A barrage of sharp winds covered Braun’s vision as he hid behind Jonas’ barriers. Whenever a blade of wind collided with the barrier, light would fluctuate at the point of impact and small cracks would form, but with Jonas’ control, the cracks would quickly recover, allowing it to remain stable without fail.

From the far back of the group, Karsen merely provided support when needed, shooting out his deadly cards whenever a bird managed to break past their line of defense and head straight for the city behind them.

Inspecting the team, especially both Kaya and Braun, the team’s two trainees, Karsen couldn’t help but smile and felt that the two were progressing rapidly and wouldn’t take much long before they could finish their training program and become official members of the team.

And Lucas… Sigh, I truly found a gem in the rough! Karsen praised as he watched Braun duking it out with the birds in the distance.

He had already rushed out of the barrier with the familiar silver threads covering his whole frame. The threads were marginally thicker than when he first started training, giving rise to greater strength. His control over them was as dexterous as when he used his own limbs, allowing the threads to shoot out with scary accuracy.

They swarmed forward and gathered to form various sharp tentacle-like shapes, and easily pierced through the wall of wind that formed in front of the crowd of flying birds.

Sharp cries rang out as a handful of them were pierced along their stomachs, and had silvery threads wrap the insides and outside of their body.

He swung his arm down, slamming the handful of birds down to the ground, incapacitating them.

Terry, in the distance, had already transformed into a giant with rough, stone-like skin, wielding a pair of golden gauntlets. He rushed forward, bracing the impact of torrents of wind like it was mere soft gusts of air.

When the crowd of birds finished launching their attack, Kaya rushed forward from behind, severed the wings of numerous birds, and flapped her wings to shoot out sharp feathers from her back.

On the other hand, Nora and her clones were busy apprehending the birds that fell to the ground. They pressed the trigger of their guns and launched out some sort of glowing net, incapacitating the birds completely.

“Where’s the sleeping gas?” The original Nora pulled back away from the rowdy scene and asked Karsen.

Karsen raised three fingers, then retracted one, then another, and as he raised a closed fist, a blue portal opened up beside him where a black box was dropped to the ground.

Hurriedly calling a few of her clones to help her, Nora unpacked the box and saw various guns along with various gas canisters placed inside. Tossing them to her clones and grabbing one for herself, they rushed back into the fray with glowing blue guns at hand.

“Pull back!” they shouted in unison as they aimed their guns at the flock of giant birds in the sky.

Braun and Kaya were the first to withdraw, while Terry and Jonas acted simultaneously to trap the whole group so that Nora could gas them all in one go.

Terry forcefully resisted the onslaught of wind and jumped into the middle of them all, enduring their relentless attacks. When they all gathered around him, a giant spherical barrier covered the sky, and Terry’s body rapidly shrunk down as the golden crown on his head dimmed.

Nora and her clones pressed their trigger in tandem and light yellow gas flew out.

Waving his hand, Jonas skillfully opened tiny holes in the barrier that acted as a birdcage, allowing for the gas canisters to shoot inside. Light yellow gas swiftly covered the entirety of the barrier, mixing in with the air and leaving no breathable air for the flying birds.

They cried out in fear and sent out blades of wind against the shrinking barrier around them but to no avail. Braun even added another layer by wrapping the whole sphere in his threads, ensuring that the birds wouldn’t be able to escape no matter what they did.

After a minute or two, Braun willed his threads to gather at the bottom while Jonas deactivated his power, causing the barrier to disappear. The unconscious birds landed on Braun’s giant silvery bowl, dropping like dead flies.

That’s quite quick. Karsen assessed with a praising grin.

If not for the base having to take a short while to deliver the gas cannisters, then the time needed to incapacitate the whole bird group would have been shortened by a lot.

As a giant portal opened up beside them and workers rushed in along with a giant truck, Braun placed the monsters inside the backside of the truck, cutting the time needed to transport all the monsters into the truck.

The workers split into two groups, with one group dealing with the unconscious birds on the ground, while the other went to deal with the birds inside the truck.

They tossed some strange devices into the air which would then construct a cubic cage made out of energy, trapping the birds and sealing them.

As they did so, Braun approached Karsen with an annoyed face, and asked, “How frequent are monster hordes gonna be?”

“Monster hordes?” Karsen laughed when he heard the terminology. “There weren’t any monster hordes back in my days.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“It’s that damn meteor again,” Braun cursed softly.

“Yes, it was that damn meteor again.” Karsen nodded his head. “If not for it, monsters wouldn’t be this common.”

Jonas walked up to them from the side, and gave his own conjecture as to why the monster horde occurred, “The weather is already changing. They must have been migrating and usually crossed over this city whenever they do so.”

“Sigh, there’s been so many monsters lately.” Braun flexed his arm and stretched his legs. “I wonder when they’d implement a system to keep these things under control completely.”

“Don’t get your hopes up too much, it’s not severe enough that Aegis would invest that much into it. Maybe if Demigod monsters start appearing en masse, then they would, but they would definitely prevent it from exploding into a bigger issue.” Karsen graciously deprived Braun of his wishful thinking.

…

After dealing with the monster horde, Braun returned to his living quarters and flashed a mysterious grin.

Not much had changed regarding his room since the time he started living here, but there were some changes.

Walking up to the table placed in the living room, he saw a large glass cage hoarding various flies inside, with every single one obediently remaining still in their respective areas. As he inspected the flies in his glass cage, a green flame flickered from the tip of his fingers and he watched as flies were covered by the color green.

With the mystical properties of his flames, the flies didn’t burn and, more mysteriously, they even began to subtly grow in size and appeared livelier compared to before. He sprinkled food into the cage and watched as they devoured them like trained pets; he nodded his head.

Ever since he acquired the ability to create soul threads and gained the perfect method to create his own puppets, he had been trying to find ways to exploit his newfound ability and found that, since he could share senses with his puppets, then he could use some small animal or insect for gathering information.

His eyes seemed to turn hollow and changed into a sickly pale color, and his vision shifted, going from the physical plane to the spiritual plane of existence.

Inside the glass cage, tiny motes of milky white lights illuminated his view, with the souls of the flies tied onto a strange illusory silvery green thread.

Staring at his insect spies, he smiled and motioned a few for them to fly out of the cage and hover around him.

One of them approached him and landed on the tip of his nose, causing Braun to chuckle.

It’s like having a pet. He inwardly shook his head as he recalled a certain matter back when he was still young when he was vehemently pleading for his parents to buy him a pet. I thought I’d have a dog or a cat as my first-ever pet, not a fly.

Oh well, this would also do. Braun shrugged his shoulders and leaned his back on the living room couch.

His vision once again changed into a completely new scene, and when he readjusted his view, he was already inside a strange enclosed space, with transparent glass walls, a white floor, and a white ceiling.

Outside the glass enclosing, he could see researchers wearing white gowns and workers wearing combat-ready uniforms walking around the place, with some giving a cursory glance at ‘him’ before continuing with their work.

Staring down at his paw, he found himself having inhabited his most recent puppet, and perhaps his strongest puppet as of right now—a Level 2 Monster known as Space Tearing Wolf.

As vast as Aegis may be as an organization, it still had limited space and had to use its resources as efficiently as possible, so it would utilize the space of every branch in every city to house monsters and artifacts.

The southwestern branch was no exception and had plenty of monsters trapped deep in the underground floors.

This meant that Braun had access to quite a handful of monsters to puppet around.

Although it was already hard enough to take control of this monster, Braun yawned and licked his paw. To an outside observer, he appeared no different from a common wolf, just that he was much larger and appeared rather monstrous.

Just like how his soul was enhanced because of his superpowers, other Supers and Monsters were the same. Because of this, the amount of effort he had to put into making them his puppets was proportionally increased.

For a normal human, all it would take was a single thread to fully control them, while it would take ten threads to control a normal Level 0 Super, one hundred for a Level 1, and 1000 for a Level 2.

At max, he only had a few thousand threads to control, both physically and spiritually, so he only had a limited amount of puppets he could control, and having too many puppets would decrease the number of threads he could wield, decreasing his overall fighting strength.

Because of this, Braun decided to only make one Level 2 Monster his puppet, and wait for further developments before attempting to take control of more monsters.

As for why he was doing this, well, it’s quite clear when you remember that it was a Level 2 Monster, a being with superpowers.

Waving his paw, the space in front of him tore open, revealing a crack in space. Although it was just a casual wave of his paw, he estimated that the destructive power of this puppet was even more destructive than his threads considering the nature of space.

He had been diligently practicing this monster’s ability for a few days now and had gained a slight understanding of the mysteries of space, but it wasn’t as efficient as him having the superpower himself.

While their senses may have been shared, it wasn’t as authentic as being the real thing, so he couldn’t progress as fast as he usually did unlike his original body, but it didn’t matter. Progress was progress, and he could even feel his connection with the Zenith deepening as time passed.

…

“Huh…” The researcher who was currently observing the Space Tearing Wolf watched with surprised eyes at the monster’s display of abilities.

This monster has been held in captivity for nearly a year already and he has come into contact with it on numerous occasions in the past year.

Unlike the previous monsters Braun had encountered that were all bloodthirsty and hungry for human flesh, all of the monsters held in captivity were well-fed and appeared no different from animals in a zoo.

As long as they didn’t aggravate it, they would just remain in captivity and laze around.

The Space Tearing Wolf was no different, but as of late, the researcher who had been closely observing the wolf felt that it was a bit more energetic than before, utilizing its abilities more frequently.

Of course, it was a good thing, because it provided more data for Aegis to analyze.

Dismissing his strange thoughts, the researcher walked to a fridge near the wolf’s sealed space and took out a large chunk of meat. Returning to the glass enclosure, he tossed the meat into the transparent glass, and as if it was the surface of a pond that rippled when touched, the meat passed through the wall and landed inside the empty box.

Standing up, the wolf took a cursory sniff of the slab of meat, before promptly biting into it. It swiftly finished its meal and returned to the center of the empty box, constantly using its abilities to tear open small fractures in space, and even forming rudimentary shapes like circles, squares, and even triangles.

When the researcher saw this, he mumbled, “Maybe I should give it an art book next time? Maybe I’d be one of the very few people on Earth that has seen space painting…”

Hearing the researcher’s remark, Braun inwardly chuckled and continued drawing in the air, tearing open space with his claws.

Time quickly passed, and another week flew by in the blink of an eye.