from inside the direwolf. It twitched once, then immediately went limp.
Smoke and blood poured out from its eyes and mouth. Yes, I internally celebrated. I managed to keep the explosion inside it.
The shadows around the wolf’s body dissipated, revealing its true
form: a wolf with a furless white hide. It was also of note that its
hide was clean, like it had no scars aside from the stab wound earlier. No scars? They don’t have a regenerative ability, do they?
I wondered. It’s either that, or it meant that this Level 7
Shadowflesh Direwolf was still considered a baby in its habitat if it
had no meaningful scars from its “hunts.” I put that thought aside from
now as a panel appeared, confirming the kill for the direwolf.
[Elimination Quest complete!]
[The rewards will now be distributed to its slayer momentarily. Please wait…]
[The following rewards have been issued to Yuna.]
- (D-Tier Artifact) Magi-Silicon Sneakers
- (D-Tier Talisman) Stamina-Boosting Talisman
The red border of the stage shimmered away. Relief washed over me as I
let go of the wolf’s limp corpse, confirming that the battle was
finally over—and then, I collapsed onto my back. The moment the
adrenaline faded and its pain-dulling effect wore off, the extreme pain
in my right arm finally caught up to me.
I clutched it and looked down.
It was mangled. Deep jaw marks were dug into my flesh, with blood
seeping freely from them. My arm was dislocated in several places, with
parts of bone and muscle exposed to the air. Fuck…
I groaned, barely holding back the pain as limping footsteps approached
me, and that was Yuna who had now stopped beside me. She lightly kicked
my temple with the tip of her black sneakers.
“Ow,” I reacted blankly.
“You do realize you could’ve died at any moment during that fight.
And if you died, I’d be the next to go,” Yuna sighed. “Take this. We’re
even now.”
She pulled out her own Potion of Moderate Healing, squatted beside
me, and lightly slammed the glass potion against my forehead. I sat up
and took it from her hand, chugging it down.
I didn’t register the taste at first but unlike the cold lemonade-ish
flavor of the lesser potion, this one tasted like overly sweet
chocolate milk. As it flowed down my throat, the smaller wounds began
sealing themselves shut, bones grinding as they fixed and slid back into
place on their own.
But the residual pain was still present. I still couldn’t move it
properly. My other arm, though, had already fully healed. During the
fight, it had only taken—what? One or two minutes to heal? I sat up,
groaning as I felt like my entire body was in an aching pain. Yuna sat
beside me on the ground, wincing a bit as she extended her still-wounded
thigh on the pavement. The medical bandage did a good job keeping her
wound closed. Although she only moved a little bit, it looked like it
needed another replacement soon.
“You should’ve used that potion on yourself, Yuna.”
She looked at me with a disgusted face. “I’d puke if I had to see
that bloody arm of yours again. Besides, you’re not done helping me deal
with those fleshwolves, right?”
I nodded in realization. “Right… You haven’t cleared the wave yet.”
“Thankfully, I also got credit for killing the fleshwolf’s pack
leader, so I only need to kill twenty more monsters,” Then Yuna pivoted
to the topic to what happened earlier, ”Did you shove something else in
its mouth? I wasn’t expecting the explosion to be that violent. My
puppets weren’t even scratching its hide.”
I explained the Ammonium Nitrate Cube to her, then added my own
theory. “Its hide was likely absurdly tough. My longsword alone couldn’t
pierce it properly but my skills allowed me to pierce through it. I
wouldn’t have stood a chance if we let the fight go any further,
though.”
I pushed myself up the ground with both my arms, which I managed to
do so with both of them nearly completely healed. I walked up to the
dead direwolf, and I placed both my hands into its chest.
“What are you doing?” asked Yuna.
“The System said that its jaws are valuable. I might be able to make
use of it once we get out of this EVENT—Oh, it worked,” I answered as
the direwolf’s carcass lit up into small beams of light and disappeared,
now stored into my inventory as a new item called:
[(D-Tier Carcass) Dead Shadowflesh Direwolf]
[(Heavy) This item takes up five inventory spaces.]
It still fit into my inventory, thankfully, now putting my total number of filled spaces from 2 to 7.
“Now that you mention it,” she said slowly, “You wrestled that
direwolf with your bare hands and looked like you could’ve fought it
without your sword. Meanwhile, I was struggling to hold my against one
of those smaller ones…”
I nodded. “It’s probably the level and stat difference. I was level
5, and the wolf was level 7. I had a skill that grants me plus-two to
all of my stats and plus-five to my strength and constitution. The
latter is a skill that attracts monsters—”
Stolen story; please report.
I stopped. I remembered I still have Beast Attractor active. I shut
it off immediately. My eyes now scanned the surroundings as my
nervousness spiked.
“Oh! So that’s why I wasn’t getting attacked by the direwolf! Smart
move, Devon—” Yuna stood up too having noticed my sudden alertness. She
was oblivious to what felt like impending danger about to come for us.
“What is it?”
“After I killed the direwolf, the fleshwolves are gone.”
“So?” she replied casually. “Monsters outside the Elimination Stage
can’t hear anything inside it. And even if they could, skills from the
inside can’t influence the environment from the outside. I know that
much since I experienced it last wave.”
“Yeah, but…” I said, tension creeping into my voice. “I only turned it off just now.”
Yuna frowned. “Is that a problem…? We’re not being attacked.”
“That’s exactly what worries me,” I said quietly. “Because if they were nearby, why can’t I hear them?”
If I were to take the behavior of the goblins from last wave, it
meant that Pack Leaders always traveled with those they’re commanding.
The fleshwolves were no exception, as they also traveled in packs. The
Elimination Stage only instructed us to kill the direwolf. So if its
pack had been nearby, they should have shown themselves the moment the
red border vanished.
“Devon…” Yuna’s voice suddenly trembled. “W-what the hell is that?”
She was looking behind me, so I turned and followed her gaze.
Suddenly, at the far end of the street, a massive black silhouette
spanning two stories tall marched into view. Each step it took was
extremely quiet, highly unusual for a creature its size. I could make
out three individual heads moving independently, each one with baring
its jaws and faintly glowing eyes buried beneath layers of writhing
shadow. Its body resembled a wolf with three heads, but distorted and
overbuilt, as if several beasts had been forced together into a single
frame. A cerberus.
Every hair on my body stood on end. It was not looking at us. It was
not even walking in our direction. And yet, my legs refused to move.
[You are now in a combat encounter.]
Despite that notice, the monster did not turn its heads. It continued
forward, crushing debris beneath its feet, indifferent to our
existence. I scooped Yuna off the ground and into my shoulders without
warning, ignoring her startled yelp, and bolted toward the nearest
alleyway. I didn’t even know if this was the way to the bakery we stayed
on. My Goblin Longsword slipped from my grasp and clattered onto the
pavement behind us, but I did not slow down to retrieve it.
I ran without looking back, without listening, without caring about
anything except the narrowing space ahead of me. Even when the combat
encounter notification faded from my vision, I did not stop. I focused
entirely on what’s in front of me. After a few minutes of running, I
reached the end of the alleys as I exited on an open space. A plaza,
decorated with a non-working fountain and neatly trimmed hedges over the
grass. It was only the entrance leading to a building called the Azalos City Public Library, with its name embossed on the marbled archway above the circular revolving door.
This building’s architecture seemed more like a mix between a Roman
courthouse with massive marble pillars which seemed like it was only
built for decoration, yet beyond those pillars was a solid cemented wall
filled with four stories of windows symmetrically placed beside each
other.
What’s more peculiar was the place should’ve been crawling with
wolves,; but there wasn’t a single one of them on sight. It was likely
because of the boss monster being nearby.
As I pushed the revolving door open, I carried Yuna inside, deep into
the aisles of books to hide us from the absent threat we were still
running from. As I set the silver-haired girl down the carpeted
flooring, Yuna’s puppets gathered around her. They must have latched
onto her while we were running.
“What the hell was that…?” Yuna said with an unsteady voice.
I bent over slightly, hands on my knees as I tried to catch my
breath. The info panel for the monster was still lingering at the edge
of my vision. “I’ll read it for you,” so I told her.
[Shadowflesh Cerberus]
[LVL. 20]
[The Shadowflesh Cerberus—most
commonly referred to simply as Cerberus—is the apex predator of the
continent of Raven Noth. Abandoned at birth, it is thrown into survival
the moment it opens its eyes. They hear everything, eat everything, and
most dangerous of all… its extremely keen eyes amplify not only its
vision, but all of its other senses. This makes its eyes a commodity for
magical artifacts. Unlike the other fleshwolves, they act alone. They
treat everything as their prey, including their own kind. If you see it
and it ignores you, consider yourself fucked—because it would only take a
moment before one of its heads emerges from the shadows beneath you.
But why is its lesser counterpart’s magi-calcite jaws more valuable than
Cerberus’ sense-amplifying eyeballs? That’s because of its one
weakness—]
“So at that moment, if you didn’t run off with me when it passed by the street…”
“Yeah,” I gulped. “We would’ve died then.”
That morbid realization made me lean against the bookshelf, refusing
to sit down as I didn’t want relief to take hold of me. I told Yuna, “I
still think you should’ve took that potion for yourself. Your leg’s a
liability.”
“Oh shut up,” Yuna retorted. She was tending her thigh wound again by
tightening the bandage even more. “I’m not a fast runner. I still
would’ve made you carry me at that moment.”
With all of my skills in cooldown, I cannot afford to make another
mistake or get into another fight. I still resolved to help Yuna get her
kills, so I told her, “Let me know once you’re done there. I’ll try to
see what we can do next.”
The easiest case scenario would be if there were direwolves outside
of the building. We can try attracting them one by one and fighting them
as per our original plan, but without the safety of the alleys, we’d
have to find another way to fight them. I already lost my Goblin
Longsword when we escaped from the Cerberus earlier, so Yuna would be
left defenseless again. I’d have to use this building to my advantage…
somehow.
As my eyes scanned around the library, I looked above—illuminating
the vacant seats and tables was a grand, golden chandelier with smaller
ones chandeliers beside it. It seemed too grand, too overkill for a
public library, but I stared it… for a bit too long, it seems. The
lights were already searing into my eyes, but I couldn’t look away. Not
when a hypothetical was forming in my mind at this very moment. What if, I thought. What if we didn’t need to hunt any more fleshwolves?
But I was broken out of my stupor when one of Yuna’s puppets squeaked
below me. It was pulling on the sleeve of my pants, gesturing to
follow. It then started running to the direction I came from, so I
eventually followed it. I found Yuna on the far end of aisle standing by
herself. She was still using the bookshelves as support. As we locked
eyes, she handed me the multi-shifting blade that I had lent her. She
put a finger on her mouth, gesturing me to keep quiet.
“Don’t make too much noise,” she said in a whisper. “We’re not alone here.”