"What are those snake-like things? Words?" Ivan mumbled with a deep frown on his face and began to memorise everything he could see. But soon after, he heard some kind of thumping sounds coming from a distance. He stood on guard as he began to glance around and soon felt the ground trembling slightly.
His frown deepened as he subconsciously channelled his mana into his eyes and ears, focusing on sight and sound, which soon found him a pack of massive wolves, snakes, and spiders rushing towards him from a distance of 50 kilometres. Though not clearly, he could tell that these monsters were sane and rushing towards him with the intent to hunt him.
"Run!" Suddenly, his own voice sounded in his head as it had previously, but a lot more mature than his current voice. And he turned around in the opposite direction of the horde and dashed.
*
After running for quite a while, he could feel that the monsters would catch up to him soon enough, and if he continued to run away, he wouldn't have any strength to fight when they caught up to him, so without hesitation or second thought, he sat in the middle of nowhere, concentrating on recovering even a bit of his strength before they caught up.
After a mere few minutes, the monsters' footsteps sounded louder than ever. Ivan opened his eyes and gazed at the horde of massive monsters' rushing towards him with drool dripping from their mouths.
BAM!
Ivan punched at the ground just like before and picked up a sharp-edged rock from the small crater that appeared beneath him from the force of his punch.
He stood up with a foot-long, fist-wide, sharp-ended rock in his hand and glared at the horde of massive monsters that contained 4 huge wolves, similar to those he had fought before falling unconscious, 6 huge snakes with fangs protruding out from their maxilla, and 3 huge spiders that gazed at Ivan as if he were their prey, a gaze that he didn't like one bit, but he couldn't do anything until he killed at least one of them, so now he searched for the one that had let its guard down.
A tense atmosphere descended upon them, which confused the horde of massive predators because they were stronger and even outnumbered their prey, but somehow it still felt ominous whenever Ivan's gaze landed on them. Finally, one of the spiders ignored its instincts and pounced on Ivan with two scythe-like arms pointed at him, ready to rip its prey apart.
He gazed at the incoming spider with a calm expression, which even Ivan was inwardly terrified of. And when it was only a few long steps away from him, Ivan channelled his mana into his arms, legs, and torso, raised the rock held hand behind his back, and threw it at the spider's head with every ounce of strength he could muster.
Fortunate for him, the mana boosted his overall abilities, making the throw a lot stronger than it should actually be.
BOOM
With a ring of wind pressure, the pointy rock shot out like a bullet and pierced through the spider's head as if a hot knife were passing through the butter, and Ivan, who lunged towards the spider as soon as he released the rock, appeared next to the dead spider's body as soon as it died, and
"Summon." He mumbled under his breath, picked up the pointy rock that dropped together with the spider's flesh, placed his hand on the dropped flesh, and sent it into the sub-space, hoping they wouldn't rot in it, and rushed towards the horde of massive monsters with a skeleton spider in his company.
He and the skeleton spider caught the horde by surprise, and Ivan killed a wolf as the skeleton spider cut off the heads of three snakes, vertically.
"Summon." He muttered again, gaining four more skeleton companies that changed the battle tide soon after.
*
All the claws swings, stabs, and bite wounds healed completely even amid his fight, but at the end of the fight he was tired from all the profuse bleeding and summoning that used almost all of his mana reservoir. He collected as much flesh as possible, storing it in his sub-space. When he was about to fall unconscious, he heard the sounds of footsteps again, also remembering what the engraved information said about his necromancy, and jolted awake from his slight daze, slapped himself, and sat on the ground with his summons guarding him to recover mana and strength to fight against the new horde of massive monsters'.
Their numbers counted up to fifty, a number Ivan would surely die against no matter what he did, so he sat—no, because of the spiky spine of the wolf, he couldn't sit—so he stood with his legs on the skeleton wolf's ribs, riding it quite far away, in hopes of digging underground to sleep, recover from all the fatigue, and fill his stomach before doing anything else.
*
After hours and hours of riding on the skeleton wolf's back with his other summons following him, he noticed that he was out of the footstep's sound range, so he ordered his summons to dig a rabbit's hole, in which he could trap and hunt the monsters or run away from the other side.
Of course, he too joined the dig, hoping to gain the summons' favour to make use of the [Aura of the Dead], thinking of different ways to use that against the enemies to confuse them. And amid all his thoughts about his survival, a question for which Ivan was in dire need of answers popped up in his mind.
'Why am I not affected by killing?' Ivan asked himself with a deep frown; not once had he thought of everything happening to him as weird, and that revelation confused him even more. But even among these thoughts, he didn't stop digging as he kept himself busy; his mind diverted off topic a few times, but he persistently asked himself that question, pondering about it.
Soon, after digging a few feet underground with many different pathways leading in different directions, Ivan ordered his summons to guard him and slept in the middle of them with that question continuously ringing in his mind.
And in a flash, a few days passed by and Ivan woke up. Since he didn't know how long he had slept, he didn't take his chances, and without wasting a single second, he tossed the monster flesh he collected at his summons as a "price," and watched them finish eating everything in a flash as he gazed at the phenomenon of the food they bit off turning into magic power before strengthening the bones of his summons.
Intrigued by the method, he thought of imitating that, but before he ate his fill, he mustered up all the courage he had, took a deep breath, pinched his nose, and took out the blood-dripping flesh from his subspace with muddied hands and wolfed it down. As disgusted as he was with the taste, texture, and stench, he wolfed it down with tears streaming out of his eyes. Since his summons didn't have a digestive system, he thought he should channel magic power to his teeth and throat to imitate the phenomenon, so he did, and he felt some of the flesh still going down to his stomach, so he shrugged it off and channelled the magic power throughout his entire body.
'If it is like this, wouldn't this benefit me more if I continuously channelled the magic power throughout my body? That reminds me of how strong I was while fighting against the monsters, and how strong my throw was....' Ivan pondered inwardly as he continued to wolf down the raw flesh and decided he would continuously channel magic power in his body until it became involuntary.
And at an abrupt thought, Ivan took out a fistful of spider flesh from his sub-space and threw it on the ground, and thankfully, for whatever reason, the flesh didn't rot.
"Hahaha." Ivan laughed in delight. He didn't question why he saw nothing happening to the flesh but was just thankful for it.
And a small tremor began to cruise through the ground he sat on, and his expression turned serious when he prepared his mind for the upcoming battle. He ordered a snake skeleton summon to scout the area, two of the summons to guard him, and the rest of the 10 to fight near the pitfalls they had created.
"Return alive." Ivan ordered his summons with a serious tone; since he was thankful for them, who have been guarding him while he slept, he didn't want to give up on them so easily as he did with the other wolf summons, so he really hoped that his summons would survive, and his summons could feel it, and his unintentional actions caused their favourability with him to rise, engulfing all 14 of them in a faint, terrifying, ghastly aura.
'Survive.' Ivan muttered in his mind about the condition he needed to fulfil if he wanted to return to Earth, and though he didn't know how long it would take to fulfil the condition, he would do it.
"No matter what."