He returned back to the real world barely screaming. A new rune was being drawn on his body. This time around, it was more than one and combined to form the whole. On his arms, the runes of two long tusks began to appear.
The same thing went for his legs but instead it was runes of an elephant's feet instead.
Luckily for Atlas, the process took shorter than usual, lasting about only twenty minutes. Compared to the hour and day long inscriptions, this felt like a breeze.
'Two more to go!'
He got to his feet and charged forward again, expecting to cut through the normal steps easily. It turned out that after the third bottleneck, the normal steps became even harder. Not quite the level of a bottleneck, but reaching quite close.
'Dammit!'
This was going to cause him to spend even longer than before. Atlas couldn't risk that. He had way less than a day before his deadline arrived. There was no way he'd spend that amount culling the cannon fodder.
