Chapter 56: At The Edge Of Greater

The five peak Lesser-ranked monsters had separated under pressure, exactly as Adesewa intended. Marcus and Cassian dragged two toward the northern bank while Safiya, Odhran and Bastian each intercepted one of the remaining three before they could reach the pool. These were not ordinary Lessers.

Every creature carried Mana dense enough to make the air around its body tremble, their flesh already pressing against the boundary of the next rank. One Palladium Fruit could push any of them across it.

That hunger made them vicious, but it also made them predictable. None wanted to retreat. Behind every human standing in their path was the island, the silver tree, and ascension.

Safiya met hers beside a line of shattered stones. The creature resembled a hairless panther stretched to monstrous proportions, nearly four meters from muzzle to tail, with six narrow eyes arranged across a wedge-shaped skull.

Bone hooks curved backward from its elbows, and every breath leaked pale vapor between serrated teeth. Safiya pulled both spears from her back and rolled her wrists.

Along the dark skin of her shoulders and upper arms, a tattoo awakened: dozens of tiny red markings arranged like the footprints of hunting dogs around a larger circular symbol.

Her Divine Rune was the Hounds of Ngalam, an A-Rank Rune inherited from an old Sahelian hunting legend. It did not summon animals.

Instead, every clean wound Safiya inflicted left a temporary Hunt Mark that sharpened her awareness of that target’s position and allowed later strikes to tug subtly toward existing marks. The effect was small. Against something this fast, small was enough.

The panther vanished.

Safiya twisted before her eyes caught up.

CLANG!

A bone hook struck one spear shaft and threw sparks across her face. She yielded instead of resisting, spun with the impact and dragged her second spearhead across the monster’s flank. A red paw-shaped mark flashed beneath the blood.

The creature landed behind her and attacked again. Safiya ducked beneath its jaws, but a forepaw clipped her shoulder and hurled her across the stones.

CRACK!

She rolled twice, planted a spear into the earth and stopped herself. The panther came immediately. Safiya threw her left spear deliberately wide.

The weapon curved.

Not dramatically. Barely half a meter.

That was enough.

The spear corrected toward the Hunt Mark and buried itself into the creature’s flank. Its stride broke. Safiya rushed through the opening, retrieved neither weapon, and drew a narrow knife from her belt.

The panther swiped. She slipped inside the limb, cut beneath its foreleg and created a second mark. Now she could feel both wounds like hot points in the back of her mind.

The next exchange lasted seconds.

Claw. Dodge. Knife.

Bite. Pivot. Blood.

A third Hunt Mark appeared along its neck.

Safiya ripped her embedded spear free, backed away and hurled it with everything she had. The panther twisted its head to evade.

Three marks pulled at the spear’s path.

SHRAK!

The point entered beneath the jaw and burst through the top of its skull. Momentum carried the monster forward until it crashed at Safiya’s feet, carving a bloody trench through the grass. She stood breathing hard, shoulder bleeding, then kicked the corpse away from her boot.

Thirty meters east, Odhran Keary had no room for celebration.

His opponent was airborne.

The monster looked like a grotesque union of bat and stag, its skeletal wings spanning nearly twelve meters while branching antlers grew forward from a narrow black skull. Its hind legs ended in hooked talons, and patches of dark membrane between its ribs inflated whenever it screamed.

SKREEEEE!

The sound shook leaves from nearby branches.

Odhran raised his recurve bow and fired.

The creature folded one wing. The arrow missed by centimeters.

Odhran’s Divine Rune stretched from the fingers of his right hand to his shoulder: a black tattoo depicting seven ravens flying along a broken spiral.

The Seven Carrion Paths was not a Rune that made arrows stronger. Each consecutive shot Odhran fired at the same target could preserve one fragment of the previous arrow’s flight path. He could then force a later arrow to repeat part of that path before diverging toward a new trajectory.

Useful.

Complicated.

And useless if he couldn’t create the paths first.

The monster dived.

Odhran fired left.

Miss.

He stepped sideways and fired high.

Miss.

A talon swept toward his head. Odhran dropped flat.

WHOOOM!

The claw passed close enough to cut several strands of hair. He rolled, came onto one knee and fired backward without fully turning.

The third arrow missed beneath the creature’s wing.

Three paths.

The monster climbed sharply, wheeled around and opened its jaws. Mana gathered between its teeth.

Odhran moved before the attack came.

BOOM!

A compressed blast tore apart the ground where he had knelt. Dirt hammered his back. He stumbled behind a broken trunk, drew another arrow and watched the monster circle for its second dive.

"Come on," Odhran muttered, blood running from one nostril. "You’ve seen me miss enough."

The beast descended.

Odhran fired toward empty space on its left.

The arrow followed his first preserved path, traveling left exactly as before.

Then it changed.

It climbed along the second path.

The monster adjusted, confused by an arrow apparently missing twice.

The shaft dropped into the third preserved line beneath its wing, then Odhran released the path.

Its final trajectory was new.

THUNK!

The arrow entered the thin membrane beneath the monster’s ribs.

It screamed and lost altitude. Odhran was already drawing again. His next arrow followed the opening portion of the same constructed route, bypassed the creature’s antlers and punched through its eye.

The winged monster crashed through two trees.

CRAAASH!

Branches exploded across the ground. Odhran lowered his bow only after the body stopped moving.

Bastian’s battle was louder.

BOOM!

His tower shield slammed backward into his chest as a hulking reptilian monster struck it again. The creature stood on four pillar-like legs, its body protected by interlocking ivory plates, while a flattened tail covered in jagged knobs swung behind it like a siege weapon. Its head had no visible eyes. Instead, rows of vibrating pits ran along its jaw, sensing movement through sound and ground vibration.

Bastian skidded through mud.

The monster charged.

His Rune ignited across his back.

The tattoo depicted a massive tortoise shell divided into thirteen uneven plates, each containing a different angular symbol. It was called Thirteen Burdens, an A-Rank Divine Rune with a brutally simple limitation: Bastian could store a fraction of physical force absorbed through his shield inside one plate of the Rune.

Each plate held only one impact, and storing too much damaged his own body. He could release stored force through his next shield strike.

Three plates were glowing.

The monster’s head smashed forward.

BANG!

Four.

Bastian coughed blood.

"Again, ugly."

It obliged.

BOOOOM!

Five plates ignited, and pain shot through his shoulder. Bastian’s boots sank into fractured earth. He could have continued storing impacts, but surviving thirteen against this thing would be stupidity, not courage.

The tail came next.

Bastian saw the huge appendage swing and dropped his shield edge into the ground.

CRAAACK!

The impact bent him sideways. A sixth plate burned to life. His left arm went numb from fingertips to shoulder.

Enough.

The monster charged to finish him.

Bastian ran toward it.

At the last moment he shifted aside, letting its armored skull scrape across the face of his shield, then planted both feet beside its foreleg. Six glowing plates across his back went dark simultaneously.

He drove the shield upward.

BOOOOOOM!

Stored force erupted.

The ivory plates beneath the monster’s jaw shattered. Its front half lifted completely from the ground, exposing the unarmored seam running down its throat. Bastian dropped the shield, ripped the mace from his belt and swung with both hands.

CRUNCH!

The mace sank into the broken seam.

The monster collapsed so violently that earth jumped around its body.

For several seconds Bastian remained beside it, one arm hanging uselessly while blood dripped from his mouth. Then he retrieved his shield and looked across the northern battlefield.

Safiya was pulling her spear from the dead six-eyed panther. Odhran stood beside the wreckage left by the winged beast, bow still raised in case it moved again.

Three peak Lesser Monsters.

Three corpses.

Safiya caught Bastian’s eye and lifted her bloodied spear. Odhran answered by raising his bow. Bastian simply struck the rim of his tower shield once with his mace.

CLANG!

They had done their part.

But two peak Lessers remained.

Neither Safiya nor Odhran moved to assist him immediately. That had been part of Adesewa’s orders. Winning their battles did not mean abandoning formation. They checked the field first, confirming no Lesser Monster was slipping toward the pool while their attention shifted north.

Farther north, another explosion rolled across the valley, followed by the roar of something enormous.

Cassian and Marcus were still fighting.