My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 482 Strange Undead Creature
Chapter 482 Strange Undead Creature
Liam One walked deeper into the Eldwood Forest, his mind processing the encounter’s implications while his enhanced senses monitored his surroundings for additional threats.
The lack of dragons in this region was disappointing but not catastrophic. The forest was vast—hundreds of kilometers in every direction according to what he’d observed during his flight to its edge.
If Rikilda and Bethan weren’t here, they were somewhere else, and he had both the time and resources to conduct a thorough search across multiple regions.
The confrontation with the minotaurs had been educational in its own way. He now understood that his mere presence as a human in monster territory would generate automatic hostility, which meant future encounters would require either more careful approach or acceptance that violence would be the default greeting.
The forest’s scale made casual exploration inefficient. He could wander for weeks without encountering anything significant, burning time that could be better spent if he had more concrete information about dragon territories in this world.
Perhaps he needed to reconsider his search methodology. Instead of walking through wilderness hoping to stumble across his targets, he could seek out settlements or entities that might have knowledge about where dragons actually lived.
Liam One was considering these adjustments when he noticed something unusual ahead.
A cave entrance, partially concealed by hanging vines and overgrown vegetation, opened into the hillside like a dark mouth. But what drew his attention wasn’t the cave itself. What caught his interest was the faint shimmer of magical energy emanating from the entrance.
He quickly realised what it was. It was a dungeon.
And Liam One, despite his overwhelming power and strategic objectives, was at his core a battle enthusiast. The prospect of exploring a dungeon, of facing whatever challenges it contained purely for the satisfaction of combat and discovery, appealed to something fundamental in his nature.
The search for Rikilda and Bethan could wait a few hours. This was an opportunity he wasn’t going to pass up.
Liam One walked toward the cave entrance, pushed aside the hanging vines, and stepped into darkness.
The interior was cool, damp, and carried the mineral smell of deep earth. Luminescent moss provided faint illumination, enough to see by but not enough to eliminate the shadows that clustered in corners and crevices. The passage descended at a gentle angle, leading deeper into the hillside, and his enhanced hearing detected sounds echoing from somewhere ahead—scratching, movement, the distinctive noises of living creatures existing in confined spaces.
He’d taken perhaps ten steps into the dungeon when the first inhabitant revealed itself.
The creature materialized from a side passage with startling speed—tall, gaunt, its pale skin stretched tight over a skeletal frame. Pointed ears jutted from its skull at odd angles, and when it opened its mouth to screech, Liam One saw fangs designed for tearing flesh.
Its eyes were completely white, pupil-less, reflecting the moss’s faint glow with an eerie luminescence. Long claws extended from fingers that seemed to have too many joints, and its proportions were wrong in ways that made it difficult to look at directly.
Liam One frowned. He’d encountered many creatures during his time in the magic universe, but nothing quite like this. The thing looked like someone had taken a humanoid form and twisted it, corrupting natural proportions into something that existed specifically to unsettle and disturb.
The creature screeched—a high-pitched sound that scraped against his eardrums like nails on glass—and launched itself forward with speed that would have overwhelmed a normal human.
Liam One didn’t bother drawing a weapon or manifesting any complex technique. He simply slashed his hand outward in a casual gesture, and a blade of compressed Primordial Essence materialized in the air, cutting through the creature’s torso with surgical precision.
The thing collapsed mid-charge, its momentum carrying it forward even as its body separated into two pieces that tumbled across the stone floor.
Liam One watched it fall, expecting that to be the end of the encounter.
Then the creature’s flesh began writhing. The separated halves pulled toward each other with visible effort, tissue reconnecting, bones realigning, skin knitting back together in a grotesque scene. Within perhaps five seconds, the creature stood again, completely whole, as though the bisection had never occurred.
Liam One’s frown deepened. Regeneration wasn’t uncommon in magical creatures, but this speed suggested something more than natural healing. The thing’s flesh had literally pulled itself back together, defying normal biological processes.
The creature screeched again and charged, having apparently learned nothing from its first failed attempt.
This time, Liam One didn’t bother with restraint. He appeared directly in front of the charging creature, with his movement too fast for it to track, and his hand shot forward with precision.
His fingers closed around its head, and with a single smooth motion, he tore the skull completely free from the shoulders with a wet ripping sound that echoed through the passage.
His other hand punched through the creature’s chest, his fist emerging from the back with fragments of bone and tissue clinging to his knuckles. His fingers found what he was looking for and he ripped it free.
The headless, heartless body collapsed backward, hitting the stone floor with a meaty thud. The head rolled away, coming to rest against the passage wall, its white eyes still somehow maintaining their eerie glow despite no longer being attached to anything.
Liam One stepped back from the corpse, holding the extracted heart in his palm, studying it.
The organ was completely cold, its tissue gray and lifeless. This heart hadn’t been beating—perhaps hadn’t beaten in a long time—which raised immediate questions about what kind of creature could function without a working cardiovascular system.
He turned the heart over in his hand, his enhanced senses analyzing its structure, searching for clues about what he’d just killed.
The obvious answer was undead. But “undead” was a broad category encompassing everything from mindless zombies to even intelligent liches, and this particular specimen didn’t match any of the specific undead types he’d encountered or read about.
The regeneration suggested something more resilient than a basic zombie. The speed and aggression indicated predatory behavior rather than mindless wandering. The physical characteristics—pale skin, elongated features, fangs, claws—suggested adaptation for hunting in darkness.
Some variant of vampire, perhaps? Or a ghoul? Something else entirely?
Liam One was considering these possibilities when he heard it multiple high-pitched screeches, echoing from deeper in the dungeon. Dozens of them, all voicing their presence simultaneously in a chorus of disturbing harmony.
And beneath the screeches, the sound of approaching footsteps. Many, many footsteps, moving toward him with coordinated purpose.
Liam One smiled, the expression carrying genuine anticipation. The cold heart still rested in his palm, but his attention had already shifted forward to what was coming.
The screeching grew louder and the footsteps accelerated. And Liam One stood in the center of the dungeon passage, completely relaxed, waiting for the horde to arrive so he could discover exactly what these strange undead creatures were capable of when they attacked in numbers.
