He landed on the damp with a heavy thud, his butt taking the brunt of the impact. A sharp pain flared up his tailbone. He groaned.
He was strong, but he was just an untrained monster with no real battle experience.
The two remaining monkeys, the one he'd head-butted and the one that had knocked him down, scrambled down the tree and charged towards him, their black eyes filled with mindless rage.
Azearth pushed himself up, his pride wounded.
He focused, and used his newfound Trueborn ability. He willed the grass at the monkeys' feet to grow. It responded instantly, long blades twisting and tangling around their ankles, throwing them off balance.
Seeing his chance, he threw himself forward.
He stabbed the closest monkey with his right-hand talons, punching through its ribcage with a wet crunch. He swung the dying creature's body into the last one, slamming them together.
As the final monkey stumbled, he drove his knee up with all his strength, connecting with its skull with a sickening crack.
It fell, twitched, and was still.
He stood there, panting, the adrenaline fading.
"I'm so strong, Ahh!!" he exclaimed.
A sharp, throbbing pain in his rear end said otherwise.
He was strong, but he was not invincible. He was still learning.
He searched the monkeys' bodies, looking for a shard like the Gorger's, but found nothing.
"Only stage level two and above monsters have shards, just like demons," Ashborn muttered, a hint of dark amusement in his tone.
"You could've told me that before I went looking, asshole," Azearth grumbled, knowing the primordial had let him learn this lesson the hard way. He was about to lash out with more curses when a primal alarm screamed in his nerves.
Something was approaching from behind. And it was fast.
He had just enough time to tense his back, willing his scales to harden.
SLASH!!
A line of fire erupted across Azearth's back.
He cried out, stumbling forward from the force of the blow. He spun around, his talons extending, ready to face this new, unseen threat.
What he saw made him freeze.
It looked almost human.
Purple skin, pulled tight over pure muscle. Its eyes were solid, dead white, like polished marble. Its hands ended in long, bony claws. But its face… it was twisted in a silent, endless scream of pure rage.
It was the angriest thing Azearth had ever seen.
When he looked at it with his Eyes of Life, he didn't see the soft green glow of a living creature. He saw a swirling, violent mass of raw Nyrr, like a storm given shape. It felt…Dead.
Ashborn's voice broke him out of his daze,"This is going to be problematic."
He paused and again said,"That is a Lost , beings that are devoured by Nyrr because they couldn't defend against its mental corruption or were too slow to progress to the higher stages. Be careful, they are stronger than their past selves. And by the looks of it, this one failed to condense it's nyrr while breaking through to the shardspawn stage."
Azearth asked," So we've got a peak stage one to take care of?"
"It's strength rivals that of entry level shardspawns so don't let your guard down"
As if hearing them, the Lost lunged. It was a blur, faster than the monkeys by a mile. Azearth barely got his arms up in time to block, taking the full brunt of the attack.
"Ughhhhh!!"
The impact was like being hit by a truck.
The bones in his forearms cracked under strain, and he was driven to his knees, the force numbing his hands. Before he could recover, the Lost slashed again, its claws scoring foue deep lines across his scaled chest, drawing dark blood.
Azearth scrambled backward, putting some distance between them.
The Lost followed, not with animal grace, it moved like a broken puppet, but its speed was terrifying.
It was like a mindless zombie.
He tried the grass trick again, urging the vines to snare its legs. They wrapped around its ankles—and then snapped like dry twigs as the Lost took another step. Its raw power simply tore through them.
It closed in, arm pulled back for another killing swipe.
Shinggg!!
Something unexpected happened.
As the clawed hand came for his face, Azearth's head jerked forward. His teeth, sharper than any human's, clamped down hard on the Lost's wrist. He bit down with all the strength in his jaw, tasting foul, coppery blood.
Both he and the Lost seemed stunned for a split second.
It was the opening he needed.
Still holding the arm in his teeth, Azearth drove his free hand forward, talons aimed at the creature's throat. The skin was like tough leather over stone, but his claws, fueled by desperation and his recent growth, punched through.
Black blood welled up, but the Lost didn't die. It thrashed, its free hand clawing at his face.
"The spine! Sever the head from the spine!" Ashborn's command was a whip-crack in his mind.
Grunting, Azearth gripped the Lost's neck with his other hand.
The situation was absurd and brutal: one monster-arm locked in his jaws, his demon hand buried in its throat. The Lost was spasming, its strength immense. Azearth held on, a grim wrestler in a death match. He pulled with the hand on its neck, pushed and twisted with the talons deep inside.
CRUNCH!!
SNAP!!
The head came clean off with a terrible, wet rip. The body collapsed, twitching, as black blood sprayed all over Azearth's body.
Azearth spat out the disgusting arm, panting.
"Its blood tastes like shit!"he spat, a mix of blood and fury.
A sharp, jagged pain in his mouth made him probe with his tongue. His bottom left canine tooth was gone, snapped off at the root.
"Fuck!"
"Hey Ashborn, please tell me, I can regrow teeth right!??"
"Let me see," Ashborn said.
Azearth pulled back his lip, revealing the gap.
"Hahahahahaa "
Ashborn was grunting like a pig laughing. "It'll regrow in a day maybe but you're a sight to see, haaaahahaha"
"Your true name should be Toothless"Ashborn said still grunting like a pig.
Azearth rolled his eyes, wiping black blood from his chin. As he did, he noticed something strange.
The Lost's body and the spilled blood began to shimmer. A faint, dark fog of Nyrr rose from it, swirling like smoke. In seconds, it consumed the entire corpse, leaving no trace behind.
On the ground where the body had been lay a single object: a bracelet.
It was black metal, etched with faint, glowing red symbols that seemed to move when he wasn't looking directly at them.
Azearth was dumbfounded by the scene.
"What is this, it feels like a game, monsters dropping loot after being killed"
He picked the bracelet up. It was cool to the touch.
"A relic," Ashborn explained, his laughter gone. "It is what happens when you kill a Lost, the nyrr in it's body condenses and forms a shard most of the time but sometimes when the emotions of the Lost are too strong, they form relics, the last proof of their existence. By the looks of it, it is a grade 2 relic, try it on"
The bracelet was small, but when Azearth tried to slide it onto his wrist, it expanded smoothly. Once in place, it contracted, fitting him as if made for him.
A strange lightness flowed up his arm and engulfed his body.
He took a few experimental steps.
He felt quicker, his movements less burdened.
"I feel like I'm much faster now"
"Let me read the runes," Ashborn said. After a moment, he continued. "Rune of weightlessness. And… minor protection. You cannot activate the protection yet unless you break through to Veinbloom stage. You have to channel nyrr into the bracelet to activate that feature. For now, enjoy being slightly less of a dead weight."
Feeling both stronger and mildly insulted, Azearth continued his journey.
The forest was changing.
The trees were still huge, but further apart, and the undergrowth was thicker, stranger.
He walked for another half-hour, his new senses alert.
Then he heard it.
A sound that was not the wind or the distant calls of monsters.
Crunch!! Crunch!!
The sound of something eating.
Not the messy gulping of a beast, but the deliberate, focused sound of teeth on bone and sinew.
He crept closer, using his Life Vision.
Ahead, about eighty meters away, was a humanoid shape, its back facing him. It glowed with the steady, strong green light of a late stage-one demon.
As he moved silently from tree to tree, the details became clear. The demon was huge, easily two meters tall, with grey skin and muscles that looked carved from stone. He wore a skirt of dirty green hide, decorated with small bones, which looked far more tailored than Azearth's own crude wrap.
The moment Azearth crossed the 30 meter mark, the demon turned its head.
Crunch!!
Still munching on the bones.
Its mouth was smeared with dark red blood, bits of flesh caught between teeth that were just a little too sharp. It had the face of a male teenager on the edge of adulthood—sharp, angular, but hardened by a life of violence. Its hair was a wild, matted mane of blood-red.
Its eyes, a flat, predator's yellow, locked onto Azearth. They held no surprise, no fear. Only a cold, calculating recognition of another predator in its territory.
The chewing stopped. The demon slowly turned its whole body to face him, dropping a gnawed leg bone. It didn't speak. It didn't snarl.
It just stared, and the air between them grew heavy with a silent, deadly question.