Now it was time to find out what he could do at the rank of Instinct of Toxin.

As he swallowed the poison pill, the start of his minute was called and he leapt up onto the neck of the monster. Using the newfound control over Movement Boost, he focused the full effect into only his arms and shoulders and rammed Viper Fang into the skin of the A-ranker where Profound Toxin was already working to weaken the tissue enough for him to penetrate properly.

Wiggling the blade around in the shallow wound allowed him to dig deeper, the toxin already making its way into the behemoth’s circulatory system. With the strong connection to the toxin, he could tell that there was a main artery a little too the right of his blade where the harmful, blue substance was already flowing.

But if he could get a direct path into it, he could do unimaginable damage so he worked the sharp edge toward it. Nine seconds into his one minute, he nicked the artery and flooded the vessel with Profound Toxin.

With a thought, Eik sprouted six long branches of solid blue from his back, the tips of which were sharp and pointed. With awkward movements, he dug them into the now widened knife wound and spread them wide under the monster’s skin like parasitic worms.

This opportunity, combined with the enhanced flow speed of Instinct of Toxin, saw the beast’s system saturated in seconds. He could probably have gone for more, but realistically, it would probably be better to spark it now and go for a refill.

“Accelerant,” he muttered under his breath, a rush of adrenaline washing through him the moment he felt the reaction inside the victim. What a magnificent feeling this was. Pleasantly addicting.

Anytime he felt this, it was as if other emotions and thoughts were wiped away in favor of the bliss. There was a sense of concern somewhere in the back of his mind but in the moment that concern simply didn’t matter much.

He let himself be pulled along, like when he’d Accelerated the toxin in the fungus king. The journey this time was certainly shorter, but that sensation of rocketing through the system, embodying his own ability completely, was unparalleled.

As his consciousness was flung back into his own body violently, a pulsing shock wave of blue followed that ripped his fingers from their hold on the scales. Only the spindly limbs he’d prepared in advance allowed him to stay on to continue pumping in the toxic fluid ceaselessly.

In the short time since he started, the bastard’s thick skin had actually already started to regenerate around the grievous wound, encasing his hand, which was all the way inside, and his weapon in solid tissue. This too softened once he drenched it in toxin.

The Accelerant had caused the giant’s frozen body to slump slightly, the sphinx-like regality lost. Before the first thirty seconds had passed he had managed to set off another three Accelerants of smaller scales.

He dug the limbs of solid toxin deeper into the beast and was struck by an idea. And it was either going to work really well or tank so hard that he’d ruin his score.

On instinctual auto pilot, the blue substance gushed out through his hand and Viper Fang, which he tried to keep from blocking the passage of blood through the artery lest the circulation of his toxin was also impeded.

Meanwhile, Eik released five of the six limbs. Since he wasn’t great at controlling that many simultaneously yet he’d been moving them in pairs, so now that there was only one left, he could really focus. Using the sense of the monster’s body provided by the flowing poison inside, it slithered into and up along the artery toward the head.

“Thirty five seconds!” the judge called.

Carefully, Eik stretched the slender limb further through the vessel until he reached the back of the skull. That would have to do.

It would be a shame to lose out on points, and thus alliance credits that could support his alchemy business as it got off the ground, but given the incredibly lethal nature of his ability, a test like this was the perfect opportunity to try something against a monster that wasn’t actively trying to bite his head off.

“Fifty seconds!”

In the last second he added a bit of girth to the spindly blue branch while deadly fluid continued to rush through the monster’s body.

“Fifty three seconds!”

Eik created a flat disc under his feet and triggered Accelerant on almost thirty seconds’ worth of Profound Toxin, a deep, resounding whomp ringing through the behemoth’s entire body and roiling across its skin like waves on the ocean.

All over, the monster began to glow blue as the toxin inside reacted to Eik’s final order. From the entry wound where Eik’s hand was inside, a radiant line of blue ran up the beast’s neck, aligned with the solid branch of toxin lodged in the artery.

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It began to shimmer and Eik leaned back inadvertently, feeling an aggressive response from the toxin just before a bright, cerulean pulse tore him away like a flood.

Supporting himself against the disc, Eik watched, enraptured, the fruit of his murderous labor bloom in all its glory.

The A-ranker’s body jolted and rocked as if struck by something heavy that pushed it violently onto its side. That alone would probably done significant damage on its own, but that wasn’t where it stopped.

***

Ihasu of the Ougi clan was a proper young lady whose passion and talents were dedicated solely to the betterment and continued prosperity of the Ougi clan. Anything she did she did in order to expand the clan’s influence and secure new opportunities for growth, or to protect assets and interests that kept the clan in power whether large or small — anything that belonged to the clan should forever belong to the clan.

Ihasu, too, belonged to the clan. That was simply how it was. It was clan law and clan law was sacred and unbreaking. To the clan, the laws of the clan and the laws of nature were equal.

At least, that was what the clan’s raving hagiographer, a wrinkly old raccoon of a man who was tangentially related to Ihasu… in one way or the other, had filled her ears with throughout her childhood.

And if you asked Ihasu it might just be the biggest load of bull to ever come out of someone’s mouth. Self-aggrandizing drivel like that was exactly why Ihasu couldn’t stand clan politics. And it was why people were losing respect for them.

So many of the clan members worked their asses off in order to gain respect from the clan, so why was it so important for her mother that Ihasu emulated that behavior? Wasn't it enough that everybody else was doing it?

No, she had never been interested in living her life for the clan. Her life was her own and she was going to keep it that way.

But… if, hypothetically, she had been in the business of blindly following the clan’s directives, then this outrageous man going wild before her would have become a person to be recruited obsessively. He had supposedly only just evolved to D-rank recently but no matter how she spun and turned it, this was not a new D-ranker’s performance.

The ferocity alone qualified as disturbing, but causing an A-rank monster, even one stuck defenselessly in a powerful stasis, to apparently explode from the inside out, and in under a minute at that… Whatever the hell was going on here simply wasn’t normal.

Ihasu had witnessed countless talented fighters test themselves in the Crucible to the point where she had developed an eye for it. Being a young lady from an influential clan, she had been dragged to these performances all the time.

Rather than the practiced and graceful style of fighting that was so common in established families and clans, the Eik that was rampaging up there looked more like a monster himself.

It was primal.

It was furious.

And it was joyful. The blissful expression on his face as he giggled madly, caught up completely in the carnage, was frightening to say the least.

He ripped and tore at the victim with a smile that he barely seemed aware of himself. The skin crawled down Ihasu’s back.

In the final few seconds of his minute, Eik had once more triggered the ability that caused blue light to erupt out through the beast’s skin and orifices. The shock wave of it threw him off its body on a disc of poison. The mad grin never wavered as he watched his work come to a head.

For a moment she thought that it was over with that but when the glow faded from the rest of its body, a noticeably brighter line of blue stood out as it ran along the behemoth’s neck.

It hummed and pulsed as if it was powering up for something big.

Then, suddenly, it grew still and quiet, only the cerulean radiance remaining. And then it detonated with a vengeance. If the monster had not been an A-ranker with skin and muscles to match it, Ihasu thought she might well have been bathed in blood.

Like a macabre flesh balloon, that whole section of neck billowed out as if with compressed air, the skin ripping in places along the affected area. A sonorous thunder echoed inside, lurching the armored giant forcefully as it lay on the ground.

Ihasu had never thought much about the high-ranked monsters being wailed upon by Awakened several ranks below them, but now she couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity for this poor thing getting helplessly wrecked by Eik.

The Earthling watched the aftermath with a face that now seemed somewhat troubled. It was as if a veil had dropped from his eyes and the mirth had turned to sobriety.

There wasn’t a pair of eyes that wasn’t staring up at Eik as a dark patch of massive internal bleeding spread across his massive victim’s skin, the smaller tears allowing the lifeblood to spill onto the ground.

What a monster. He had done something utterly ridiculous. To think she had initially taken him for a defensive specialist. Looking back at it now, it was a laughable notion.

“Oh… wow…” Michael muttered breathlessly. “What’s the standing record for the category Eik fits into here?” he asked Mikla.

Ihasu answered before her superior had a chance. She knew most of the records by heart at this point. “It's a record held by Masakir Hahakan. He’s an S-ranker now, as far as I know. His score is 134,765, I believe.”

“What’s Eik going to get then?” Michael wondered out loud.

“I doubt he’s going to match Masakir,” Ihasu said. “The man's basically a legend.”

“But he already beat his score once before, though,” Heath noted.

“… What?” she breathed. No, wait. There had actually been some talk that one of Masakir’s previous high scores had been crushed recently. “Th- That was Eik? He got that unbelievable score? I hadn’t checked for myself so I just assumed someone was pulling made up facts out of their ass.”

“Yeah, and this was way more insane than back then,” Heath grinned.

Ihasu swallowed hard and looked back to the stage where Eik waited for his score to be announced by a judge who looked unsure about what to say although he had presumably calculated an exact damage score already.

The man closed his eyes and seemed to be recalculating his assessment just to be sure. When he opened them again he initially simply mumbled the score under his breath. Then he seemed to notice everybody waiting with bated breath around him and yelled loudly enough for every person present to hear him.

“E- Eik Magnasen… Eik Magnasen. A score of 203,543!”