Chapter 3: He's gone?
Suddenly, many haunting, howls; blood-curdling, screams; unnerving, wails; resonated from within the atramentous, alpine woods enclosing the man in a grim colosseum.
In anticipation of the oncoming onslaught, the man firmly grasped his weaponry.
Pupating from the blackened trees, repulsive, odious mutants emerged spewing a familiar mucus on the pulsating terrain waking from their hibernation.
These contorted creatures crawled in a twisted unnatural form, moving in a foul fashion.
The monsters infected the land like a dreadful disease,
spreading, killing, and destroying the natural biome. Feeding of the living turning them into nutrients.
Morphing the very plains they inhabit into a monstrous confine, a vile virus that spreads uncontrollably.
Growing putrid woodlands, that were cancerous to the natural ecosystems they infected.
The mangy, mangled, mutants emerged from their shadowed confines to reveal their horrid appearances, illuminated by the deep blue light from the pulsating veins that sprawled over every inch of their alien ecosystem.
The monsters had many variations. Some were ailing, sickly, skinny, bony abominations crawling on all fours starved, hairless, and slimy. Their black veins were visible through their thin, pale, discoloured skins.
Some took a more beastly form of deformed wolves with thick black mangey fur.
Others were more reptilian, but all variations shared one singular feature.
Two pairs of soulless empty white, grey cataract eyes.
With a marbled layer of …
Baby blue.
The man spared no time as he leaned on his left leg digging it into the pulsating moist ground, diverting all his strength to the silver spear, he firmly grasped in his left hand.
The spear began to glow a bright crimson.
His muscles contracted into a coiled spring as he flung the spear.
Zip! it flew, supersonic!
The ground vibrated rapidly, as the spear let out an ear-deafening whistle as it began to glow red.
It broke the sound barrier.
BANG!
Bursting the wriggling ground, unearthing the deep sown veins, the dark red blood from before was now spread across the plain scattered by the initial explosion.
A huge crater was made by the spear stretching for miles, the once thick full forest now empty.
The gargantuan explosion unearthed even the tallest trees as it flashed through the air destroying everything in its path.
The spear that now glowed a bright red was submerged in wild roaring crimson flames.
The land burned, releasing a putrid rotting stench that disperced spreading through the air.
Even the sunny boy made a displeased expression smelling the pungent stench.
Thousands of screeches and ghastly squeals of agony could be heard from the fire-ridden lands, eradicated by the spear's outburst of mana.
Then, surfacing from the fire and embers of the crater, cast a mangled shadow.
If it was this easy to kill monsters the man would have already destroyed the monster plains long ago.
Rising from the flames, a few of the remaining monsters emerged, their flesh bubbling popping, their bones exposed their muscles tattered.
But as they made their descent from the crater, their skin stretched, and string-like muscle fibers began to spiral over their exposed bones, like maggots crawling, sizzling.
The burnt areas began to bubble viciously smoking with a subtle deep blue glow.
They were regenerating.
"Tch! And I here hoped that all your disgusting flesh would've been burnt off your cores. But there are always the few, that choose to struggle."
The monsters that exited the crater were different from the masses that were burning within the void of fire.
They were larger, taller, and darker.
Their muscles bulged like tumors. They were superior. Stronger than the rest by a large margin.
The man then spun his sword as he stepped forward.
His bright red sword began to also glow the same crimson as the flames.
He embedded it with mana.
Darting, the man charged toward the barrage of monsters that rushed toward him.
The man, upon meeting the first of the monsters that emerged, swiftly, swung his sword, slicing the massive beast into two clean halves the man dodged, avoiding the splatters of blood.
Prying its core from the centre of one of its halves, that now rolled to the origin of the curved plain.
He then looked over to see the ten other shaggy beasts and reptilian mutants that had also made it out of the crater.
None of the sickly-looking abominations made it through the first strike the alabaster man had made.
The man then looked at the baby that now seemed to be suffering the consequences of previously tasting the fur of his coat.
Making a pitiful expression gagging; the white fur from his coat clung to his pink tongue.
Let's hurry this up, thought the man his sword began to glow brighter, extruding a more chaotic aura as he vanished from his spot.
Fazing behind a reptilian monster stabbing it clean through the centre, making the sound of ripping metal as he sliced its spine, segmenting its back, causing a pool of its thick red blood as he removed its core.
Pouncing on the man from behind another beastly monster.
The man turned decapitating the beast, causing its headless body to flop to the ground as its exposed flesh began to bubble.
The man sliced it open its belly, gutting it and removing its core in the process.
The man then turned around, throwing his sword, which stabbed a beast in its cataract eye.
Pushing the blade further into its skull, a loud cracking sound came from the monster as its bones shattered under the force of the man's sword.
Before slicing through its rib cage, bursting its core left its body.
The man then tugged his sword from the motionless corpse, flinging it in front of him, spearing the heads of two reptilian monsters.
The man stepped on their still-moving bodies and sliced both from their cores.
The man then swiftly cleanly sliced, stabbed, gutted, and carved the remaining five monsters cleanly, lacerating their thick skins and armoured bodies, with such brisk agile movements that he appeared to flash in and out of sight.
Like how a master chef sashimi fish, the man made quick work of the monsters, not even a drop of blood could be found on him or the child.
The way he hunted was like an art form precise and calculated.
Within seconds, the monsters that enclosed him in the arena of death now coloured it with their gore.
The thick mucus-covered floor now thinned with blood looked even more repulsive than when the man first walked out into the monsters' land.
The man continued to walk into the massive burning crater he had made. Its fires were still lighting the surroundings, a strong bright crimson red.
The man held out his sword in one swell motion, extinguishing the roaring flames.
Immersing the bright burning forest back into the veil of darkness.
Glowing a deep blue, the burnt floor began to bubble as it attempted to recover from the flame's destruction.
The depths of the crater revealed a layer of black soil under the mutant woods that resembled the barren land on the outskirts of the monster plains.
The man walked into the crater, checking the multitude of cores that now lay next to the silver spear that glowed a flaming orange, encasing its surroundings in a thick fog.
The heat from the spear's blast had vaporized the monsters.
The man went over to the spear walking past the vaporized remains of the monsters that were within the centre of the crater. That covered miles in its radius.
The thousands of cores from the vaporized monsters had collected in a disorganized pile after rolling down the steep slope of the enormous crater.
The man went to go retrieve his spear.
But when the man went to grab his spear.
Sizzle!
The man's hand began to burn his skin, peeling a bright red. He had forgotten he was not wearing his thick gloves of monster hide.
Thanks to a certain individual who seemed to have enjoyed all the jumping the man was doing.
Considering, the boy had been in hysterics every time the man leapt or sprinted.
At least someone is enjoying it.
"I guess it's baby's day out, huh?"
The man then scouted the area to see if any monster had made it out of the flames.
The man heard distant yelping coming at least five miles away from the other side of the crater.
He then jumped over the staggering wall of jagged displaced sediment to find one singular beast dismembered, squirming, wriggling, twitching.
A good portion of its body had been blown into a thick mush-like paste.
The monster glowed a deep blue as it bubbled, regenerating the rest of its body from the ribs down.
This cockroach-like resilience made monsters quite the problem to deal with, and this is why the man never leaves an area without checking thoroughly beforehand.
The man held his silver spear above the twitching monster plunging into its coarse thick skin, twisting it into its rib cage, weeding out its mudded metallic core.
The once animated monster that squealed and squirmed was now a motionless blob of burnt mush that tinted the black terrain red.
These small lumpy cores were clouded.
Nothing like the perfect spherical pure shiny metallic legendary cores. But with a large enough quantity, they may work.
The man was doing the equivalent of trying to power a car with button batteries by powering a barrier with thousands of regular mana cores.
He was hoping that if he stacked the power of thousands of regular cores, he could replicate a legendary one.
The man walked further inland to the northern end of the massive crater, where he slashed his sword into the lively roots and pulsating veins of the tree, severing them from the rest of the woods.
Disconnecting the burnt land he raided from the rest of the monster plains.
The now severed plain began to shrivel as the life that once breathed into it was fading.
The pulsating ground that glowed a deep blue faded no longer illuminating the foreground.
Halting its regeneration, the tall trees began to crumble, and the moist mucus-covered floor shrivel up drying out, slowly crumbling into a flat black plain just like the one thousand-mile plain that lead up to the monster territory.
Yes. The thousands of miles of empty black flat lands the man crossed to enter the woods were once part of the monster's living ecosystem.
Until the man came, even the white borders were blackened-infested monster lands.
The alabaster man lifted his spear and swished his sword, removing the excess blood before sheathing it in the holster on his left leg.
He began collecting the mana cores, removing a smooth gold item ring off his finger.
It was the item ring used to store the legendary rank mana cores.
He began to fill it with the thousands of mudded cores that piled in the crater.
After collecting the thousands of cores that were stacked in the centre of the crater, he left the deep hole to retrieve the ten monsters' cores that survived the initial attack.
The man collected their cores that weren't as mudded or irregularly shaped as the cores in the crater.
Their cores were of higher purity. These monsters were no weaklings they were the strongest of their colony.
But, unfortunately for them, their opponent was no average bloke either. But rather a monster of his own accord.
The man of alabaster.
Soon enough, after collecting the cores, the forested land had already disappeared, removing another ten miles from the monsters' plains.
The man decided to remove the hides of the ten monsters that escaped his first attack.
Hoping to replace his cloak and gloves.
To once again complete his set of black monster armour.
He then removed the boy from his stomach, placing him down on the now dry flat land, after reassuring himself that there was no blood on it.
The boy was five months old but could already sit up by himself and understand simple words.
It's not something a five-month-old should be capable of.
Regardless, only babies seven months or older were able to crawl, meaning the kid can't go anywhere.
The man began to remove the monster's thick fur, strong armoured scales, thick hides, and leathered skins with his mana embed blade.
It takes a lot of mana to penetrate a monster's hide, but the boy can do that with his small row of sharp teeth.
Just what is the boy anyway?
Is he an elf…
No, they have pointy ears and characteristic green eyes.
Then how about a semi-human species…
No, can't be they develop like humans.
…
Dragon? …
It makes the most sense, but
Do they even have a nation? Were they, not solitary beings by nature?
The man lost in thought pondered as he removed all the useful materials from the monster corpses.
He then looked over his shoulder to the sunny boy that had now appeared to have left…
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.
.
.
" HES GONE!?!!! "
.
The man shouted for the first time in many years.
He was in a frenzied state of panic.
"He's gone! where is he, WHERE IS HE!"
The alabaster man stood up and turned around desperately searching, franticly looking, and then he remembered the boy could use mana.
The alabaster man scurried and hurried and followed the gold trail of the boy's sunny mana.
He went further and further into the monster plains that grew thicker and thicker the trees taller and taller.
The faint deep blue glow from the veins now became stronger and stronger.
The man was sprinting so fast that he appeared as a white blur, and then he reached the end of the trail.
What he saw made his heart drop.
Giggling could be heard from the thick, overgrown forest.
The small sunny boy had crawled to a ginormous wolf-like creature its stature was huge. Ten meters in height alone, it was large, more built than the average wolf, its eyes a marbled white, its fur black, thick.
The majestic beast released its potent aura of bright blue.
Unlike the previous monsters, the kaiju-sized wolf had a majestic appearance.
There was no other monster, but this wolf for a few kilometers…
.
.
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This wolf is a legendary rank monster.
Chapter 3 fin.