The air in Falus Forest was so dense that breathing felt like inhaling hot liquid. Dex retreated slowly, step by step, toward the mud patch concealed beneath its carpet of dead leaves-drawing the three Acidic Gloom Lizards behind him the way a hunter drags bleeding bait before sharks.
The two subordinate lizards moved in terrifying synchrony on either side of him, closing off his escape angles with gradual, merciless precision. Meanwhile the leader-still bleeding black from the paw Dex had pierced with the stone protrusion-crawled along the centre, its crimson eyes blazing with a sadistic fury. Its phosphorescent saliva dripped onto the ground in a continuous sizzle, dissolving the wet grass and leaving behind toxic vapours that reeked of sulphur and putrefying flesh.
"Five steps... four..." Dex counted inside his mind, while the phantom Mana gauge in his consciousness flickered amber warning-energy down to seventy percent from the sustained rotation of the Water Momentum Blade around his dagger. A headache had begun to tap at the back of his skull, the first herald of approaching Mana Sickness. He knew he had less than two and a half minutes before his nervous system gave out.
"Now."
The instant Dex's heel touched the edge of the hidden mud patch, he stopped retreating. The abrupt halt shattered the rhythm the lizards had been following, and their animal instincts read it as a moment of surrender-or terror-induced paralysis. The three lizards released a collective hiss that split the forest's silence and launched themselves simultaneously. The two subordinates charged blindly from both flanks, while the leader-hampered by its wound-did not run. Instead it coiled the muscles of its uninjured hind limbs and launched itself into the air, jaws spread wide, firing a concentrated jet of green acid directly at Dex's face.
In that fraction of a second where time seemed to move through thick glass, Dex did not flee. He planted his feet on the firm earth at the bog's edge and stretched his left hand flat toward the mud patch the lizards were descending into.
His incantation was not classical magic recited in sonorous verse. It was a brutal application of physics through Mana. He drove every available trace of Earth Mana into the mud, rendering it more fluid and viscous for a fraction of a second-causing the two subordinate lizards to plunge into it up to the midpoints of their armoured bodies, flailing in the mire that had swallowed their short limbs whole.
And in that same instant-in a mental shift that nearly tore his Mana Core apart from the sheer strain of contradiction-Dex activated his Water Mana. He did not conjure new water. He used the magic to pull every molecule of moisture present in that mud patch. It felt as though he were uprooting something from the centre of his chest. A vast surge of murky water erupted from the earth into the air, scattering like rainfall in reverse.
The sudden and absolute absence of water left the gaps between soil particles hollow-and the Earth Mana moved in to compress those particles with crushing, overwhelming force.
CRAAAACK.
A grinding sound of horrifying magnitude reverberated through the area-like the snapping of a giant's bones. In under one second, the clinging bog transformed into dry grey stone, hard as reinforced concrete. The two subordinate lizards screamed with frenzied terror. The lower halves of their bodies had been solidified entirely within the earth. They had become half-living statues, their lower bodies entombed in rock that nothing would break. The trap had succeeded with overwhelming, total effectiveness.
But the elation found no path to Dex's heart. His prisoner's mind always anticipated the worst-and the worst was now airborne, hurtling directly toward him. The leader lizard, propelled by the height of its leap-a leap born from the pain of its wounded paw-had not touched the mud at the moment of solidification. It had been in the air. And rather than sinking into the bog, its healthy front claws landed on the surface of the freshly formed concrete.
Although the rough concrete surface shredded the scales of its underbelly from the impact and the slide, the leader had escaped the trap. And carried by the terrifying momentum of its landing, fuelled by a killing instinct that overrode all pain, it surged forward past the stone trap and pounced directly at Dex.
Dex was still in the posture of releasing his compound spell. His Mana had collapsed savagely to twenty percent. The headache had become blades sawing through his skull, and his vision had begun to swim.
Shhiiisst.
The jet of acid the leader spat mid-leap scattered toward Dex. He had no time for a full evasion. He raised his left forearm-still clad in the assassins' thick leather coat-to shield his face. The acid struck the coat and a dense white smoke billowed upward, carrying the smell of burning leather. Dex felt fire sear his forearm, but the high-grade coat absorbed the greater part of the corrosive load.
Before Dex could lower his arm, the beast was on him. The black armoured mass-weighing over a hundred kilograms-slammed into his chest and hurled him backward. Dex flew several metres through the air and crashed violently onto his back, rolling over exposed roots, snapping at least two ribs in his ribcage. The air evacuated his lungs in an agonised wheeze, and the dagger with the Water Momentum Blade tore from his right hand and clattered away into the dark.
The leader lizard gave him not a single second to breathe. It charged, jaws yawning wide to swallow his head whole, front claws gouging the earth as it prepared for the final lunge.
"Damn it," Dex thought, tasting blood in his mouth. Mana remaining: ten percent.
In this critical instant-where terror paralyses ordinary minds-Dex did not think like a nobleman, or like a sorcerer. He thought like a killer locked inside a narrow cell with no weapons. In prison, when you lose your shiv, your body is the weapon, and your environment is your armour.
As the lizard pounced, Dex did not retreat. He drove both bare hands into the wet soil beside him and flung a fistful of earth and gravel-laced with the last dregs of his Earth Mana-directly into the lizard's sensitive crimson eyes.
The lizard let out a high sibilant shriek as the grit struck its exposed eyes, and its eyelids snapped shut by reflex-causing its jaws to miss Dex's skull by centimetres, driving its needle teeth instead into the tree trunk behind him and releasing a burst of acid that dissolved the wood within seconds.
Dex seized that moment of temporary blindness. With rapid hands, he drew the second black dagger that he kept concealed in his boot, a habit he had never abandoned since his prison days. But the lizard was massive and its scales were iron-hard. A random thrust into its back would snap the blade. He needed a lethal vulnerability.
The lizard twisted violently, shaking the grit from its eyes, and raised its right claw to tear open Dex's stomach.
"Not today, you bastard," Dex snarled.
Rather than retreating from the claw, he wrapped the leather coat-still trailing wisps of acid smoke-around his left forearm and used it as a flesh shield to take the blow. The lizard's claw drove through the leather and into his arm, tearing it to the bone. Dex screamed from the raw, blinding pain-but did not pull back. He had locked the beast's limb in place.
As the lizard's head drew close to deliver the killing bite to his throat, Dex let himself fall backward, dragging the beast down with him. In a curved, explosive motion-like a scorpion's sting in reverse-he drove the black poisoned dagger upward from below.
He did not target the scales. He targeted the only unarmoured, soft region on the creature's body: the underside of the lower jaw, driving the blade straight toward the throat and brain. The dagger sank to its hilt. The beast convulsed with savage resistance, attempting to close its jaws-but Dex channelled the final five percent of his Mana into the blade, activating the Water element for one single instant to generate a tiny pressure bubble inside the lizard's skull, then made it detonate.
BOOM.
A muffled detonation occurred inside the leader lizard's skull. Its movement ceased instantly. The crimson light in its eyes went out, and its massive, grotesque body collapsed with its full weight directly onto Dex, shuddering through its final involuntary convulsions.
Dex shoved the lizard's carcass off him with immense effort. He was gasping, blood running freely from his left arm and from his lips. His vision spun in slow circles, and a lethal cold was creeping from his extremities toward his heart.
"Mana Sickness... it's arrived," Dex recognised it. His Mana gauge read two percent.
But the battle was not over. Behind him, the two subordinate lizards entombed in the concrete were still shrieking and spraying acid at random, trying to fracture the rock crushing them. They were completely incapable of moving-but their hysterical screaming was a dinner bell for every predator within a five-kilometre radius.
"I cannot... leave them alive," Dex murmured, lurching upright. Every step required a colossal act of will to keep himself from losing consciousness.
He walked toward the two helpless lizards. There was no pride in what he was about to do, and no chivalry. These were the brutal laws of the forest: eliminate the threat by the fastest and most efficient means available.
He retrieved his first dagger-the one with the Water Momentum Blade-which had fallen earlier. He could not activate the Mana to spin the water again, but the black metal blade was sharp enough. He approached the first trapped lizard and sidestepped a desperate jet of acid it fired at him. He seized its head from behind with cold brutality and, in a single clean motion, drew the blade across its throat and severed the spinal cord. The lizard convulsed and was still.
He moved to the second, which had begun to whimper with an eerie, almost primal fear as it witnessed its companion's fate. Dex did not hesitate for a single second. The blade rose and fell. Silence reclaimed the forest.
The dagger fell from Dex's hand, stained with green and red blood alike. His legs could no longer carry him. He crumpled to his knees on the blood-smeared concrete he had conjured with his own hands.
Darkness began to creep across the edges of his vision. The pain of the broken ribs, the acid burn on his arm, and the deep wound from the claw all merged into the overwhelming agony of total Mana exhaustion. It felt as though red-hot needles were being driven into his brain, and his consciousness was guttering out like a candle in the wind.
"I... survived," Dex whispered with a bloodied, feeble smile.
He had faced three beasts capable of shredding an entire party of adventurers-and he was nothing more than a Rank E young man. He had proven that his mind was the most dangerous weapon.
He leaned his back against a nearby trunk beside the trap, and let his body go slack. He knew he had to move-had to extract the Mana Cores from the lizards before something came for the blood-scent-but his body had declared absolute and final mutiny. He closed his eyes and surrendered to the exhaustion, letting it drag him down into a dark, aching sleep, hoping the forest would grant him a few hours of peace before the smell of death drew the next visitor.
In that moment, as the forest's silence closed over him once more, Dex Williams had proven that his survival was no accident of fate. It was the unbreakable will of a soul forged in two separate hells-the hell of the prison, and the hell of Ekarthas.