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

By the time they had finished, the three of them were covered in the dust of the stone dungeon and the residue of butchering, and Bruce was suddenly aware of his own soul-body wanting the washing room back at their rooming house with an immediate physical longing.

He picked up his loaded frame. The weight was substantial. He shifted it on his shoulders.

"Spatial ring tonight," Kael said, picking up his own frame.

"Spatial ring tonight," Bruce agreed.

They walked out of the chamber, past the cracked wall where the alpha had hit, through the wide arch, back through the chambers of crab and roller they had already cleared, and toward the soft blue-white pool of the exit portal.

The stone dungeon’s cold pressed on them more gently on the way out than it had on the way in. The mineral chill, which had felt strange and unwelcoming when they entered, felt now like the cool of a place they understood. They had taken from it what it had to give them. The dungeon, in its old patient way, had given them more than they had expected.

Theron, just before they reached the portal, paused.

He looked back at the great cavern stretching behind them, the formations rising in the dim light, the quiet that had felt so old when they arrived.

"I want to come back here," he said.

"We will," Bruce said.

"I mean, alone. Eventually. To meditate."

Bruce looked at him.

"It feels like a good place to think," Theron said. "About the talent. About, what it means. The reaper at the edge of the field." He turned back toward the portal. "I want to come back here when I’m ready to think about it properly."

"Then we’ll come back," Bruce said.

They stepped through the portal together, the cold of the stone dungeon falling away into the warm gold of Xiltra’s afternoon light, and the third day’s hunting was done.

They came out of the stone portal into the slanting afternoon light of Xiltra.

The blue-white cold of the dungeon fell off them the moment they stepped through, replaced by the warm gold of the city’s air. Bruce felt his soul-body adjust to the temperature change the way a real body adjusts to walking from a cellar into a courtyard, a small involuntary settling, the muscles unclenching slightly from the cold they had not consciously been holding against.

The guard at the stone portal’s post looked up from her stool.

She was a soul Bruce had not seen before, older, with a long thin scar running from her temple down to her jaw, the kind of scar that suggested she had been on the wrong end of something serious in her past. Her glow was deep and steady, B-rank at minimum, sitting at a guard post that did not require a B-rank. Bruce wondered, briefly, what story put a B-rank soul at an F-rank dungeon’s gate, and filed the question.

She took in the three of them.

The loaded frames. The state of their clothes, dust-covered, mineral residue on their hands and forearms. The size of what they were carrying. The way they were standing.

Her eyes lingered for an extra beat on Bruce’s frame, where a length of dark spine-blade jutted up above the top of the pack.

"Alpha?" she asked.

"Spine-roller," Bruce said.

"How big?"

"Bigger than the three of us standing side by side."

The guard’s eyebrows went up. They did not stay up for long, she was a professional, this was not her first surprise of the day, but the small motion was the first reaction of its kind Bruce had received from a guard.

"That’s a high-F catch," she said. "Very high. You’re sure it was F? Not E?"

"It was on the F-rank level. The dungeon registered it as F."

"The dungeon registers what level the beast lives on. Doesn’t mean the beast hasn’t outgrown its level." She made a small note on her board. "Two cores?"

"Two cores."

"Mm." She did not say anything else. She made another note. She waved them through.

Bruce did not ask about the notes. He had already learned that guards’ notes traveled, to the Guild, to the captain of the gate district, to wherever else the city’s quiet record-keeping infrastructure ran. He and his companions had now been noted by two guards, the heat dungeon’s and this one. Word of them was beginning to move through the system.

He could not yet tell whether that was good or bad. He filed the question with the others.

The Guild side yard was busier than the previous evenings.

It was the late-afternoon rush, hunters coming in with full hauls, the day’s last sales, the exchange clerks working at a faster pace. Bruce, Kael, and Theron joined the line, and Bruce used the wait to organize his frame’s contents on the carry strap in the order he wanted them displayed: cores at the top, prime cuts next, spine-blades along the side, secondary cuts at the bottom.

When their turn came, they were directed to a particular clerk, a different one from their previous sales, a tall thin soul with sharp eyes and an ink-stained sleeve. He was the senior clerk, Bruce realized after watching him handle the load before theirs. The other clerks deferred to him on anything unusual.

The guard at the stone portal had clearly already sent word ahead.

The senior clerk waved them up to his table with the small efficient gesture of a man who had been told to expect them.

"Spine-roller alpha?" he asked, before Bruce had set anything down.

"Yes."

"Lay out the cores first. Then the spine-blades. Meat last."

Bruce did.

The clerk picked up the first core, the larger primary one, the chest core, and held it to the light. He weighed it in his palm. He set it down. He picked up the second, the lower belly core, and did the same.

He took longer with the second core than the first.

"Two cores," he said. It was not a question. "Primary core is high-F. Density and clarity both. Standard pricing." He looked at the secondary. "But this is what’s interesting. This is a forming core. The creature was developing a second core because it had passed the threshold where a single core could hold all the essence it had accumulated. A creature in active rank-transition. Caught mid-process."

"That’s what we thought," Kael said.

"Were you aware of what you had when you killed it?"

"Yes."

The senior clerk looked at the three of them with new attention.

He did not say anything for a moment. He simply looked. Bruce held his gaze without volunteering anything further. Kael grinned. Theron stood quietly beside them, his face carefully neutral.

"Mm," the senior clerk said. He set the secondary core down beside the primary. "Most F-rank parties wouldn’t have known what a forming core was. They’d have brought it in not realizing what they had. We sometimes get whole alpha kills sold for half their value because the hunters didn’t know."

"We knew," Bruce said.

"I see that." The clerk made his own notes. "I’ll grade them properly. Primary, three hundred and twenty. Secondary, two hundred and forty, it’s smaller, but the rarity bumps the price. Spine-blades, fifteen per length, you have, six clean lengths and two damaged. Damaged sell for eight. Standard cuts, weighed and called as we go."

He worked through the rest of the haul.

The numbers added up faster than Bruce had thought to expect. The primary and secondary cores together were already higher than the flame-mane alpha’s single core. The spine-blades added a meaningful sum. The meat, prime, secondary, shell, the lot of it, was priced significantly higher than the lizard meat had been, because depth-essence meat carried a premium for the niche market of hunters specifically trying to balance their advancement.

When the final number was called, the senior clerk slid three soul-stone slips across the table.

"Split three ways equal?"

"Equal," Bruce said.

The slips were stamped, recorded, slid back. The clerk gave them a small nod that, on a man like him, carried significantly more weight than a casual nod would have.

"Keep hunting like this," he said, "and you’ll outgrow F-rank work within a week."

"That’s the plan," Kael said.

The senior clerk allowed himself the small ghost of a smile, and called the next party.

The three of them stepped away from the table and Bruce called up his window.

Soul Points: 1,247

He looked at the number for a long quiet moment.

Twelve hundred and forty-seven F-rank soul points. He had crossed the eight-hundred threshold for the small spatial ring with hundreds to spare. He could afford the small ring and still have money left for everything else they needed tonight, better food, restocking the soul-seal paste, paying the week’s rent on the rooming house with margin.

He closed the window.

He looked at Kael, who was looking at his own window with a similar quiet, and at Theron, whose face was doing the thing it had done the first day, the careful unbelieving look of someone who had not yet adjusted to the rate at which their life was changing.

"Twelve hundred," Theron said, almost to himself.

"Twelve hundred," Bruce confirmed.

"That’s, Bruce, on the first day you said the spatial ring was seven days away. It’s been three days."

"I miscalculated."

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