The pressure wave hit him like a wall of compressed air and stone fragments, and Yuan did the only thing available to him at that particular moment in space and time.
He burned his cooldown.
Shadow Step activated with maybe half a second left on the timer, he'd been counting and he'd been wrong about where he was in the cycle, which was a mistake he was going to think about later extensively, and the intangibility caught the brunt of the Stone Burst while he was still in it. He felt the pressure pass through him rather than into him, a deeply unpleasant sensation like the world briefly forgetting he had mass, and then the three seconds expired and corporeality returned and the debris that had been passing through him was now around him instead.
He hit the floor. Rolled. Came up behind a collapsed pillar section with his ears ringing and a shallow gash across his right forearm from something he hadn't tracked.
[Ding!]
[HP: 64/100]
Sixteen points. He took a breath. Sixteen points was survivable.
The hall was chaos, the Stone Burst had scattered everyone, students down across the debris field, some of them moving and some of them not yet. The mana lamps had taken the pressure wave badly and two of them had gone dark, which left the hall lit by the remaining two and the faint phosphorescence of disturbed mana particulate hanging in the air.
The Gargoyle King was in the center of it all.
And it was finally, visibly, breaking.
The Stone Burst had been the structural equivalent of a building cracking its own foundation. The calcified plates across its back and shoulders had split outward and not returned, the stress fractures from the entire fight running through the hide had reached a threshold that the outward pressure had tipped past recovery. Its right knee was on the floor. Its right shoulder hung at an angle that suggested the joint had fully separated. The chest crack Li Meilin had driven to eight centimeters was now closer to fifteen, and through it Yuan could see the interior mana structure of the creature pulsing with an irregular, damaged rhythm.
It was trying to stand. The left leg was pushing, the left arm was pressing against the floor, and it was making the effort with the particular determination of something that had never in its existence been forced to consider retreat.
It got halfway up.
Li Meilin hit it with everything she had left.
The formation was the largest thing he'd seen her produce, a compressed lance of ice mana that she'd been building during the Stone Burst recovery, both hands forward, the temperature drop around her visible as a shimmer in the disturbed air. It hit the chest crack directly and the fifteen centimeters became a fracture line that ran from the sternum to the left shoulder joint, and the sound the Gargoyle King made was not the millstone sound and not the roar.
It was something lower. Something with finality in it.
The creature came down.
The floor shook with the impact. Yuan grabbed the pillar section to keep his footing, and across the hall he could see other students doing the same, and in the sudden relative quiet after the crash the only sounds were breathing and the slow creak of settling debris and the Gargoyle King's remaining mana structure cycling in that damaged, irregular rhythm.
[Ding!]
[Gargoyle King critically wounded. Life force rapidly depleting.]
[Extraction opportunity detected.]
Yuan read the second line and was already moving.
---
The students were focused on Li Meilin.
That was the natural gravity of the moment, she'd landed the decisive visible blow, she was the known quantity, she was what the room's attention oriented toward in the aftermath of a fight. The fire-affinity girl was next to her, and Dao Fen was somewhere behind them, and the sixty-odd students who'd been compressed against the far wall were starting to cautiously redistribute themselves now that the largest immediate threat was horizontal.
Nobody was watching the far left of the hall.
Yuan moved through the debris field in a low crouch, no Shadow Step, cooldown still recovering, and he didn't need it for this, just needed to be fast and quiet and unremarkable in a room where remarkable things were happening elsewhere. He reached the Gargoyle King's right side, the collapsed side, the one facing away from Li Meilin and the main student mass.
Up close, the creature was different from the Shadow Stalker. Larger, obviously. But the mana structure was different too, not the tight, compressed signature of a stealth predator but something sprawling and architectural, built for mass and territory and the assumption that nothing in its environment would ever push back hard enough to matter.
It had been wrong about that.
The core was visible without him having to search for it. Bigger than anything he'd extracted before, roughly the size of both his fists together, seated deep in the chest cavity behind the fracture line, cycling in slow irregular pulses. The colour was different too. The Shadow Stalker's core had been cold and pale. This one was a dark, dense amber, the colour of something ancient and geological.
He felt his right hand respond to it before he consciously decided to reach.
'Is this still,' he started, and then stopped himself the same way he had in the passage after the Shadow Stalker. The question about whether this bothered him. Whether it should.
The honest answer was that the Gargoyle King had just tried to turn him and sixty other students into fragments and had largely succeeded at the structural damage portion, and he was finding it difficult to locate the moral complexity with any precision at this particular moment.
'Later,'he thought, for the third time since awakening. 'Properly, later.'
He reached through the fracture line and closed his hand around the core.
The extraction was different this time.
The Shadow Stalker had come apart like smoke, quiet, quick, threads unwinding inward. The Gargoyle King came apart like architecture being deconstructed, the calcified hide dissolving in sections from the point of contact outward, each plate going to mana dust in sequence. It took longer. It was louder, a sustained low sound that Yuan felt in his chest rather than heard with his ears. The amber light from the core traveled up his arm and he felt it settle somewhere behind his sternum alongside the Shadow Stalker's contribution and the Goblin Warrior's, a growing collection of things that were his now.
By the time the last plate dissolved, he was crouching over empty floor.
He heard someone behind him say, quietly, "What—"
He didn't turn around.
[Ding!]
[Ability Extracted: Gargoyle King — Stone Skin (C+ Rank)]
[New Skill Acquired: Stone Skin]
[Ding!]
[Bonus Extraction Detected.]
[Rare Ability Unlocked: Tremor Sense (B-Rank)]
[Note: Ability Extraction has detected a dormant ability within the host monster. Rare extraction successful.]
Yuan stared at the second notification.
B-rank. From a C+ monster. The system was telling him that the Gargoyle King had been carrying a dormant ability, something latent in its structure that normal means of killing it would have destroyed without accessing, something that only his talent had been configured to find.
He hadn't known that was possible.
He sat with that for a moment, crouched over empty stone in the half-dark, the amber warmth of the extraction still fading from his arm, and understood that he had been thinking about his talent too narrowly. Ability Extraction wasn't just taking what was visible. It was taking what was there, all of it, including the parts the monster itself might not have known about.
Every monster in every dungeon in the world.
He'd thought that before. It landed differently now.
Behind him, the hall was coming back to life, voices, movement, someone trying to organize a headcount. He heard Li Meilin's voice cutting through the noise with precise, directional instructions. He heard the fire-affinity girl saying his name wasn't, saying "someone was there, I know what I saw"
Yuan looked at his hands.
Stone Skin, Tremor Sense, Shadow Step, Battle Instinct.
F-rank, his status window would tell anyone who checked. Ability: Mana Sense.