๐ฅ[๐๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐! ๐ฎ๐ฌ ๐พ๐๐๐ฅ๐ฉ๐๐ง๐จ ๐ฉ๐ค๐๐๐ฎ!]๐ฅ
๐๐ ๐๐ง๐ #๐ญ ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐ฌ๐ ๐๐ง๐ ๐ฃ๐ค๐ฉ ๐จ๐ฉ๐ค๐ฅ๐ฅ๐๐ฃ๐! ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ค๐ช ๐ฌ๐๐ฃ๐ฉ ๐ข๐ค๐ง๐, ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐! ๐๐๐ฉ'๐จ ๐จ๐๐ค๐ฌ ๐๐๐๐ฃ๐ค๐ซ๐๐ก ๐ฌ๐๐ค ๐๐จ ๐ฉ๐๐ ๐ง๐๐๐ก ๐๐ค๐ซ๐๐ง๐๐๐๐ฃ! โ๏ธ
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The ridge was no longer a place of stone and moss; it had become a pressurized chamber of redirected intent. Leonardo pressed his chest against the cold granite of the boulder, his breathing so shallow it barely clouded the freezing night air. He didn't just hide his body; he retracted his presence, pulling every stray thought and every flick of his pulse into the center of the Vazio.
The clicking was closer now. Skritch. Skritch-clack.
It wasn't the sound of a mammal's paws. It was the sound of calcified joints grinding against one another, a rhythmic, mechanical noise that suggested something with too many legs and not enough skin.
Leonardo tilted his head a fraction of an inch. Through a narrow crack in the rock, he saw it.
The Void-Stalked Scavenger crawled over the edge of the ridge like a nightmare made of obsidian and oil. It was roughly the size of a large wolf, but its body was segmented, covered in a dull, translucent exoskeleton that allowed Leonardo to see the pulsing, violet-black veins beneath. It had no eyesโonly a row of sensory pits along its snout that twitched in the air, tasting the molecular traces of fear.
Level 1, Leonardo thought, his left eye throbbing in a low, warning heat. But it's been touched by the Incision. It's faster than the books say.
The scavenger stopped. It was only ten feet away from his hiding spot. Its snout drifted toward the boulder, the sensory pits flaring a deep, bruised purple. It didn't "see" him, but it felt the "lack" of a soul where Leonardo stoodโa hole in the world's natural mana that was more suspicious to a void-creature than a bright light.
Leonardo's hand tightened on the Sting. The Earth Tier dagger felt like a shard of ice in his palm. He didn't wait for the beast to find him. In the Elinor, the one who waited was the one who was eaten.
He didn't jump out. He didn't scream. He simply allowed the Void to "spill" forward.
Leonardo blurred. One moment he was a statue behind a rock; the next, he was a streak of gray shadow moving through the mist. He didn't strike for the head. He remembered the Hunter's lesson: Strip the mobility, then the life.
The Sting lashed out, its matte-gray blade cutting through the air without a whistle. It sliced through the creature's rear joint, the Earth-Tier metal ignoring the reinforced chitin as if it were.
There was no cry of pain.
The Void-Stalked Scavenger didn't bleed red. From the severed joint, a thick, violet ichor hissed as it touched the stone, evaporating into a cold mist that smelled of ozone and rot. The creature spun with a speed that defied its segmented bulk, its multiple limbs skittering across the rock like a hail of obsidian needles.
It didn't scream, but a low-frequency vibration rattled the airโa sound Leonardo felt in his teeth more than his ears.
The beast lunged, its front mandibles snapping inches from Leonardo's chest. He didn't parry; he vanished. Using the Void State, he stepped "beside" the trajectory of the attack, his body becoming a blur of gray fabric and pale skin.
The Sting is working, Leonardo noted, his left eye tracking the flickering violet veins of the beast.
The Earth-Tier dagger hadn't just cut the shell; it had "bitten" the mana. Around the wound, the creature's translucent exoskeleton was turning a dull, brittle white. The Intermediate Earth Tier property was actively draining the energy the scavenger needed to regenerate. The beast tried to pivot on its wounded leg, but the limb buckled, the joint no longer recognizing the commands of its distorted nervous system.
"You're fast," Leonardo whispered, his voice a ghost of a sound in the mist. "But you're heavy. Every move you make costs a lot of energy."
The scavenger sensed the "gap" in the world where Leonardo stood. It reared up, its belly revealing rows of needle-thin ribs that glowed with a frantic purple light. Suddenly, it spat a glob of the violet ichor toward him.
Leonardo didn't dodge this time. He twisted his wrist, bringing the Sting up in a vertical arc. The dagger didn't just deflect the liquid; it swallowed it. The silver etchings on the blade flared a bright, aggressive white as the artifact consumed the raw void-essence of the attack.
The recoil sent a jolt of freezing energy through Leonardo's arm, but he didn't let go. He leaned into the cold.
"My turn," he muttered.
He didn't run at the beast. He appeared under its guard. He was a Level 1 Inept, a boy with no flashy spells or golden armor, but in that moment, he was the apex predator. He drove the Sting upward, aiming for the soft, pulsing gap between the scavenger's head and its primary thorax.
The blade sank in up to the hilt.
The resistance of the creature's inner anatomy was unlike anything Leonardo had felt in training. It wasn't just flesh and bone; it felt like stabbing a bag of thick, electrified sand. The Sting vibrated violently in his grip, its silver runes screaming with a cold light as they began to siphon the scavenger's very essence.
The beast didn't thrash. It froze, its many legs locking into place as the violet glow in its veins was forcibly pulled toward the blade. Leonardo held on, his boots sliding slightly on the blood-slicked rock. He could feel the creature's lifeโa jagged, hungry, and mindless thingโflowing through the hilt and into his own arm.
Then, with a sound like a glass vase shattering underwater, the scavenger's form collapsed. The translucent exoskeleton turned to gray ash, fluttering away into the mountain wind. All that remained was a small, pulsing orb of bruised violet light hovering just above the tip of the dagger.
Leonardo gasped, his lungs suddenly feeling as if they were filled with needles. The "Inept" label in his mind flickered, momentarily drowned out by the raw data of the kill.
[System Alert: Level 1 Void-Stalked Scavenger Terminated] [Harvesting Essence... Analysis: Corrupted Mana] [Soul Fragment Acquired]
The orb didn't wait for his permission. It sank into his chest. The cold wasn't just on the outside anymore; it was internal. Leonardo's left eye flared with a heat so intense he had to drop to one knee, clutching his face as the world turned into a kaleidoscope of violet and black.
"Is this... what it feels like?" he choked out, his voice cracking.
In the Spire, the "Sacred" ones talked about the euphoria of a harvest, the feeling of "Ascension." But for Leonardo, there was no joy. There was only a heavy, hollow ache and the sudden, terrifying realization that he could now "feel" every other living thing on the ridge. He could feel the worms in the dirt, the birds shivering in the trees, andโmost importantlyโthe three other scavengers currently circling the base of his boulder.
The first kill hadn't ended the hunt. It had just rung the dinner bell.
The heat in Leonardo's left eye didn't fade; it sharpened, turning the world into a monochromatic landscape of gray and pulsing violet. Through the rock, through the mist, he could see themโthree distinct heat signatures, cold and jagged, moving with a synchronized, predatory grace.
They weren't scavengers. These were Void-Stalked Seekers, the larger, more specialized cousins of the creature he had just killed. While the scavenger was a bottom-feeder, the seekers were the hounds of the "Incision," bred to find and eliminate anything that carried a trace of the old world's mana.
"Three," Leonardo whispered, his breath hitching. "Grandpa said to run if it was more than one."
But there was no running. The ridge was a narrow tongue of stone, and the seekers had already cut off the path back to the forest floor. He was trapped on a pedestal of granite, three hundred feet above a canopy that wanted to swallow him.
The first seeker crested the eastern edge, its long, spindly limbs hooking into the stone with a sound like iron nails on a chalkboard. Its head was a smooth, eyeless dome of chitin, split down the middle by a vertical mouth lined with rows of needle-teeth. The other two emerged from the mist to his left and right, forming a perfect crescent.
They didn't lunge. They began to circle, their movements twitchy and rhythmic, clicking to one another in a language of vibration that made the very air feel like it was bruising Leonardo's skin.
Leonardo stood his ground, the Sting held low at his side. He felt the weight of the soul-fragment he had just harvested pulsing, its energy erratic and violent. It was trying to merge with his Vazio, and the friction was making his vision swim.
He looked at the terrain. To his right, the ridge dropped off into a sheer chimney of rock. To his left, a cluster of lightning-struck pines stood like charred sentinels. If he stayed in the center, he was dead.
"You want a hole in the world?" Leonardo muttered, his violet eye flaring with a dark, defiant light. "I'll give you one."
He didn't retreat. He charged the seeker in the center.
The Seeker in the center didn't expect a frontal assault from a Level 1. It hissed, a sound like steam escaping a pressurized valve, and reared back to lash out with its scythe-like forelimbs. But Leonardo wasn't aiming for a killing blowโnot yet.
Just as the creature swung, Leonardo dropped. He didn't slide; he collapsed his weight into a roll, passing directly between the beast's spindly legs. The smell of the rot was deafening here, a physical wall of stench that made his eyes water. As he passed under the thorax, he drove the Sting upward, not deep enough to kill, but enough to leave a jagged blood on the creature's soft belly.
The Seeker shriekedโa high-pitched vibration that cracked a nearby layer of shale.
Leonardo didn't stop to admire his work. He was already at the edge of the chimney, the vertical drop swallowing the moonlight. Behind him, the other two Seekers were closing in, their clicking becoming a frantic, angry strobe.
"Catch me," Leonardo whispered.
He threw himself over the edge.
For a heartbeat, there was only the cold rush of the mountain air and the terrifying weightlessness of the void. Then, his hand found a jagged outcrop. His fingers screamed as they took his full weight, but the Void State allowed him to dampen the kinetic shock, his body becoming unnaturally light for a fraction of a second.
Above him, the wounded Seeker lunged over the edge, its predatory instinct overriding its caution. It tumbled into the chimney, its limbs scraping uselessly against the narrow walls.
Leonardo, hanging ten feet below the rim, swung his body with a violent momentum. As the falling Seeker passed him, he kicked off the wall, launching himself toward the creature in mid-air. He slammed into its side, his small frame pinning the beast against the opposite wall of the narrow chute.
The Sting found the gap he had carved earlier. Leonardo drove the blade in with both hands, using the gravity of their shared fall to bury the metal deep into the Seeker's core.
The silver runes on the dagger flared so brightly they turned the chimney into a pillar of white light. The Seeker's internal manaโdistorted and darkโwas sucked into the blade in a violent whirlpool. Leonardo felt the creature go limp beneath him, its exoskeleton shattering into gray flakes before they even hit the bottom.
Leonardo grabbed a thick, protruding root as he fell, his arm nearly popping out of its socket as he came to a swinging halt. Below him, the remains of the second beast vanished into the mist.
He hung there, gasping, his left eye bleeding a single, violet tear. He had two souls now. But above him, silhouetted against the dark sky, the remaining two Seekers were looking down into the chimney, their sensory pits glowing with a murderous, persistent light.
The hunt wasn't over. It had just moved into the deep.