I reached them just in time to see a small, dark orange creature dash atop Nida from behind. She had been protecting Nasq’s flank from incoming creatures creeping in from other parts of the village. Her spear whistled through the air, skewering the orange creature as she twisted around at the last second, only to have three more leap in her direction.
The creatures were no more than knee-high, with oval torsos and tiny clawed feet that belied their raw speed. Instead of arms, they had short, scaled wings that flapped frantically but seemed incapable of giving flight. They darted at Nida and Nasq like arrows, but they ignored Brianna, who I spotted screaming down a dune—apparently not worth their time.
A group of Harrowing Brutes broke through the wall of the stationary Brutes who were busy firing a continuous barrage of energy and mana beams at Nasq. Nida’s frown deepened as she dispatched the last of the orange beasts and reoriented herself, positioning between Nasq and the approaching Brutes.
I blew past Nida, screaming as I left them behind. “Go! Get the carriage and take off. I’ll meet you later.” I was already too far past Nida to hear her response, but I could have sworn it sounded like a furious "No," followed by a string of profanities.
By the time the few seconds I needed to reach the oncoming Harrowing Brutes came and went, my senses were wailing with warnings of incoming danger from every direction. The entire village was surrounded by multiple rings of monsters, each made of perhaps thousands of monsters. There wasn’t enough time for me to focus on my senses with enough precision to get an accurate count, but the approximation was enough.
I released the full fury of my core, fueling and empowering my body to the very limit of its physical prowess. I slammed into the first Brute like a bolt of rage-filled lightning, my fist shattering its skull as if it were a thin stick of wood.
It was viciously easy, powered by the raw force of my mid-tier silver core. The Harrowing Brutes screamed and howled as I spiraled through the air, moving too fast for them to defend. They turned their thick hides and twisted forearms to absorb what hits they could
The strength of their defensive skin and hide caused my strikes to send reverberations through my arms with every impact, pain radiating through my muscles and bones. I desperately ignored it, focusing on my next target and hoping Nasq and Nida had used the opening to flee. I couldn't spare them any attention. Not with thousands of monsters breathing down my back.
A group of two dozen or so orange monsters dashed toward me, their scaled wings and clawed feet lashing out toward me in a myriad of random and frantic movements. One managed to clip its claws against the side of my ribcage, tearing clothes and skin. I barely stopped myself from doubling over, small streams of red liquid streaming down the side of my shirt. My senses shrieked another warning, and I whipped my head around to find the source.
Nearly a mile away, perched on a house, was the largest Harrowing Brute I had ever seen. Unlike the other Harrowing Brutes I and Nasq had dealt with, this one had three heads. While the first head condensed its mana and energy into the Gravitum Beam, the other three howled like wolves under a full moon, their eyes wide with the red frenzy of bloodlust.
I didn’t panic. With my Silver core fully engaged, there was no reason to. Despite knowing I still wouldn't be able to block the beam, I had confidence in my chances. My abilities may have been mainly offensive and not defensive, but I had seen this attack before and had gauged its speed. Even if this Brute’s beam was faster, I had enough distance to dodge. I made quick work of the remaining orange creatures, careful not to let them near my open wound but ruthless in my attack.
Sound from behind me caused my head to snap around, spotting more of them approaching, likely to stop me from wandering. I roared at the two dozen Harrowing Brutes and the fifty orange creatures closing in, trampling over their comrades in desperation to pin me down.
I didn’t know if they regretted their choice.
But they should have.
Any reasonable being would have held great regrets after I exploded toward the nearest Brute and allowed my Authority to expand to its limits.
The power of Authority was relative to the user’s Core. And my Core was on full blast.
The closest Harrowing Brute collapsed before I even reached it, foaming at the mouth, alongside the orange creatures within a fifteen-foot radius. I weaved between the falling Brutes, delivering fatal strikes to their weak points and removing from them whatever limbs I could reach with a fury.
Hundreds of Harrowing Brutes fell in my wake, their corpses piling into a bloody graveyard. My muscles screamed with the effort to keep going, the wound in my side begging for healing.
Whatever remained in my trail of horror was incinerated when the three-headed Brute’s beam swept the area, obliterating everything in its path.
To my surprise, the three-headed Brute didn’t die like the others after firing its beam. The central head sagged, falling limp with exhaustion, but its hate-filled eyes still flickered toward me ruefully. The two remaining heads roared, spewing baleful fire as the beast leaped from its perch, barreling through other creatures in its way. It ran on all fours, its front limbs—whether arms or legs, I wasn’t sure—pounding the ground in rhythm with the rest of its body.
I dispatched another handful of Brutes before dodging an incoming Gravitum Beam by leaping fifteen feet into the air. The attack ended with a resounding thunk as the offensive Brute collapsed, dead from the energy expenditure.
As I landed, the three-headed Brute was on me, its ten-foot tail whipping around to interrupt my descent. I barely managed to raise my arms before it slammed into me, sending me crashing into the ground. My body slammed into the cobblestones with a deafening impact, the force of the collision so immense that the stones and earth beneath it cracked and buckled. Dust and debris exploded outward as the ground caved in, a jagged crater forming with me at the epicenter. The crater's edges crumbled slightly, leaving a sunken cavity where the ground once stood.
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Ignoring the pain, I surged to my feet, sneering at the Brute. The other Harrowing Brutes had proven no stronger than low Bronze cores, aside from their Gravitum Beam, which temporarily boosted their attacks by at least one core level. Judging by this three-headed Brute’s strength, I figured it was likely equal to a mid-silver tier core. At least, on Graedon.
I punched through the leg of a deceased Harrowing Brute and ripped out one of its leg bones, cracking it at the end so it took on the shape of some horrid spear. I pointed its tip at the three-headed Brute and let out a roar that promised it only death. It responded in kind, spewing plumes of white-hot fire to encompass its own deafening promise of destruction.
Brilliant rays of white lunar energy burst from my free hand as I jumped toward the fire. The energy ate through the white fire like it was nothing. In turn, dark, oozing necromantic energy started to coalesce around me, extending out with slow, sluggish movement to enwrap the entirety of the bone spear with its toxic slime.
The fire split around me, gravity pushing me ever faster at the Harrowing Brute. It tried to keep some distance between us but it was useless. The creature wasn’t fast enough. It wasn’t strong enough.
It may have been a silver core-level monster, but that was only on Graedon.
I was from Ordite where we ate such leveled beasts as delicacies on hunting trips. It was nothing to me.
Nothing.
I screamed and slammed the bone spear straight through the eye of the right head. It pierced through the soft flesh of the eye with an almost sickening squish.
I didn’t have time to dismount the creature’s face before it began to convulse, the sickly venom of my necromantic energy permeating and sinking deep into every inch of its being, poisoning its mind and destroying the body from the inside. Its body swiftly began to deteriorate into a husk of what it had been only moments earlier.
The third head whimpered as it died, the entire creature’s body sagging to the ground. Lifeless. But not gone.
Oh, no. Its soul wasn’t going anywhere.
The orange-white of the usual soul was nowhere to be seen. Instead, floating just slightly above the creature’s deteriorating torso was a purple-black soul flame. Unlike that of a human or other more sentient being that flickered with life and promise, the purple-black soul crackled with hate and rage, beckoning my Soul Weaver energy. Pleading with it. Begging for the opportunity to become something more than what it was. To become more than just a monster.
Despite having never resurrected a monster before with my Soul Weaver attribute, I instantly knew the word for what it would become. The word whispered itself into my mind.
It would become an Eldritch. A level of monster unlike anything Graedon had likely experienced. A creature that existed only in the bottom pits of Graedon’s hells and deep in the bowels of places no one ventured in Ordite.
My Soul Weaver energy, almost on its own, reached into the purple-black flame and wormed its way into it. At first, it didn’t force the soul back into the body. For seconds I could only feel my energy draining into the body of the dead Harrowing Brute, slowly filling up the hungry soul.
As the soul drank from my core, I continued my onslaught of the Harrowing Brutes. Their flesh, bones, and blood left a trail of murder and destruction behind me. I tore bone after bone from the compounding corpses, burying each broken bone into another. I collapsed skulls and necks. I broke legs and arms where I could. I decimated each of the Harrowing Brutes and any monster I could get to that posed a threat until none remained.
I heaved in a deep breath, black ooze and red blood covering my body from head to toe like I’d just rolled around it in. Every muscle in my body was tired, every inch of my skin slick with sweat and blood.
Then, just as I started to refocus on what was happening with the Harrowing Brute’s soul, something else roared from across the village. My head snapped toward the sound, spotting only hundreds of red circles bobbing above the houses. Perhaps some sort of giant? Another sound echoed from the opposite side of the village, also rapidly approaching me. These appeared as long, four-legged felines that prowled atop dilapidated buildings with a predator’s glare. Their short black fur ruffled only slightly in the wind, their movements done in complete silence.
Those would be more annoying than the Harrowing Brutes. When faced with extreme numbers, speed was always tougher to deal with than strength.
As if not wanting to be outdone by their competitors, a cacophony of other shrieks, howls, and roars echoed in every direction going so far back that I was sure the Harrowing Brutes I’d dealt with were only the first wave.
And that there were many more waves to go.
I turned back to observe the three-headed Harrowing Brute in time to watch as the purple-black soul descended back into the creature’s chest. It didn’t simply re-enter as the souls of others had done. No, this purple-black soul slowly sunk into the creature’s chest like a knife plunging into raw meat.
More black liquid oozed from the body under the soul’s pressure and the corpse shook. It quaked and spasmed until the creature had been lifted into the air and its body began to distort.
Its torso expanded to over five times its original span, the front legs jerking upward along the other heads, the bones within snapping and cracking, reshaping themselves until they resembled its other heads.
The eyes appeared in what used to be the arms, sluggishly opening to reveal pairs of golden-red eyes. Each eye darting from side to side, no doubt taking everything in as if the beast had not been resurrected, but newly birthed. Its torso bulged just under the neck, protruding from the body with thick needle-sharp claws already blackened by its own blood. The bulges continued to grow until they matched the hind legs and the creature fell forward on all fours.
The black of its heads twisted and shook as its skin was pulled apart and replaced with black, glimmering scales that seemed to suck in the sunlight raining down from the rising sun. Each of the four heads opened their mouths, revealing a slithering forked tongue that lashed around with vehemence.
Just when I believed the transformation to be over, the creature released the most horrific scream of raw pain I had ever heard and the heads began to tear in two. Flesh tore, dropping black blood and ripped scales until the tearing ceased.
Eight heads now stared up at the sun. Still, it didn’t move. The heads parted such that each side had four heads, with none remaining in the center. The scaled flesh between the fourth and fifth neck began to bulge, pulsating forward. Then a ninth head burst through that center, rearing in the air taller and thicker than the other eight.
Its forehead bore the marking of a crescent moon. The mark of a Lunari.
Or, in this case, the beast of a Lunari.
All nine heads bellowed, purple-black fire erupting from every mouth toward the sky to combine into a single act of pure terror and power.
[SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT: Congratulations, Host! You have resurrected your first Monster and created an Eldritch monster.]
[Species: Hydra.]
[Title: The One Returned to Fight the Main System]
[WARNING: You have created an Eldritch beyond your current abilities. The Eldritch may not respond to your commands.]