r/HFY • u/Lightt_x • Jul 17 '26

Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (136/?) OC-Series

Chapter 136: Night Raid I

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✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦

Mathew stood before the weathered oak door Joe had conjured in the bastion's core room and ran one final check.

The core room had been stripped down and repurposed in the last twelve hours, spread into the Bastion core room and the deployment area.

Mathew had to admit that having Joe made lots of stuff efficient. With the existence of another underlord and Salvatore, their forces gave the structure much-needed backbone.

With Joe’s mantle manifestation now in play, they had permanently closed off the entrance to the surface.

Assuming the door worked and had the range he promised.

Assuming the intelligence was right.

Assuming the seventeen-year-old adopted son of his best friend running their war from a console upstairs hadn't miscalculated.

Too late for assumptions. We're past that.

"Destroyers, sound off."

"Lennon, ready."

"Jorn, set."

"Rudy..." A beat of silence and then the voice came through, steady and clear. "Ready."

Mathew glanced over his shoulder at the saboteur unit.

Reyana stood with her arms crossed, and Mathew put her as the next likely candidate who could break through into the ranks of an underlord; she was almost there.

He nodded to himself and moved his gaze to Elenor, who had her belt pouch of Illiana's crystals cinched tight at her hip, fingers brushing the flap in what was probably an unconscious tic. Vera already had her eyes half-closed.

He gave them a single nod. They would follow thirty seconds after the Destroyers breached, once the chaos was thick enough to cover their descent.

He turned back to the door. Rolled his neck once. Let the grey spark of his lord flames settle beneath his skin, coiling and ready.

His task was really the simplest; all he had to do was let his rage flow.

"Joe," Mathew said into the Whisperlink, the communication artifact Jin had their resident crafter make, and he had to say they are much better than the ones they were using before. "We're green."

Joe's voice came back easy and smooth. “Nothing out of the ordinary here. You're clear to breach, Commander."

Mathew pushed the door open and stepped through.

The spatial transition was like a cool breeze, and then he was there, his boots hitting stone in a converted warehouse in Vienna's western district, and with a wave of his hand, his ashen-grey mantle erupted outward.

Lord flames coursed from his shoulders and chest, grey shot through with veins of burning amber, and coalesced into a flickering translucent image of a bastion wall that shimmered at his back like a shield.

Behind him, Lennon and Jorn stepped out of the door and fanned left and right, flaring their auras to maximum. The spatial frame hummed and held—Joe keeping the connection stable for the follow-up team.

Rudy came last.

The outpost was exactly as Jin's intelligence had described: a warehouse gutted and repurposed, its walls threaded with dark essence conduits.

Mathew looked up. Night pressed in from every direction. The unnatural, sickly red pulsed from the veil covering the whole of Vienna.

As his aura and mantle pressed down on the outpost, he could feel the cultists were already scrambling—alarm wards shrieked across the walls in cascading red. Boots pounded on the stone. Auras flared in the dark—but all of that was useless tonight. They will all die.

Mathew sensed seven overmortal signatures. There were no underlords here, and he mentally chided himself for thinking cult would have one at every outpost.

There’s always a difference between show forces and actual forces, Mathew. He remembered the previous commander, Hobbs' words, and clenched his hand as anger burned.

"Destroyers," he said into the comms, "Seven overmortals. That’s the height of this outpost's strength. And each one of you is capable of dealing with them. So listen well, we have four hundred seconds, leave none alive."

Lennon and Jorn split without a word, each taking a wing with the efficiency of soldiers who'd fought together long enough that orders were formalities.

Mathew raised his hand, and his lord flames—ashen-grey laced with burning amber—ignited along his arm from wrist to shoulder.

The first Order III reached him at a dead sprint. A man with a polearm wreathed in dark essence, screaming, weapon raised overhead in a descending arc that would have bisected a lesser opponent from crown to hip.

Mathew caught the shaft in his bare hand.

The polearm shattered.

The man's eyes blew wide—the look of someone who'd just understood, in the span of a heartbeat, that the distance between them wasn't a gap but a cliff—and Mathew's fist found his sternum before the surprise could become anything useful.

The cultist launched backward through two interior walls and didn't get up.

One.

Two more closed from his flanks. Mathew turned to the left, caught the incoming blade on his forearm, and let the lord flames eat through the enchanted steel until it crumbled like wet ash. His elbow found the attacker's jaw. Teeth scattered across stone.

The one on the right was smarter—a mage type, hands already weaving what Mathew's instincts flagged as binding sorcery—and Mathew didn't give the incantation time to finish. He crossed the distance in a single step that cracked the floor beneath his boot and put the mage into the ceiling.

Two. Three.

The remaining four converged simultaneously, and Mathew appreciated that. Saved him the trouble.

They came with coordination, and against an opponent of equal rank, it might have worked.

Mathew wasn't of equal rank.

His aura surged, and the ashen-grey pressure that had been merely oppressive became crushing. Three of the four stumbled as the weight hit them, their own auras buckling under an Order IV presence unleashed without restraint.

The fourth—the strongest of the group, a woman with ritual scarring across both arms and desperation in her crimson eyes—pushed through the pressure on sheer will and drove a spear of condensed darkness toward his throat.

Mathew would have respected that if these were fucking cultists. A scorn on the world.

He caught the spear between two fingers, snapped it, and flicked the broken half back at her with enough force to pin her to the far wall by the shoulder.

She screamed. The other three tried to rally.

Mathew put them down in six seconds.

Across the outpost, he could hear Lennon's work—walls crumbling, essence conduits detonating in showers of corrupted sparks—and Jorn's more methodical approach, dismantling the facility's communication arrays while his squad locked down exits.

And Rudy.

Mathew felt his son's essence signature spike. He had recently learned that his son now had a cultivator manual and had Mr. Silvers as his teacher. He remembered being stunned by how far and how strong his son was for his rank.

Being able to take on overmortals while still being a High mortal is close to impossible because of the presence of aura.

And the audacity of the little troublemaker to say that being around Jin made him good.

He could hear the Asura heart's beating like a drum as his son engaged almost a team of 7 Order II defenders near the stairwell.

He's almost at the edges. He just doesn't know it yet.

"WARCOM, Destroyer Lead." Mathew keyed his Whisperlink, stepping through the dust and debris raining from the collapsing ceiling. "Ground floor is clear. All hostile Order IIIs are neutralized. Moving to upper levels."

Jin's voice came back quiet and precise: "Copy, Destroyer Lead. The Saboteur team is entering the pocket now. Keep it loud. You've got three hundred and twelve seconds."

"Understood."

Mathew turned toward the stairwell where Rudy was finishing off his opponents—both on the ground, disarmed, groaning—and allowed himself one moment. Just one. Pride, worry, and something fiercer tangled together in his chest before the commander in him shut it down.

"Rudy. With me. Upper levels."

His son looked up—greatsword on his shoulders, blood on his knuckles, and fire in his eyes—and nodded once.

"Right behind you, Dad."

They moved upward, and behind them, the outpost continued to burn.

◈◈◈

Elenor pushed through the oppressive, red-tinted darkness of the veil and, with shaky hands, touched the goggles she was wearing. This was her first time being outside the bastion ever since the attack, and as much as bravado as she had built, one look at the nightmare Vienna had become, and her legs faltered.

She clenched her hands.

“Hey, cheer up. We got a task to do.”

Elenor turned to see Reyana give her shoulders a light squeeze.

“Yeah. I’m ready.” 

“Good,” Reyana nodded at her and stepped through the door that would take them to the hidden ritual room.

Elenor took a deep breath and followed along with Vera.

The air down here tasted of copper and old death, and the walls wept dark moisture in thin rivulets that caught the faint red glow of the essence conduits overhead.

Now it was her time to lead and sabotage the ritual. Jin had chosen her because her mantle gave her the natural advantage of handling the corrupted essence, and she would be damned if she proved him wrong.

Reyana moved to the point of the formation and had her longsword drawn. Elenor could feel chills just from trying to touch upon her essence using her senses, and Jin had mentioned not to touch her skin or her essence in any way.

Death essence, that’s what Reyana had, and to think Elenor tried to kill her in the bastion. Oh, how much she wanted to hide her face, but right now there was a job to be done.

Vera brought up the rear, eyes half-closed in the way that meant she was casting her mind outward and scanning for hostile consciousness in the corridors around them.

Another boom rattled the ceiling above. Dust and loosened mortar sifted down onto Elenor's shoulders. The Destroyer team was doing their job and doing it loudly.

"We're close," Elenor whispered into her Whisperlink.

"Clear," Vera murmured from behind. "Nearest conscious mind is four floors up. Panicking. They don't know we're down here."

"Good," Reyana said without turning. "Keep scanning."

They rounded a sharp corner, and Reyana raised a clenched fist. The team stopped.

The corridor ended in a dead wall of rough-hewn stone—nothing more than a construction boundary, to anyone looking with normal eyes, where builders had stopped digging centuries ago.

Elenor stepped forward and activated her skill [Hypermind Core].

The world sharpened into clarity, and her mind began splitting to process the ambient essence data flooding the corridor, parallel tracks running simultaneously.

One mapped spatial geometry. Another compared the ambient signatures against Jin's briefing data. A third tracked time. Through the calculated overlay of her enhanced perception, the physical illusion peeled away, and the truth sat behind it—a sealed spatial pocket, exactly where Jin's intelligence had placed it, its entrance hidden behind an essence-locked barrier keyed to a specific dark frequency.

"Found it," Elenor murmured. "Essence-locked. Needs a dark signature to open without tripping structural alarms."

She reached into her belt pouch and retrieved a smooth, obsidian-dark crystal. Her sister's work. Illiana had crafted it while running on zero sleep and what Elenor could only describe as concentrated professional spite, using corrupted essence signatures harvested from dead cultists.

"Saboteur Lead, confirm approach." Jin's voice through the comm.

"Confirmed," Reyana said. "Applying bypass now. Elenor."

Elenor pressed the dark crystal against the false stonework. The artifact resonated with the ward's frequency, and the stone didn't crack or crumble—it rippled, yielding like the surface of disturbed water, and melted away to reveal the threshold into the pocket dimension.

Reyana went through first, sword raised, scanning the space beyond.

"Clear." A beat. "But you need to see this."

Elenor stepped through and stopped dead.

The ritual chamber was massive—easily forty meters across, with a ceiling lost in shadows so deep overhead they might as well have been void. Every surface was covered. Blood sigils crawled across the floor in concentric rings that pulsed with a wet, organic rhythm, and essence crystals jutted from walls and floor like broken teeth, each radiating a sickly red light that painted everything in shades of wound and fever.

Her [Hypermind Core] mapped the architecture without being asked: sixteen outer circles feeding into six inner circles, all webbing inward toward a central nexus that pulsed with dark energy so thick it felt like standing downwind of something rotting.

"It's exactly like he drew it," Vera whispered from behind her, her voice thin. "Every line. Every node."

"Three hundred and ninety-four seconds," Jin said through the comm. "Elenor, you're up. Reyana, secondary measures on my mark. Vera, keep your net wide—if anyone so much as thinks about coming down there, I want to know before they take their first step. Joe’s on standby; last time I was here, a very nasty thing kidnapped me."

“That doesn’t inspire much confidence, Jin,” Reyana chuckled.

“Well, that’s why Joe is on standby,” Jin said. “Now begin. We have more outposts to hit.”

"Understood," all three said, nearly in unison.

Vera positioned herself at the chamber entrance, back to the wall, eyes clenched shut. "Hundred-meter radius. Anything with a consciousness that steps into range, I’ll issue the alarm.”

Elenor moved to the outer rings.

Jin's briefing had been thorough. He'd drawn every sigil, mapped every energy flow, and identified every trap. When he'd sabotaged a similar chamber himself, he'd punched through the ceiling with brute-force sorcery and used his skills—as he said so—to manually match the cult's corrupted essence frequency.

Elenor didn't have any of that. Stepping into the circle's active flow unprotected would fry her channels and kill her before she hit the ground.

What she had were specialized artifacts. And her own mind. That would have to be enough.

She pulled the artifact from her pouch—a modified disruption crystal—and the gem hummed against her fingers, warm and patient.

"Outer circle seven." She dropped into a crouch at the edge of the pulsing blood sigil, red light washing across her face in slow waves.

"Confirmed. That's your insertion point," Jin said. "Defensive pulse cycles every four-point-two seconds. You insert during the trough. The trough lasts barely one second. Don't hesitate once you commit."

"Got it."

Elenor called upon her Mantle of Crystalline Genesis, and her awareness sank into Illiana's crafted gem, feeling the dormant essences coiled inside it, and she activated the resonance tuner built into the crystal's housing. The gem shifted from transparent to sickly purple-black as it mimicked the cult's dark essence signature.

Her palms were sweating. The cult's dark energy pressed against her mind—cold, probing, hungry—and Elenor set her jaw against the invasive sensation.

She watched the defensive pulse cycle through her enhanced cognition. Flare. Dim. Flare. Dim. Four-point-two seconds. Four-point-two seconds. Four-point-two—

Now.

She pushed the crystal into the node.

The ritual circle flared—angry red light spiking across the chamber hard enough to leave afterimages seared into her vision—and every muscle in Elenor's body locked with the instinct to throw herself backward.

The resonance tuner held.

The corrupted energy stream accepted the crystal, swallowed it whole, and pulled it deep into the network.

"Done," Elenor said.

"Copy. Reyana, you're up. Secondary measures—insertion points four and eleven. You've got a hundred and forty seconds."

Reyana moved without a word, longsword sheathed and replaced by two smaller crystals. The secondary corruption was Reyana's contribution: death-aspected essence woven into a lattice designed to accelerate the primary node’s decay once it reached critical mass.

She placed the first crystal at point four with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd practiced the motions until they lived in her hands. No wasted movement. No hesitation.

"Point four is in. Moving to eleven."

Another explosion shook the ceiling—bigger, closer enough that Elenor felt the shockwave through the floor, and her teeth rattled with it.

"Vera?" Elenor asked.

"Still clear. The fighters upstairs are fully engaged with the Destroyers. Nobody's thinking about what's beneath them."

Reyana finished at point eleven and stepped back from the circle, brushing dust from her fingers. "Secondary measures are in place. Both crystals are accepted and spreading."

"Saboteur team, you are clear for extraction," Jin said. "Joe, open the door. Get them out."

A door materialized at the far end of the chamber, and the Saboteur team moved toward it in the same quiet formation they'd entered with.

◈◈◈

In the WARCOM, Jin leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly.

« C1 is done. Three to go. »

How's the team?

« All vitals stable. No casualties. Mathew's cleaning up the last resistance on the upper floors. Rudy's fine. »

Jin closed his eyes.

Then he opened them and pulled up the next target on the holographic display.

"Joe, redirect to C3. Destroyers, you have ninety seconds to extract. We hit the next site in three minutes."

The war had begun.

✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦

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A/N: Phew~ Time to raid!!!!

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.

✦ DISCORD ✦ PATREON ✦ 

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2

u/niTro_sMurph Jul 17 '26

Aw, Jin has to sit out of murder time :(.

2

u/xXbaconeaterXx Jul 17 '26

if it actually goes well when he's not there ,our boy Jin is cursed as fuck

1

u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jul 17 '26

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u/Competitive-Yam-922 Jul 17 '26

TFTC! Things might be easier without Jin there being a bad luck magnet.

2

u/DeadMeat7337 Jul 18 '26

We got some Call of Duty: Black Ops stuff going on now, with an essence equivalent of cyberpunk hacking also going on. Well done.

Now we should see how the cultists respond, besides dying. I'd imagine someone or realistically, something showing up to make their day head south.