2 hours have passed since Rune engaged the first squad of monsters.
The rhinoceros squad already became completely berserk and didn’t care about hurting their own companions as long as the human that still lived took damage.
With his perception sphere, Rune could see that finally, a second squad was answering the call of blood, birds started to appear 40 minutes ago but not even one dived.
They waited like scavengers, but their strength was real and should never be underestimated.
A horn passed 2 centimeters next to Rune’s head before he kicked at a gigantic opening that appeared to his close proximity.
The squad that was coming was composed of 16 big agile black cat monsters moving at the top of the jungle canopy, those types were true killing machines, he knew, but it would only accelerate his advance to tier 3.
The moment those panther-like monsters arrived, they dispersed, dived, and started to harass the rhinoceros squad, and Rune, who was under a tree, received a visit from one of them.
Against a diving cat monster, you should never try to evade, with their airborne dexterity they could bend at 90 degrees to reach your escaping back or evade an incoming blow.
Only defense utilizing blocks was a steady method to counter this move, so he found somewhere another monster couldn't attack him without giving obvious signs and therefore gave himself enough time to react and received the diving cat attack at perfection.
The situation now became even more chaotic as seeing a general confusion, birds started to dive to take some strike opportunities.
In a group configuration, one member would have the duty to monitor the sky attacks and respond appropriately, but alone, Rune had to use his perception for everything.
From the 200 meters away panther that was looking at him and was prepared to climb to a tree, to a 400 meters away lone rhinoceros that wanted to charge in his direction like a car, with about the same consequences.
And now, to opportunistic birds that only had one of their eyeballs turned to look creepily at him as a sign for their next move.
He had to do all that while evading, striking weak points, preparing his next move, and concentrating on having a perfect position. These were all the requirements to reach tier 3 before he accumulated enough, or maybe he was pushing a little too much?
‘The worst is still those unavoidable moves, they are using tier 3 energy to bully me!’
Rune could dream as much as he wanted, but not having tier 3 energy and not having a way to answer specialization attacks was why he kept losing armor.
The berserk monsters released all their elements in the forms of large area smokes or explosions, it didn’t have the punch of a concentrated attack, but it couldn’t be avoided.
If Rune was the one with tier 3 energy, he would keep it all for boosting his perception and imitating a slowed time-perception as he did back in the day.
He had long learned what the slowed time effect was, it was a mix of energy and awareness.
If one was more powerful than the other then a dissonance would appear and the person would have the impression that time was slowed down around him, but it was just normal time for the tier after.
A bird dived and Rune stuck close to the side of a rhinoceros, the best method was a diversion, in this case, then once the bird dived straight on the rhino, Rune punched one of the wings of the bird, making it fall on the ground.
The rhinoceros next to him as well as the lurking panther appreciated his gift by gleefully jumping on the downed bird like it was a Christmas present.
Those precious seconds allowed Rune to recover and made his energy balance as good as new.
He was in for a lot more than that.
…
Squads and squads of monsters came and disappeared, but never because they retreated, they only got dispersed by all the chaos and killed one by one, and in the end, they all died.
From what Rune knew, such situations happened naturally a lot when monsters' nests existed too close to each other.
A very long battle ensued and only ended when a group of monsters or even only one individual from one of the nests distinguished themselves and became true veterans, resulting in the other nest being wiped clean without any survivors.
Rune was very crazy to think that he could keep an idea of how much time passed, by this point he only knew that 8 squads were in the melee, with no rhinoceros alive anymore and few panthers, while the largest mass was a gorilla army of 300 individuals who surged not long ago.
A humanoid body could give some advantages but it wasn't supreme, and even more when simple instinct controlled it, you couldn’t run as fast as your strength should allow without proper training, you couldn’t punch as hard as your experience should permit.
Every organic body had strengths and weaknesses, and only as long as you perfectly learned them then everyone became equal.
For Rune, it trained him in new ways, claws, horns, bites, hoofs, quadruped monsters had their own style, and those gorillas added new moves that Rune knew from doing it himself, grab, punch, extension, but encountering them as the target was another thing that he didn’t think he would have experienced so soon.
A gorilla just punched him, Rune grabbed the wrist and bent it, then he responded with a jab and front kick, repositioned himself, and adopted a full guard stance, another gorilla attacked from behind, so he just advanced in the direction of the gorilla he just kicked to evade.
While ditching a spinning wheel, his foot collided with the gorilla that advanced, and like he kicked a rock, Rune was led by his kick towards the side, aborting the second gorilla's plan to punch him.
After doing this sequence, he sensed his surroundings with his sphere because he felt the appearance of a surprise.
A squad of 7 big cats with menacing teeth, tiger-like monsters, was joining the battle, and they were clearly projecting an aura telling that they weren’t newly born tier 3.
Be it their speed or how they acted, they were at least late or peak tier 3 entities, they probably already started their massive power spike period.
For them, it was a buffet, a free all-you-can-eat buffet. From the moment Rune became aware that they were here to when they arrived, only a few seconds passed, and before he could react to what he saw coming, a tiger monster's mouth bit his head.
There was no stopping it, he could do nothing against a monster who had 5 000 stat points in both strength and momentum.
The one who assaulted him was even of the lightning element, specializing in offensive, quick movement with flashes of light and paralyzing anything it touched.
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His armor took at least 1 000 points of damage, an aberrant amount, the fact that if it was a tier 4 his armor would have taken 2 000 to 3 000 points was not enough to find solace in his mind.
The only thing he could do against such an invincible monster was to divert its attention to weaker prey.
He knew there was no hope in a direct confrontation, he had neither the stats nor the masteries required to exchange moves with a peak or late tier 3 monster.
Even a medium tier 3 was pushing it unless he was 1 versus 1 with unlimited time, but the reason he dared do what he was doing was that at tier 2, he was more resistant and fit at surviving than many others.
Every second he gained 110 armor discounting the energy funneled to his permanent reinforcement.
He only needed 10 seconds to completely absorb an unprotected tiger bite, so his first instinctive plan was to make the tiger back off by poking its eyes and then rushing to the nearest weak monster.
So he executed it, sending his hand to poke the tiger’s eyes but as a result, his hand got bitten, then he received a paw strike, sending him flying.
Dazed by what just happened, Rune tried to find another monster to at least complete the second part of his plan, but the tiger just appeared behind him and with its two forelegs flattened him against the ground, he lost 4 000 armor in 3 strikes, he used his emergency stocked energy to replenish it.
And his perception sphere, which he didn’t keep his attention on, suddenly sent a sickly feeling to his mind just when he wanted to react, delaying his move and allowing the tiger to bite his exposed neck in the blink of an eye.
It was maybe the first time in his entire life that Rune was the victim of an attack that didn’t stop.
The tiger didn’t stop its bite, it wanted to pierce this annoying armor and kill this weak prey before going after all the other miserable existences around.
Rune thought of one plan that could save him, a unique plan that could free him from this sudden weakness that appeared on his fighting style, so he let the tiger continue biting him, he mindlessly pumped his energy armor full every time it was damaged so he didn’t have any remaining, but now he stopped doing that.
1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, his energy armor was ready for anything but such a long piercing bite without any sustain made it reach its collapse point.
Not taking the risk of being decapitated by the tiger’s bite, Rune sent all the energy he accumulated into a reinforcement, a 120 reinforcement, and this time, this time he felt it when his finger penetrated through a weak point of the tiger, its eyes.
The tiger finally freed Rune from his bite and backed down from what Rune concluded to be instinct and pain, he didn’t have another explanation as lots of other monsters did the same thing.
He reached with all his strength for a passing gorilla's team and before the tiger behind him catched up, he arrived in the middle of their team, prompting aggression.
Once attacked, he let them come closer, and the tiger finally arrived.
Seeing so many other preys, it just attacked, with its first attack ripping an entire arm from one of the gorillas.
Rune slipped out of its reach and gave attention to his sphere, learning where the tigers were, he took the position the farthest and most hidden he could find.
It was amidst a snake squad that arrived in 5th since he started to fight if he remembered well.
He had to regenerate his armor and his energy pool so he needed a whole minute out of intense fighting.
This was the absolute rule of the Ether Law for Rune, the key to balancing one’s health and energy in the middle of even a monster apocalypse.
Jumping to land in the middle of a snake fortress was a lot safer than being close to a tiger, any of the tigers, all seemed trickier than the other.
The lightning one he got had its own way of doing things, but the metal one was just his nemesis, he only read about the metal element on the board, but weight and sharpness were par for the course for it.
If he was trapped under it he would be killed without even being able to attack its eyes, so it was the one to avoid at all cost, even going for other tigers in the worst-case situation.
Penetrating in the middle of a snake fortress caused a reaction, they tried to bite him, basic, simple, but he only had to side-step or use other snakes as shields to have a positive energy balance over a whole minute.
Regaining 50 energy every minute was awesome in his case, his nearly destroyed armor came back to full in 19 minutes, truly a witness to how much it was abused by the tiger’s bite, then he waited 20 minutes more for his energy pool to go back to full.
Once he was there, he only had to continue surviving, being even more careful of what happened inside his sphere.
The hundreds of monsters, be they from the sky or the earth could generate a chain reaction that he wouldn’t be able to escape from if he wasn’t that careful.
The tigers acted like apex predators but with all the berserk monsters around they also took hits, but not enough to cancel their natural regeneration or defenses, so they were like Rune, as good as new at all times.
But the new factor, stealthed monsters were approaching, it was responsible for the sickly feeling from his sphere, but as the tigers all had 5 000 perception they all knew that something was approaching, making them slow down a little in their feasting.
Rune could feel his spirit burning.
He wanted to know everything that was happening, it was a new form of training he never did to this extent, it was pushing the limit of his perception control beyond what he considered his limit, but the situation pushed him to it because death was standing behind him no matter how he positioned himself.
If he gave up his plan, then he would have a chance of leaving without fighting, but he knew that he would never do that.
Every part of him wanted to surpass this challenge and be faster than dictated by others, his ego was that of an average human, but his dreams were only worthy of the greatest.
So he continued to push himself, retreating would happen naturally when his spirit couldn’t handle any additional thoughts, but as long as he could evade, block and perceive perfectly with his sphere, then he wasn’t at his last breath.
This expedition had to make him by-pass an accumulation period of months, so it at least had to make him battle peak tier 3 to prove that he was worth it.
The snakes were a lot easier than he expected, like his encounter with the tiger already changed his perception of time.
Leaving their fortress was easy compared to blocking one of those monsters among monsters, once Rune got out of the snake’s trap he charged towards a team of gorillas, then started fighting them.
…
‘This time it’s really the end…’
He knew that it had been more than an entire day since he started fighting, every monster hundreds of kilometers around had been drawn here.
The ground on which he was walking was a blood swamp, and a part of it came from him, it was something he didn’t expect to happen, at one moment, the monster's body, blood included, just stopped disintegrating, like the air couldn’t support more ether.
Every monster had long become berserk and Rune wasn’t far from such a state too, he overestimated how tough his spirit was.
Handling a continuous input of information of tier 3 monsters moving everywhere was giving him his first headache since the Ether Law awakened, and it was far from relaxing.
The place was becoming an anomaly by itself because Rune and the other monsters never stopped.
Naturally, those situations would stop after some hours, when monsters had their fill, and already it was showing signs of calming down.
Birds dived at him, but he side-stepped everyone, he was so used to it.
A tiger fixed him, so he diverted, the panic was always here.
The situation was looking like a situation he lived before, his ether soul was acting strangely.
It was in its dispersed state, but Rune’s senses started to have problems, true black spots in his sphere, cold sweat appearing without explanations.
Half an hour later, one of his senses finally deactivated, his sense of hearing, the sudden silence perturbed his mind so much that he miss-stepped and received a gorilla’s punch, shaving 800 armor and by reflex, he didn’t let his armor absorb the impact but preferred to be sent flying.
After this punch, he tried to focus again, but as he focused on receiving info from his own perception, massive black spots and even white spots spontaneously appeared with it.
Having no choice, he decided to reduce his perception range, from 2 000 meters, he lowered it to 1 000 meters, it was like closing his eyelids and reducing his sight, it didn't need him to be able to manipulate his perception, he wasn’t going to let his failing spirit block his challenge and fights.
It was a situation he once did to have fun, fighting without hearing anything, but this time it was so serious that his happy-go-lucky mind that only desired to fight calmed down, choosing to end his passive awareness training, his ether soul condensed back.
Once it condensed, Rune knew that something that had been delayed took place, and suddenly, the world not only became silent from his spiritual perspective, but everything became more silent than when he couldn’t hear anymore.
‘Time dissonance…’
His ether soul couldn’t weave a tier 3 perception with a tier 2 body, so as his masteries advanced to tier 3, his perception, his spirit, adopted a different outlook of life than Rune’s one.
The gorilla that was punching him, he could now see it, the fist slowly closing in on his left side, when he took a step forward it reacted by adjusting its fist, but Rune could see it now.
He could counter it now.