Awoooo—!
A deafening chorus of feral roars tore through the gorge.
The sight of their pack brother’s severed head rolling across the gravel shattered the wolves’ mocking indifference, replacing it with primordial fury.
Their yellow eyes turned blood-red beneath the moonlight, fangs bared in snarling unison.
From atop the high boulder, the Alpha’s throat rumbled with a thunderous growl.
It didn’t leap toward Lucien.
Instead, recognizing the human as a lethal anomaly, the massive black beast bounded off the crag in a dark blur, lunging straight toward the dying white tigress to finish the feast while signaling the rest of the pack forward.
With a unified howl, nearly thirty Moon-Scar Wolves charged at once.
To an ordinary observer, thirty low-rank Tier 2 beasts were dangerous enough.
But demonic beasts were not humans; their skeletal density was thicker, their claws bore natural venom, and their predatory ferocity far surpassed that of common human martial artists.
Facing thirty of them at once was equivalent to fighting a coordinated battalion of thirty second- and third-level Bone Forging experts.
Lucien did not retreat a single step.
He gripped the six-foot greatsword with both hands, lowering his center of gravity as the ground shook beneath the thunder of approaching paws.
“Come!”
He lunged forward to meet the tide.
CLANG!
The first wolf leaped, jaws aimed at his throat, only to be met by a savage upward sweep of the heavy blade.
The eighty kg iron slab split the beast’s chest wide open, sending entrails and hot blood raining across the stone.
But before Lucien could even reset his stance, three more wolves lunged from his blind spots—one clawing for his knee, two snapping at his ribs.
Lucien pivoted on his back heel, executing a textbook horizontal sweep of Flawless Basic Swordsmanship.
The brutal momentum sheared through the skulls of two beasts, but the third managed to rake its curved claws across his left thigh.
Tsssk.
Fabric shredded, and four thin lines of red blossomed across his jade skin.
The wound stung, but thanks to his eighteen cycles of stellar tempering, the beast’s steel-rending talons failed to bite deep into the muscle.
It was merely a surface scratch.
Still, the sheer arithmetic of the battle began to grind him down.
Slash!
Crack!
Every swing of Lucien’s greatsword carried the weight of a falling boulder, reaping a life with every precise arc.
He fought with mechanical, ruthless efficiency—cleaving spines, severing limbs, and parrying bone-shattering charges.
Yet for every wolf he slaughtered, four or five more swarmed into the vacuum, snapping at his ankles, lunging from the air, and tearing at his back.
Tear—!
Claws ripped through the shoulders of his training robe.
Another set of fangs grazed his forearm, sending fresh blood splashing onto the dry loam.
I was foolish to rely purely on single-target strikes, Lucien realized as he drove his blade down through a snarling muzzle, pinning the beast to the dirt.
I should have developed a sweeping, area-of-effect technique with my Genesis Elemental Control before coming here.
A wall of radial fire would have incinerated this swarm in seconds.
Regret was useless now.
Gritting his teeth, Lucien ripped the sword free and spun in a complete circle, the sheer kinetic fury of his blade carving a lethal perimeter of shattered bone and spraying gore. This chapter was copied from NovelPing without permission.
For half an hour, the gorge became a slaughterhouse.
Lucien’s breath turned ragged.
Sweat mixed with hot beast blood, burning his eyes as he swung his weapon again and again.
His clothes were reduced to shredded rags, dozens of shallow lacerations crisscrossing his chest, back, and arms.
Yet beneath the blood, his stellar-tempered body remained unbroken, his unyielding will driving his muscles through pure exhaustion.
THUD.
With a final, two-handed downward chop, Lucien split the thirtieth wolf cleanly in half.
The blade crashed into the bedrock, throwing up sparks.
Silence descended over the clearing, broken only by the crackle of burning reeds and Lucien’s heavy, rasping breaths.
Thirty carcasses lay scattered across the ravine, painting the stones in an ocean of dark crimson.
Lucien dragged the bloody greatsword behind him, his boots squelching in the crimson mud as he stepped toward the cliff face.
There, the carnage had also ended.
The mother tigress lay collapsed in a massive pool of her own lifeblood.
Her throat was torn open, her silver-white coat almost entirely soaked red from the Alpha’s savage assault.
Beside her, the tiny white cub was shivering violently, pressing its tiny face against its mother’s cooling nose, letting out weak, mewling cries that broke the stillness of the night.
As Lucien approached, the tigress’s glazed, dying eyes weakly shifted toward him.
She looked at her weeping cub one last time, an agonizing maternal grief burning in her failing gaze.
Then, with the last ember of her fading consciousness, she turned her silver eyes directly onto Lucien.
There was no beastly malice in her look—only a desperate, pleading prayer:
Please… take care of my child.
Lucien met her gaze.
Standing covered in blood with his sword resting in the dirt, he offered a slow, firm nod.
“I swear it.”
A faint, rattling breath left the tigress’s shredded throat.
Her head slumped heavily against the stone, her silver eyes closing forever.
The little cub let out a heart-wrenching, cat-like wail, pawing desperately at its mother’s lifeless jaw.
AWOOOOOOO—!
A terrifying, bloodthirsty roar shattered the grief.
Standing atop the tigress’s corpse, bathed in cold silver moonlight, was the wolf pack leader.
The Alpha was completely uninjured.
Seeing the entirety of its pack wiped out by a single two-legged mortal, the beast’s eyes burned with a venomous, unbridled malice that defied reason.
The red crescent between its brow flared with a ghastly crimson light, its muscular shoulders bunching as a fifth-level Bone Forging aura crashed down across the gorge like a physical tidal wave.
The beast locked its eyes onto Lucien, its lips curling back to expose dagger-like fangs dripping with the mother tiger’s blood.
Then, it struck.
The ground exploded beneath the Alpha’s hind legs.
It crossed thirty paces in a fraction of a second, moving so fast its shadowy form left an afterimage in the air. New chapters come out on g.com first.
BOOM!
Lucien barely managed to bring the flat of his heavy sword up to parry before the collision occurred.
The sheer, crushing impact felt like being struck by an avalanche.
The immense kinetic shockwave bypassed the blade, violently reverberating through Lucien’s wrists and forearms.
He was thrown backward, his boots carving two deep trenches through the gravel before he managed to dig his heels in ten paces away.
A metallic taste flooded his mouth as blood trickled past his lips.
The disparity was vast.
A fifth-level Bone Forging monster possessed density, skeletal reinforcement, and pure kinetic mass that utterly dwarfed his second-level Stellar Body.
Yet Lucien didn’t look at the beast with despair.
A wild, reckless grin stretched across his blood-stained lips, his bright blue eyes burning with manic, untamed defiance.
“Is that all you have, dog?!”
He surged forward, refusing to cower.
Clang!
Skrrrrt!
Boom!
Man and beast collided in a savage, high-speed storm of violence.
In the span of a dozen breaths, they exchanged dozens of lethal blows.
The Alpha’s claws slashed like black scythes, tearing chunks of stone from the gorge walls, while Lucien wielded his six-foot slab of steel with mechanical perfection, intercepting lunges and countering with bone-shearing thrusts.
Yet Lucien’s fatigue was mounting.
Every clash sent bone-jarring vibrations into his tired arms, and the blood loss from thirty earlier skirmishes was steadily sapping his stamina.
Blood coated his face, matting his snow-white hair until it was dyed a horrifying, battle-hardened crimson.
Still, he swung.
Still, he pressed forward, trading vitality for every inch of ground.
Then, his exhausted body betrayed him.
Following a heavy downward cleave that missed the Alpha’s flank by a hair’s breadth, Lucien’s lead foot slipped on a patch of wet moss.
It was an error of less than half a second—a microsecond of disrupted balance.
To an apex predator, it was an eternity.
The Alpha’s slit pupils flared.
Twisting mid-air with unnatural flexibility, the beast whipped its massive right foreleg across Lucien’s guard, its razor-sharp talons glinting cold beneath the moon.
RIP!
Five deep, gruesome gouges tore diagonally across Lucien’s chest, ripping through flesh and grating violently against the solid wall of his stellar-tempered body.
“Ngh!”
Lucien choked on his own breath, stumbling back four heavy steps, leaving a trail of crimson droplets in the dirt.
He fell to one knee, driving the tip of his greatsword into the bedrock to keep from collapsing entirely.
His chest heaved violently, his vision swimming as dark crimson blood cascaded down his torn torso, painting his shredded robes entirely red.
He was battered, bleeding, and gasping for air, his stamina scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel.
Ten paces away, the black-furred Alpha stood tall, utterly unharmed, circling Lucien with mocking, slow steps, savoring the scent of its prey’s impending death.