Chapter 122: The Pearl
She hesitated for a brief moment.
Then she took a deep breath, slowly exhaled, tightened her grip on her sword, and fixed her eyes on the creature before her.
It resembled a withered, four-legged creature, its body so shriveled it looked as though it had been drained dry, its face almost completely devoid of any recognizable features.
She had already decided to take the risk.
There was no point retreating now.
Every path seemed to lead to death anyway so she might as well gamble on this approach and see if it led somewhere.
With that thought in mind, she stopped hesitating.
The next instant, she shot forward.
The creature reacted instantly.
It exploded out of its crouched position with a burst of speed that caught her completely off guard.
There was no warning.
No buildup.
Just an instantaneous explosion of movement that forced her to throw herself sideways at the exact moment its claws sliced through the air where she had been standing a heartbeat earlier.
She landed in a roll, came up fast, and reassessed.
It was quick. Very quick.
But she immediately noticed something. Its speed came in explosive bursts. A sudden lunge, followed by a brief pause.
It didn’t seem capable of maintaining that level of movement continuously.
Or at least, It shouldn’t have been.
The creature came at her again before she had fully steadied herself, low this time, its featureless face angled downward as it charged. Selena sidestepped, let the momentum carry it past her, and brought the blade down hard across its flank as it went by.
The moment the steel made contact, the impact traveled up her arms like she had struck stone.
The creature stumbled, just barely. It had clearly felt the hit, but not enough to do any real damage.
It turned on her with what she could only describe as irritation, despite having no face to express it with.
She felt the weight of that brief exchange settle in her bones, and from it she was able to draw a clearer read on what she was dealing with.
As always, her mind worked rapidly in the middle of combat.. Its speed was high, its raw strength slightly above hers in a direct clash, but only slightly. Its movements, while fast, followed a pattern. Explosive bursts, no feints, no deception. Whatever this creature was, it didn’t think like a trained fighter.
It just attacked. Driven purely by the instinct to eliminate the prey in front of it.
’Hmm. I can work with this,’ she thought coldly, finally finding the first sliver of hope since encountering these creatures.
The creature lunged a third time, claws spread wide, and this time she didn’t retreat.
She stepped into it.
The claw grazed her shoulder, she accepted the hit, and in the same motion she was already inside its reach, her elbow driving hard into the joint of its foreleg, disrupting its balance just enough. She pivoted, dropped low, and drew the blade across the back of its hind leg in a clean, lethal arc.
No mana. Just raw strength and muscle memory executing her combat techniques with millimeter precision.
The creature let out a sharp sound, one with no mouth to produce it, which somehow made it worse, and staggered.
Something had shifted in her. The moment she grasped the gap between them, the fear that had weighed on her chest ever since leaving the giant tree quietly receded. In its place, something sharper took over.
She pressed forward without giving it time to recover.
Strike. Redirect. Strike again.
She moved through its defenses the way water finds cracks, not by force, but by reading every opening before it fully existed and filling it with precise, targeted strikes that landed exactly where she intended.
A cut to the shoulder joint. A thrust that it deflected but that cost it positioning. A feint to the left that pulled its weight the wrong way, leaving its right side briefly, completely exposed.
She took the opening with both hands on the hilt.
And then, without hesitation, nothing but raw force and determination, she drove the blade into the side of its neck.
The creature locked up instantly.
For one suspended moment it held perfectly still, caught between one state and the next, and then its body gave. Its legs lost their strength and folded beneath it, the rest of its frame following, collapsing to the ground as though every last bit of tension had been cut loose at once.
Selena stood over it, sweat on her brow, the brief but intense exchange having taken more out of her than she wanted to admit. She let out a slow breath and allowed herself to sink to the ground, back against the wall, sword still in hand.
’I... did it,’she thought, noticing the faint tremor in her fingers.
It was clear that however resolute she had been, the very real possibility of being wrong, of walking directly into the arms of these creatures, had weighed on her more than she had let herself feel in the moment.
It didn’t matter how composed a person was. The fear of dying was always there. It had been there for her too.
She still had a score to settle. Which meant she couldn’t afford to die. Not yet.
Just as she was beginning to calm down, the sword still lodged in the creature’s neck seemed to give way on its own, sliding free and clattering to the floor as though it had simply slipped loose.
Selena didn’t understand what had happened, but she noticed the change immediately.
The creature’s lifeless body began to crumble.
The dark mass of its body dissolved into ash, and then into nothing, until all that remained was a faint grey residue drifting slowly down through the frozen air.
She watched it happen with an expression caught between confusion and alertness, unsure of what she was seeing, but even after it was fully gone, nothing else followed.
That seemed to settle her slightly.
Then, just as she was beginning to breathe normally again, her eyes caught a faint glimmer coming from the floor where the creature had been.
Hm?
Her gaze landed on what appeared to be a small pearl, grey on the surface, resting on the ground.
’Did it come from that creature’s body?’ she wondered, her mind going immediately to something she recognized, a mana core. Awakened Beasts had them. Was it possible these creatures had something similar?
She looked closer. The center of the sphere was faintly white. Its surface carried a subtle luminosity.
She hesitated for a moment, then reached down and picked it up.
The moment it made contact with her skin, she noticed the warmth, mild, steady, like the surface of a lightbulb that had been on for a few minutes.
Selena stared at it.
She had no idea what it was.
But as she felt that warmth radiating from the pearl, something inside her seemed to respond to it. Not an instinct exactly, something more concrete than that. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it felt like it was trying to draw something out of the sphere.
An idea immediately crossed her mind.
She sat down cross-legged on the floor and attempted to cultivate from it.
Normally, to advance in rank, one extracted refined mana from the cores of defeated beasts, or drew it in from the surrounding environment.
There was no ambient mana here.
But perhaps, perhaps, there was something inside this pearl.
With that thought in mind, she reached inward and attempted to draw from whatever was contained within the sphere.
A warm current entered her body almost immediately, flowing directly into her core.
Her eyes went wide.
She stared at the pearl in her hand with an expression of pure disbelief.
"This... what is this?"