Taking a look with his spatial sense, Kiel considered the risks of making a move on the goblin chief. The forest returned to its deadly state a few dozen meters away from where he was hiding, and he doubted it would chase him there.

He remained hidden for a while longer, already thinking about joining the picnic with Melissa and Edel. Two things made him want to continue observing, however, one of which was to learn more about a potential enemy, and the other was curiosity.

With the original camp of goblins that had tried to kill him, dead, he didn't want to go starting a war on his own. If Edel was here, they would probably already be fighting, but escape would have been a lot more tricky.

At least with the threat of the corrupted ones it didn't hurt to give the goblins some rest. Worst case he would be better prepared to deal with them and best case the city would be facing less threats from the corrupted ones. One point he would give to the goblins was that they seemed to be more territorial compared to the roaming corrupted ones.

He watched as the smaller goblins gruesomely tore the dead monsters apart for food and entertainment. A few minutes passed before another group of corrupted ones found the encampment, and the previously relaxed goblin-mage in charge took a more serious look, growling and putting an end to their "celebrations".

Half a minute later he could see why as a monster exuding the same pressure the goblin chieftain had appeared at the forefront of the ravenous monsters.

The monster had a lioness's face covered in still dripping blood and a body twice the size of Edel. Thick grey fur covered lean and powerful muscles and where the fur didn't cover its body, pale grey skin made its appearance, making it seem like a ghost, which he supposed wasn't entirely wrong.

It was at this point that he regretted not searching for actual popcorn. If he had some inside his spatial storage it would have been picture perfect. Nonetheless, he had the next best thing. The corrupted ones started running for the goblins and he removed some snacks he'd lying around. He didn't have popcorn with him, but he'd found the next best thing.

It was a crunchy grape-like fruit that tasted like a watermelon. He'd tried it once in Melissa's house, found where she stashed the delicious fruit and bagged most of them in his spatial storage. If she'd noticed, she had yet to yell at him for it.

The moment the grape-watermelon appeared in front of his paws, the head of the gold-ranked corrupted one immediately turned towards his direction, ignoring the goblins entirely.

For crying out loud...

He popped the grape to his mouth because throwing it away was too much of a waste. As the lioness ran at him full sprint and mouth open, idle thoughts filled his head. Do lions even live in forests? Could he even call this a lion?

That still didn't solve his problem of a monster far too strong for his current strength. He didn't think about a back-up plan, immediately throwing his entire focus towards preparing Spatial Rend.

He sacrificed some strength and as much vitality as he could, boosting his perception in exchange. In an instant the taste of watermelon exploded in his mouth, the world slowed a few times over and he could suddenly smell something very rotten from the monster charging at him. At the same time the earthy smell around the goblin chief eased and taking a look, he could see that the goblin seemed to be focusing on his fight, ignoring the one happening right in front of him.

If it wasn't going to spear him with earth magic, he had a more pressing issue to focus on.

He put everything unnecessary out of his mind and focused on the fight ahead, keeping half a mind on the inactive goblin mage. Soon, however, he found that having half his attention away from the monster two dozen meters away from him wouldn't be enough.

It was fast, faster than he could believe. If he hadn't enhanced his perception, a blink would have been enough for it to maul him. Thankfully, however, his enhanced perception could follow the monster's movements despite its impressive speed.

Space weakened in front of him far faster than ever before, greatly increasing the speed in which the cracks formed. Which was good because despite his high perception, the monster was still too fast for him to be standing still and preparing an attack otherwise.

The rift required less ether and concentration to expand here, which was something he'd almost forgotten about, an increase in strength both from the weakened space as well as his attributes and skill level.

The crack expanded outward, meeting the corrupted faster than he could blink. Faster than both of them could blink... which was weird because it dodged.

Spatial Rend expanded in a small space in front of him, focused mainly on covering the rapidly closing distance between him and the monster in front of him. Between that and the unpredictable nature of the cracks themselves, the monster was able to dodge. It wasn't without injury, however, as its front leg and a small part of its nose were cut off.

He immediately tried to expand the rift where the monster stood, shocked, but found it immensely more draining and difficult to do so. Due to that, the monster managed to dodge again, jumping to the side and stumbling.

Cold sweat started running down his paws when the creature ran towards him again with the same ferocity, making him question if it was truly running with one less leg. It was faster than him, stronger and better in every way and- it charged head on.

Without thinking too much about it, he created a crack where it was going to step next and the creature backed off again. They played that song and dance two more times before he realized he was on the losing end of that exchange. His ether was finite and if he continued wasting it, he would find himself without, while the vitality and endurance of the lioness seemed endless.

Deciding that enough had been enough, he tried not to think about what would happen if he failed and stopped trying to conserve his ether.

Taking a deep breath, he tore the space apart in front of him at a much greater speed and extent, his ether integrating with space and destabilizing it in a wider range than he'd done so before. Reality fragmented with hundreds upon hundreds of cracks forming in the space in front of him. The monster hadn't changed tactics, only trying to dodge when it sensed the attack coming.

It didn't have intelligence, it had instincts, and with that in mind it was so, so very predictable.

A system notification popped up, but he couldn't spare the attention to read it.

Space didn't stop fragmenting when the lioness dodged this time. He cracked space immediately where it would dodge next. He was one step ahead of the monster, and this was checkmate. Almost the entire area around the lioness had been covered in hundreds of thousands of cracks, which included the space above it.

Then, two things happened that he had been slow in accounting for. First, the expansion of the cracks in the space slowed greatly as his body reached its limit on how much ether he could expel at once. His will worked inordinately more to continue where his ether dropped the ball, though it wasn't like he had much remaining either way. Second, because of this, the monster found itself one step away from escaping... a step that it tried to take with its missing leg.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The lioness slowed down for less than a second, and space cracked the rest of the way, trapping it inside a sphere of destruction.

He wanted to laugh at his success but it had been a close enough call that it almost gave him a heart attack.

The monster seemed to be at a loss as there was nowhere to escape, and there was a lull in the fight for the first time since it started. He blinked and realized no more than a few seconds had passed.

The goblins had just started fighting and were struggling to deal with a group of five corrupted ones, all of which seemed to be from mid to high silver in strength. As for the chieftain, it seemed content to let them try on their own. No goblins, nor corrupted ones had fallen yet, but it didn't seem like the stalemate would last long even so. Sooner or later the first of the goblins would fall unless their leader did something.

Though before worrying about the goblins, he had to worry about himself. The gold-ranked monster was still alive, and although he was slowly taking care of that, it was a slow going. Expanding the cracks in space near the lioness was hard and doing so purely with his will was even more so.

He was exhausted, but what kept him going was the fact that he could feel his control and effectiveness over the spatial destruction grow by the second. His head swam from the exertion but he still couldn't help but wonder how many system notifications he'd missed, each one representing measurable growth in strength.

He really wanted to see the expressions of Melissa and Edel when he returned to the city. Part of that was trying to think of a way to survive their reactions. Cassandra at least didn't seem like she was going to kill him for putting himself in more danger on top of the one they'd reasonably been expecting. In all fairness though, how was he supposed to know the monster was sensitive to spatial manipulation; that was his whole shtick.

At least the gold-ranked goblin didn't seem fast on its feet, so he should be able to out-run it should it decide to join in on the fun, and he was regaining his ether at a faster than normal speed in the high ether density of the forest.

As he watched the lioness struggle to find a way to escape, he considered hiding and leading the angry creature over to the goblins to take care of them. It was an idea he found himself entertaining more and more when the corrupted monster decided to jump through the blender of spatial cracks.

For the third time since the start of the fight he thought it was over, yet to his shock and horror, the corrupted monster managed to endure the cracks in space with its body, all of which should have been lethal. He'd never met, nor was expecting a monster to be able to survive that kind of attack, especially given previous results.

Even so, the monster did not come out of it unscathed.

The lioness breathed heavily, as numerous small and deeper cuts adorned its body where it'd jumped from the spatial blender. One of its eyes was paste and there were entire chunks of its body missing. It by all means shouldn't be breathing, yet, if anything it seemed ready to go for more. That was despite losing a metric ton of blood and carrying enough wounds to kill Kiel a hundred times over.

The faintest breeze of the air seemed like it would be enough topple it over, and he could see it struggle trying to remain standing on its feet, which made for two of them..

The goblin chief thankfully was content to merely observe, hopefully deciding getting involved wasn't worth the trouble.

The corrupted lioness didn't give him more time to contemplate, running towards him ready to exchange her life for his.

Having recovered somewhat, he was able to use his ether again. This time he was able to shatter space with much greater ease and control than even before the start of the fight. Which was good, because he didn't have much ether to go off of.

A point in space was broken where the monster would run into, and three others where it was most likely to dodge at, taking the remainder of his ether with it. Even so, it wasn't enough to take it down, the monster twisting its neck to avoid having its head taken apart and instead gaining an equally lethal wound in its neck. Blood gushed out of its neck, each beat of its heart giving less to its brain and more to the world to which it didn't belong.

In its last breaths it found strength it shouldn't possibly have, and this time when it ran towards him, he had nothing to protect himself with.

Kiel's eyes took a crazed gleam. He was completely out of ether, against a crazed enemy that knew no fear, no respite. In this moment with his life on the line his heart beat faster than it ever had before.

He didn't try running, knowing his speed wasn't enough to avoid the overgrown kitty. The world grew faster and faster as he stopped his skill from feeding anything more to his perception.

He forced his skill to release his sacrificed attributes faster than it was meant to. He felt his body tear at the changes he was forcing it to take, every sub-attribute of [Body] feeding into toughness, strength and vitality included.

His entire body tensed in preparation. A blur reached him in less than a second and he felt something hit him like a truck 'bout to send him to another world. He blanked out for a second and found himself hitting and skidding on the rough ground for almost a dozen meters.

He fully expected to be too injured to move, yet even though his entire body felt like one big bruise, nothing seemed to be broken, though he was still unable to move, the attribute imbalance he'd caused somehow locking up his entire body.

From where he was lying he could see the lioness poised to attack him again... And not moving.

A second later, it collapsed on the ground and more system notifications came to congratulate that achievement, but he ignored those too, quickly trying to reverse the skill holding his body captive as he felt his body too rigid to move properly.

Unbound Adaptation, however, fought back even harder against this rapid change, and with his will near exhausted he found it impossible to force the skill to listen. He felt trapped as his mind refused to focus and his body couldn't move.

Adrenaline clashed with dread to create a nauseating feeling as he pushed more and more ineffectually to make his body move. The goblin chief was still standing, was still watching... he fully expected his last memories to be that of an earth spike piercing his body.

When the seconds passed and nothing happened, he shook himself awake.

Finally, almost a minute later, his skill finally listened to him and his body slowly started feeling warm again, enough to overwhelm the pain he was feeling all over his body. He hadn't even noticed he'd been shivering until now.

How much vitality did I even sacrifice?

Nonetheless, he didn't have the time to ponder on it, he needed to run away. The stability of the space didn't seem to be recovering so well after he poked so many holes in it, and he didn't want to be here when the goblins discovered that.

If the goblin chief was content to watch, he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. When he got up from where he was lying, the goblin turned to look at him in surprise.

Oh... did it think I was dead?

The goblin watched him for an entire three seconds before he felt it gather ether. Whether that was meant for him or to help the goblins he didn't know, nor did he care enough to wait and find out.

He teleported behind a large tree, pushing through the pain and moving his feet one paw at a time, just very, very fast.

When he entered the vastly more tumultuous space, he remembered exactly how annoying it was. For a moment he debated trying his luck with the goblins as he struggled to close the dozens of cracks about to tear him apart, none of which was made better by his current state.

Not that he seriously considered it... or at least not for more than a few seconds.

Something which made the trip bearable was his idea to sacrifice his sense of smell and taste in exchange for improved endurance and vitality, giving him a much needed boost to both stay awake as well as make the trip. Getting over his initial hesitation in using Unbound Adaptation was as easy as almost getting cut into pieces by the space around him in a moment of haziness.

In order to keep up the skill, his will remained at a perpetual state of near exhaustion, forcing him to use ether which recovered much faster and he had less of a use for to close the cracks in the space around him.

Using ether to close the cracks in space was quite different compared to using his will. In a sense every skill needed will in order to be used, but reinforcing the space around him meant he was focusing less on closing the cracks themselves and more on the space around him. He quickly figured out that the bigger the space he tried to cover, the more expensive it was on his ether.

By keeping the area a few centimeters from his body and moving at a slow pace, however, he managed to find a welcome balance.

Of course that didn't make finding his way out of the dead forest easy. Some spaces were too horrid and unstable to pass through and he ended up needing to backtrack for dozens, or even hundreds of meters at some times.

If he didn't have his bond with Edel and Melissa he would have long since gotten lost, and he started to wonder just how many of a cat's nine lives he had remaining. If the myth was true, and he was starting to believe it was, he probably didn't have many remaining after how much trouble he had a habit of getting into.

When he found himself still inside the forest but outside the dead space, he was expecting to see the city somewhere around here. It was a few minutes of confusion later that he remembered he'd been following his bond with Edel and they were supposed to be out on a picnic.

He didn't know how long it'd been since he left the city, the hours just blurred after he exhausted his will and went on a stroll inside a deadly forest.

He checked and found out that Edel and Melissa were oddly close to him. Were they walking towards me?

It was the last thing he remembered thinking as everything went black.