The pace of battle changed immediately, before the hunters had been content to sit still and carefully gun down the approaching kobolds, now they were desperately zig-zagging everywhere and flying into various bits of cover.

A few people returned fire and suppressed the kobold mages but it was too little too late. Nearly half their entire team was gone, another two dozen hunters had joined their predecessors in the afterlife.

Trying to get an understanding of the new battlefield, Thomel looked around hurriedly, spotting where concentrations of his allies and the kobolds were.

He could see Volly lying in a ditch, dirt plastered all over her and gritting her teeth as she applied an ointment to the burn wounds covering her left arm.

She wasn’t alone either, nearly a third of the remaining hunters were injured and a couple looked to be on the verge of death.

The battle hadn’t stopped just because he wasn’t shooting though, spheres of arcane light were still being hurled into trees and hunters, exploding both equally and sending splinters of wood and chunks of flesh flying everywhere.

He stared over at a clump of two hunters who were laying down covering fire for a third hunter who was trying to advance and watched as a sphere smashed onto the ground between them, sending fragments of the duo up into the air.

The hunter they were trying to protect died shortly after, as without their covering fire another sphere was easily flung at her, the first one missed but the second vaporised her.

Witnessing all this carnage, Thomel felt impartial. Not a single trace of fear or regret washed over him, he could empathise with the others but he couldn’t sympathise with them.

But despite his feelings, he couldn’t remain an observer any longer, he’d already located a few mages and he knew where his backup would come from.

Aiming down his sights, Thomel carefully tracked one of the kobold mages and opened fire, his bullet punched cleanly through its chest and blasted bits of meat out behind it in a bloody trail.

Automatically, he switched to another mage and pulled the trigger, killing yet but another deadly foe with ease.

Time seemed too slow as he sighted and fired upon the third one, the tunnel his bullet bore through its head progressed at a minuscule rate and the blood spurting out looked static.

He drank in the details like a parched desert wanderer finding an oasis. Analysing and deconstructing the war paint that gleamed a soft hue, trying to understand if the way it shaped its hand was responsible for the small sphere that was forming nearby.

Then time resumed its normal pace, the kobolds corpse continued to run forward a little longer, propelled by momentum but then it slipped and fell into the embrace of a dead tree branch, which clung onto its frail form with vicious thorns.

All the knowledge Thomel had drunk in dissipated, slipping through his mind like sand through his fingers.

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Trying to shrug it off he swung his rifle around to where a kobold mage was hiding behind a tree and fired.

However his innate skill had left him now and the bullet zipped past the kobolds neck, missing by nearly a foot and penetrating a tree instead.

Panicking, the kobold slipped around to the opposite side of the tree. Thankfully his gun was automatic so he simply flicked a small switch and then sprayed the entire area with nearly twenty armor piercing bullets.

Confident he’d killed the mage, he jumped off his perch and landed heavily on the ground, throwing out his magazine and jamming another one in quickly.

A mere second later one of those white spheres engulfed the interlinked trees and sent shards of wood everywhere.

Thomel covered his eyes with one arm and used the other to protect his neck as long nails of wood stabbed into him.

Once the outburst was done, he tugged out the biggest bits and then picked up his gun and fled over to where one of the remaining clusters of hunters were.

Sliding into cover thirteen yards away from them, he hurriedly yanked out the remaining jagged splinters and then looked out from behind the tree he was hiding behind.

This turned out to be a mistake as a kobold magician spotted him and flung a readily formed sphere in his direction.

It blew a chunk out of the side of the tree but luckily this one was a few magnitudes thicker so Thomel was able to escape relatively unharmed.

Breathing calmly and with his heart rate perfectly sincere, he poked his head out of cover again and dropped the kobold like a sack of potatoes.

Sighting another one immediately he put a bullet in between its eyes as well. His innate skill was back in force.

Thomel wasn’t the only one taking out the opposing mages either, the other hunters were killing their fair share too and the battle was quickly becoming a stalemate.

Guided by that same instinctual urge he’d had earlier, Thomel activated his system status. It was far from the cautious move he would normally pull but it felt like something that’d been predetermined for him. As though his choice was superficial.

Calling forth his status screen, he took a look at what had been innately changed about himself.

NAME: Thomel

CLASS: Apostle

LEVEL: 58

EXPERIENCE: 3612/21568

Physical

[82]

Attunement

[0]

Magical

[0]

[Boons]

Tracking

Hunted Hunter

Survivor

[Gifts]

But other than his class everything else remained the same. H

Pouring all his points into physical, he moved onto the main course. His newly granted boon.

Embracing it, he laid himself bare before the system-piercing gaze, unknowable questions that he somehow could parity understand were asked and something answered for him, subverting the position that would have been normally held for himself.

He now had a lawyer at this interrogation table and it was a damn good one. Ignoring some questions and countering others, even asking some of its own.

This back-and-forth argument quickly turned into a debate as new voices joined the choir, soon he had an entire team of lawyers on his side.

Conceding, the time-wrapping void that had consumed his mind disappeared and the system status came back into focus.

He’d gained a new boon, Sanctification.

His mind and body had been evolved by his personal God, yet he was still missing something, a third ingredient to complete the recipe of ascension, now he had it.

More importantly though, he’d gained a new understanding of reality and his place in it. He knew what he had to do to break the chains and collapse the cursed cycle.