Chapter 421 The Shark Beast Enters

Nick hailed from a remote village in the northeastern mountains of the Upstream Coast Province.

His family was relatively well-off by the village's standards. His father was a carpenter who took on enough work to feed their large household.

This meant Nick didn't have to squander his golden childhood years on endless farm chores like the other kids his age.

On the hottest summer afternoons, he often retreated to the mountain behind the village to escape the heat. The dense canopy provided ample shade, making it much cooler than the outside. Villagers frequently went there to log and gather firewood, so it was relatively safe.

More often than not, he would lean against a trunk, lie deep in the shade, and listen to the rustling branches overhead. With his eyes half-closed, an entire afternoon would drift by.

Of course, a young boy's energy was like the stray dogs roaming the village—boundless. Over a few years, he explored nearly every corner of that mountain.

Near the summit lay a small pool of water, emerald and clear, reflecting the canopy above.

No one knew where they came from, but a few fish lived in that pool. They weren't large, about the length of a palm, yet they stood out vividly in the crystal-clear water.

Much like the naive, blank-slate boy who had grown up deep in the mountains, these fish raised in the secluded pool had never experienced the outside world. They were completely defenseless against even the slightest temptation.

Even when Nick used a crude fishing pole fashioned from a fallen branch, frayed rope, and a thorn, baited with an earthworm dug up on a whim, the fish showed no wariness, taking the hook time and time again.

Truthfully, those little fish didn't taste very good. Their meat was riddled with tiny bones. After eating them twice, Nick stopped taking his catches home and simply released them back into the pool.

Perhaps this was why, years later, he managed to stand out among countless bottom-tier adventurers, successfully acquiring a Class Level and becoming a veteran.

—Nick didn't quickly lose interest in fishing just because the results came too easily, unlike other children.

His attention shifted deeper.

He began observing the fish's exact movements when they took the bait.

Attracted by the faint vibrations of a struggling earthworm, a fish would gently flick its tail fin and quietly approach. Its upper lip would brush the bait in a probing touch, confirming its nature as "harmless food."

Then, it would retreat, leaving enough room for a sprint.

And then...

"Swish!"

To this day, Nick still remembered how that palm-sized fish acted when it lunged for the kill.

The muscles of its cheeks, jaw, and throat contracted in unison with astonishing speed. Like a compressed spring, they suddenly snapped open as the fish surged forward, creating an expanding cavity.

The earthworm and the hook were violently sucked into its mouth. Its upper and lower jaws snapped shut, and its gill covers flared to filter out the water.

Nick found the process fascinating, never feeling anything beyond that.

After all, he was the one holding the fishing pole.

To continue or to leave, the initiative was entirely in his hands.

Even if his younger self had jumped straight into the pool, those tiny fish couldn't have posed any threat to him...

Until now.

When the violent gale whipped his cheeks with stinging pain, and a blinding crimson reflected in his pupils.

When the hunter truly became the hunted, and the angler holding the pole became the bait dangling on the hook.

A sense of extreme danger surged from the depths of his heart, and the shrill voice of death echoed in his mind.

Only then did Nick finally understand the rules by which this world operated.

The haughty half-elf with her beautiful, delicate features stood just across from him.

Blessed by her Elven bloodline, she was inherently tall and slender. Years of adventuring had added a subtle curvature to her physique beneath her tight clothing, brimming with the beautiful contours of strength.

Her slender, leaf-like eyebrows—meticulously trimmed in the ancient Elven tradition—were knit together. Her delicate nostrils flared slightly with the rapid breaths of intense emotion. Her thin lips were parted, faintly revealing strings of saliva between her pristine teeth, as her stubborn, crisp voice still lingered on her lips.

But in this seemingly frozen space and time, standing in jarring contrast to her was a grayish-blue blur locked in the air, trailed by countless shattered water droplets.

It was a grotesque, bloodthirsty maw that sent a chill down the spine just looking at it.

Five rows of serrated, ghastly teeth resembled a vibrantly blooming, bone-white flower. An indescribably foul stench spewed out with the airflow from its throat, revealing the dark red, squirming flesh deep within.

"Chhh... crack!"

It was a heavy, wet thud mixed from a myriad of sounds.

The shriek of metal buckling under brute force intertwined with the sickening squelch of violently crushed bones, organs, and muscle—the sound of something plump and juicy instantly bursting under immense pressure.

The upper and lower jaws of that massive maw clamped perfectly around the half-elf's waist.

She didn't scream. Her delicate face didn't even have time to register a look of agony.

Everything happened so fast that it seemed even the pain had been severed.

Leda's upper half still maintained her argumentative stance from a second prior, her right hand clutching a wooden arrow she had just pulled from a corpse.

But from the waist down, her long legs clad in deerskin boots, her carefully color-coordinated kneepads, and her skirt armor engraved with traditional Elven patterns were completely gone.

All that remained was a ragged stump, as if she had been savagely gnawed in half by a wild beast.

"Splat."

Stripped of their fleshy containment, crimson blood and viscera splattered onto the ground under the pull of gravity.

It wasn't until the half-elf's torso hit the earth that Leda's agonizing, despairing scream finally exploded in Nick's ears.

Perhaps due to the violent gust rushing his face, or perhaps due to some psychological reflex.

The middle-aged man with years of adventuring under his belt subconsciously took two steps back, his leather boots splattered with blood.

With a stiff neck, he turned his head and looked at the massive, grotesque figure looming just a short distance away.

Nick had never seen a monster like this before.

Standing nearly nine feet tall, it leaned slightly forward with a low, stable center of gravity. It possessed a streamlined build rarely seen in land creatures. Its shoulders were extraordinarily broad, rapidly tapering down from the chest to form a comically exaggerated inverted-triangle torso.

It looked like some forbidden offspring born from the union of a human and a "hunter shark" from the ocean depths.

A towering dorsal fin jutted from its thick, powerful nape and ran down its spine. Small lateral fins sprouted from its shoulder blades, designed to aid steering in the water. Its entire body was covered in rough, sandpaper-like grayish-blue skin, faintly displaying dark spots and stripes.

The muscles beneath the skin of its arms bulged visibly, each arm thicker than an average adult man's torso. Its hands ended in four black claws connected by thick, leathery webbing. Its lower limbs were somewhat slimmer, better suited for underwater hunting, while its tailbone extended slightly into a crescent-shaped tail fin, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.

Naturally, the most striking feature on this monster was its massive, hideous shark head, completely disproportionate to its body.

Its snout formed a sharp inverted triangle, thick and broad. Serrated teeth lined its mouth in rows. Its fish eyes were pitch-black and lifeless, while the gill slits behind its cheeks flared and clamped shut, spewing a bloody mist.

Leda's lower half was currently inside the Shark Beast's mouth.

Her two calves, still wearing leather boots, dangled outside. But with a slight tilt of its head to swallow, accompanied by a chilling, teeth-aching crunch, it devoured all of the half-elf's flesh and blood.

Squirting blood cascaded down from the corners of its mouth like drool.

Nick stood rooted to the spot, his mind completely blank. The half-dead half-elf was still screaming.

At this moment, his thoughts weren't filled with despair over the total annihilation of the Silver Claw Osprey Squad he had spent years painstakingly building, nor did he feel sorrow over the tragic death of yet another teammate.

The sudden shock, the shadow of death, and the monster's brutal aura left him paralyzed in a state of shock, much like the fragile enemies affected by [Night Mother's Gaze].

Fortunately, years of honed muscle memory allowed Nick to subconsciously raise his dual swords and cross them in front of his chest before his brain could even process it. An automatically triggering combat technique made the blades erupt with a solid metallic luster the moment they crossed, significantly boosting his defense.

This saved Nick from being killed on the spot by the Shark Beast's subsequent ram. Instead, he was blasted away like a broken ragdoll, crashing violently into the rock wall.

Howl—

A wolf's howl had rung out the instant the Shark Beast appeared.

Spanning the distance in a flash, the grayish-black Wolf Fang, cloaked in a crimson-brown glow, carved a perfect arc through the air, cleaving toward the back of the monster's neck.

The highly compressed, rune-like forcefield energy contracted and expanded, on the verge of erupting to its limit. The monster seemed to vaguely sense the danger from behind. Driven by its beastly instincts, it forcefully twisted its body, causing the crimson-brown sword glare—which should have struck the fatal spot on its nape—to land on its left shoulder instead.

"Boom!"

Clearly lacking any special resistance to forcefield energy, the rough, grayish-blue shark skin was blasted apart, exposing a mangled, bloody wound beneath.

The massive body swayed slightly but passed the "imbalance" check from [Heavy Tide].

Howl—

Missing the vital strike, the wolf's howl echoed through the air once more.

By the time the Shark Beast whipped its thick, steel-crushing arm around its back, the agile, abyssal black wolf had already leapt away to the other side of the cave.

His leather boots hit the ground, squeezing blood from the minced flesh beneath the soles.

He glanced from the corner of his eye toward where Nick had been sent flying. Seeing movement there, he paid it no more mind.

Staring intently at the giant, deformed monster ahead, Xia Nan showed no extra emotion on his face, though his heart grew increasingly cautious.

Right now, mere seconds had passed since the Shark Beast leapt from the pool. Of the four adventurers present, one was already dead and another injured.

And he had already completed his first round of probing.

His mind raced, gathering all the information on the battlefield.

Xia Nan had never seen this bizarre, human-shark hybrid monster in any bestiary. Although he had some vague guesses about its origins—thanks to the sahuagins' sacrificial behavior and the altar deep in the cave—now was clearly not the time to delve into it.

With one exchange, he had formed a rough estimate of the beast's actual combat prowess.

First, it possessed a certain level of intelligence, and its stealth capabilities were exceptional.

Even with the water as a barrier, evading Xia Nan's Perception was no easy feat.

It was only the surging bloodlust erupting the instant it attacked that exposed its presence.

This proved its underwater stealth abilities.

It had kept itself hidden the entire time, waiting until their battle with the sahuagins was completely over and the two members of the Silver Claw Osprey Squad had let down their guard before launching a sudden ambush.

The patience demonstrated throughout this entire process was something an ordinary beast could never possess.

Xia Nan even suspected that while they had been fighting the sahuagins, this creature was already hiding in the water, observing them in secret to find the right prey and the most vulnerable opening.

Second, the monster's physical attributes were incredibly formidable.

It may have had the advantage of a stealthy ambush, but the half-elf Leda's class was [Ranger]. Her physical attributes leaned heavily toward "Agility", making reaction speed her forte.

Yet, just a few seconds ago, her lower half had been bitten clean off before she could even make an evasive move.

This displayed a sudden explosive speed that far exceeded that of standard monsters.

Finally, when he swung his sword just now, Xia Nan had observed very closely.

The "true damage"-like special effect of [Gravity Etching]'s forcefield energy was still present, but the crimson-brown energy blooming like fireworks had been slightly delayed when tearing through its skin.

He naturally knew what that meant.

It meant that the creature's grayish-blue shark skin boasted considerable defense and resilience.

A regular slash without the damage bonus of a combat technique would likely fail to deal any effective harm.

Currently, his [Gravity Etching]—which had been leveled up to max, granting him more uses—had three charges left.

Xia Nan needed to seize his opportunities carefully. He couldn't afford to pre-apply the forcefield energy to his blade and release it with a [Spinning Slash] just to maximize lethality, as he had done earlier.

He was better off sacrificing a bit of damage output to use it only when he was certain he could strike a vital spot. Otherwise, if the creature dodged, he would easily waste a chance.

'The Challenge Rating of this monster has probably surpassed the Level 3 of an Owlbear, reaching around Level 4 like an Armored Lurker.'

'I need to be careful!'

Even with many trump cards yet to be revealed, Xia Nan maintained the highest level of vigilance against this unknown foe.

Thrum—

While he was pondering, a familiar Lute strum quietly echoed through the cave.

Standing some distance away, the Halfling Alton looked focused. With his eyes half-closed, his fingertips danced rapidly across the strings of the Lute cradled in his arms.

Unlike his usual hyperactive self, the little guy was always reliable in combat and never dropped the ball.

Faced with the sudden shift on the battlefield, he showed no panic and reacted swiftly.

Aware that a powerful enemy had entered the fray, Alton was playing a distinctly more difficult tune than in their previous battles, one that demanded absolute concentration.

Accordingly, the melody was exceptionally rousing and loud.

The invisible notes seemed to solidify in the air, seeping through their pores and into their skin.

"Hum!"

Xia Nan felt an inexplicable heat suddenly surge within him, washing through his entire body as a feeling of boundless strength erupted.

His will to fight flared wildly!