The rush of the stagnant, cold air tore at Soren’s cloak as he plummeted from the roof.
Instinct and the few parkour lessons he had of running rooftop jobs as a scavenger took over as he executed what he did in the dream.
He landed on the wooden pillar of the opposing building, using it to slow his fall, before throwing himself onto the awning of the tavern he was staked on.
This time, however, he took account of the lack of structurability of the fabric awning so he caught the supports of them while landing on the soft fabric, breaking his fall.
Soren breathed out a sigh of relief, grateful he didn’t gracelessly fall like he did earlier and slowly lowered himself to the ground.
He landed with a soft thud, his joints thanking him for the soft landing that he so graciously planned for.
He listened for any sounds of scurrying that could indicate that an Abyssal Creature heard the light commotion, glancing at the Dream Sword before thanking the Angels for his luck.
It looked like most of the Abyssal Creatures were nowhere to be found.
For now, he had beaten his accursed luck.
He sheathed the Dream Sword back, hand instinctively brushing against the hilt of the Dream Sword securely tightened to his makeshift sheathe.
The white orb hummed with a faint, comforting warmth, that tethered his debilitating mind with a sense of familial embrace.
Soren grinned at the feeling before wiping it off.
He didn’t have the luxury of lazing around.
The Dream Sword had shown him the way and he will follow the path it provided until he reached his objective: activating the Anchor.
Crouching low and hugging the deep shadows cast by the closed buildings, Soren began to move.
Every step was deliberate, eyes darting between the cracked pavement and every shadow that could house an abomination within its dark covers.
He was just a normal scavenger—no grand powers, no divine right, and no reinforcements behind his back.
But he gripped the hilt of the soulbound blade as a grim, defiant expression crept onto his face.
The alleyway smelled of a cold, stale tang unlike the Genesity he knew.
It was the static air from the Abyss that bled into the atmosphere of the city, causing Soren to wince at the foul sensation.
Although he was used to the extreme elements and sensations that scavengers were usually exposed to, the Abyss was the opposite end of the spectrum with its intense senses and sweltering heat.
He quickly sneaked out of the alleyway before his head poked out onto the deserted streets.
He stabilized his beating heart and stepped out.
The Void above was fully exposed to him, causing his head to throb every moment he looked up so he kept his head forward, focused on the task at hand.
After crossing various streets, the cobblestone ground beneath him sloped downwards toward a plaza swallowed by darkness, only illuminated by the faint glow of the Starlight Abyss that managed to creep through the cracks of the buildings and the purple auroras of the Void sky.
Soren slowed his pace, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the perimeter.
No Abyssal Creatures.
His eyes finally caught the outline of a human.
There, slumped against a cracked stone pillar, lay the fallen royal guard.
His heart quickened in anticipation at the sight from both anticipation and nervousness.
As he neared, the faint shine of the royal guard’s armor caught the violet and starry luminance leaking from the abyss above and below them.
His mood became somber as he reached the guard, his head torn off as extremities mutilated.
Although he did wish bad things upon the guards of Vulcanis, Soren was hardly ever one to wish death upon others.
He muttered a quick prayer before he crouched beside the corpse and touched the armor.
The metal was cool to the touch and with clumsy hands, he began unbuckling the latches and stripped the armor from the royal guard.
If the guard was a royal guard like he believed it was, then the looted armor wouldn’t be a mere, standard-issue armor normal guards wore.
It would likely be created and enchanted to be at least an Awakened rank to fit the status of the royal guard.
He held up the giant chestplate with trembling arms as he sighed in disappointment.
It was way too big for him and he didn’t think that he would fit inside its cavernous cavity anytime soon.
Soren unsheathed the Dream Sword from its sheathe and willed the mirror-like reflection to show the stats of the armor he looted from the royal guard.
Name: [Royal Guard’s Armor]
Rank: [Awakened]
Attributes: [Feathersteel], [Malleable]
He noted the lack of [Soulbound] at the rank section before focusing on the attributes of the chestplate.
Attribute: [Feathersteel]
Description: [You are able to manipulate the weight of the armor freely to what you desire]
Soren grinned at that before sending a pulse of entropy from the white orb on his necklace into the Royal Guard’s Armor in an attempt to make it as light as a feather.
The armor’s weight quickly increased as the strain on Soren’s arm disappeared before he could barely tell he was holding anything at all.
The heavy chestplate was almost as big as he was!
Attribute: [Malleable]
Description: [You are able to manipulate the form the armor takes]
Soren paused at that before inwardly jumping up and down in joy, praising the Angels for his blessed luck.
This was quite possibly the best news he could’ve gotten from the Dream Sword because the Royal Guard’s Armor went from possibly useless to useful to invaluable.
He was worried that the size and weight of the armor would make him have to abandon it but he was proven wrong—thank the Angels.
Soren quickly took off his cloak and wore the oversized armor, sending a pulse of entropy to manipulate the Royal Guard’s Armor.
The armor immediately obeyed and moved to fit his body, extending past just the chest and providing him with vambraces and gauntlets that reached his ankles.
He thanked the royal guard and secured the armor underneath his cloak, feeling much safer already.
It didn’t even feel like he was wearing anything extra.
It was just a safe barrier that could leave a nasty surprise if someone decided to punch him.
He even contemplated if he should even sell it on the black market.
Even if he sold it for a lot of money, the Royal Guard’s Armor was simply too good!
Soren quickly put on his cloak again and felt like one of those protagonists in those stories he occasionally read as a child.
They were always lithe and lightly equipped when they were sent off to adventure and slay the evil Tyrant of the North—he felt no different from them.
Soren quickly focused on the task at hand, quietly berating himself for taking too long looting the corpse.
He looked around, looking for the sword that the royal guard threw at Shindo but he couldn’t see anything.
The sword should’ve been right there, impaled deeply within the building’s wall but Soren couldn’t see anything.
He glanced down at the Dream Sword with furrowed eyebrows.
‘Could you possibly be both a mixture of the sword in the dream and the sword in reality?’
He quickly dismissed the thought, shelving it for later.
Right now, Soren had to survive if he wanted to know the mysteries of life.
Soren looked one last time and, in the shadows, the faint outline of a bolt could be seen next to the guard’s body where the guard grabbed it mid-air and threw it away.
Soren snatched it and stuffed it in his cloak next to the crossbow he kept stowed away, thankful for another weapon he could potentially use in the danger-filled dimension.
‘So now I have a crossbow with a bolt.
One for an Abyssal Creature and if that wouldn’t work, I could use it on myself,’ Soren joked before sighing at his lack of taste.
Sometimes he wondered why he was alive.
Soren straightened up before looking at his trusty scout, the Dream Sword.
He saw the path to the Anchor still empty, but he wasn’t sure for how much longer.
The Abyssal Creatures wandered from the outskirts of the island towards the center, where he was, and now, he was cutting it close.
He berated himself once again for taking too long before setting out on his journey, Dream Sword in hand so that he could use the reflection to go around any Abyssal Creatures that were blocking his path.
As he lurked in the shadows, Soren cursed as he saw an Abyssal Creature wander to block the path in front of him while another Abyssal Creature wandered behind him, cornering him from any backtracking.
He quickly dashed into an abandoned alleyway and checked the Dream Sword again, willing the reflection to focus on the Abyssal Creature that was blocking his path forward.
The reflection shifted before it showed an Abyssal Creature scuttling into every alleyway, sniffing the air, and leaving.
It was grotesque with a large pincer as one arm while the other arm was fashioned as a blade.
It was gigantic in size, likely ten feet tall and black all over.
It looked like a mad fusion between a demon and a crab with none of the adorable aspects of the crab and all the ugly aspects of a demon.
The Dream Sword wavered before text appeared above the creature’s head.
[Crabmon]
He grimaced before focusing on the name, detailed stats showing up within the Dream Sword.
Name: [Crabmon]
Manifestation: [Formless]
Rank: [Normal]
Pathway: [Demonic]
He sighed at the creature’s stats, relieved that it wasn’t impossible to fight such a creature.
It was a Formless Normal.
The handbook laid out the hierarchy clearly: human Ascension progressed from the rank of an Awakened, Transcendent, Divine, Deity, to World.
In contrast, Abyssal Creatures were assigned Manifestations that scale from Formless, Echoed, Dark One, Shadowed, to Nightmare, growing stronger as they consume human existence.
A human could only climb the ranks while an Abyssal Creature remained in their spawned Manifestation while climbing the ranks by consuming humans.
That meant that the Crabmon in front of him was the weakest a Crabmon could get.
A mere fraction of the might a stronger, more harrowing Abyssal Creature could be.
Still, an Abyssal Creature was an Abyssal Creature and any small mistake could still spell the doom for a normal scavenger like him.
‘Damn,’ Soren thought, looking at the creature.
‘The thing is huge!
It even has those nasty weapons as arms.’
He thought over everything he could possibly do to either sneak around the Crabmon or fight it but everything he came up with came to a dead end.
In every scenario he came up with where he snuck around the Crabmon, the creature would sniff him out and chase him down where it eventually killed Soren.
However, if he chose to fight the Crabmon, he’d likely lose to its deadly arsenal and size, also eventually killing Soren.
That meant that he had only one option remaining.
Trap it.
Soren rummaged in his cloak before pulling out the bolt he recovered earlier.
He breathed in before he brought the head against his forearm and sliced.
Blood guzzled out of the wound before he cut a piece of cloth from his cloak and lightly pressed on the wound to soak it with blood.
After the cloak got soaked with blood, he took it off and threw it on the ground before applying another, more thicker piece of cloth and tightly pressing on the wound to stem any bleeding and securing it.
He winced at the lightheadedness he felt after the bloodletting.
Soren grimaced at the fact that the wound would likely get infected in the future if he didn’t get proper healing but he put it off, prioritizing the plan that could save his life right now.
He brought out the cross bow and tightly wrapped the blood-soaked cloth around it, drenching it with blood, before loading the crossbow with the bolt.
He placed the contraption into a corner filled with shadows and angled it up fourth-five degrees.
Soren looked around before finding a ladder that led straight up to the roof.
Perfect.
He gritted his teeth before he started scaling, attempting to put as little pressure on his cut forearm as he could until he got to the top where he collapsed and laid on top of the roof, arm over his eyes as he laid supine.
The easy part was over.
Now, the hard part.
The plan relied on ninety percent luck and ten percent skill and if he managed to pull it off, well, he’d live and get another cool story to tell when he finally got back to Atheo.
Although he’d love to simply stay on top of the roof and wait for the storm to pass, he doubted that the Crabmon needed blood in order to track his trail.
Just his mere existence was probably enough for the damned thing to find where he was.
And, staying on the rooftop was not a good idea given how open he was to the flying abominations that prowled the clear Void sky.
Soren looked at the Dream Sword and saw the Crabmon still three alleyways down, sniffing the air for any sign of humans.
That gave him enough time to experiment with his plan.
He stood up on the flat roof and took off his cloak and armor and put down the armor he reshaped to be a giant chestplate.
He touched and willed the Feathersteel attribute to change to be as heavy as the attribute could allow it to be.
The necklace he wore quickly pulsed in response to his command before the chestplate rapidly changed from the weight of a feather to a boulder.
Soren tried lifting up the chestplate but found that he could barely lift it, struggling to even move it an inch.
Soren thanked The Divinity for the necklace before he manipulated the chestplate to become as light as a feather and held it in his arms as he laid flat against the roof and looked into the Dream Sword.
The Crabmon quickly reached his alleyway.
Soren licked his lips in anticipation and his heart started racing.
This was it.
The preparation that he worked for should pay off soon.
Systematically, the Crabmon entered the alleyway and sniffed the air.
Usually, it would sniff the air and leave right after it didn’t get a scent, this time, it stilled.
It sniffed the air once more before it became alert and snapped its eerie gaze at a shadowy corner.
It noticed the scent of blood coming from an obscured, distinctly lump-shaped pile.
Noticing its prey, it stalked towards the pile, remaining silent as it sniffed the blood it tracked.
It scuttled over until it loomed over the pile, eyes fixated on the pile.
‘Come on, shoot!’ Soren prayed, hoping that the crossbow he rigged would malfunction and shoot after it’s been loaded.
He knew this from past experience that the crossbow would shoot on its own after being rigged after around three to five minutes and the timeframe was perfect!
Then, it stilled, before it stared at the ground.
It slowly shuffled back, eyes staring at the ground before it seemed to track something.
Its eyes wandered until it landed on the ladder Soren used to climb.
There were specks of blood.
Horror dawned upon Soren as he realized his fatal mistake.
He led a trail that led straight to him, spelling his doom.
The creature snapped its head upwards at the roof where Soren lay and screeched, deafening Soren.
Soren, who was peering over the edge of the roof, felt his heart drop.
‘I’m so incredibly dead.’
The Crabmon leapt towards Soren in a terrifying, gigantic leap, claws and blade extended to sever him in half.