It was the same notification from before, just telling him that he had also completed the second wave with the best score. Well, he was assuming that S was the best score, given the way that the System was treating it.
He was met with another five minute countdown, and he decided to wait for a few minutes before starting the next waves. His body ached from the exertion, but it was nothing that a few moments of meditation would not fix. After two minutes, his body had regenerated to its natural state, and he was ready to challenge the next few waves. He pressed the button, and the air shimmered in front of him, almost across half of the arena. Whatever was coming now, it was big.
Shapes started to pop into existence in front of Jonathan, revealing themselves to be squat, bent over lizardmen with crude weapons. About fifty of them in all appeared in front of him, and they cackled in glee upon seeing their lone opponent. They were individually weaker than many of the previous monsters, but there were a lot more of them too. It seemed that the halfway point of this challenge was where the difficulty level rose.
The monsters charged him a moment later, their legs beating up sand across the arena. They moved pitifully slowly, but there were enough of them to still render the spectacle imposing. Their movements were eerily similar, and they moved almost in lockstep, which was strange for a group of monsters. Perhaps their minds were linked in a way.
As they neared Jonathan and the first row of the monster thrust out their spears in near unison, he confirmed it. They were linked at some subconscious level, and their movements were synced up to each other exactly. Still, that did not affect the speed or the power of those movements, which was all that really mattered.
Jonathan snatched a spear out of the air and wrenched it out of its owner’s hands, turning it around in his hand. Driving the spear forwards, he skewered a trio of lizardmen on the end, before letting go of the spear. Dashing into the hole in the lines, Jonathan began to let himself loose, sending his mana and Divinity into his attack. Lizards fought and died in a circle around him, none of them able to reach Jonathan before being turned into splatters of gore on the arena sands. However, there were quite a lot of them, and Jonathan was not infallible. One of them eventually managed to nick his skin with the tip of its spear, which was a lot sharper than it should have been, and poison entered his bloodstream. He immediately began to feel slightly dizzy and nauseous, but it was too weak to really affect him. However, a few moments later, another spear struck home, and the poison’s effects doubled.
Jonathan roared in anger and picked up his pace, butchering his irritating enemies left and right. By the time that last of the monsters had died, he had been nicked a few more times, and he was stumbling around, his motor functions somewhat diminished. As the monsters faded away however, he leveled up, which was lucky, seeing as it cleansed the poison. He could have fought with it active, but it would have been an annoyance.
As the next monster appeared, Jonathan took a deep breath and sent his mana to his hand from the get go. This time, he attacked first, racing towards the creature in front of him. As some sort of elephantine monster appeared in front of him, Jonathan leaped up, and drove his fist into the front of its skull. The creature buckled, and stumbled backwards, blood seeping down its gray skin. It looked like an elephant from Earth, but it was about twice the size, and had razor sharp fangs instead of tusks. In addition, its face was that of a human’s, just like a lot of the other monsters. All in all, it was a deeply disturbing sight.
Jonathan ignored the revulsion however, and remained with his mind in the fight. As the creature’s trunk swung towards him, moving like a whip, he kicked off its head and flipped backwards, landing on the ground in front of the monster. Its trunk snapped in the air like a gunshot, and the tip of it accelerated to beyond the speed of sound. For something that large to do such a thing meant that it was packing some serious force too. If that attack hit Jonathan, bones would break. It looked to be slightly dazed from the damage it had taken, but it was mostly unharmed. Its skin and bones had been thick enough to repel Jonathan’s blow from earlier without much difficulty.
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The monster trumpeted upon seeing that Jonathan had avoided its attack, and then stamped the ground. Cracks spread out through the ground, and some sort of conceptual weight seemed to be forming around the elephant, likely related to the element of Earth, if there was such a thing. Jonathan was guessing that there was. There was no other explanation for the fact that sand was staying in a cohesive shape, even though it was still, to his touch, sand.
Jonathan ignored this impossibility, and focused his attention on his enemy, eyeing up the massive creature in front of him. He dodged as one of the cracks came his way, and it surged past him, splitting the arena into chunks. However, it didn’t seem to do any damage, and Jonathan frowned at the elephant, which looked proud of its attack, if he was reading its expression right. Then a mighty suction erupted from the cracks and Jonathan was suddenly fighting, as if against the pull of gravity, to escape.
The sand around the holes fell down into them, and the air began to boil near them. It was as if the force of gravity was being magnified at some place at the bottom of those holes, to a degree to which Jonathan could feel it. He planted his feet, and took a few steps forwards, taking himself out of the range of effect.
The elephant roared and charged, its footsteps causing more cracks to form. The creature was a lot faster than its size would indicate, and it reached him deceptively quickly, with its trunk already whipping towards him. Jonathan had nowhere to run with cracks all around him, and he was instead forced to stand his ground. He braced for impact, and covered his arms in a liberal application of highly condensed mana, which created a glimmering aegis of light in front of him. It was not a proper shield, but perhaps it would suffice for now.
The trunk slammed into his upraised arms and sent him flying back, his bones creaking under the strain. The trunk burnt away where it touched the mana, but it was not in contact for long enough to be much of an issue. Jonathan slammed into the bottom of the stands, cracking the rock. He groaned, and lay there for a second, dazed. As the thundering footsteps of the monster echoed around him, he forced himself up.
The elephant had almost reached him by then, and narrowly avoided another blow from its truck that fractured the rock behind where he had been lying. Jonathan scampered out of the way, and recovered as he ran, trying to get his strength back. The monster loomed over him like the behemoth that it was, and it trumped again, the noise sounding almost amused. Jonathan grunted in rage as he heard this. The brute chasing after him was amused at his suffering, was it? He would have to show it the error of its ways.
Jonathan turned around as the creature barreled towards him, and packed as much of his energy into his right fist as he could. A massive ball of purple light, that quickly condensed down into a marble sized orb, appeared in front of his glowing red fist, limned in the light of his Rune of Hatred. The elephantine monstrosity snorted in dismissal of the tiny technique, but Jonathan ignored it, knowing the true power of his attack.
As the monster neared him, Jonathan started running toward it, cocking his fist back as he went. Noticing the monster preparing to swipe with its trunk, Jonathan leaped into the air, avoiding the strike. He ran up the length of the monster’s trunk, and reached its forehead. The monster writhed, trying to get him off, but Jonathan grabbed onto one of its many loose folds of flesh, anchoring himself there. He then slammed his fist into its head as hard as he could, not holding back an ounce of his strength.
Driven by over 250 points in his Strength stat, the power of the void, and the power of a nascent god, Jonathan thrust the attack directly through the monster’s skin and into its skull. The bone fractured almost instantly, turning to powder as the attack reverberated throughout it. The creature’s brain turned to mush a moment later, and grey matter oozed out around Jonathan’s fist. A nimbus of mingled purple and red light spread outwards, vaporizing the flesh that it touched. The strike was so powerful that it blasted Jonathan himself backwards, throwing him towards the ground. The monster staggered backwards, and then fell, dissolving into specks of light. Jonathan raised his hands in victory, and shook his fists at the crowd of monsters, who were starting to go silent. It seemed that they were not happy about this turn of events.