The glittering dust of ten thousand dead Glass-Wing bats had not even settled before the screaming started again. It was not a human scream this time, nor was it the crystalline tinkling of the swarm.
It was a sound that did not belong to the throat of any living thing. It was a low, oscillating hum that felt like a serrated blade being dragged across the surface of David Silver’s brain. It was a very uncomfortable feeling that made his teeth itch and his vision blur.
The Groks were usually as stoic as the boulders they resembled, but they were the first ones to lose their minds. The lead beast let out a terrified sound.
Its six legs scrambled for balance on the rough road as it tried to reverse its massive bulk into the wagon behind it. The sound of heavy scales grinding against stone echoed through the narrow pass.
"Steady! Steady, you overgrown slugs!" Gerrard roared.
His voice was cracking with a strain that David had not heard before. The caravan leader was pale and his eyes were darting toward a massive spatial rift that was pulsing like a bruised heart against the canyon wall. Gerrard was a veteran, but right now he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
Even if one were to ignore the terrifying sound of the rift, every man in the caravan was paying attention to Mercenary Rose for two simple reasons, Boobs!
Rose was standing on the second wagon, her hand gripping a heavy crossbow.
"What is that thing?" Rose screamed. Her voice was trembling.
The rift did not just flicker. It tore open like a piece of wet paper. A jagged line of absolute nothingness opened wide and from the ink-black void, a predator emerged. It was a Void-Stalker.
At first, it looked like a spill of oil suspended in the air, but as it fully entered the reality of the Wailing Maw, it solidified into a terrifying feline shape. It was the size of a carriage.
Its body was made of shifting and semi-translucent smoke and obsidian-edged shadows. It did not have eyes. It had two glowing violet slits that leaked a mist of pure and concentrated mana.
"Tier 5," Barnaby whispered.
The old man was not even pretending to drink anymore. He sat on the bench and his knuckles were white as he gripped the wooden edge. "A Void-Stalker.
The apex of the Maw. It was not the chimes that killed the Glass-Wings. It was this thing. It was just using the swarm as a light snack before the main course arrived. We are the main course, kid."
David felt a cold and sharp dread settle in his gut. Tier 5 was the realm of Grandmasters. In the Academy, a Tier 5 mage was someone you bowed to. They were people whose very presence could command an entire city. For a group of Tier 2 and 3 mercenaries, it was a death sentence.
"Everyone! Break and run!" Gerrard screamed.
His veteran instincts finally took over. "Abandon the wagons! Get to the caves! Now!"
The mercenaries did not need to be told twice. They were professionals, which meant they knew exactly when a fight was a suicide mission. They scrambled off the Groks and left the valuable mana crystals behind.
They bolted for the narrow crevices in the cliffside. Rose jumped from her wagon and her heavy chest jiggled in the process as she sprinted toward the rocks. In seconds, the bustling caravan was reduced to a row of abandoned wagons and two souls that had not run away yet.
The Void-Stalker did not chase the fleeing guards. It was a refined predator. It wanted the concentrated mana in the wagons and it wanted the two souls on the rear bench.
It prowled forward and its paws made no sound on the glass-dusted ground. With every step, the air around it distorted. Reality was flickering and bending as if the creature’s sheer mass was too much for the Maw to handle.
"You should run, Ghosty," Barnaby said.
He did not move an inch. "I am old. My joints are rusted and I have seen enough of this world. But you? You have got a lot of things to do. You have got a future."
David looked at the monster. He looked at the abandoned wagons. If he ran, the Void-Stalker would consume the crystals and grow even stronger.
It would likely hunt them down in the caves anyway. More importantly, David realized he was tired of running. He had run from the Academy and run from the Council. He was sick of being the rabbit.
"If I run now," David rasped. His voice was vibrating with a dark and cold clarity. "I will be running for the rest of my life. And I have got a really bad pair of boots for a marathon. My feet would hurt too much."
[Warning! High-Tier Predator Engaged.]
[Target: Void-Stalker (Tier 5 - Rift Manifestation).]
[Detection: Standard physical and magical attacks will phase through its smoke-body.]
"Phase through? So I cannot hit it and I cannot reflect it?" David thought.
His heart was pounding a rhythmic drum of war. "System, give me something that is not suicide. I would like to live through the day."
[Analyzing...]
[Required Technique: Mana Compression.]
[Description: Forcing your mana into a state of infinite density. If mana cannot flow, make it heavy. If it is heavy enough, it creates its own gravity.]
"Gravity. I like the sound of that. How long?"
[Standard Mastery: 10 years of gravity-chamber training.]
[Multiplier Status: 100,000x.]
[Required Practice Time: 30 seconds of total focus.]
"Thirty seconds. Barnaby, do not let it eat you for half a minute!" David shouted.
He did not hide this time. He stepped off the wagon and stood directly in the path of the beast. He looked small compared to the smoky cat, but his eyes were hard.
The Void-Stalker let out a sound like two grinding tectonic plates. It leaped! It did not move through the air normally. It phased out of existence and reappeared ten feet closer. It was a blur of shadow and violet fangs.
Barnaby suddenly moved. The drunk old man did not use a spell, but he flicked a single copper coin toward the beast. The coin did not hit it, but it hummed with a Tier 8 aura that forced the Stalker to linger in reality for a fraction of a second longer than it wanted to.
"Clock is ticking, kid!" Barnaby grunted. He was sweating now and his face was serious.
David closed his eyes. He did not cycle his mana in a reverse spiral this time. He did not try to phase it. He imagined his Static mana core, that immovable lead weight in his chest, and he started to squeeze. He used the 100,000x multiplier not to move the mana, but to crush it into a tiny point.
[Practice Initialized: 5 seconds... 10 seconds...]
Inside his mind, David felt like he was trying to hold a dying star in his bare hands. The pressure was immense. His meridians groaned and his Toxin Sovereign blood began to sizzle under the heat of the compression. He was taking the vast capacity of his core and forcing it into the size of a marble. It was a very painful process.
[20 seconds... 25 seconds...]
The air around David began to crackle. Stones on the ground began to roll toward his boots. They were pulled by an invisible force. The Void-Stalker sensed the sudden shift in the environment.
It let out a hiss of genuine fear. It gathered its smoky mass and its violet slits glowed with a blinding intensity. It prepared to unleash a Void-Breath that could erase a city block.
[30 seconds. Practice Complete.]
[Skill Developed: Mana Compression (Divine Mastery).]
David opened his eyes. They were not purple-black anymore. They were a dense and shimmering gold that seemed to pull the light from the air. He looked like a god standing in the mud.
"Stay down," David whispered.
He did not fire a beam. He simply released the weight of his compressed mana.
The effect was instantaneous and horrific! The air within a fifty-foot radius of David did not just get heavy. It became a solid and crushing wall. The gravitational pull was so intense that the Glass-Wing dust on the ground was instantly flattened into a layer of solid diamond.
The Void-Stalker was caught mid-leap. It did not just fall. It was slammed into the ground with the force of a falling mountain! Its smoke-body found that it could not phase through the very fabric of space being bent. The creature let out a high-pitched and agonizing shriek as its obsidian-edged limbs were pinned to the glass-dusted road.
David stepped forward. Every footfall sounded like a hammer hitting an anvil. The gravity was so dense that even light seemed to bend around him. He looked like a distorted shadow.
The Void-Stalker tried to phase back into the rift, but the Mana Compression had created a localized Gravity Well that locked the rift shut. The predator was trapped in a reality that had suddenly become too heavy to breathe in. Its violet slits were wide with terror.
"You like the rifts, do you not?" David rasped.
He stood over the pinned monster. "Let us see how you like being part of the pavement. You should have stayed in the void."
David raised his hand and made a closing motion with his fist. The gravity field intensified by another factor of ten. The Void-Stalker’s smoke-body began to compress.
Its violet mana was being squeezed out of its form like juice from a fruit. The ground beneath it cracked. A crater formed that was ten feet deep. The stone was being turned into powder by the sheer atmospheric pressure.
With a final and pathetic whimper, the Void-Stalker collapsed. Its smoke-body did not dissipate. It was crushed into a single and dense violet crystal. This was a Void Heart.
The gravity field vanished. The air rushed back into the vacuum David had created with a deafening pop! The sound was so loud it made David’s ears ring.
David staggered and his knees nearly gave out. The Mana Compression had drained him more than anything he had ever done. His meridians felt like they had been scrubbed with sandpaper and fire. He leaned against the side of the wagon and his breath came in ragged gasps.
[Status Update: Tier 5 Predator Neutralized.]
[Reward: Void Heart (Tier 5 Catalyst) acquired.]
[Warning: Physical stress reaching 88%. Suggesting a nap. A very long nap.]
"Relatable humor, System," David wheezed.
He wiped a trickle of blood from his nose. "I think I just broke my own gravity. I am going to be sore for a week."
Barnaby climbed down from the driver’s bench. His bleary eyes were wider than David had ever seen them. He walked over to the crater and looked at the violet crystal sitting in the center of the pulverized stone. Then he looked back at David.
"Gravity manipulation through sheer mana density," Barnaby whispered.
His voice was devoid of any drunken slur. "That is not a mage trick, David. That is a God-Mage fundamental. You did not just kill a Stalker. You rearranged the Maw’s furniture. That was quite a show."
"I just wanted to make it sit still," David muttered.
He slid down the side of the wagon to sit in the dirt. He felt like his muscles were made of lead.
"Well, it is sitting still now," Barnaby said.
He picked up the Void Heart and handed it to David. "And once those mercenaries come crawling back from the caves, they are going to have a lot of questions about why the road is ten feet lower than it used to be. They are going to be very confused."
David gripped the cold and pulsing crystal. He felt the 100,000x multiplier cooling down in his mind. He had stood alone against a Tier 5 monster and won. But as he looked at the spatial rifts flickering above, he knew this was just the Predator’s Echo. The Maw was waking up and the noise was only going to get louder.
"Tell them... tell them it was a localized rift collapse," David rasped.
His eyes were fluttering shut. "Tell them I am just lucky. That is what we always say, right?"
"Sure, kid," Barnaby said.
A strange and knowing smile touched his lips as he hoisted David back onto the wagon. "Lucky. That is exactly what I will tell them. I am good at telling lies."
As the mercenaries began to peek out from the rocks, their eyes were wide with disbelief at the cratered road and the missing monster. Rose looked at the spot where the beast had been and her heavy chest moved as she gasped.
David Silver drifted into a dark and dreamless sleep. He was a Tier 1 Novice who had just grounded a Tier 5 nightmare.
In the heart of the Wailing Maw, the shadows were starting to realize that the most dangerous thing in the mountains was not the rifts. It was the boy in the grey cloak. He was the real monster here.