Arthur didn’t so much as hit the Corrupted Deepstone Ape as blow straight through it. The hill-sized monster simply ceased to exist, flesh, bone and muscle instantly vaporising. Getting hit with over thirty billion joules of energy would do that to you.

  Arthur’s body hit the ground with the force of a small meteor, creating a localised earthquake that would be felt for dozens of miles. The thousands of monsters that had been preparing to attack him died almost instantly as the released energy washed over them. Bastion's wards flashed red as the remnants of the blast reached them, almost overwhelming even after crossing through thousands of corrupted bodies.

  Arthur groaned as he sat up, or at least tried to. It felt like he’d broken every bone in his body, which, upon closer inspection, didn’t seem to be far from the truth. The first thing he did was run some healing ether through his eyes. They’d been vaporised on impact, along with much of the flesh covering his skull. Opening his eyes, Arthur inspected the destruction around him, ignoring the surging energy running through his body.

  He lay at the bottom of a massive crater, a quarter of a kilometre deep and over two wide, running right up to the city's wards. The deepstone rock beneath him had developed an almost glassy texture, and he could see streams of lava running in certain places where deepstone had melted. Only the monsters at the very edge of the crater had survived with their bodies relatively intact, though they were still very much dead.

  This was far more than he'd expected, more than the physics of his attack dictated. How had his impact generated so much force. Did his enhanced skeleton have anything to do with it. Had his flesh vaporising generated all this extra energy?

  Arthur's body hadn’t fared too well either. His legs, arms and a part of his ribcage were broken, the damage visible in places where his meat had been completely removed. The only parts of him that were fine were his skull and spine. The runes didn’t disappoint, at least when it came to durability. Nonetheless, Arthur wasn’t sure he’d be trying this again, at least not until he’d become more durable.

  How would he have fared if he’d timed things perfectly and hit the monster while at his full weight? Yeah, I’ll be doing that at half speed from now on. He wasn’t like Wovan, who could just sacrifice a body if she messed things up. Arthur finally pulled up the System notifications clamouring for his attention. He’d just gone and killed thousands of monsters. Even if they weren't as strong as what he was used to facing, they were still far higher levelled than he was. That translated to a lot of experience.

  A seven-level jump from a single attack; it was the most lucrative yield he’d received in Haadran so far. How many monsters had he just killed? Five thousand? Or was it closer to ten? Arthur was a little surprised he hadn’t received a title for that, or for his new skeleton and unlocking Nether, for that matter. It seemed that his soul had simply become too strong for the necessary scarring that led to titles. Who knew having such a durable soul could be a double-edged sword?

  Arthur placed 500 stats into Willpower. It had been lagging behind for a while now, especially with the quantities of ether Arthur was throwing around these days.

  The sudden increase was like ice running through his veins, and his head felt clearer, like it had been cleared of pain he hadn’t even been aware of until now. He doubled down with the remaining 144 free points and placed them all into Draconic vitality.

  Arthur shuddered as he felt the enhancement pass over him, surprising considering how little the attribute had grown relative to its already substantial size. A second later, the System answered his question.

  Arthur read through the System message as he ran some numbers through his head. He’d heard a little about stat limits before in passing, but it was nice to get some visual confirmation of it. Arthur had been far from a ‘standard’ human, but he wondered what his limits would have been had he not become The Perfect Homunculus. An argument could be made that species with lower stat limits had greater opportunity to hit their peaks and evolve their stats more often, but lower limits tended to come with reduced stat-per-level growth.

  Whatever the case, he had an ongoing siege to get back to. He did wonder what his limits for his other stats would be, though. For that matter, how did he compare to dragons and apocalypse beasts, the pinnacle of beast kind?

  Should he never invest his free points into Draconic Vitality again, he’d still hit his supposed limit within 60 levels, which was a little terrifying to think about. For others, that was. Not him. Next, Arthur checked his skeleton's charge and wasn't surprised to find that it was full. If his last attack hadn’t done it, then nothing would.

  The energy rested within his skeleton, similar to ether but also very different. It was far too rigid, with little to no flexibility to it. Where ether's uses were near infinite, Arthur only had three options here: destroy, heal, or do both at the same time. Arthur chose the second option, focusing the charge on his broken body.

  How would it measure up to ether?

  Arthur marvelled as he was engulfed in green flames. They weren't hot to touch, or even warm, but they did feel pleasant, similar to a deep tissue massage. It was very different to his healing skills. The energy didn’t respond to any direction; it just focused on the life-threatening injuries first and then worked backwards from there. It was both a welcome change and a limiting one; it had none of the nuance or adaptability of healing ether but required no mental input either. He’d best describe it as a passive skill, one that could be turned on and off depending on his skeleton's battery percentage.

  Arthur had to reluctantly admit that the quality of healing the flames provider was on par, if not greater than his own, which said a lot considering he had a legendary skill. Dragons, even when they were babies, weren't slouches. Once he was fully recovered, he checked his final criterion: its cost. 321,057 points of health had used up a little over 70,000 skeleton charges to heal. Not the greatest efficiency, but not so terrible to be unusable either.

  The greatest test still remained, though. Arthur used his health to generate some water and cool the ground, and then healed the damage with his new flames. He was overwhelmed by a wave of giddiness that threatened to leave him laughing like a maniacal fool.

  Arthur had just broken his class.

  The health recovered through his green flames was different to magical healing and the kind brought about by potions and elixirs. According to his soul—the only metric that mattered—it counted as his body's natural health recovery, even as absurdly accelerated as it was. This changed everything. So long as he could keep his skeleton charged while in combat, he had access to an infinite pool of magic. If Shylo were spying on him right now, he probably thought he was crazy with how maniacal his grin was.

  Arthur looked up to see the monsters gathering at the eastern side of his crater. Just because he’d wiped out so many in a single attack, it didn’t mean the siege was over. Perhaps the corrupted Avatar thought he was on his last legs, weakened from his last attack. Arthur wouldn’t complain. He needed all the experience he could get.

  ~~~

  Maverick sat on the city walls, nursing a cup of warmed brandy in his calloused hands. This was the good stuff, aged in the city's cellars for over half a millennium, capable of getting him tipsy even through his remarkable constitution. He’d been sitting here for a while now, through the night and into the next day. Over twenty hours.

  That was how long Arthur Ward had been fighting.

  Maverick shuddered as he recalled the Originator's first attack. One moment, he’d been hovering in the sky, his domineering domain extended for all to see. The next, everything had been destroyed. He hadn’t seen the attack that did it—no one had—but the city wards that had almost failed to tell him exactly how likely his survival would have been had he not been behind them. When the dust had settled, it had revealed the Originator standing there, glowing a faint shade of green.

  The battle that had followed had been enlightening, if it could even be called a battle. Arthur had begun by setting everything before him alight with fire, the magic Ikiros had granted him, he’d learned. From there, he’d adapted incredibly quickly, eventually learning to shoot concentrated beams of it from every part of his body, even his eyes and mouth.

  The man fought like a masochist, throwing himself into attacks he could have easily dodged, though in his defence, nothing thrown at him ever made him bleed. His mastery over magic was amateurish, but deadly. Poisonous blasts that destroyed the strongest foes, shadowy tentacles that stalked the battlefield, clawing and exploding beneath his enemies, and water that fell like rain, only it granted death instead of life.

  The most terrifying thing, however, was not his magic or his durability. It was just how... unrelenting Arthur Ward was. He simply did not falter. Maverick had long lost track of how much ether the Originator had spent, but it had crossed ten million a few hours ago. Arthur's realm feared Wovan, feared the monster that could end everything. They dismissed Arthur as weak, the spider's reverse scale.

  Maverick took a long swig of his brandy, relishing in the burning path it took to his stomach. They were fools, just as he had been.

  They fear the monster, but are blind to the devil who created it.

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  Etherious: Originator

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