"Why are you curled up here, Jack?"
A massive shadow descended, swallowing the small boy who was huddled beneath the tree.
Jack slowly lifted his gaze. What met his eyes were layers of silk as thin as mist, dyed the color of dried blood.
The fabric clung tightly to her voluptuous figure, cut deep to reveal bare shoulders and a porcelain-white chest. The dress's high slit fell between her legs, yet the lower half was entirely open, displaying her toned, naked thighs without a shred of modesty.
Her fiery red hair cascaded down, blending into the crimson robe. Rising prominently from her head were two glossy black horns, curving proudly toward the sky.
Jack squeezed his eyes shut, burying his face in his knees, his hands clutching his head tight.
His voice was barely a whisper:
"No one... wants to play with me."
Hot tears welled up, rolling through the gaps of the boy's soaking fingers.
"Why... why don't I have horns?"
His small hands moved to the top of his head, clawing desperately at his own red hair. Fingers scraped against smooth skin, searching in vain for something hard, something proud like his mother's, but finding nothing but humiliating difference.
His voice broke, choking on sobs:
"Why aren't I like everyone else?... And Dad... Where is my Dad, Mom?"
The innocent question fell into a heavy silence.
The woman slowly knelt. She spread her arms wide, pulling his trembling, tiny body into her warm, soft embrace.
Her hand gently stroked his small back, tender yet firm. She did not answer the question about his father, instead whispering into his ear a mother's solemn vow:
"It doesn't matter. No matter what form you take, you are my flesh and blood. I will always be with you."
Her large hand caressed the boy's red hair, her voice sweet as honey but carrying the weight of a promise:
"Listen to me, Jack. When you are old enough, I will give you a gift—something your father left for you. Trust me, once you hold it in your hands... no one in this world will ever dare to bully you again."
...
"Hey Och! I've got a gift for you too."
Jack growled, tossing the rusty sword (borrowed from Lucas) aside like a piece of trash.
He focused his entire being into his hands, gripping the bleached-white bone handle of the axe. His fingers squeezed so hard the shaft emitted a sickening crack, as if it were about to shatter. Answering its master's bloodlust, the muscle fibers coating the axe blade pumped furiously, turning a brilliant crimson, pulsating like a heart in cardiac arrest.
"Hmph...!!!"
Jack began to spin.
One rotation. Two rotations.
The wind screamed.
BOOM!
Ending the spin with a thunderous stomp, the stone floor beneath him cracked into a spiderweb pattern. Enormous inertial force traveled from his heel, corkscrewed through his hips, surged into his shoulder, and exploded out of his arm.
Jack let go.
The Blood Axe tore through the air, spinning blindly like a meat grinder, shrieking a horrific sound as it aimed straight for the giant toad.
On reflex, Och swung his massive, spike-covered arm, intending to swat away the incoming projectile.
Squelch!
The spinning axe wasn't deflected. Instead, it sheared cleanly through the giant hand, piercing the thick hide and embedding itself deep into the corner of the monster's mouth. A deep trench of a wound split open, purple blood spraying out like a waterfall.
Jack didn't stop. He raised his bleeding hand high.
The scent of the master's fresh blood was an absolute command. The Blood Axe shuddered, jerking itself free from the wound, spinning in mid-air before shooting back toward Jack.
Thud!
The bone handle snapped into his palm. Using the returning momentum of the axe, Jack spun, borrowing the inertia to hurl a follow-up strike.
And so it went. The axe flew out and returned at breakneck speed, relentless as machine-gun fire. The giant monster roared, contracting its body into a ball of meat to shield itself.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Chunks of flesh were minced, layers of warty skin ripped apart, scattering across the slimy arena floor.
The stone floor, already pitted, became even more wretched under Jack's frenzied stomps. Cracks spread like veins, pulverizing the stone into gravel, making the footing increasingly precarious.
Not wasting the golden opportunity Jack had created, Lucas had already vanished from his previous spot.
Whoosh!
He tossed a massive wooden greatbow toward Arwen. The bow's body was rough and gnarly, like an ancient branch fresh snapped from a primeval forest, still bearing a few green leaves fluttering with life.
Immediately after, the magic staff was thrown precisely toward Lily.
Support duties finished, Lucas finally grabbed his own weapons.
It was a pair of Blood-Chain Dual Blades. The blades were long as short swords, curved and crimson as blood. Connected to the hilts were long, cold black chains that automatically coiled up, constricting around Lucas's forearms like snakes.
"Let's go!"
Lucas threw both hands behind his head, gathered momentum, and swung hard.
Clang! Clang!
The two blades tore through the wind, dragging the long chains behind them to embed deeply into the vertical stone wall on the left.
Lucas yanked his arms back. The chains went taut, catapulting his body into the air toward his weapons. He latched onto the wall, his hands alternating, driving the blades into the stone face to scale the height with terrifying speed.
In the blink of an eye, Lucas was hanging upside down from the apex of the domed ceiling, his cold eyes looking down at the monster below.
Every muscle bundle in his legs tightened, compressing all his strength, and then... released!
Boom!
The ceiling stone cracked at the launch point. Lucas dove down like an arrow shot from heaven, his dual blades pointed straight down, aiming directly for General Och's warty skull.
Lucas's brain-piercing stab sent an anaphylactic shock through the monster's entire nervous system.
Gurgle... Gurgle...!
Och's stomach convulsed uncontrollably. Green, steaming acidic bile surged up from its gullet, erupting from its mouth like a broken dam, drenching the floor.
Lucas gave it no time to breathe.
Schwing!
He yanked the dual blades out. A spray of purple blood splattered onto his face, instantly matting his curly hair, weighing it down. The blood-soaked locks straightened, inadvertently creating a gap that revealed eyes as black as the abyss, silent as a dead lake.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Lucas's arms became blurring streaks. The stabs rained down, relentless, moving with the speed of an industrial sewing machine running on overload, mincing the toad's crown into a pile of slimy ground meat.
"GROOOAAA!!"
Och roared in agony. In desperation, it swung a giant arm toward its head, intending to crush the ant causing havoc up there.
Bang!
The massive hand was blasted backward before it could touch Lucas.
A wind-clad arrow from Arwen had drilled a massive hole right through the center of its palm, blowing away both flesh and bone.
"Found its core yet, Lily? Jack's running on fumes!"
Arwen gritted out, her hands continuing to loose covering fire, but her eyes darted anxiously to her teammate.
Lily didn't answer. She gripped her staff tight, sweat pouring down her temples. Her golden eyes were wide open, focused to the extreme.
The floating orbs of light around her flared, projecting scanning beams that penetrated the monster's thick flesh. In Lily's mind, General Och was no longer warty skin, but a complex web of thousands of red muscle bundles and thick layers of fat.
"Where? Where is it?"
She frantically filtered through tons of meat and organs. There! Hidden deep beneath the blubber was a tiny anomaly, pulsing with rhythmic energy.
"Found it! Lower abdomen!"
Lily's scream echoed through the room, drowning out the monster's roar.
"The energy core is right at its navel!"
Arwen's face went pale, cold sweat soaking her back. She looked at the giant toad, which was pressing its belly flat against the floor to shield itself, and screamed in despair:
"What? The lower abdomen? It's lying flat on the ground! How the hell am I supposed to aim at that?!"
Arwen's warning had barely faded when the nightmare began.
The deep wounds on General Och's body started to bubble. Severed muscle fibers automatically weaved back together, knitting at a speed visible to the naked eye. The infinite energy from the crystal in its gut was turning it into an immortal fortress. Every effort so far had been in vain.
On Jack's side, his breathing grew heavier. The axe in his hand felt like lead; his swings no longer carried the wind-shearing force they had moments ago.
Sensing the prey was exhausted, Och seized the moment.
Boom!
It drove its entire weight into its hind legs, kicking off with such force that the stone wall behind it exploded, showering debris. Its massive body launched like a cannonball, straight at the teetering woodsman.
Jack instinctively stepped back, but it was useless. The pitch-black shadow engulfed him, blotting out the surrounding space.
"GET LOST!"
Lia's shout tore through the air.
Whoosh—Wham!
An invisible hand of force field slapped upward from below, crushing the monster's momentum. The ton-and-a-half mass of meat was flipped backward, its belly exposed in mid-air.
Lucas reacted instantly. He threw his blades into the wall, the chains retracting to pull him out of the danger zone in the nick of time.
Simultaneously, a figure charged forward.
Arwen didn't run. She gathered speed and dropped to her knees, using the momentum to execute a long slide across the slick stone floor.
Skreee...
Her knees frictioned against the floor, sparking fire. In a perfectly artistic backward-leaning slide, Arwen raised the greatbow high. The string was drawn to its limit, the arrow aimed straight at the faintly glowing spot on the lower abdomen of the monster currently tossed into the sky.
Bang!
A sharp explosion rang out as the wind-clad arrow bored through the soft belly skin, shattering the glowing crystal inside.
The massive hulk crashed down, rolling several times across the stone, revealing a gaping hole smoking with black fumes in its lower abdomen.
"WE WON!"
Arwen couldn't help but scream, a smile of victory just blossoming on her lips.
But that joy was extinguished in a single breath.
The heap of meat on the ground began to twitch. Och braced its hands, slowly lifting its massive carcass up.
Blood drained from Arwen's face. She panicked, turning her head to look behind.
The stone gate was sealed shut, trapping them all in a dead end. Jack was leaning heavily on his axe to keep from collapsing, his chest heaving. Not far away, Lia had collapsed, kneeling on the ground, two streams of fresh blood running from her nose to her chin—a sign her endurance had shattered.
Lily stood frozen, shaking uncontrollably. Her golden eyes were stretched wide, staring at another point of light that had just flickered into existence on the monster's back.
"No... impossible..." Her voice cracked, crumbling in despair. "It... has two cores?"
Clatter.
Arwen's fingers went numb. The greatbow slipped from her grasp, hitting the cold stone floor with a dry thud.
In that moment of despair, Arwen tried to look back at the last teammate capable of fighting.
High on the wall, Lucas was still hanging by a dagger wedged into the stone. His cold gaze was still fixed on the darkness behind the beast.
Arwen screamed, the heart-wrenching cry of a sister shedding her thorny shell:
"Lucas! I'm sorry! I'm sorry for always being so hard on you... I was just afraid something would happen to you, afraid you'd die in this godforsaken place..."
She sobbed, pouring out the words she had buried deep:
"I love you all... For an orphan like me, you are my family. Since I met this team... I've been truly happy."
Tears rolled down her dirt-streaked cheeks, accompanied by choked sobs.
But Lucas didn't seem moved. He maintained his posture, the knife in his free hand slowly raising, pointing straight at a blind spot behind the monster's back like a guiding signal.
Following the direction of Lucas's knife, through her tear-blurred vision, Arwen vaguely made out a dark figure stumbling up from the shadows.
"Who is that?"
She asked herself, ransacking her memory for who she had miscounted. Jack was here, Lia here, Lucas on the wall, Lily beside her...
"Long?!"
Arwen started, whipping her head toward Lia.
Though kneeling on the ground, blood streaming from her nose due to exhaustion, a sly, triumphant smile played on Lia's lips.
The memory rushed back to Arwen like a lightning bolt.
The moment Lia unleashed the force field palm, she hadn't just knocked the toad back. Another dark figure had ridden that wave of force, flying over the monster's head to land on the far side of the room.
A crazy tactic.
And the price was not cheap. Long stood there, swaying as he leaned against the wall. The forced "landing" clearly hadn't been smooth. A large gash on his forehead poured fresh blood, running down and dyeing half his face crimson.
"You know what?"
The cold voice rang out from behind, sending a chill down the monster's spine. Och turned its head reflexively, but it was too late.
Long smirked, the smile on his blood-caked face becoming twisted and manic:
"Speaking of flammable gas coming out of a living body... the only thing I can think of is your farts."
Thud!
Long put every ounce of his remaining strength into his arms, thrusting the wooden spear forward.
The sharp steel tip skewered the high-capacity backup battery he had tied to the end, then drove straight, hilt-deep, into the monster's "back door"—the only place unprotected by the rugged hide.
Sizzle... BOOM!
The punctured Lithium battery instantly triggered a thermal reaction, exploding right inside Och's rectum. The flame from that small explosion was like a match thrown into a powder keg, igniting the massive pocket of toxic Methane gas compressed within its gut.
KA-BOOM!!!
A dull, terrifying explosion resonated from deep within the General's body.
Och's massive belly ballooned in an instant and then burst. Organs, flesh, and slime sprayed across the cavern like an acid rain. The monster was obliterated instantly, unable to utter even a dying roar.
The shockwave from the blast hurled Long back, slamming him hard against the stone wall behind. He slid down, coughing violently, but his eyes remained locked on the mess in front of him.
From the smoking debris of meat, a purple crystal shot out, hovering in mid-air.
"Now!"
Without needing Long's signal, Lucas was already waiting.
From the cavern ceiling, the boy let go, diving like a falcon seizing its prey. The dual blades in his hands swung, tracing two crimson semicircles that sliced through the air.
Clang! Crack!
The crystal shattered into a hundred glittering fragments before vanishing into the void.