The crater around the obelisk was covered in a cloak of silence when a small flash of azure light lit up on its exterior. As the air around the obelisk rippled with the colour of white and blue, a man in a black robe slowly walked out of the fissure in space. As Alex looked around, he saw nobody. The last time he was here, he was together with Sarah, Claire, Harry, and Michelle, which brought about memories of their journey from the apartment complex all the way to the obelisk, including the encounter with the awakened beast dog.
“Come to think of it, I should check how Harry and Michelle are doing after this assignment,” Alex thought, making a mental note.
As Alex took a look around himself, it seemed as if other cultivators already cleaned up around the obelisk, leaving no prey for Alex.
“I’ll have to move farther from the obelisk if I’ll want to find large quantities of awakened beasts.” Alex thought as he entered a sprint and moved out.
As the obelisk was located in the region of the city centre, Alex decided to first scout the biggest streets branching out from the city square. Unfortunately for Alex, after about fifteen minutes of a slight sprint, he confidently concluded that the whole centre of the city was clear of any type of non-human threat.
“This is going to take an eternity if I’m going to wander around the city aimlessly. I should find some higher ground.”Alex decided as he looked towards the highest building in his vicinity.
In a minute, Alex reached the twenty-story company headquarters of a local cosmetic company. After stopping, understanding dawned on Alex; he covered almost a kilometre in less than a minute without breaking even a drop of sweat, and he didn’t even try that hard. As he lifted his head, the building looked ominous to him, probably a mixture of the grim design in tandem with the absolute lack of any type of light during the slow onset of nighttime.
“I should get to the roof and search for targets from there.” Alex mused, looking for an open entrance to the building.
As he walked around the perimeter of the building, an idea entered his mind. The idea would have been in the realm of crazy a couple of days ago. Now though? Now, it seemed like something very much in the realm of possibilities for Alex.
Abandoning his search for an entrance, Alex approached the stone wall of the building. As he reached it, he looked up.
“Perfectly vertical surface. I must be crazy,” he thought in excitement.
Immediately as he thought, he tensed his hands and jumped up the wall, using his clawed gauntlets to dig into the hard stone of the wall. As he turned his head to look down, Alex was absolutely shocked; his small jump left him about four meters above the ground.
“Haha, holy shit! I think it’s about time I tried for real!” Alex spoke to no one in particular.
Deciding to find out the limits of his newly acquired powers, he planned his next movements. Considering he was holding onto the wall with only his hands at the moment, he decided to rectify that first. He tensed the muscles of his legs as he focused inward towards the golden Unity serenely floating in the space of his solar plexus. Immediately as he felt the warm presence of the Unity inside him, he willed it to enforce his body.
With absolutely no resistance, the golden transparent sphere obeyed the will of its creator and started spinning and diffusing the golden-coloured breath throughout Alex’s body. Immediately as the breath started spreading through every inch of Alex’s body he kicked the wall. His feet slid into the hard stone like a hot knife through butter.
Now that Alex had more points of contact with the wall, he had more leverage to generate force from his body. As he settled into a comfortable position, his hands grabbing onto the stone harder while his legs were digging deeper into the stone, he tensed his whole breath-suffused body. Steeling his will, he used the full extent of his physical strength as he pulled with his hands and pushed with his legs.
A second later, Alex found himself catapulted straight towards the top of the building at an insane speed. The cold evening wind was whistling all around as Alex was faux-flying towards the top when he started losing momentum at around the last floor of the building. As his momentum totally left him, he was forced to once again dig his clawed gauntlets into the wall of the building to avoid falling down the way he came from.
“I think that’s enough flying for today,” Alex thought, feeling the familiar aching of muscles.
As he gathered his wits, he decided to use his hands to climb the last stretch unto the roof of the building. After another ten seconds of awkward climbing, he pulled himself onto the roof with a thud as he stumbled on the roof fence and fell. As he stood up, he looked at the whole city from a bird’s flight view.
Even though down on the streets it seemed to be nighttime already, from the roof, Alex could still see the pink-red sunset littering the far-off horizon. It was only now that he noticed that the sky was normal. When the obelisks first arrived, the crimson matter that seeped out of the fissures in the sky, which Alex now knew was the Divine Breath, made the sky take on a blood-crimson hue, that was entirely gone now.
Taking a deep breath, Alex looked content at the lifeless city below him when a vicious sound resounded above him.
“Cawww!” the sound approached closer at a fast speed.
As Alex looked up, he saw a giant crow break off from its murder diving beak-first straight for him. His immediate instinct was to dive sideways in hopes of dodging his assailant when his Unity started spinning again, this time faster than when he jumped up the wall of the building. As the Unity spun, the golden-coloured breath it expunged went directly towards his brain.
The moment his brain came in contact with the breath, time slowed down for Alex. The mad crow diving towards him seemed to be moving in slow-motion as his mind was overclocking. As the crow was suddenly crawling according to Alex’s senses, he gained time to decide on a new course of action instead of jumping to the side in a panic. At this moment, the [Musings of Destruction] he absorbed in the Librarium made their knowledge known.
As the crow finally reached the crown of Alex’s hair, Alex made a minute sideways step and drove his hand through the crow’s torso in one smooth motion. With Alex’s hand piercing the crow’s body, its lifeless corpse simply hanged off his arm.
“That was… anticlimactic. To say the least.” Alex thought as he shrugged his hand, dropping the dead giant crow onto the roof’s surface.
“One down, forty-nine to go” Alex concluded with a silent sigh.
As he looked at the dead crow’s corpse, he remembered that when Jake and Amber killed the three giant dogs, Amber used a knife to cut off a small part of the dogs, namely their ears. It seemed as if they needed to do that to prove they actually killed the beasts.
“Damn, I was so worried about feeding Nova, I didn’t even think about that. How the hell am I going to carry fifty body-parts with me?” Alex asked rhetorically as a frown formed on his face.
Deducing that at some point he would have to find some kind of bag or sack, he squatted towards the crow corpse at his feet. Looking at the giant bird, he decided that for now, the easiest part of the crow to carry would be its shiny black beak. He used his right hand to hold the crow’s head in place while he used the left hand’s claws on his gauntlet to rip the beak off. As he held the bloody beak in his hand, he glanced at the maimed corpse once again and thought.
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“This is weird. If I had seen something like this before, I would be throwing up right about now, but I feel normal. No, I feel amazing, not just normal. Perhaps it has to do with the Unity enhancing my mind right now.” Alex hypothesized on his current condition.
As Alex was deep in thought, the space above him once again became filled with the mad cry of crows.
“CAWWWWW!!!” the murder of crows screamed at Alex, who snuffed the life out of their companion.
As he lifted his head, the murder was already descending on him as his mind, which was still in that weird state where things seemed to move slower than usual, went to work.
“One, two, three…eight. Front, back, left, right, all covered. I can’t dodge everything.” Alex concluded as he steeled his will.
The Musings were a predominantly offensive art, which meant that beyond the basic block, parry, and dodge, they didn’t provide all that many options in a situation where the user was on the defensive.
Recounting the position of the eight crows above him, Alex chose the lesser of two evils, or rather, eight evils in this case. With a sudden jump, he moved towards the left and used his gauntlet-clad hands to cover his head in a basic martial arts block. A second later, he felt the crow above him crash with force into himself. Considering the crow was falling beak-first with a terminal velocity at Alex, the force with which it crashed into him was enough to leave any normal human crippled for the rest of their life. Unfortunately for it, Alex was no longer normal by human standards.
“My arms are slightly aching from the impact, but no wounds aside from that. The fact they can fly is a disadvantage though.” his mind raced through the thoughts.
Considering the meagre damage the crows could do with their most powerful dive, Alex decided to drop his defensive measures in favour of a more offensive approach. As he opened his arms, which were previously covering his head, he saw the crow that smashed into him flapping its wings in front of him in a dazed manner while the other seven of its companions were already manoeuvring through the air towards him. Deciding to finish this faster, he totally abandoned any thought of defence as he reached for the crow directly in front of him as a verse from the Musings resurfaced in his mind.
“Compared to land-based Awakened Beasts, which circulate their Divine Breath strictly throughout their body, Awakened Avian Beasts circulate their Divine Breath in a rudimentary manner throughout not only their body but through their feathers as well. As a result, their feathers provide limited resistance from blunt impacts. The advised course of action is slashing or piercing attacks for optimal destruction of the target. Weak points for most Avian lifeforms are; head, wings, chest. ” Alex remembered the teachings contained in the Musings.
As he reached the crow in front of him in one swift motion. He grabbed its head with one hand and its neck with another, and twisted. A grisly crunch later, its lifeless body fell at Alex’s feet, joining its other unfortunate companion from earlier, leaving another seven crows circling Alex from the air.
As the lifeless crow fell, Alex became aware that the limited amount of Divine Breath he had was running out after his reckless experiments earlier as well as the energy required in overclocking his mind at the moment.
“I have to finish this fast, or else I’m in for an unpleasant time.” Alex thought with finality.
Alex lifted his head to look at the crows above when his focus was drawn to something; he noticed nebulous clouds of yellow and red forming around the remaining seven crows.
“Yellow is fear, but what is red?” Alex sent the question to Nova through their bond and received a jumbled mess of intent and meaning in response.
“Red is anger,” Alex affirmed in understanding as another verse of the Musings surfaced in his mind.
“Destruction does not refer merely to the destruction of the physical vessel. It can mean the destruction of an idea, or, in the case of an enemy, their mind. Employ any and all means to crush your opponent’s mind, and bring their demise one step closer.” Alex recounted.
As the teaching flashed through his memory, an idea came to him. He did not know how much the crows above understood beyond basic concepts of hunger, prey, and hunter, but Alex supposed he would find out soon enough.
As the crows were still circling the air above Alex in apprehension after losing two members of their little clique, Alex took a step forward and inhaled as much air as he could hold in his lungs. In an instant, he lifted both his head and his right leg, and then immediately willed his Unity to enhance his lungs to their fullest capacity. A split second later, after Alex made sure the crow's attentions were focused on himself, he dropped his leg onto the skull of the fallen crow below him and let out an utterly savage roar. The loud crunch of skull-bone under Alex’s foot along with the promise of destruction suffusing his roar destroyed any remaining will to fight in the crows. As their survival instinct took over completely, Alex could visibly see how the specks of red around the crows were thoroughly extinguished by a sea of yellow as they collectively decided that revenge was not worth their lives. Immediately as Alex’s roar died down, the crows, thoroughly terrified, fled as fast as they could away from Alex’s presence.
As he was left alone on the building’s roof, the golden Unity started slowing down in its revolutions until it stopped completely, continuing to float inertly in the region of his solar plexus. As the enhanced state of his body and mind wore off, fatigue crashed into Alex like the waves of an ocean.
“No more stupid expenditures next time. If I wouldn’t have jumped all the way from the base of the building to the top, this fight wouldn’t have left me completely dry. I also need to pace myself more; enhancing my mind is extremely useful, but it drains my reserves too fast. I should do that only for opponents that drive me into a corner, and not some mindless beasts I could have taken care of anyway.” Alex commented to himself, creating a mental checklist of things he’d have to work on in the coming month.
With a tired but content expression, he took his mask off and took a deep breath before exhaling. Tucking his mask into his inner robe, he slowly approached the second crow that fell by his hand and used his hands to rip its beak from its twisted head and put it into his pocket, letting it rest alongside the first beak he collected.
“I doubt those crows will return anytime soon, so this place should be clear from any distractions; for a while, anyway.” Alex mused, as he walked over to the edge of the roof overlooking the city, and sat with his legs crossed.
As he sat, he immediately focused on his almost empty Unity and willed it to start revolving differently than before. If the earlier revolutions were used to expunge the breath from the Unity, these revolutions carried a certain suction force within their movement, absorbing the ambient Divine Breath from Alex’s surroundings.
“Hmm? It seems the higher the altitude, the higher the concentration of the Divine Breath in the surroundings.” Alex noted the difference in density of the Divine Breath compared to that of the ground level.
“Good to know, considering I have to recover and go back to my task.” he thought, after which he cleared his mind of all stray thoughts and focused entirely on the revolutions of his Unity and recovering his Divine Breath reserves.
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Somewhere below the roof of the building where Alex’s battle with the murder of crows was taking place, two individuals were sprinting somewhere. The duo wore dark green robes and had shoddy sabres strapped to their backs. Both of them had a thuggish air around them, a remnant of the time before the obelisks arrived. The two used to be bottom of the rung thugs in a local gang before the world as they knew it came to an end. The two were mugging some poor soul, too drunk to understand what was happening to him at the time, when the obelisk crashed. The two were close enough to the city centre, that they were among the ones who were instantly transported inside the outpost, and didn’t have to walk all the way to enter like Alex and his companions.
Being one of the first ones to join a faction, the two of them took their already existing predisposition towards violence and having received orders from their Elder, took up an extermination request.
Unfortunately for everyone involved with these two, old habits die hard. Instead of clearing the path of Awakened Beasts for those who didn’t make it to the outpost yet, the two thugs, drunk on their newly acquired scraps of power, decided to terrorize the ones they were supposed to protect.
As they were sprinting, one of them spoke.
“Move it, Bones! The bitch is going to get away!” one of the two yelled.
“Oh shut it, Pack, the stupid cunt is going to get tired eventually. Just enjoy the chase. Hehehe.” the one called Bones replied in a creepy voice.
“Easy for you to say, she didn’t slash your eye with a pocket knife!” Pack was seething anger from his voice.
“Eh, I told you to either tie her up or knock her out before having some fun, but nooooo, you like ‘em when they scream. You get what you asked for.” Bones told him off with the same creepy smile plastered on his face.
“Shut up! She couldn’t have run away far enough, which means she’s hiding somewhere around here.” Pack said, looking menacingly around when something happened.
A deafening roar made the air tremble around the area the two were in. The two turned towards the source of the roar, which was a towering building half a block away from the duo.
Hearing the roar, the two froze with fear, which subsided only when the roar’s echoes died down completely.
“What the fuck was that?” Pack asked.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know that?” Bones asked, his creepy face littered with sweaty beads of fear.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like none of it.” Pack said.
“Let’s get away from whatever that was, ‘cause I don’t want to be here when and if it passes by,” Pack added.
“What about the slut?” Bones asked, pointing at Pack’s wounded eye.
“Hehe, if she’s somewhere around here, whatever made that sound is going to make quick work of her. She’s still a mortal.” Pack answered with evil glee in his voice.
“I guess you’re right. Let’s get the hell away from here then.” Bones added.
And with that said, the two unsavoury characters turned around, and started running at full speed away from the source of the roar.