Chapter 111: Just What the Fuck is Going on?

Dion gasped for air as his lungs acted on raw, helpless survival instinct.

The world spun in his vision and he wheezed, unable to stop himself for pulling for skuk spray ladend air, and he coughed harshly at the same time.

The toxic mist went deep down into his lungs, burning every inch of his throat on the way down.

Dion rolled sideways across the wet asphalt before his brain could even process the command to move.

The massive paw slammed into the tarmac right where his chest had been a fraction of a second prior, shattering the road into a mess of loose stone.

He scrambled up onto one knee, the blood-forged longsword trembling slightly in his hands.

It was in that rise that he felt the coldness start to take hold, a sharp, icy thread spreading outward from his lungs and into his shoulders.

It crawled through his body along the pathways of his own veins.

'No, no, no...'

His fingers were already beginning to stiffen around the leather-wrapped grip.

The skunk turned over the wreckage of the sedan it had crushed, the blood-pikes still protruding from its flank scraping with a harsh, grating noise against the bent metal.

Dion forced his stiffening legs to push him out of the way.

The dodge that should have cleared the beast entirely barely carried him far enough.

The thick edge of its shoulder clipped him hard, sending him spinning sideways into the battered frame of a parked delivery van.

He only stayed on his feet because the side panel of the van caught his body and took the force of the blow.

'This damned thing's paralytic... is way too strong.'

His mutated body, because it was not human, was resisting the chemical toxin in a way theirs couldn't, the vampiric Sangour within him feeling like it was churning to keep up with its effect., but it was losing ground fast.

He could tell, because of his connection to his blood, that it wasn't going to be able to hold up if he didn't do something soon.

His left knee buckled out from under him on his next attempt to step back.

On the swipe after that, he couldn't dodge at all.

The beast's spiky tail raked across his back, the finger-thick quills dragging open jagged, hot lines across his flesh because his legs had barely moved a half-second too late.

A sharp grunt tore through his teeth as the impact nearly threw him onto his face.

The rain continued to fall over the slick intersection, where seven paralyzed people lay frozen in the water, watching him lose.

Dion slammed his left shoulder flat against the dented side of the van and let his blade arm drop.

In the brief two seconds the massive animal took to turn its bulk around on the narrow road, he stopped trying to fight the cold creeping through his limbs and focused directly on it.

'It's in my blood!' He realised.

It was being carried through his entire body by his own pulse, pumped outward by the very heart trying to keep him alive.

'If its like that then... maybe...'

His blood had answered him from the moment he first pulled it off the pavement and shaped it into steel.

He had only ever commanded to move as violently as he was thinking about doing it now once it was outside his skin, but he couldn't afford being careful here.

There was no time to hesitate or doubt if it would work, so he didn't waste a single moment wondering.

Dion turned his focus inward, flooding his mana through his internal circulatory system.

The sensation was instantly, violently unnatural.

From the inside out, every vein and capillary was ringing and straining at once, and threaded throughout all of it, the icy chemical poison felt like coarse grit in clean water.

He reached out with his mana and gathered it all together.

The skunk lunged toward the van, its heavy paws hammering the asphalt.

Dion threw himself along the rusted side panels on legs that barely held his weight.

The van's metal doors caved inward with a violent groan right where he had been standing.

He was spending the absolute last reserves of strength his body possessed before it was fully paralyzed, and all the while, beneath the fear and the stinging pain, he was dragging every single thread of that chemical grit through his own veins.

He routed it down his arms, straight into his palms, pushing it toward the cuts his longsword had kept fresh.

'GET THE FUCK OUT!'

The cuts across his palms split wider under the sudden internal pressure.

The blood that burst from his hands was practically black.

It spurted from his open palms in thick, heavy ropes, dark with the concentrated chemical toxin it carried out of his body.

The relief that followed was so immediate and overwhelming that his throat opened in a ragged gasp.

Strength surged back into his thighs and calves mid-stride.

The stiff numbness in his fingers burned away completely, and his palm clamped down over the sword's leather grip with full feeling.

The skunk wheeled around on the slick asphalt, its spiky tail rising high over its back once more.

Dion didn't bother running from the impending spray this time.

He threw both hands wide, and every single drop of blood he had shed across the street answered his command at once.

His blood was everywhere.

It was smeared along the side of the delivery van, pooled in the shallow depressions where he had knelt, washed thin across seven paces of rain-slicked road, and dripping from the dark ropes still wet near his boots.

All of it lifted off the wet ground together, streams rising into the air around the creature on every side.

The skunk's tail came down, launching another dense fan of blinding white mist into the air.

Dion drove the entire floating mass of gathered blood straight through the center of the cloud like a heavy wall, tearing the white fog apart before it could reach his face.

Then the thick wall of blood split into a barrage of crude pikes mid-flight.

They hardened in the exact same moment they flew, a dozen thick, jagged spikes of crimson iron shooting through the rain.

He directed every single one of them directly into the open wounds already torn into its flesh.

The two blood shafts already buried in its flank were hit dead-on, driven inches deeper into its body like nails being struck by a hammer.

The gaping gash behind its jaw where the longsword had torn loose took three pikes in rapid succession, each one hammering into the raw tissue right behind the last.

The beast let out a shrill, gurgling scream and reared up onto its hind legs to its full height, rain streaming off its quills.

Dion was already sprinting directly beneath its lifted belly.

His legs were completely his own again, and that single difference changed everything.

He lunged up into the narrow space between its front legs, driving the blood-forged longsword straight into the gaping neck wound his pikes had widened.

There was no nonsense keeping him from killing the damned thing this time

He drove the steel all the way to the hilt with both hands, putting his full shoulder weight behind the thrust.

He felt the point punch through dense cartilage and sever the major artery behind the jaw, cutting the creature's scream off at the root.

The skunk's massive bulk swayed above him in the dark, three meters of bone and muscle teetering in mid-air.

For one brief second, Dion stood beneath the looming shadow with his hands clamped tight around the hilt, feeling the life drain out through the blade like heat leaving water.

Then the beast toppled forward.

Dion yanked his sword free with a wet jerk and threw himself sideways across the pavement.

The massive corpse slammed onto the asphalt with a heavy impact that reverberated off the surrounding buildings before dying away in the falling rain.

The beast did not move again.

Dion stood over the giant carcass, utterly drained, his spilled blood settling into the rainwater around his boots.

The intersection fell completely silent, save for the steady, relentless patter of the rain.

{You have felled a Level 31 Destitute Skunk, harvesting its essences. Your Strength, Agility, Mana, and Magi have been nourished significantly.}

'They're already in the thirties, and they just began transforming?! What the fuck is going on in the world?!'

It seemed far too disgustingly disproportionate.

What exactly was meant to be the difference? They were just fighting and killing things that much? Or was there some kind of difference in how much essence the animals earned from killing things in comparison to humans?

The questions buzzed through his hazy brain, and with each thought, he only began to feel worse about the circumstances.

At this point... it was stupid to think he should not try to be getting stronger as fast as possible, especially when he couldn't level up.