Chapter 188: Savage Persistence
Kael hopelessly watched the creature rushing toward him in a hurry, unable to do anything at all.
With no limb left to attack its enemy with, the creature was forced to rely on its maw only. Unable to see anything, it managed to sense its prey through the deep stench of blood or his unique scent, otherwise, it would've missed its target completely.
Its needle-like teeth pierced straight through the flesh on the side of his chest. Instead of tearing the flesh out, the creature grabbed it tightly, holding him in such a way that whatever it was going to do later would not cause him to slip away.
In the next moment, it raised its head along with Kael's bloody body before slamming his broken shoulder into the boulder in front of it. It was the same thing that had halted his rolling from the slide.
Since the creature was blind, it didn't know that there was such a thing in its path, or at least, it shouldn't have. Perhaps it had intended to crush him into the ground below, but the boulder happened to come in its way.
Kael let out a terrifying scream that reverberated throughout the empty area.
Hearing his scream, the creature seemed to become even more aggressive and tried to crush him against the boulder again.
Before it could do so, Kael raised his bloody fist and struck its bloody eye, squashing it deep inside. Unexpectedly, it had no effect on the creature this time.
In the next moment, his broken shoulder struck the heavy stone awkwardly again and again, as sickening sounds of breaking bones rang in his ears. A wave of agony rushed through his body like a tide.
'Ah!'
Kael, however, ignored all of it.
He couldn't let himself be wavered by the pain now. He had come far enough with this battered body of his while gambling with his life, so, he was not going to let it end here. Instead, he was going to see it through to the end.
Gritting his teeth, he forcefully dragged his chest upward and pulled his fist back before thrusting it sideways at its neck.
Aside from its front limbs, the creature's body was mostly encased in a white exoskeleton or something similar, so, he wasn't sure how resilient it truly was... or if it was even breakable to begin with.
Still, he was determined to give it a shot.
As his fist connected with its skin, it broke through easily and struck something deeper inside with a soft, squirming sound.
Kael grinned.
In truth, his hand didn't do a thing, but it was the fact that there was another wound closely around its neck, or perhaps at the side of it, that had given him an opening.
As for where it had come from, considering that the two limbs near its neck had simply been obliterated by something, it was only natural that some kind of wound would have remained there.
As he was about to drive his fingers inside and try to behead it, the creature halted its attempt to slam him against the boulder.
'It noticed? That was fast!'
Before he knew it, the creature twisted its neck, causing his body to shudder uncontrollably. It turned away from the rusty stone and started dashing toward the other side. Since the land here was diagonal and uneven, each step it took made its speed even greater than before.
Still, for some reason, the creature didn't seem satisfied with it. It was as though something was chasing it down, something that it desperately wanted to escape from.
'What's its goal here? And why is it running away? It's afraid of something... from the exact same one that injured it?'
Kael was hanging from its mouth, but to prevent himself from falling, he wrapped his hand around its neck and grabbed it tightly.
A deadpan expression appeared on his face.
'Wait... shouldn't I be wrapping my arms around my lady's neck? No, that's not right either. She should be the one wrapping her arms around mine... so, why am I doing it with a monster, huh? Well, it's still better... since either way, she'd be strangling me.'
He narrowed his eyes, but all he could see was the deep fog surrounding him. Yet, for some reason, there was a part of the fog that felt strangely and incredibly darker than the rest. Or was he imagining it?
At some point, the creature lifted its wings and flapped them through the air at a terrifying speed, causing its body to rush even faster than before. Slowly but steadily, its body began to rise from the ground as it glided down from the strange place swiftly, carrying Kael along with it.
Its clamp on his body hardened as its teeth sank deeper into his flesh, making sure that he didn't fall behind.
'It can fly, no?'
Why was it gliding down then?
'Who cares? I'm getting a free ride here.'
Just as he thought that, he noticed a boulder blocking their way forward.
His brows twitched as he shouted.
"Turn left... turn left, bastard."
The creature neither listened to him nor tried to turn away from it. Instead, it flapped its wings faster and tried to fly over it, but unable to determine its exact height, its lower body still struck the tip of the boulder violently.
'Ah, right... it's blind. No, wait... how does it even know that there's something ahead of us? Does it have some special senses?'
Losing its balance, the creature crashed down awkwardly and tumbled across the uneven land. However, after a few rolls, Kael managed to free himself from its maws and found himself lying flat on his chest.
The creature, on the other hand, halted its fall with the help of its four legs a metre or two away from him. It steadied itself and raised its head, staring at him with its empty eyes soaked in green blood.
Looking back, Kael gritted his teeth.
'Damn you!'
With the help of his hand, he managed to roll onto his back and force himself into a leaning position, but instead of looking ahead, he leaned his head back as though looking at the sky.
'Back to where we began... huh?'
Not long after, the creature lunged at him, its needle-like teeth biting into his neck and slamming his head into the ground while tearing some flesh from his shoulder.
As blood dripped down from there, Kael wrapped his hand around its thick neck in return. He deliberately tightened his grip as though trying to crush it with sheer strength alone, his broken nails digging into its mangled flesh.
'But now, the situation is different. Like me, you're also battered and broken. However, unlike you, I'm not blind. Sure, you can still sense me from a distance, but that doesn't mean you can locate the exact parts of my body, correct? After all, true vision could never be comparable to mere senses. That's why you've got no choice but to attack below the highest point within your keen senses, no matter what it is... so that your attack doesn't miss its target. Pretty clever.'
Kael had figured it out from how the monster managed to notice the boulder but failed to cross it fully. He had assumed it became blind after losing its eyes only because his body could be sensed by any monster due to his unique scent or that cursed tattoo, but it seemed he was wrong.
As it turned out, even after losing its eyes, the bastard was still capable of vaguely perceiving whatever was in front of it.
'No wonder... it survived its predator even after losing both its eyes and limbs to it.'
That was why Kael used its flaw to his advantage and hid his head, waiting for the creature to try to bite his neck instead.
'It went pretty smoothly, I would say.'
The moment the creature noticed the trap, it jerked its head up right away. Despite that, Kael didn't let go of it and supported himself with his grip, hanging down from its neck. However, because he had only one hand left, and an injured one at that, it was a difficult task to maintain his grip.
He felt as though he wasn't merely hanging from it, but instead, his hand was being torn apart from his shoulder.
When it didn't work to shake him off, the creature changed its approach and slammed him into the ground with a thud first. Then, it stepped on him with one of its four legs, which possessed a dagger-like tip that sliced through the flesh on the side of his waist.
A loud scream escaped his lips unwillingly.
'Argh!'
Amidst the bone-chilling pain, Kael drove his fingers into its flesh and snapped its neck with a twist of his shoulders. Sadly, it wasn't enough to kill it. In fact, it didn't even harm it significantly, since these mantises' necks were just too damn flexible.
But that was fine with him.
He was never hoping to snap its neck.
As the creature struggled to break free of his grip around its neck, it also tried to devour his head in the process, its teeth scraping and peeling the flesh from his face while leaving several grazes behind.
If it could kill him here, there would be no need to go through extra trouble, after all.
In response, Kael twisted its neck to the side while preventing its teeth from piercing deep into his cheeks or close to the eyes.
After gathering all of his remaining strength together, he raised his chest as high as he could and threw it to the side in an attempt to perform a roll across the slide-like area.
However, it failed miserably because of his lack of limbs and strength. He simply wanted to turn the creature upside down, since its legs were supposed to be injured after crashing into the boulder. So, if he made it lose its balance, it would've fallen over on its own without a doubt. Yet, he couldn't even accomplish that much.
'Shit! Shit! Shit! Why is nothing working? Maybe it's just stupid of me to think that such a crash could break its legs to begin with, just because they're not made of exoskeleton and are rather thin compared to its body. This creature isn't the fragile insect I'm used to knowing, it's far more dangerous. Still, isn't it supposed to have some weakness at least? So why doesn't it?'
Lost in thought, he suddenly felt a bad premonition.
As soon as his grip loosened, the creature drove its head forward and bit off his ear in an instant. If he hadn't moved his head to the side in time beforehand, maybe he would've lost his head right then and there.
'Wind Sense? But why now?'
His cold gray eyes glinted faintly.
After devouring the ear in a gulp, the creature leaned back and opened its mouth again, revealing its needle-like teeth stained with lingering blood.
It closed its jaws around his face as drops of foul saliva slid down from them, falling onto his face one after another.
Kael was unable to move forward or even sideways since he was pinned to the ground by one of its legs.
Soon enough, its teeth sank into his skin, then deeper into his flesh, and just when it was about to use its bite to crush his head into a pulp, its grasp loosened around his head. Its body swayed a little before it fell beside him with a heavy thud, rolling into the ground before halting on its back.
Kael let out a sigh, drops of blood sliding down from the wounds on his face.
It had only been a few minutes since he had last run out of mana, which meant that in those brief moments, he had replenished just enough to cast a small spell or two.
The Wind Sense had reminded him of that.
So, while the creature was busy devouring him, he had aimed his hand beforehand and manifested only one wind blade, which was briefly larger than his usual ones. With its perfect sharpness, he launched it at the joint of the leg that was restraining him. Since it was just a joint, the blade simply cut through it and struck the leg behind it before severing that as well.
With both of the creature's legs on the same side being severed at once, it completely lost its balance and fell on its own, without him ever needing to do anything personally.
The reason why he hadn't attacked its neck was because he doubted whether his wind blade could penetrate through it or not. He didn't want to take any latent risks either.
Though, he was still not satisfied with it.
Forcing himself into a leaning position, he caught the leg piercing through his waist and tore it out of his body in a swift motion.
Using it as a lever, he managed to crawl toward the fallen creature, which was struggling to stand up again. The wings beneath it were flapping awkwardly against the ground in an attempt to lift its body. But no matter how hard they moved, they were of no use in its current position.
'If it isn't caught off-guard, the bastard would've somehow managed to maintain its balance using those wings... and I wouldn't even be surprised if it did that.'
When he finally reached its neck, he was about to push himself into a sitting position. But before he could do so, the creature let out a deafening shriek that rang through his eardrums like a crushing wave.
His body fiercely wanted to avoid listening to it, but he had no limbs to block his ears with. Worst of all, he was too close to it.
'This...'
He felt as though his head was being crushed beneath a heavy boulder, or perhaps something was brutally throbbing inside his skull. It was the kind of pain that could neither be suppressed nor ignored, no matter how much one wished to do so.
So there was nothing he could do to calm himself down.
'Ah!'
He kept grinding his teeth against each other, producing a strange sound, while his fingers clenched tightly around the broken limb in his palm.
Drops of blood slid down from the corners of his eyes and ears as he coughed, spitting out a mouthful of blood onto the ground.
'My body can't take it anymore.'
Still, through his hazy eyes, he saw the creature lash its head toward him and grab his neck, or at least that was what it was supposed to do.
However, Kael thrust its leg through the wounds in its neck before pinning it into the ground below, but because of the stone beneath it, the limb did not implant deep enough, which meant that it would set itself free in a matter of seconds.
Ignoring the aching in his head, he stared at the struggling creature with a cold sense of ruthlessness burning in his bloody eyes.
Clenching his fingers into a tight fist, he began delivering a barrage of devastating punches into the creature's face, striking it over and over again without giving it even a moment to recover.
In the first few strikes, the creature's face didn't seem to suffer much damage at all, but soon, the surface of its exoskeleton-like skin began to crack, the fractures spreading outward like a spiderweb. The cracks were then torn apart by the countless strikes of his fists until nothing but bloody, gruesome flesh remained on its face. Drops of green blood and splinters of mangled flesh splattered everywhere around him.
Despite that, the creature still seemed to be alive somehow, its intact legs swinging wildly through the empty air while its wings desperately flapped in an attempt to fly.
A cold sense of anger seemed to appear across his face as he scowled.
"Die! Die! DIE! DIE!"
"DIE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!"
His broken voice reverberated through the deathly silence of the gray fog.
Just then, the creature managed to free itself from the restraint and lashed its neck out at him, its teeth grabbing his neck while threatening to crush his windpipe.
But Kael was prepared for it.
Halting his fist in the middle of a strike, he grabbed the limb himself and forced the creature back down against the ground with everything he had left in his body.
Just as it opened its maw, Kael struck the remaining flesh covering its skull, or whatever it was, with a barrage of headfirst strikes, repeatedly smashing into it.
He stopped himself only when there was no movement left in its wings or limbs anymore. By then, its head was barely recognizable, as though something had squashed it completely into the ground.
'No, I can't be sure yet.'
He retrieved the leg from its neck and slit its throat, making sure that no matter what happened now, it would not find a way to get back up again.
Only after making certain of this did he finally let out a long sigh of relief.
Setting the sliced limb aside, he raised his bloody fist, which was covered in a mixture of both his own blood and the monster's blood, and stared at it for a moment.
Then he studied the corpse for a moment, his gaze lingering over its ruined body.
'Its willingness to survive is unlike anything I've ever seen before. Didn't know monsters could be this persistent. Even though it had lost, it should deserve a name at least.'
Usually, if a person discovered an unknown creature, the guild gave them the privilege to name it according to their liking, no matter what kind of name it was, or they could leave it to the guild to name it instead, and either way was acceptable.
Kael had never even cared nor bothered himself with how he should address a creature. It was because most of the monsters he had fought throughout his life were registered in the guild, so he always knew their names.
But this was the first time he had found himself on an unexplored floor and fought an unknown monster, something that wasn't recorded in any guild registry he knew of. Still, if there had been someone accompanying him here, he would've dumped the responsibility onto that person without a second thought, though.
'Come to think of it, those two unknown creatures would be named by her, right? I wonder what kind of names would she give them?'
Shaking his head with a faint smile, he glanced at the creature's neck and said.
"White Scyther. That will be your name."
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(Chapter Ended)
To be continued...