Tetsu declines the strongest skill offered to him on a silver platter without batting an eye. His stupidity cost RJ her life, and this technique is his penance.
A strain, a curse, forever placed over his shoulder as a remembrance of RJ and a reminder of what he did.
Blink... Tetsu’s vision blurs as tears fill his eyes, blocking his view of the ominous forest ahead of him.
Blink, Tetsu looks at himself, walking away from the back and at a lower angle. A pebble with an eye, Tetsu’s eye, monitoring him, from the left, right, up, and a stupid snake plotting a hundred meters away.
Blink, Tetsu looks at himself crying. A pebble with an eye in his palm.
"Is that all you can do?" An inner voice questioned him.
Tetsu hops and places the pebble high inside a tree hole, creating a higher scouting point.
Artificer class helped Tetsu keep track of the depleting mana within the pebbles. A weird math Tetsu could do because of the class. The same way that it calculated the level of a unique skill.
Oh yeah, class and title hacks are on a completely different level. Take the Artificer class, for example. It gives a rough estimate of the runes. Any rune over a hundred meters can only be accessed once, between forty and ninety, twice, and the closet one’s thrice.
Without the class, Tetsu would have been blinded for life before creating the skill. Even during the process, the information from the class guided Tetsu. Similar to how ‘Saint’ helps in Info. Without them, the runes and most of Tetsu’s experiments are a dud. Do not tell this to the saint, though, he already has an inflated ego larger than a hot-air balloon.
Tetsu’s mind kept joking about the ridiculous math he dodged or the awkward stares he gave himself, but a heavy heart anchored over his smile, and kept him focused. Yet when he snuck up onto his target, he was only met with disappointment.
Info placed the beetle at level five, but all it was—Was an oversized bug.
The human startled the beetle when she turned and found him patting her with a death glare.
The human used her sudden movement to escape against her. He first mimicked her movements before she thought of them and moved before she decided to move.
One step ahead… one step closer, and every step placed in her shadow, stepping before she stepped.
‘How? a level-two human!’ Her eyes widen.
Tetsu slams the beetle into a trunk and later shifts her trajectory with ease.
‘A mere human shouldn’t be this strong.’ She thinks to herself before being dragged across the floor.
Pave path, Tetsu deactivates the skill and sits over the beetle’s wing shell, placing his feet over her horns.
Buried in the ground head first, she couldn’t grasp the situation. A level-two human should not be stronger than her, yet she struggled to budge him.
“Molten shell.” Beetle activates a skill and summons magma to seep into her exoskeleton.
Tetsu steps aside and kicks the bug away. “Weak.” He spits, disappointed and furious.
The beetle flaps her wings in rage, regaining her balance. “Spread.” She commands the magma to condense over the horns. “Fire.” Two bolts of molten larva shoot toward Tetsu.
Already in position, Tetsu slips his hands into his pants pockets and walks toward the beetle as if he had all the time in the world.
A step to the right, his left leg following through with a curve, a slight bow, and he dodges both the larva bolts, with his hands still in the pants pockets, walking, crying, and furious.
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“Pathetic.” He grunts.
The beetle's anger turns to fear, and an added hiss from the human freezes her in place.
An intense pain rushes through her skull, caused by a sharp stick jabbed into her eyes. The pain pulls her out of the trance and into the gaze of a predator.
Tetsu broke, sharpened, and jabbed a random twig into the beetle’s eye. It yelps and backs away, releasing a huge fire orb, blocking any further pursuit.
“Free orb.” Beetle activates a skill, spewing out fire orbs from beneath her wings, ready to blow up half of the forest.
Every time she activated this skill, her opponents had to let her flee. Those foolish enough to follow her got a face full of miniature explosions. Yet!
“This beast.”
Beetle gaped at Tetsu, who stuck to her like a magnet.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out the bug’s next move. Tetsu stepped, aiming for the gap between release and activation, and rode alongside the beetles’ escape route with 'Pave Paths' and a couple of runes.
"Predictable." He scoffs, steps to the right, vanishes, appears behind the beetle, pivots, and uses its confused state to pull and slam it over a boulder.
Beetle recovered to find herself stuck inside the fire orb’s turf while the human glared at her from a safe distance. Any sudden movement and a chain reaction will rock the forest with her in its epicenter.
Fire orb bared close resemblance to the Dandralith’s ‘Firefly’ skill, and this churned Tetsu’s stomach the wrong way.
Still prideful of her higher level, Beetle aims to summon a fire spell but gets hit on her injured eye with a pebble.
She lowed at the human, meeting his eyes. They flickered uncontrollably, reading, judging, and planning his and her next move.
Pebbles flew from every direction, never missing their mark; her eyes.
This is when Pride left her. The human did not wait for her to slip up. He just played a foreign game, one where he adorned the role of a hunter, and she played the part of prey.
Trying to defy her fate one last time, she raised a shield before the explosions, before he had his way. She only wished these explosions would signal a single individual. Someone who can avenge her.
An explosion shook the forest. Not as big compared to ‘firefly,’ but huge enough to carry one last request.
Fate wasn’t kind to the beetle. A gut-wrenching pain forces her out of the stupor and into the judgment of a hunter.
"Weak." He claimed.
Tetsu’s frown grew larger. The longer he looked at the Pathetic bug clinging to life. Its mandibles opening and closing, cursing or begging him to finish or leave it.
Beetle wanted to die, yet fate saved her, and now she knew why.
A shadow crept behind the human. A shadow similar to hers and yet so much stronger.
The pride, protector, and chosen amongst the ‘Larva Beetle.’ Not just for their clan, but for her pride, a shadow chosen, promised to accompany her throughout her life.
He heard and now came to fulfill her last wish: to witness the human scream, beg, and be ripped apart from head to toe before she passes away. No amount of healing could save her and that was okay, more than okay. Once he grants her—her last wish.
Beetle fights through her pain to view the human’s demise.
She would savor every scream, the sense of despair that would slowly latch onto him... " Took you long enough." The human scowled…?
Blink… Tetsu opens his eyes and tilts his head back, observing his opponent’s advance.
“Took you long enough.” He groaned in a disappointing tone as he blinked again, looking at his opponent, looking at him.
This beetle stood on two legs, had four arms, an exoskeleton that shone with a dark brown tint that almost made it appear black, and had a unique set of horns, shaped as sword handles.
The horns made sense when it casually pulled one out and dipped it between the wing shell and exoskeleton. Molten lava spewed and clung onto the handle, forming a Kukri point blade.
Tetsu impatiently waits for the beetle to repeat the process over its second horn, and later drops his fangs. “You better be strong.”
Five minutes later, Tetsu stood unscathed over a dead, level pathetic larva beetle, pointing the larva blade at the female.
“Got anyone stronger than this?” He points at a burnt, severed head under his foot. Other pieces of the male beetle scattered around a blazing forest.
"No?" Tetsu steps harder, squashing the beetle’s head with a ‘CLUG,’ and tosses the blade to the female beetle.
“Believe this belongs to you, then.”
Tetsu tosses the molten larva blade over. The boiling larva still encompassing the blade burns through the beetle, filling the forest with her shrieks as Tetsu walks away with a frown.
“Pathetic.” He spits and heads back to meet the Oak.
[Ding! You have slain 'Stag Stain Beetle,' level 07. Bonus points for defeating an upper-class opponent.]
“Level seven?” Tetsu’s frown grows deeper.
[Ding! You have slain 'Larva beetle,' level 05. Bonus points for defeating a higher-level opponent.]
[Ding! Congratulations, you have gathered the required XP to advance to the upper level. Level 02-->03.]
[Ding! Congratulations, you have gathered the required XP earned to step to the upper level. Level 03-->04.]
[Ding...! Ding...! Ding...! Calculations halted because of internal error... Reprocessing current status.]
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