Jet felt a sharp sting on his left cheek. He brushed his grime-covered fingers against the skin and pulled them back to see fresh, dark crimson blood wetting his fingertips.
He didn’t have a single second to worry about the laceration. His heart was beating like crazy, hammering violently against his ribs as he forced his white pupils to scan the surrounding area.
His eyes frantically searched the immediate terrain, but the damp forest air had suddenly gone dead still and quiet.
The previous chaotic sounds of the wilderness had completely vanished; there was no rustling of ferns, no occasional distant roars of higher-rank monsters, and not even the minor chirping of birds.
The environment was locked in a vacuum of terrifying, absolute silence.Just then, another cold glint flickered sharply from the absolute periphery of his vision.
This time, his perception tracked the exact trajectory coming from his left blind spot. Jet immediately shifted his entire torso to the side, leaning his weight low into the mud. Simultaneously, his right hand clenched into a rock-solid fist.
Driven by a surge of pure survival instinct, he blasted his fist straight forward through the air.
BANG!
A heavy, compact sound echoed through the clearing as Jet’s knuckles connected solidly with something that felt surprisingly soft and dense, like compressed cotton. The impact force violently blasted a small white figure backward into the thick brush.
Jet’s white eyes lit up immediately with a sudden hint of grim joy. "Finally..."
He locked his stance toward his front, and this time, he finally got a clear, unobstructed look at the exact entity that had been conducting the invisible ambush.
When his gaze settled on the creature, he was momentarily left completely speechless, his eyes wide open in sheer disbelief.Standing a few meters away from him, looking directly into his face, was a white bunny.
It was a completely pristine, white, and superficially cute rabbit. However, this was no ordinary animal. The beast stood at the exact height of a five-year-old human child, precisely one meter tall from its heavy paws to its shoulders.
A pair of exceptionally long, upright ears constantly twitched atop its head, adjusting to the slightest vibrations in the air. Its eyes were two wide, bulging spheres that burned with the deep, unnatural red of polished rubies, radiating a chilling predatory intelligence.
When it pulled back its lips, a pair of oversized, razor-sharp front incisors flashed under the dim light, covered in a light sheen of clear, corrosive saliva.What made Jet’s throat tighten, however, were its limbs.
Two long, gleaming steel-like blades emerged directly out of the bone structures of its front paws. The weapons were single-edged, slightly curved blades measuring exactly sixty centimeters in length. They possessed no hilt or guard; the cold metal simply fused perfectly with the creature’s muscle tissue, gleaming with a terrifying, mirror-like finish.
"Are you kidding me? Is this the thing that was actually attacking me?" Jet was simply flabbergasted as he stared down at the small beast.
The crimson system interface materialized instantly in the gap between them, confirming the entity’s parameters.
[ Beyond Monster has been spotted: Vorpal Bunny ]
[ Rank: Lesser ]
[ Description: A highly dangerous speed-type predator native to the lower canopies. It possesses an agile skeletal frame, extreme baseline velocity, and bone-derived blades capable of executing high-frequency continuous attack chains. It targets human blind spots with absolute precision. ]
"So this bunny is called a Vorpal Bunny, huh..." Jet muttered, his mind running through various tactical combinations at lightning speed.
His hands tightly gripped the broken halves of his ironwood stake, using the remaining jagged splintered ends as makeshift daggers. He lowered his center of gravity, balancing his weight on the balls of his combat boots.
The Vorpal Bunny suddenly tapped its heavy hind legs against the dirt.
SHUCK!
The ground beneath its paws didn’t just indent, it violently imploded, kicking up a spray of black mud as the creature turned into a literal blur of white light, shooting straight toward Jet’s chest. Jet’s reflexes, artificially elevated by his active rune, kicked in instantly.
He raised the thicker half of his broken ironwood spear, cross-blocking the descending trajectory of the single-edged blades.
CLANG!
The collision generated a sharp, metallic screech that vibrated straight through Jet’s wrists. The sheer force distribution behind the small creature’s momentum was staggering, pushing Jet three full steps backward, his heavy boots carving deep furrows into the wet earth.
His muscles groaned under the recoil, the physical shockwave rippling through the tattered sleeves of his shirt.The Vorpal Bunny didn’t give him a single millisecond to rest or recover his balance.
The moment its paws touched the dirt, it pivoted cleanly, using its light weight to transition into a secondary strike. It lunged directly from the left side, Jet’s absolute blind spot.
Gritting his teeth until they bled, Jet violently twisted his spine backward. The cold edge of the bone-derived blade grazed past his chest, missing his throat by a mere couple of inches and slicing clean through the outer layers of his tattered black cargo vest.
The bunny didn’t stop. There were absolutely no intervals or windows between its individual movements. It attacked in a perfectly continuous, lethal chain, seamlessly connecting the momentum of the first miss into a sweeping low kick with its secondary blade.
It was a flawless speedster style, light, evasive, and entirely reliant on constant high-frequency trajectory shifts. Jet was forced entirely onto the defensive, his non-existent formal martial training making him look incredibly crude as he repeatedly stepped back, desperately using the broken ironwood segments to deflect the incoming silver flashes.
CLANG! CLANG! SHUCK!
The pacing of the combat accelerated into an insane burst of high-density exchanges. The white light of the bunny and the dark form of Jet blurred together against the massive tree roots.
Jet’s arms were accumulating dozens of minor, stinging cuts as the blades continuously found the gaps in his guard, attacking from impossible angles.
Sweat mixed with fresh blood poured down his pale face, his stamina bars steadily depleting under the constant exertion.
But as the minutes dragged on, the passive trigger of the Asura Physique began to assert absolute control over his failing body.
The deep, heavy warmth radiating from the full-body tattoo on his back grew into a burning, rhythmic pulse. Jet’s heart rate stabilized despite the intense physical exhaustion.
His white pupils, initially struggling to track the creature’s high velocity, began to slowly synchronize with the vibration of the bunny’s long ears. He notice the subtle wind-up before each lunge; he saw the minor muscle contraction in the beast’s hind legs a fraction of a second before it changed direction.
His movements, initially clumsy and reactionary, became highly calculated and fluid.
The bunny executed a vertical downward cleave, aiming to split Jet’s face in two.
Jet didn’t roll away this time. He stood his ground, his stance rooted firmly into the earth like a heavy iron bar. He waited for the absolute peak of the wind-up, tracking the line of sight perfectly.
The moment the blade descended, Jet tilted his head by a fraction of an inch, letting the cold steel slide past his ear, and delivered a brutal, short-range horizontal elbow strike straight into the center of the bunny’s chest.
CRUNCH!
The sheer weight and kinetic force distribution behind the blow completely bypassed the creature’s light agility. The shockwave of the impact flattened the white fur on its sternum, and a sharp sound of fracturing cartilage echoed through the quiet clearing.
The Vorpal Bunny let out a painful, high-pitched shriek as the raw physical power of the Asura physique blasted its small, one-meter frame through the air, sending it flying across the clearing before it crashed heavily into a thick mass of ferns.
Jet stood in the center of the muddy ground, his breathing loud and rhythmic, blood dripping from his knuckles.
He didn’t chase after it; he used the brief quiet interval to draw a deep breath, recalibrating his spatial awareness.
The ferns violently parted. The Vorpal Bunny scrambled back onto its paws, its white coat completely stained with dark green myriapod blood and black mud. Its ruby eyes were wider now, bloodshot with an unhinged, wild frenzy as it realized its human prey was evolving right in the middle of the slaughter.
The bone-blades on its paws vibrated rapidly, humming with a cold, desperate energy.The creature tapped its right hind foot twice against a slick stone on the ground.
POP!
The white silhouette of the bunny completely vanished from Jet’s line of sight, leaving behind a small vacuum of displaced air where it had stood.
Jet’s perception spiked to its absolute limit, his instincts screaming of an imminent, lethal strike. Before his head could even complete the physical turn to check his perimeter, a cold, silver glint materialized abruptly out of thin air directly behind his exposed neck.
The Vorpal Bunny had reappeared in his absolute blind spot, its single-edged blade already descending in a wide, horizontal arc, aiming to cleanly sever Jet’s head from his shoulders.
/N: Support by adding to your novel. And dropping a powerstone or two. Thank you.