Xavier punched his clawed hand straight into the wolven’s chest. He tore through muscle and sinew, cut through fat and bone, until he reached what he was after, grabbed hold of it, and ripped.

He grasped a chunk of the wolven’s heart, holding it gripped tight in his hand. A kill notification sprang into his vision the instant he’d ripped it out. Xavier tilted his chin up, staring through half-slitted eyes at the heart. Blood poured through his fingers, its slow trail staining his skin red, but it slid straight off hid Midnight Robes, unable to cling to the self-cleaning surface that they maintained.

There was a thrum in his chest as his own heart beat hard, pumping blood through him at a rate quicker than was usual for his body. As was normal for him since his transformation had begun, his heart was not beating faster from the fight. No, it was beating faster because he wanted to tear through the chunk of the wolven’s heart he held in his hand.

He wanted to devour it.

I am in control.

Xavier’s breathing—which had been ratcheted up to twice what was normal—slowed. He tossed the heart off to the side and looked through the barrier of his time dilation field.

He was standing in the middle of a clearing not far from the grove where he’d been training with Liana, surrounded by a pack of wolven. Well, it was only half a pack of wolven now that he had dealt with the first four members. Their corpses were strewn across the grass around him within the time bubble, but the rest of their kin—including the grey-furred, stocky beast that was their alpha—were awaiting him outside of it. The moment he popped the time bubble they would be upon him.

And he relished the moment.

Xavier looked through his notifications. It wasn’t just kill notifications that he had received.

Close Combat Fighting has reached Rank 31!

Close Combat Fighting has reached Rank 32!

Red In Tooth And Claw has reached Rank 49!

Iron Grip has reached Rank 17!

Xavier smiled. He was making good progress. He hadn’t gained any new spells since assimilating the properties from the Rhinoceros Monkeys, but he had gained several new skills that were proving to be quite useful in his new path.

He was also gaining better control over himself while he was in this… bestial state. He still felt like an unchained, wild beast—but an unchained, wild beast that he knew how to push the buttons of.

One he knew how to guide toward the right actions.

Xavier came to stand right at the edge of the time barrier. Two parts of him warred, as they often did now. The new bestial part of him wanted to bring the barrier down and charge the grey-furred wolven before taking on any of the others. Taking out the alpha would show his strength, and it would take out the enemy’s biggest threat.

The bestial part of him had no regard for strategy. It did not look at the situation in that way. It knew it was strong enough to rip through that alpha—knew that it would be able to survive. But it did not think much beyond that.

It’s right, Xavier thought. Then, he corrected himself. I am the beast. I’m right.

He would survive the fight if he took it that way, but he didn’t wish to. The other part of the two sides that warred within him wished to take a more measured approach. The way taking on these beast parts had affected him… it gave him the will to act even more profoundly than he’d experienced in the past.

Xavier had always pushed forward—always moved before thinking too hard on something. It had been an asset to him.

It was also, perhaps from a different perspective, his biggest flaw.

The bestial part of him brought that out in him even more. But if he’d learnt anything since coming to this floor it was that a degree of caution was a wise thing for him to cultivate, so even though he did know he could tear the alpha limb-from-limb, he prevented himself from acting upon that impulse.

Instead, Xavier pushed the time barrier forward, making a bridge to the next of the wolven, allowing him to fight the beast one-on-one.

Xavier left the grey-furred wolven last. He didn’t continue carving a path with his Time Alteration spell. Instead, he deactivated the spell. The time bubble came down, and the alpha saw the dead wolven around him.

One moment his kin had been alive—the next, they were all lying dead on the ground.

Xavier had done a similar thing to the Alpha Rhinoceros Monkey. He had been expecting the grey-furred wolven to react in the same way as that beast had—with rage.

With an attack.

Instead, it yelped, turned, and bolted through the forest.

Xavier blinked as he stared at the wolven that was running from him. Beasts were many things, but he had never known them to be cowards. There had only been one beast in his experience that had ever run from a Denizen, and that had been the beast—the kraken—that he had encountered on the floor where he’d met the older version of himself.

According to Adranial, beasts like that—ones that know they are both predator and prey—are rather rare in the Greater Universe. The thing was, he had faced beasts like the fleeing grey-furred wolven before.

The other wolven had most certainly not been cowards. They had fought to the bitter end, even when it was clear that their efforts would be futile. Even after he had obliterated their kin. They fought more ferociously, not less—and they certainly didn’t run away.

Does this have something to do with the change that I’m undergoing?

Xavier barely hesitated. All these thoughts zipped through his mind as he tore through the forest in a sprint, pursuing the grey-furred wolven that had fled from him.

His instincts had kicked in. The beast ran, and so he made chase.

The beast barely put up a fight. There was so much fear in its eyes. That’s something he wasn’t sure he’d ever really seen in a beast’s eyes before—fear.

Beasts weren’t known to let their fear get the better of them. Not in his experience.

The grey-furred alpha died swiftly.

Xavier stood, staring down at the corpse of the alpha. Fear was still written on its face, even in death. As the experience of seeing fear in a beast was so alien to Xavier, he sat, cross-legged on the ground, just a few feet from the dead wolven, and contemplated what it was that had happened.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

That was when a notification popped up in his vision.

No—it wasn’t just one notification. It was two.

You have learnt the skill Predator’s Gaze!

Predator’s Gaze - Rank 1

You have the gaze of a True Predator of the Greater Universe. Enemies quiver in fear at the sight of you. There is a small chance of making an enemy flee in fear from you, or freeze up at the sight of you.

This chance is higher or lower depending on the relative power level of the enemy compared to that of your own.

Xavier tilted his head as he read the description for the skill.

Predator’s Gaze?

Well, that was interesting. He’d gained a fair few skills since using Assimilate Properties so heavily, and embracing the bestial part of himself as best he could. This would definitely be something that would work to his advantage in the future.

He wondered if this skill would work against other Denizens, or if it was something that would only work against beasts. The description hadn’t specified, so he wasn’t sure why it wouldn’t work on Denizens, too.

Xavier couldn’t help but chuckle. He imagined himself walking through a busy, peaceful area—perhaps back in his own city, that the citizens had dubbed Collinsville, much to his dismay—and having people flee from him in fear just because they looked at him.

He paused for a moment. Was that something he should be laughing at? Striking fear in the heart of his own people, people he wished to protect?

He shook his head. He couldn’t help but find it a little funny, even if he didn’t truly want to frighten his people.

The second notification that had popped up was a Spell Quest.

Spell Quest Unlocked: Fear Dominion

To unlock Fear Dominion, you must strike fear into the hearts of a thousand enemies.

Progress: 1/1000

Fear Dominion. Well. He had to say he liked the sound of the spell’s name, even if it didn’t describe anything about what it did.

Striking fear into a thousand beasts… that sounded at once like a difficult thing to do, and also like an incredibly easy thing to do in the long term, now that he’d gained his new Predator’s Gaze skill.

Statistically, he would eventually unlock this spell even if he wasn’t trying very hard to do so.

Xavier interlocked his fingers where he still sat on the forest floor and pondered how he might be able to speed up the process. If he could encounter another stampede like that one he had just faced, the chances of him striking fear into lower-level beasts went up…

Or, he could be patient. There were other goals he wished to pursue, after all.

Xavier stood up and stretched. He placed a hand on the corpse of the wolven he had just killed and deposited it into his Storage Ring, then he returned to the clearing where he had killed the other members of the pack, and repeated the process with the corpses he’d left behind.

Xavier was pushing himself harder and harder to take out as many beasts as he could in the time between his lessons with Liana. Part of the reason for this was because facing D Grade beasts was the easiest way for him to rank up his spells and skills—the other part of this was because he wished to gain the rank of D Grade himself.

He felt as though he had spent far too long stuck as an E Grade Champion, and though he had cultivated a fair amount of patience under the tutelage of Liana, there were things that he wished to accomplish on this floor—and beyond it. Things that he desired to come closer to.

While the manner of this floor along with his newfound Time Alteration spell meant that he wasn’t technically in any sort of rush, he still felt the need to act. The need to constantly keep moving forward.

There’s no way I’m going to become strong enough to take on that C Grade dragon as an E Grade.

And so he pushed, and pushed, and pushed, gaining as many levels as swiftly as he could. Over the next few weeks—weeks in the time of the hundredth floor—Liana’s lessons became less frequent. There was less and less that the woman was able to teach him.

He had already mastered his ability to use the Time Alteration spell, pushing it beyond even what Liana herself was capable of. The time mage showed more and more respect for Xavier as time went on, becoming more attentive in his lessons than she had at the outset—though that didn’t mean she’d stopped reading her books.

He’d also pushed his Time Prison spell forward, but he was quickly finding that even though the spell was powerful, it wasn’t near as versatile as his Time Alteration spell.

The spell had jumped up considerably in rank, all the way to Rank 32. He was now able to use the spell on multiple opponents—of a limit of three—before its cooldown was activated. He could also activate the cooldown manually with a thought if he only wished to use the spell on a single opponent.

While trapping three enemies in a Time Prison where they could not escape was quite a wonderful ability, there wasn’t much more to it than that.

Though it was helpful that he didn’t need to trap those three enemies at the exact same time. For instance, if he were fighting a pack of wolven, he could slip through them, touch one on the back and freeze it in time, then later touch one of its kin, and so on. This was exactly what Liana was doing the first time they’d run together—she was using the Time Prison spell.

But it wasn’t reliable against stronger enemies. The biggest drawback of the spell was that he never knew when the spell would end. The cooldown worked like this: If he cast it on a single opponent, deciding not to use it on three different opponents, he could manually activate the cooldown. But the cooldown wouldn’t actually start until the enemy he had frozen broke free from the Time Prison, or Xavier freed it from the prison.

In that case, he would be able to feel when the cooldown began—and thus know the instant the enemy broke free of it.

But if he decided to use it on multiple opponents, he needed to wait until all three of them were freed from the Time Prison. So, if one broke free he wouldn’t be able to feel it at all, as his cooldown would not yet begin.

Still, he was better off with the spell than without it.

While Liana had taught him to be patient, he was beginning to notice some impatience in the time mage herself. Xavier had spent months with the woman in the time bubbles he’d created. He was beginning to get to know her moods, and he was starting to realise that within the time dilation field the woman was… well, hiding from something.

Xavier had never been the best at reading people, and if he were honest, he still wasn’t. But he thought he was beginning to be able to read Liana. Sometimes, there was a darkness in her eyes. They became flat, emotionless, and it seemed as though when she looked at him, she was looking right through him—but it wasn’t the same glazed over expression that people got when they looked at their status screens.

This was definitely different.

Every time he saw that look, he thought that it was familiar somehow. It took a while for him to put two-and-two together.

The woman had worn the exact same look when she’d been attacked by The Nightmare. When its dark tendrils had been wrapped around her body, crawling over and through her skin ready to take over her mind and make her nothing more than one of its infected minions.

Xavier had struggled to make sense of that day. The day that he’d found her and saved her from The Nightmare’s clutches. The woman had made a deal to train him because of that—but she had never seemed… entirely grateful.

Liana had known about The Nightmare—the C Grade beast that called the Dark Mountains its home—well before she’d made her way to the mountain. Unlike Xavier, she’d done her research and come in prepared. She’d had plenty of salt within her Storage Ring to repel the beast—the demon—from ever getting as close as it did.

Yet whenever he scoured his memory, he couldn’t for the life of him remember the woman having any salt on the ground around her at all. She’d known exactly what to do, but it was almost as though…

His mind kept coming to the same, dark conclusion. The woman had gone to The Nightmare with the intention of being taken. With the intention of succumbing to its will and becoming one of its infected minions.

Every time his mind came to that conclusion, he didn’t know what to do with it. To him, it made little sense.

Why would a Denizen of the Greater Universe ever wish to throw their life away, especially someone with a gift for time magic like this woman?

It was a subject he didn’t know how to broach, and one he wasn’t even sure he wished to broach with the woman, but as their lessons together were swiftly coming to an end—Liana wished to be done with this floor—he didn’t know if he would ever have another opportunity.

He didn’t know where in the Greater Universe this woman resided. That, too, was something that he wished to learn. He was playing the long game, there. He knew that his goals were far reaching. That it would take what amounted to an eternity to achieve his ultimate goal of saving the universe from destruction—or whatever it was that would cause the end of it—and he wanted to have as many allies in as many places as he could manage to help in him in his goals.

And the best way to make a true ally was through mutual understanding. At least, that’s what he hoped was the case.

So when they were back within the time bubble, alone in the grove, not a soul able to hear the contents of their conversation, Xavier cleared his throat and asked the question he wished to pose to her.

“Why did you let The Nightmare take you?”

Liana had been eating some sugary cake-like snack. Her hand was halfway to her mouth when the question had been asked. It froze along the way. Her hand, like the question, simply hang there for a long moment.

“What are you asking me?”

Xavier leant forward. He was sitting on the ground, cross-legged. He’d been working on further attuning his Intelligence attribute, but he was fast hitting a plateau he didn’t know how to break through. “I think you know.”

The woman’s hand dropped. She looked at him. That same dark look was back in her eyes. But there was something else there, too. Like… a flicker of flame. “There’s someone on that mountain I wish to save.”