the second... happened a few days ago. Word got out that Alpha was sent on a covert op into forgotten Sector G and they came back half-dead! They faced some horrific synthetic entity, and if Jackson Reed hadn’t intervened personally, they’d be names on tombstones!"

"Jackson Reed..." I muttered, remembering the future vision. A world that has monsters like Jackson yet collapses before that dark half in the sky — how terrifying was that future?

"They’re falling, Kyle," Zack continued, eyes gleaming with unhealthy excitement. "These guilds, these special forces, are just façades. Someone’s pulling their strings from the shadows..."

Before he could finish —

CRRRAAASH!

A violent explosion rocked the entire café.

The giant glass door — reinforced magical shatterproof glass — didn’t open. It was kicked in with such force it shattered into thousands of crystalline shards that flew everywhere, embedding in the marble walls.

I jolted. My heart leapt into my throat. The survival instinct honed in dark alleys made my hand drop under the table, ready to call up black Eitra.

"What the hell?!" one patron shouted.

The soft music stopped. A suffocating silence took over. The air pressure in the café shifted. The temperature plummeted ten degrees in a second. Frost crept along the rim of coffee cups; our breath turned to white steam.

From the broken door stepped in a person.

Not a monster. A girl.

But not an ordinary girl — she was an embodiment of an icy storm.

Her hair was silver, shining, cut to her shoulders and moving sharp and rigid with each step. Her skin was unnaturally white and flawless, pale as death. Most terrifying were her eyes — a glowing crimson, the color of fresh blood, stark against her absolute pallor.

She wore an elegant black-and-silver military uniform bearing the emblem of the High Intelligence command.

The aura she radiated was suffocating. Her presence made the wealthy patrons tremble; some collapsed to their knees, unable to breathe under the weight of her Eitra. This girl wasn’t A-rank — she was something worse.

Behind her, trudging with bowed heads, came four people I knew very well.

Aiden — chest wrapped in magical bandages.

Sia — red-rimmed eyes, her face pale as if she hadn’t slept in days.

Damian — his right arm in a sling supported by healing circuits.

...and Eva Blackwood — the black-haired girl, walking with her usual cold composure, a thin, fresh scar on her left cheek — the scar I’d given her with my bullet.

Time stopped for me.

They were the team that had chased me. The squad that nearly ended me in the street. They were here, a few meters away.

"Oh my God..." I thought, my body freezing like stone.

The silver-haired girl with the crimson eyes swept the room with cold disdain. She stopped in the middle of the café and turned to face the broken four behind her.

"Not our fault, Valisera!" Aiden blurted, tense, clutching his bandaged chest. "It’s not our fault we weren’t at full strength on the last mission! That damned lab — we literally melted against that S-rank abomination! It was a trap beyond our classification!"

The woman called Valisera looked at him. One glance from her crimson eyes made Aiden step back, as if a mountain had dropped on his shoulders.

"Why do you keep spewing those damned excuses, Aiden?" Her voice was calm but bit like blades of ice. It carried absolute authority and limitless contempt.

She stepped forward. "Just admit you’re a failed team. A group of arrogant people who believed the hype about themselves. Why — God help me — was I assigned oversight of such pathetic weakness? Why did I have to lead a squad this laughably inept?"

Aiden bit his lower lip; Sia lowered her head further, trying to choke back humiliated tears.

Valisera continued with a cold, nerve-rending precision: "The fact you’ve lost twice in one week made you the joke of every other division and command office. You’re the season’s punchline. The first to mock you at every leadership meeting is Arthur Sterling and his team. Are you satisfied? Do you want to be Arthur’s doormat?"

At Arthur’s name, Eva Blackwood’s fist tightened until her knuckles whitened. She lifted her head; her black eyes met Valisera’s crimson ones in a silent challenge only a few dared to make.

"I told you, Valisera..." Eva said in her icy, usual tone, though a suppressed tremor of anger ran through it. "... the Black Joker’s escape was my misjudgment — I underestimated his sewer-rat instincts. But he did not win. I left him bleeding to die. And the Sector G mission? We completed it and brought back the data, despite the initial misassessment."

Valisera smiled — not a smile of joy but a hard, frightening curl on her pale lips.

"Underestimated?" she scoffed and walked slowly to stand face to face with Eva. "A prettier excuse than the crime, Blackwood. Your pride made you take a scratch on that pretty cheek from a worm with negligible Eitra. Don’t tell me you left him bleeding — you failed to decapitate him when you had the chance. Failure is failure; don’t dress it in fancy words."

Valisera turned toward Damian, who watched in silence, supporting his broken arm without attempting to defend himself.

"Why not be like Damian?" she said with backhanded sarcasm. "At least he has the courage to admit he’s a loser knocked unconscious. He isn’t arrogant or blaming bad classifications or sewer rats like you."

Silence fell like a gavel. A full humiliation — the elite team’s pride crushed in front of wealthy civilians at a public café. The message from Intelligence was clear: we spare no one, not even our heroes.

I sat in my corner, the cup in my hands trembling slightly — not from Valisera’s aura, but from the hot coil of anger burning in my veins.

I looked at Eva, at the scar on her cheek. I looked at Aiden, who once wanted to crush me, and at Damian, who had played the lover in my deathplay.

"Those bastards..." I murmured in my head, and the System’s red whisper pulsed in the back of my mind: (harvest the skin-born... look at them... they’re weak now... full of high Eitra... golden opportunity...)

I crushed the demonic voice hard.

I am not insane enough to attack an entire squad who have that crimson-eyed woman with them. But my hatred for them hadn’t lessened.

They were the ones who tried to execute me coldly just because I nicked some stones from a corrupt guild.

I kept staring at them with a dark, sharp hatred I couldn’t fully hide — the look of a man returned from death to see his killers complaining about bruised pride.

"Hey... Kyle."

Zack’s quiet, trembling voice snapped me back.

I met his eyes. He sat hunched, watching me with wonder and worry. Apparently my face expressed my terror and fury.

"Why are you staring at them like that?" Zack whispered, afraid Valisera might hear. "Honestly, the way you’re staring makes you look like a crazed asylum escapee, or a serial killer hunting his next victim. Lower your eyes, man — that silver-haired girl might melt us with a look!"

I took a slow, deep breath. I relaxed my facial muscles by force. I had to play Kyle the melancholic, the coward.

"Nothing, Zack," I said softly, forcing a look of fake admiration instead of hatred. I nodded toward them and whispered in practiced awe:

"Apparently, they’re the FBI. The elite team everyone talks about. I’ve always wanted to get in. I was just... awed to see them up close. To see these heroes and how harshly they’re reprimanded."

Zack nodded naively, sipping his iced coffee. "Intelligence is a dirty place, buddy. Thank God you weren’t accepted. They’d use you as a human shield."

"Yeah..." I murmured, my gaze still fixed on Eva Blackwood as she left the café behind Valisera. "Thank God I didn’t join them."

I couldn’t tell Zack the truth. I couldn’t say these "heroes" nearly ripped my guts out in a filthy alley seven days ago. I couldn’t tell him that his pathetic friend is the Black Joker that haunts them now — that he survived by eating a monster core.

They disappeared into the broken street. I breathed out slowly, but one thing was certain in that instant.

Our paths will cross again. Elysium is too small to hold hunters and monsters apart.

When we meet next, and in the chaos the future vision brings... I won’t be just a rat scurrying from their trap.

When the sky opens, I will be the nightmare they fear more than any S-rank beast.