Mercion did many things. He shook his head like an angry bull, punched everything within reach, kicked the ground hard enough to throw up a storm of dust, and even yelled once or twice. Frustration had possessed him, body, mind, and soul. It was all too bad there were no monsters for him to vent his rage on. Well, not at first.

And then the gigantic serpents burst out of the ground.

Of course, the monsters weren’t what had made him mad in the first place. No, that was the accursed circumstances he kept ending up in. And the fact that he had allowed himself to get so worked up over them had only hammered in his self-hatred, fuelling his rage even higher.

It wasn’t fair…

Not fair. None of this was fair. Ah, he needed to kill something. That was going to make things settle back into their proper place.

Bad enough that he had let Searin die. She had turned out to be a dependable ally, an excellent third member of his team. Bad enough that Silomene had turned from a friend whom he could always rely upon to someone who now saw him as a toddler she had to keep watch over at all times. Bad enough he had lost the trust of nearly everyone, thanks to that gods-forsaken Gravemark Puppeteer manipulating him.

Bad enough that he had failed to beat back those worthless excuses for cultivators, relying on Rieren and the other part of their “plan” to lead them away. Bad enough he was utterly, undoubtedly useless.

Bad enough that he’d let that all affect him to the point he was raging at nothing and everything all at once.

Even worse, he had now even allowed a dozen gigantic monsters to breach a location they should never have reached in the first place.

But the worst of all…

Mercion shook his head violently once more. The worst thing of all was that accursed voice in his head popping up every time to send his thoughts into disarray. Curse the Abyss, he needed to concentrate.

“Please control yourself, my lord,” Silomene said. She looked like she wanted to place a calming hand on his shoulder, perhaps even comfort him with an embrace. That just soured Mercion’s soul further. He really wasn’t in the right state of mind at all. “We couldn’t have known about this. It’s completely unforeseen.”

“That makes none of this any better,” Mercion said. Gods, he could barely talk without sounding like a skulking, rasping mongrel eternally lamenting his misfortune. Argh.

“We aren’t even the ones responsible for the monsters. Rieren and my uncle and the rest… something must have happened. They wouldn’t have allowed this.”

“No, Silomene, this was their plan all along.”

“What?”

“The monsters. They’re smarter than we give them credit for.” He scowled, then tried to moderate it, then scowled at the instinctive need to hold back the expression of his feelings. So what if it was going to leave a few permanent wrinkles? “Trust me, I know.”

Silomene didn’t argue. It stood to reason that someone who’d been possessed and manipulated by an Abyssal would know full well how devious they could be.

“Wait a moment,” she said instead. “I’ll see if I can call them, see what we should do.”

What they ought to do was more than obvious. With the Fellserpents climbing out of the ground, the monsters were now free to submit their tokens and qualify for the next round. In fact, as Mercion watched with growing concern, more monsters emerged from within the gigantic snakes.

They weren’t the real monsters here. The serpents were merely the transport.

Mercion shook his head again, wishing he had actual horns like a bull. Monkey-kissing monsters.

“—I see,” Silomene was saying. The call had done nothing but raise her concern, if her expression was anything to go by. She was trying quite hard not to look at Mercion. “But they’re here, Your Majesty. The monsters are a mere step away from submitting their tokens. We need to stop them immediately. I—yes, I know, but—”

She went silent. It didn’t look like anything she was hearing was pleasant.

Mercion sighed. If one had to do a thing, one had to do it oneself. Unless, one had more accomplished companions who could take care of it, of course. No such luck for him. This time—this god-blasted time, for once—he, Mercion Ordorian, the heir to the Archnoble throne of the Stannerig clan of the Shatterlands, had to step up.

He stepped forward.

“Lord Mercion?” Silomene said. She switched back to her call. “No. No, he’s just walking off. Hold a moment. My Lord! Wait, please. We mustn’t go to the monsters.”

Mercion turned around and grabbed Silomene by the shoulder. “Silomene, do you trust me?”

She hesitated, which should have been enough of an answer. It should have stoked the flame of Mercion’s rage even higher, but he’d had enough of that. “I—”

“It’s a yes or no question, Silomene. We have no time. No space to vacillate. We must decide now. So, do you trust me?”

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Silomene closed her eyes. “With my life.”

“I don’t want your life. I want you to—I want us to be what we were. It sounds impossible, but for just this once, for right this moment if never ever again, can you believe in me the way you used to? Can you put your faith in the Mercion you’ve known all these years? Can you trust me?”

“I have. I do.” A fire lit up in Silomene’s normally calm eyes. “I will.”

“Then trust me to handle this for now. As for you, you need to bring in the others as fast as possible. There’s no time to waste. Go.”

Silomene nodded, then hurried away. But even while she didn’t prevent Mercion from doing what was necessary, her concern for him still came first and foremost. “Please be careful, my lord.”

“I will.”

So will I…

Mercion was tempted to shake his head again. It always helped kicking that voice out of his mind. But for now, all he could focus on were the monsters ahead of him.

The Fellserpents were spitting out other creatures from within their enormous bodies. Some of the monsters inside them were big enough that the gigantic snakes were bloated, as though they were pushing out chunks of a mountain they’d swallowed for some reason.

Those Fellserpents would have been bad enough on their own. Their scales shimmered with reflective light, more and more spikes bursting out of their flanks the higher one looked. Near their heads, a mane of man-length dark spines crowned their necks. The heads themselves were pointed, jagged, filled with teeth big enough to use as rafts on a river.

But that was fine. They were serpents. Mindless transports. Those things couldn’t handle the exchange of tokens to qualify for their teams, even if they were part of some of the monsters’ teams. They were simply too gigantic to handle tokens smaller than a mortal’s palm.

Instead, it was the monsters they brought forward that Mercion had to worry about.

He tried to look through them to see which would be the best for him to take. There was a monster with too many treelike limbs and no head, just a gout of dark blood coming from its neck. Another Aetherian had emerged from within its Fellserpent, glowing so bright that its shape was difficult to make out. Mercion jerked his head around to take them all in.

As long as he got one of their attention, he was certain he could prevent the others from submitting their tokens, just through the sheer surprise of seeing one man—one cultivator obviously far weaker than any of them—trying to stop them all.

The sheer audacity…

Gah. He was the son of an Archnoble, for crying out loud. This was no more audacious for him than picking his teeth clean after a big meal.

Mercion locked onto his target. There. The Nebula, if he was remembering the Aetherian’s name right, would be the safest for him to attack. Mercion drew in a heavy breath to centre himself as he ran at the monster, then launched his sword forward, activating his strongest skill at the same time.

Jagged Hurricane sent out a violent storm of lightning bolts striking the entire area. Mercion hadn’t progressed in his cultivation as far as would have been ideal. It just took too much work. He had a whole region to save, alright. An Abyss-cursed apocalypse to fight off.

There wasn’t time to sit and meditate and cycle and whatever other nonsense his family of cultivators got up to.

Nevertheless, that meant Mercion’s cultivation had lagged. That was fine, though. The system recognized that the apocalypse didn’t offer many great opportunities for people to cultivate, so there needed to be a different path for progressing one’s power.

That was where the system of classes and skills came in. Mercion had done well enough in that. At level thirty-three, he was well ahead of most of his contemporaries. Some of his skills had risen to A-Grade, too. Enough to deal with these damn creatures, of that he was certain.

The only problem was—Mercion coughed even as he unleashed his skill. His Spirit was high enough, but the Essence draw required for it still strained his soul due to his lagging cultivation still only in the Early-Enlightened realm. It made the world turn distorted, the colours shifting. The only reason the disorientation didn’t make him fall was because he was used to it by now.

Still. The skill struck hard and true. A hammering blitz of bolts punched into the monsters. One good thing about lightning Aspect was how fast and surprising it could be. Not a one of the Abyssals or Aetherians saw it coming.

Mercion’s storm of bolts hammered into the Fellserpents and made them cry out in agony as their scales were ripped off and their flesh sizzled. At the same time, several of the stronger monsters retreated away, trying to find out where the bolts were emanating from. But it was Mercion’s main target who took the brunt of the attack.

The Nebula regularly looked like a dark, humanoid mass of the cosmic void, filled with a nervous system made of stars and other glittering material. But as soon as the lightning struck, it turned completely white. In fact, enough of Mercion’s bolts landed on it to send it flying off its feet, crashing into the tree line that had been set ablaze by stray bolts from the stormy spray.

“Who dares?” one of the monsters thundered out, as loud as the bolts Mercion had unleashed. It was a Blightmane, though a powerful one, going by its stark-white, spiky fur.

Mercion stepped forward, pushing aside the feeling dizziness. Why did the system have to cap one’s prowess and tie it to cultivation? He shouldn’t be suffering for the use of his own powers just because he’d had no time to cultivate.

“You will not take a single step further,” Mercion said. He summoned a spear of lightning in his right hand with Heaven’s Spear. “I, Mercion of the Stannerig clan, will not allow it.”

“One little cultivator?” the headless monster that he didn’t even know the name of said. How in the Abyss was it even speaking? “Weren’t these ants supposed to have been dealt with already?”

“They were to have been led away too the frontlines, yes.” The Blightmane growled at Mercion, though that might have been his interpretation of its natural appearance. Its following statement was less a hostile threat and more a genuinely inquisitive question. “Pray, tell me before you die, what are you doing here, cultivator?”

Mercion hawked and spat to one side. A deplorable act that would have made his entire clan ashamed that he’d been born, but the monsters were starting to annoy him tremendously. “I am here to claim my path to the second round. And if that means stopping the likes of you, then so be it.”

“You do realize that we can all proceed forward, yes? Provided you have a token, of course. Unless your plan is to take one from us.”

Before Mercion could answer, the Nebula stomped back into the area from where it had been flung. “Enough blathering about. This creature thought it could attack me. Me! I will annihilate it.”

“You do that,” the Blightmane said. “We will proceed with the plan.”

Ha. As if Mercion was about to allow that. Just as the Nebula stepped forward to face him, he raised his spear high and jumped. Surprised, the monster tried to reach him faster, shooting at him with an impressive, flickering speed, but Mercion had never aimed for it in the first place.

All he did was stab his lightning spear down and use it to vault over the horde of monsters to land in front of the brazier. He wobbled a little at the landing. Accursed disorientation.

Ignoring the aftereffects of his skill usage, Mercion stepped forward and activated Thunderclap Barrier. Walls of lightning shooting upwards out of the ground materialized on either side of him.

Mercion raised his hands high. “Want to progress to the next round, you maggots? Then you’ll have to get past me.”