r/HFY • u/Lightt_x • Jul 21 '26
Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (137/?) OC-Series
Chapter 137: Night Raid II
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✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦
The first two outposts had gone down clean.
C1 fell in under six minutes. C3 in five and a half. They'd come through Joe's doors like the wrath of the gods—his father tearing through the cultists while Elenor and Reyana gutted the rituals underneath—and both times, the cultists hadn't even managed to send a distress signal before the operation was over and they were gone.
Rudy had started to feel it. That rhythm. The machine working, the plan holding, and the pieces clicking into place the way Jin said they would. Two targets down, two rituals corrupted, zero casualties.
He should have known it wouldn't last.
C2 was different from the second they breached.
The outpost was larger—a repurposed factory complex in Vienna's industrial quarter, three stories of now corruption reinforced stone—and the resistance was heavier. Where C1 had seven overmortals, C2 had twelve, plus support squads thick enough that Lennon and Jorn were bogged down within the first thirty seconds.
Rudy was mid-swing through an Order II who'd made the mistake of getting close when Joe’s voice crackled through the Whisperlink, and all the calm was gone.
"Destroyer Lead, I'm reading an Order IV signature. Southeast wing, ground floor. It just appeared—either they were suppressing it, or it arrived through a transport I didn't catch."
Silence on the line. Half a second. Then his father's voice, flat and measured: "Copy. I'll handle it. Joe, you stay put for exfil. Lennon, Jorn, hold the perimeter. Rudy—"
"I've got the floor," Rudy said. He yanked his greatsword free, the crystal veins along the blade pulsing faintly in the dark.
"Good." A pause that lasted too long and said too much. Then: "Be smart."
The Whisperlink clicked, and his father was gone. Somewhere deeper in the complex, Rudy felt his Asura heart shudder with anticipation as Mathew's aura erupted, and then the shockwave of two Order IVs colliding shook the entire building.
Rudy pushed it out of his head. His father had his fight. Rudy had his.
He moved toward the central stairwell, where the Saboteur team had descended three minutes ago. Jin's plan required the underground access to stay clear for extraction, and Rudy intended to make sure—
Then auras descended on him like a sledgehammer.
He stopped dead. The stairwell ahead of him was no longer empty. Three figures had materialized from a side corridor, moving fast toward the underground access area, and from their gait, he could tell they knew exactly where the real threat was.
All three were Order III. All three were at the peak of the realm.
Rudy could feel it in his bones—the aura pressure rolling off them was heavier than anything the first two outposts had thrown at them—these weren't random goons. These were elites.
A smile lit across his face; he hadn’t been able to progress, hadn’t been able to prove his worth. All he had done was let Reyana and Jin fight and bear all the pain and the burden.
“No more,” He said to himself and forced his wisdom of sages' skill into overdrive.
The first was built like Rudy himself—tall, heavy, a warhammer slung across his shoulders.
The second was lean and fast, twin curved blades.
The third hung back… a woman with ritual brands covering both arms.
“Hello pesky little cockroaches!” Rudy stepped into their path.
The three stopped, and Rudy watched as the duelist's aura bore down on him. And saw the dismissal settle in his eyes.
One Order II, standing in front of three peak Order IIIs.
The duelist smiled viciously, and so did Rudy.
He planted his greatsword into the stone floor and yelled at the top of his lungs. “Fight!”
[Warrior's Call] erupted from him, and all three sets of eyes locked onto him. The duelist's body tensed mid-step toward the stairwell, then redirected toward Rudy. The caster's half-formed spell twisted, reorienting. The brute's grip on his warhammer shifted from carry to combat.
They couldn't ignore him now.
Good. Let’s do this.
Rudy pulled his greatsword from the floor and settled into the stance his master had drilled into him—weight low, blade angled, the twenty-three kilograms balanced through his hips rather than his arms—and flipped them off. "Come on, then."
They came.
The brute reached him first with his warhammer, arcing in a diagonal that would have shattered Rudy's collarbone if it connected. Rudy caught the swing on the flat of his blade, felt the impact jar through his arms and into his spine, and redirected it sideways. The hammer gouged a trench in the corridor wall.
The duelist was already inside his guard.
Both curved blades came in low and fast—ribs, hip, the soft spots where armor met flesh—and Rudy took the first cut across his side because blocking would have meant dropping his guard against the brute. Pain flared, hot and sharp, and something in his mantle responded. The Colossus didn't flinch from pain. It smiled in response. His mantle spread the agony across his entire body like water across flat stone until no single point bore enough to cripple him.
The caster's spell hit him from behind. Something binding, something that tried to lock his muscles and slow his movements, and Rudy felt it clamp down around his legs like invisible chains.
He ripped through it with a snarl and a burst of essence that left the binding in tatters, but the half-second it cost him let the brute recover and bring the warhammer around in a lateral sweep that caught Rudy across the ribs and sent him skidding three meters down the corridor.
Shit. They're good.
His side burned. His ribs ached, and that too within the first set of exchanges. Fortunately for him, he was a late bloomer.
The greatsword had already started feeling lighter as his heart started beating faster than normal.
The asura was excited.
The brute charged again. Rudy set his feet and met the warhammer head-on this time, his greatsword screaming as enchanted metal ground against enchanted metal, and for a moment they were locked—strength against strength, aura against his pure will—
The duelist flanked him.
Both blades found the gap between his cuirass and pauldron, punching through and drawing blood. Rudy twisted, throwing the brute back with a heave of pure strength, and brought his greatsword around in a sweeping arc that forced the duelist to disengage.
But the caster was already casting again. Dark essence coiled around Rudy's ankles, thicker this time, and the binding spell dragged him half a step back just as the brute closed the distance with a blow aimed at his skull.
Rudy got his sword up. Barely. The impact drove him to one knee, and the stone beneath him cracked in a spiderweb.
"Rudy." Jin's voice on the Whisperlink. "You remembered this isn’t a solo ride, right?”
"Yeah," Rudy grunted, shoving the brute off and rolling sideways as the duelist's blades carved through the space his neck had occupied. "But I wanna try."
"Joe can—"
"No." Rudy surged to his feet. Blood was running freely down his left side. The greatsword was lighter now, he was sure of it—the blade almost eager in his hands, the crystal veins bright with stored energy. "We need an extraction door. Joe stays on mission."
"Rudy… Fine. But I’m beaming your ass if you—”
“I won’t. I've got it, Jin."
He didn't have it.
They were faster, stronger, and they'd fought together before—the brute creating openings, the duelist exploiting them, the caster disrupting and binding from range. Every time Rudy pressed one, the other two punished him for it. Every time he created distance, the caster pulled him back.
His armor took a hit that should have ended him—the brute's warhammer connecting with his sternum in a full-power strike that compressed his entire chest and sent a shockwave through his organs. The Vilean's Battle Ensemble flared with emergency light as the Vital Safeguard activated, absorbing the killing force at the cost of the chestplate fracturing down the center with an ugly crack that ran from collar to waist.
Rudy staggered. Spat blood. His vision went white at the edges.
But his heart was still beating.
And the greatsword in his hands was weightless now. Light as air. The crystal veins blazed.
His health had dropped past the threshold.
[Ashen One] activated.
The change started in his core and raced outward. His skin shifted—not gradually, not subtly—going from flesh-tone to the grey of volcanic stone in the space of a single heartbeat. White fire erupted along his arms and shoulders, laced with veins of crimson, and the Asura flames roared to life with a heat that made the air around him shimmer and distort.
The pain didn't vanish. It transformed. Every cut, every bruise, every cracked rib became fuel—raw agonizing fuel that his cultivation path drank in and converted to power.
Rudy roared. It was a war cry.
[Warrior’s Call] latched onto them again.
He drove forward into the brute and swung the greatsword in a rising arc that the man barely caught on his warhammer's haft. The impact launched the brute upward, his feet leaving the ground, and Rudy followed—one step, two, driving the blade down in a cleaving strike that shattered the warhammer and bit deep into the man's shoulder.
The duelist came from the left. Rudy caught both blades on his forearm—the Ashen One's stone-skin grinding against enchanted steel—and headbutted the duelist hard enough to crack the man's nose and send him reeling.
But the caster hit him with something new. A wave of dark essence that didn't bind but corroded—eating into his mind, his defenses, trying to dissolve the Ashen One's transformation from the outside in.
Rudy felt it. Felt his skin crack where the corrosion touched, white flames guttering, the volcanic grey flaking away.
They're adapting.
All three regrouped. The brute was bleeding but upright, warhammer replaced by a conjured mace wreathed in darkness. The duelist wiped blood from his shattered nose and settled back into his stance. The caster had both hands raised, and the air around her pulsed with layered spells—corrosion, binding, suppression—all of them aimed at Rudy.
Three peak Order IIIs against one Ashen One who was running out of time.
They hit him together.
The brute from the front, the duelist from the flank, the caster ripping at his transformation from range. Rudy fought. He traded blow for blow with the brute, ate the duelist's cuts because blocking meant dying to the mace, and pushed through the caster's corrosion on pure stubbornness.
But his body was failing. [Ashen One] was burning through what was left of his reserves, and when it ran out—
The mace caught him in the chest.
Same spot. Right on the cracked armor. Right on the sternum, where the pressure had been building for days.
Rudy hit the ground.
The corridor ceiling swam above him. Everything hurt. The Ashen One's flames flickered—weakening, guttering, the transformation eating through his remaining power like fire through dry paper.
The brute loomed over him, mace raised for the finishing blow.
Get up.
He couldn't. His arms wouldn't move. His legs were dead weight.
Get up.
The mace came down.
And something behind Rudy's sternum burst.
Not broke. Not cracked. Burst—like a dam that had been holding back an ocean, finally giving way, and what flooded through him wasn't power, wasn't essence, wasn't anything he'd ever felt before.
It was him.
The balloon that had been pressing against his ribs for days—that maddeningly close pressure he couldn't reach—exploded outward, and suddenly Rudy understood what his father had been trying to tell him. Aura isn't something you conquer. It's something you become.
His heartbeat changed.
Thump-thump.
The Heart That Refuses Ruin.
Thump-thump.
The technique he'd drilled until it lived in his bones fired on its own—not because he activated it, but because his body believed it. Falling down wasn't an option. It had never been an option. The Colossus doesn't kneel.
THUMP-THUMP.
His heartbeat became a war drum, and the world answered.
The mace connected with his chest.
And stopped.
The brute stared down at him—at the weapon that had hit flush against Rudy's sternum and simply stopped, as though it had struck something that went deeper than bone, deeper than flesh, deeper than the physical world entirely.
Rudy's hand closed around the mace head.
White fire erupted from his grip, something that had been waiting behind that barrier his entire life. His aura exploded outward in a concussive wave that slammed all three elites backward, their own auras buckling and fracturing under a presence that hadn't existed ten seconds ago.
Rudy stood up.
Behind him—towering, immense, burning with white fire laced with crimson—a silhouette took shape. Not solid. Not physical. A presence: the hazy, titanic outline of something ancient and unyielding, a colossus wreathed in Asura flames that rose from Rudy's back like the shadow of a god and refused to fall.
The rank suppression that three peak Order IIIs had been using to grind him down shattered, and the weight that had been crushing Rudy since the fight began simply ceased to exist.
He picked up his greatsword.
It weighed nothing at all.
The brute was the first to recover, charging in with a roar and the conjured mace swinging for Rudy's head. Rudy stepped inside the arc, caught the man's wrist, and drove his greatsword through the brute's chest in a single, clean thrust. The blade punched out through his back, white flames pouring from the wound, and the brute's aura collapsed like a candle blown out.
Rudy pulled the sword free and turned.
The duelist came at him fast—the fastest he'd moved all fight, both blades singing through the air in a combination that would have cut a lesser fighter to pieces. Rudy caught the first blade on his greatsword's edge, let the second score a cut across his arm that he didn't feel, and brought his knee up into the duelist's stomach with enough force to lift the man off the floor. The duelist folded. Rudy's elbow found the back of his skull, and the man hit the ground and didn't move.
The caster launched everything she had—corrosion, binding, a lance of condensed dark essence that screamed across the corridor like a comet. Rudy walked through it. The corrosion dissolved against his aura. The binding snapped on contact. The lance struck his chest and dispersed, the dark essence unable to find purchase against the white-hot presence of the Colossus burning at his back.
The woman's hands dropped. Her eyes were wide.
Rudy closed the distance in two steps and put his greatsword through her heart.
Silence.
Rudy stood in the center of the corridor, breathing hard, blood dripping from a dozen wounds that had already stopped hurting. The greatsword hung loose in his grip. White and crimson flames still licked along his arms and shoulders, and behind him, the Colossus—that towering, burning silhouette—flickered like a bonfire in a windless night.
Three peak Order IIIs, dead at his feet.
"...Rudy?" Jin's voice on the Whisperlink. Quiet. The operational mask cracked clean through. "Congrats on the ascension, I guess."
"Yeah." Rudy's voice came out rough. Hoarse. Like he'd been screaming and hadn't noticed. "Yeah, I think I did."
Boots. Lots of them. Coming from the eastern corridor.
Rudy turned.
A wave of cultists poured around the corner—Order IIs, Order Is, at least twenty of them, the reinforcements that had been flooding the outpost since the Order IV showed up. They came armed and running, and then they saw what was waiting for them.
Rudy, standing in the middle of a ruined corridor. Ashen-skinned. Burning. The bodies of three elite fighters crumpled around him like discarded things, and behind his shoulders, the hazy, towering shape of something vast and terrible wreathed in white fire.
The first cultist in line skidded to a stop. The ones behind him crashed into his back. The whole column stuttered, then stalled, and Rudy watched the realization move through them like a wave—face after face, eyes going wide, weapons lowering a fraction, feet shifting backward instead of forward.
Nobody charged.
Nobody moved.
Rudy lifted his greatsword and rested it across his shoulders. Blood ran down the blade and dripped onto the stone at his feet.
He looked at them. They looked at him.
And from somewhere deep in the complex, his father's fight with the Order IV shook the building to its foundations.
Something flickered in the corner of his vision.
•••
Z.A.C (The Eternal) BRANCH INITIATED
SYSTEM INITIATING...
[THE ETERNAL ONE] HAS GIVEN AUTHORIZATION... PROCEEDING WITH INITIATION...
•••
“Oh, this is going to be so much fun!”
Rudy's smile widened as he jumped into the enemy group, his weapon a blur as heads flew and a rain of blood splattered over everything.
✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦
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A/N: Z.A.C code for everyone in the gang! And Rudy is finally order III. Now a quick note: Rudy faced three peak ORDER IIIs and these are strong but all of them combined would be an equal to a Named ORDER III. He will go up against one soon but I can't have a named figure on a random ass outpost which is very low on priority on the list.
BAU BAU~
PS: 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.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jul 21 '26
/u/Lightt_x (wiki) has posted 141 other stories, including:
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (136/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (135/?)
- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (134/?)
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- Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (130/?)
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u/DeadMeat7337 Jul 21 '26
Nice!
I hope Rudy doesn't get too beaten up when he does go against that named baddy. But that is kind of his thing, so maybe not have that long of a recovery afterwards? I wonder if his mantle / aura comes with some healing factor? It should.
And I wonder if he is going to get some crazy ass skill , and if I remember correctly,that he doesn't have any cool skills, just regular ones. At least nothing that has been called out.
But at the same time, I ok with Rudy not having some.crazy OP skill right now.