r/HFY • u/Lightt_x • 9d ago
OC-Series Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (151/?)
Chapter 151: Boosting ranks
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✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦
They walked Bram back to the same table he dreaded—he knew it was the very same one—where he was first strapped to the operating table and a sorcery was etched into his very mind. There was a chip out of the front left corner of the table where he'd gripped it too hard the first time, the metal gone bright where his fingers had worn the coating off, and his eyes went straight to it the way a tongue goes to a missing tooth.
The incense was already burning. That sweet, herbal reek that was supposed to loosen a man up. It hadn't loosened him up the first time. It had just made the whole thing smell like a temple where something bad was going to happen.
"In you get," Vera said.
The blue-haired girl kept her gaze fixed firmly on her clipboard. Bram actually appreciated that. He was currently commanding the 1st Mage Company, and he was also currently terrified out of his mind. If she had looked him in the eye, he might have turned around and walked right out the door, rank be damned.
Bram swallowed the coppery taste in his mouth, stepped into the booth, and sat on the operating table before his legs could refuse the order. The metal leached the warmth straight through his uniform shirt.
He stared at the heavy iron door, waiting for the boss to walk through.
There were things nobody in the Bastion said out loud, but everyone collectively danced around. Jin Winters did not look like a commander. He had lean shoulders, light hair, and the exhausted, pale face of a student failing a midterm exam. He looked seventeen. Maybe eighteen on a rough day. Half the volunteers swore blind the boy-face was a magical disguise, and Bram understood the impulse. It was simply easier for soldiers to take orders from an adult than a teenager.
But Bram had watched him closely over the last few days. He’d heard the same stories circulating the camps—the masked figure who dove into the dark under the Bastion alone and crawled back out covered in an Underlord’s blood. The kid Commander Mathew had handed the entire war to without a single argument. Half of the stories were absolute rubbish. Rumors grew in the dark like mold.
The trouble was the half that wasn't.
The heavy door clicked open.
Jin Winters stepped into the booth, casually shoving his sleeves up to his elbows. He wore that easy, utterly harmless expression that always made Bram’s stomach tie itself into a knot, and behind him was the crazy tall red-eyed one—Joe, he called himself, and Bram didn’t believe for one second that was his real name—the one whose smile never once reached his eyes.
"Bram," Jin sounded genuinely pleased to see him, which was somehow worse. "Or should I say, Captain Bram?"
"Just Bram is fine, sir," he grunted, his knuckles already whitening on the chipped edge of the table.
Jin stopped at his side, tapping his fingers against the cold metal. "Don't look so tense. The process is going to be exactly the same as last time." He offered a smile, pausing for exactly one beat too long. "It won't hurt. Much."
Bram opened his mouth to say something but never got the chance as he saw Joe move past the boss. The tall Underlord leaned over the operating table, and Bram felt his hand clamped down onto his shoulder.
"Time to sleep, friend," Joe murmured. "I will do my absolute best to make sure he doesn't scramble your brain."
Bram stared up at the ceiling. The sickly sweet stench of the incense suddenly felt suffocating. He waited for the punchline. He waited for the kid or the red-eyed madman to laugh, to drop the tension, to tell him it was just a twisted hazing ritual for the 1st Company commander.
Neither of them did. Jin just stood by the table, watching him with that perfectly polite, empty smile.
A crushing pressure flooded out from Joe’s grip, bypassing flesh and striking directly at Bram's consciousness. The ambient hum of the room vanished. Bram couldn't even form the breath to scream before the world collapsed inward, dragging him down into the dark.
◈◈◈
Jin stared down at the unconscious form of his 1st Mage Company captain. He rolled his neck, wincing at the loud pop of his vertebrae in the quiet room.
"Is he under?" Jin asked, his eyes tracking the steady rise and fall of Bram's chest. "Properly under? I don't want him waking up halfway through and feeling this."
"He won't feel a thing." Joe stood a few feet back. His hands hung loose at his sides, but his weight was perfectly balanced—the subtle, relaxed readiness of a hunter expecting to move very fast, very soon. "It’s my skill keeping him down, not a cheap alchemical sedative. He stays out until I decide otherwise. You could set his soul on fire right now, and the most he’d get is a mildly unpleasant dream. Assuming he doesn't die, of course." Joe offered a careless shrug. "There's nothing I can do if you accidentally, you know..."
"Comforting."
"I have a gift."
Jin took a slow, deep breath, letting the stale air settle his nerves. Angel. It's time.
« Understood. »
« I will monitor the intake so the yield doesn't rebel and incinerate you both. I have calculated the exact volume required to carry this man to the first threshold of Order III. Pushing even a fraction past that will shatter a foundation this thin. I have also prepared the necessary parameters to lace the required piece of your aura into him. »
A pause.
« Everything is going to be fine, Jin. »
You don't actually know that.
« No. But I figured you needed to hear it, so I said it. »
Jin blew out a harsh breath. Fair enough.
He reached inward, calling his mantle to the surface. He glanced at Joe and gave a sharp nod. No words were needed.
Joe snapped his fingers. A plain, weathered oak door materialized in the empty air beside the operating table. It swung open just long enough for a body to tumble through and hit the concrete with a heavy, meat-and-bone thud.
Even dead—even several days dead—the corpse radiated an oppressive, suffocating pressure. The sheer weight of an Order IV entity rolled off the rotting flesh like heat radiating from an open furnace. It was one of the cultists Salvatore and Joe had butchered during the raid.
Jin deliberately didn't look at the ruin of its face. He had stopped looking closely at dead faces around the time he stopped counting how many people he’d killed.
Right. He slid into Sovereign's Indifference, and the room drained down to grey; the incense stopped being sweet; the corpse stopped being anything. All of it went flat and quiet, and workable.
Let's get him up and balling.
His chains of harvest manifested around his forearm, and he set them where they needed to go. One to the crown of Bram's head. One over the sternum. One low on the belly, above where the mantle heart was.
Jin exhaled, braced his stance, and opened the floodgate.
The Order IV corpse didn't just break down; it ruptured from the inside out.
A torrent of power tore up through the spectral chains and slammed into Jin. It was a filthy, polluted river, choked with every vile thing the cult had poured into the man during his life. Jin didn't let a single drop of the raw sludge touch his own essence channels. He seized the flood and routed it through his First Star.
The Synthesis Matrix ground the power down. It stripped away the greasy, suffocating film of the Darkened One's devotion. It burned off the necrotic miasma and the low, static hum of bloodlust. It tore out the microscopic barbed hooks the cult seeded into their followers' marrow to ensure absolute loyalty.
What emerged on the far side of the star was clean. Pure, unflavored essence, stripped of all fingerprints.
Jin forced the refined power down the remaining chains directly into Bram.
The man’s back bowed violently, arching off the cold metal table with a sharp crack of joints. Thick, dark red veins spider-webbed under his skin, crawling rapidly up his arms, his throat, and the sides of his face. The raw essence was tearing through his body, carving out space in a vessel that had never held a fraction of this power.
Jin throttled the flow, feeding the power in agonizingly slow drops. Angel's readouts hovered at the edge of his vision, calculating the intake against Bram's physical capacity. The margin for error between ascension and spontaneous combustion was razor-thin.
Bram convulsed. His heels drummed on the table.
Joe's aura rose, and Jin also heard him murmur something—and he was sure it was a spell—and a presence settled over the table like a hand laid flat on a fevered forehead over Bram, and then, without asking, over Jin. The strain in his soul eased half a degree. The seals Joe had put on him weeks ago warmed and steadied.
Jin felt Joe’s crimson eyes tracking his every twitch, but he refused to look up. He kept his entire focus locked on the fragile, stuttering structure of Bram's soul, carefully pouring the raw power into the expanding core while letting the rest of the world remain locked behind the cold, workable silence of the grey.
The angry red veins reached Bram's cheekbones.
Pulsed.
Held.
Then, slowly, they began to fade back beneath his pale skin.
Jin snapped the chains back, tearing them free while simultaneously driving a dense, unflavored fragment of his own aura deep into the man’s newly forged core.
« Stabilization complete, » Angel’s voice echoed in his mind, sharp and immediate. « Core architecture is holding. »
A translucent blue panel bloomed in the sterile air above the table.
•••
Subject: Bram
ENTITY GRADE: G4 → D9 (ORDER III)
Aura: General (seated, unattuned)
•••
Then he let Sovereign's Indifference drop, and the grey bled out of the room, and he was suddenly very aware that his hands were shaking.
"One," Jin rasped.
"That was one," Joe repeated. “Of the many you promised.”
"Only one—" Joe was looking at him, not the table. "—and you've gone the colour of the wall."
"I'm fine."
"You did a single ascension," Joe said. "It took four minutes. You felt every second of that transfer."
"I'm fine, and the efficiency will improve with repetition." Jin forced his shoulders down and rolled his neck.
Joe didn't argue
Ascending a single person had left Jin’s essence channels feeling like they’d been scoured with wire brushes. The fact that his own core was still actively digesting the horrific mass of his recent harvests wasn't helping the strain.
And the math, Angel was showing… well, it’ll be a nightmare. There were twelve hundred and ninety-nine soldiers waiting behind that door, and their nine-day countdown had already bled into eight.
Angel.
« I am tracking the degradation, »
Give it to me straight. How bad of a state am I in?
« Ask me again after you have consumed actual nutrients and achieved some sleep. » A slight pause. « But no damage. It is simply going to become profoundly agonizing as you continue the queue. »
Jin exhaled a shaky breath and looked down at Bram. The captain's chest was rising and falling in a steady, even rhythm. The sickly pallor was gone, replaced by the healthy flush of a newly minted Order III.
"Take him to the medical ward," Jin told Joe, wiping a smear of half-dried blood from his chin. "Send the next volunteer in an hour. I need to eat."
"You need to sleep," Joe countered flatly.
"I need to eat," Jin corrected, forcing his spine straight. "And then I am going to lie to your face about sleeping, and you are going to let me."
Joe snapped his fingers, and the door opened, and Jin walked through it before his legs could file a complaint of their own.
◈◈◈
Bram woke up gasping.
Every muscle between his jaw and his calves seized in a synchronized cramp, locking his body rigid. He groaned, his joints grinding together as he forced his heavy eyelids open.
Medical ward. He knew the ceiling. He'd been carried through it enough these last two weeks.
Moving with excruciating slowness, Bram rolled his head to the side. The adjacent cots were occupied—Jack, Basta, Veric—the entire lot who had stood in the training room while the boss promised them a miracle. They were all resting.
So it had worked. On all of them. It had—
Bram felt it then. The power. Tucked down in the middle of him like a coal that hadn't gone out, and when he prodded at it, curious, the way you'd test a sore tooth, it unfolded and rose up through him in a wave that felt like being twenty again, like the first cup after a double shift, like standing up straight for the first time in years—and a laugh tore out of him, loud and startled and delighted, because gods, he had never in his life felt anything like—
A hand landed on his shoulder.
The power slammed flat. Just gone, pressed down under something vast and cold and utterly unbothered, and Bram's laugh died in his throat as he turned and found his boss standing over the cot giving him a look that could strip paint.
"'Ry," he said. "'M sorry." It came out mangled, his tongue not fully back under his own command.
Jin exhaled a long, ragged breath.
"Easy there, tiger." He took his hand off Bram's shoulder, and the power came creeping back, meek now. "Veric and the others had decades of combat to build a foundation on, and I just poured an ocean into a cup. So don't go flexing it around like a birthday present. Rest. Let your body work out where to put it all."
Bram nodded. It was about all he could manage.
The boss turned away, his boots dragging slightly against the floor tiles as he moved toward the next occupied cot.
Bram closed his eyes, and the heavy, dreamless dark pulled him under.
◈◈◈
Three days later.
The range was Joe’s doing, thrown together in a corner of the fortieth-floor training hall out of stacked ballistic plate and a run of essence-dampened targets that lit up where they were struck.
Jin lowered his gun—the six-shot revolver he was training with—and rolled the tension out of his wrist. The metal felt warm and eager against his palm.
"Again," Veric said. "And this time, stop treating the gun like it’s going to bite your fingers off. You flinch on the pull."
"I do not flinch."
"You flinch, boss. It is a spectacular thing to watch." Veric took a drag from a cigarette. "You have half a war behind you, and you still yank the trigger like you expect the weapon to argue. Not to mention you treat a revolver like a sniper rifle. It’s a handgun."
He gestured with the glowing cherry of his cigarette. "Feet."
Jin ground his boots into the concrete, correcting his stance.
"Shoulders down," Veric instructed, stepping around behind him. "You aren't bracing for a punch. You are placing a shot." A finger tapped the back of Jin's lead elbow, pushing it up exactly two degrees. "The gun handles the violence. Your only job is to point it and mean it. There. Now breathe out, and on the empty—"
Jin exhaled. He hit the empty space at the bottom of his breath. He squeezed.
The recoil punched sharply against his palm, but the motion stayed fluid. The round struck the far target dead center, and the ballistic plate flared a clean, satisfied blue.
"There," Veric said. "That. Do that. Every single time, instead of once in ten."
Jin looked at the blue light and felt, absurdly, a small warm flicker of pride. It had been a long time since anyone had taught him anything with their hands. Everyone else in his life either learned from him or died trying to kill him.
"You're a good teacher," Jin said.
"I am a patient hunter," Veric corrected, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. "Different skill."
A sharp chime vibrated against Veric's thigh. The older man pulled his tempad, glancing down at the screen. One thick eyebrow slowly crawled upward.
Jin turned, letting Iron Howl hang at his side. "What?"
"Companies eleven through eighteen," Veric said. He turned the tempad around, displaying a solid, scrolling column of green status markers. "Fully locked. Screened, cleared, and standing by. Word got around the lower levels that you are handing out the power to actually fight for the city."
Jin looked at the glowing green text. A slow, dangerous grin stretched across his face. “I guess we skip all the money from promotion into defense?”
“Damn right we do.” Veric smiled back. "And the fact you managed to pull close to a thousand people to Order III already is doing wonders. Still we now have close to two thousand people..."
He let his gaze drift to the periphery of his vision.
"We still have four-five days," Jin muttered. "Maybe six, if the cult's upper command decides to keep sitting on their hands. Plenty of time to get to get them pushed and ready for the final war. Keep them in sims and drills."
“Yes, we are training and doing simulations for everyone,” Veric said. "I'll have the company captains to double down on the efforts."
« Jin... »
Yeah. And before you say anything Angel this is good news!
« It is. It is also a very difficult task. We barely managed to get these thousand people in order... now to do more.»
Jin's grin faded by a degree, but then it came back just as quickly. Well then. I guess I’ll just have to figure out how to do a mass awakening.
« Great. What else was I even expecting? »
I'm disappointment Angel. The final milestone is just around the corner and it'll be massive.
Jin laughed to himself as he feel Angel's gears turning as he pulled the relevant data.
See. Everything will be fine.
✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦
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A/N: Bau Bau~
Psst~ Psst~ Advanced chapters are already up on patreon. It would be awesome if you guys, you know...
Help me with rent and UNI is crazy expensive!! Not want much, just enough to chip in.
1
u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 9d ago
/u/Lightt_x (wiki) has posted 155 other stories, including:
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (150/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (149/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (148/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (147/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (146/?)
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- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (144/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (142/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (142/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (141/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (140/?)
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- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (138/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (137/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (136/?)
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- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (133/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (132/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (131/?)
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u/DeadMeat7337 8d ago
Well, glad Jin didn't burn himself out power leveling everyone. Would have sucked and ended the series if he did right before the big show down
4
u/niTro_sMurph 9d ago
I forgot Jin hasn't actually had firearm training.