It took nearly twenty minutes of careful, deliberate stillness before the dark vein retreated fully from around the trapped hunter's shoulder.
Aryan kept his palm flat against the stone the entire time, breathing slow, mind carefully blank of anything resembling urgency or fear — both of which, he'd come to understand, were simply different flavors of the same resistance the crystal fed on. He counted his own pulse instead, steady and unhurried, and beside him, the trapped hunter did the same, his ragged breathing gradually settling into something almost peaceful.
"...it's letting go," the hunter whispered, disbelief cracking through the exhaustion in his voice. "I can feel it letting go."
"Don't get excited," Aryan murmured. "Excited is interesting too."
The stone around the man's torso receded slowly, reluctantly, the fused black rock softening back into something that finally resembled skin and armor rather than living wall. By the time it released him entirely, the hunter — a broad-shouldered man in cracked A-Rank plate, a deep gash along his jaw that had clearly stopped bleeding days ago — collapsed forward into Aryan's arms, shaking, alive, and entirely unable to stand on his own.
"Easy," Aryan said, lowering him carefully to the cavern floor. "You're out. Just breathe."
"Daven," the man managed, voice raw. "My name's Daven. Second team. There were—" He stopped, throat working, eyes flicking toward the rest of the chamber wall, toward the other shapes still partially fused into black stone, faces frozen mid-struggle, some still visibly straining against a fate that only fed on exactly that straining.
"I see them," Aryan said quietly. "I'll get to them. I need you stable first."
He pulled a healing draught from his spatial pouch — the same D-rank potions he'd carried as a porter for hunters who'd never once offered him one in return — and pressed it into Daven's shaking hands. "Drink. Slowly. I have five more chambers' worth of people to deal with, and I'd rather not carry you the whole way out."
Daven managed a weak, disbelieving laugh, drinking the potion in small, careful sips. "You're not... you're not with a rescue team. You came in alone?"
"I came in alone," Aryan confirmed.
"That's insane."
"I've been told." Aryan was already turning back toward the nearest of the other fused figures — a woman, judging by the build, her face slack with the same trapped exhaustion Daven's had worn moments earlier. He approached slowly, palm extended, breathing already settling into the same careful rhythm.
It took less time with the second hunter — Aryan's understanding of the mechanic sharpening with practice, his patience growing more efficient the more he trusted the process instead of fighting his own urge to hurry. Fifteen minutes. Then twelve, for the third. The crystal's pulsing rhythm overhead seemed, if anything, to grow more agitated with each successful extraction, the dark veins traveling faster, brighter, searching for resistance that simply wasn't there to find.
[Ding! Host has freed Hunter (Rank A) — Yuki Tamaki.]
[Hunter's Ledger: +30 EXP — Hazard De-escalation (Cumulative).]
[Level Up! Host has reached Level 17.]
Yuki — the name Sera had given him back in the infirmary tent, the second missing hunter from her team — came free shaking but coherent, her first words a sharp, urgent question about Sera's survival that Aryan answered honestly, watching real relief break across her exhausted face for the first time since he'd entered the chamber.
By the fifth extraction, Daven had recovered enough to help steady the freed hunters as they came loose, murmuring quiet, practical reassurances that came easier from someone who'd just lived through exactly what they were emerging from. It became, in a strange way, almost a system of its own — Aryan working the slow, patient extraction, Daven managing the aftermath, the small cluster of rescued hunters growing steadily larger against the chamber's far wall.
Six hunters freed. Two more chambers' worth of fused figures remained, deeper in, closer to the pulsing crystal itself, and Aryan could feel — without needing any skill to tell him — that proximity to the source was going to make this final stretch considerably harder.
"That thing," Daven said quietly, following Aryan's gaze toward the crystal, "we called it the Source. Nobody got close enough to learn anything more specific before it started feeding." He hesitated. "How are you planning to actually stop it? Freeing us is one thing. That thing's still going to be sitting there afterward, still feeding the Gate."
It was the question Aryan had been carefully not asking himself, focused entirely on the immediate, solvable problem of one trapped hunter at a time. The larger one — the actual mission, the reason Reyes and Marcus had sent him in at all — remained exactly as unsolved as it had been at the chamber's threshold.
"I don't know yet," Aryan admitted. "I know fighting it directly is probably the worst option. It feeds on exactly that."
"Then what does that leave?"
Aryan studied the crystal's slow, patient pulse, the way its rhythm had grown subtly more agitated with every hunter he'd freed, every small defeat it suffered without a fight to properly feed on.
"I think," he said slowly, an idea taking shape that felt simultaneously obvious and insane, "it might leave boring it to death."
Daven stared at him. "You're joking."
"I genuinely am not sure yet," Aryan admitted. "But everything it's done so far reacts to resistance. Struggle. Attention. If starving it of all three is what worked on a person-sized version of this problem, I don't see why scale should change the principle." He turned back toward the remaining trapped hunters, already moving toward the next extraction. "I need to free everyone first. Then we'll find out together whether I'm right."
Behind them, deep within its crystalline heart, the Source's slow pulse brightened once more — and for the first time since Aryan had entered the chamber, the rhythm faltered, just slightly, like something ancient and patient had finally noticed it was losing.