"Max. Nice to meet you Slavia. I'll have to admit. I find the way you warmed up to me to be strange."
Dimitria smiled, her blue eyes glinting in the twilight.
"Maybe I find you quite harmless, unlike my cohorts over here. Besides, I'll choose an encounter with a human over a Borna anyday, even though he has some weird magic I've never seen."
The orc that rode his mount cleared his throat, signalling at Slavia to back away, which she did. Their little conversation had come to its end.
Max chuckled, partly out of relief that someone sort of trusted him, and partly out of shock. He hadn't expected a world shrouded in darkness to possess someone so warm. From what Slavia said, it seemed Velda also condemned this world to the same darkness as earth, but it didn't seem to be intentional. He just wanted more power, and never cared about what happened along the way, even though it meant unleashing a battalion of deadly eyeball creatures.
Unbeknownst to Max, he should've wished the Voxper was the only Borna he had come across, because the next one wasn't something many walked out of alive.
"Halt."
Dimitria stopped the troupe on top of one of the sand dunes. A strange whistle rang through the air. The horses, or pitars, as Max had heard a gang member call them, grunted in what seemed to be fear.
Max scanned the black expanse of sand. As far as he knew, there was nothing to see for miles.
Then it struck.
A black tendril of smoke appeared out of thin air and wrapped around the torso of the burly orc that rode his pitar. It hoisted him high in the air and smashed him on the ground. So hard that his neck snapped off the rest of his body and rolled to a stop near Max's pitar's hoof.
The pitars whinnied in fear and threw all their riders off, vanishing back into the shadows from whence they came. Max dropped to the ground with nothing to break his fall, his face coming eye to eye with the orc's dead eyes.
Max had come so close to death multiple times that death shouldn't have fazed him, but the orc's lifeless eyes, the pool of blood surrounding the severed head. It reminded him of a close memory he had desperately tried to get out of his system.
His mother…
Max quickly stood up, his wrists still bound. If anyone had paid attention, they would have noticed the beads of sweat that formed on his forehead, the way he shook and shivered like a fly caught in the rain.
All the gang members, now reduced to six, had their weapons out and ready. Slavia brandished a dark glaive, while their leader. Dimitrius, held out a longsword, her eyes darting here and there like a hawk.
Max heard the whistling again, and the tendril appeared, striking at one of the bird men with lightning speed. For a moment, it seemed he was next in line for death.
But then, Dimitria struck, slashing her longsword in a vertical arc and severing the creature's smoky arm. There was a horrendous scream, and the full creature appeared not around them, but above them.
"The Dreadweaver", a member of the gang exclaimed.
The Dreadweaver floated ominously in the air, surrounded in a thick, smoky haze that shifted and coiled around it, hiding parts of it in a shroud that Max couldn't see. That must have been how it concealed itself all that time, but after Dimitria injured it, its invisibility trick was failing.
From its core, dozens of razor-sharp tendrils whipped out, dark and smoky, stretching and retracting like the tentacles of an octopus. slicing through the air with terrifying speed and precision. Glowing red eyes peered out from above its core, watching coldly as it descended towards the gang.
DING!
Thea was back, and not a moment too soon. A translucent loading screen appeared in his vision.
[Granting Host the passive ability: "Lucid Gaze"]
[Description: grants Host the power to perceive hidden details of any creature—its stats, HP, and weak points—illuminated by a revealing inner light. The ability focuses light energy directly onto the target, highlighting vulnerable spots in a faint glow and displaying critical stats in the Host's vision.]
The screen faded, and Max could suddenly see some details when he looked at the creature. They appeared as specks of light.
[Beast aspect: C-rank Borna]
[Name: Dreadweaver]
Max focused closely, and specks of light illuminated the circle of teeth at the creature's core and its two red eyes: the weak spots.
The most shocking thing Max saw when he focused very closely was a stat that appeared above the creature's head.
[HP: 10000]
Max swallowed.
How was he ever going to defeat the Dreadweaver when the only ability he had would deal damage worth just 100 points?