Chapter : 977
There was a series of sharp, sickening pops, like a thick branch being snapped over a knee. The Stalker’s body went limp, its spine severed. He contemptuously threw the dead weight aside and turned to face the next threat.
While Lloyd was engaged in his brutal, close-quarters brawl, Rosa was a whirlwind of deadly, artistic precision. She was not a brawler; she was a fencer, a duelist of the highest order, and the rocky, treacherous terrain was her perfect arena.
Two Stalkers, having recovered from their initial shock, charged her simultaneously, their strategy to overwhelm her with a pincer attack. Rosa did not retreat. She danced. She wove her Void power into the very fabric of her swordsmanship. With a flick of her wrist, a patch of black ice would appear, sending one attacker sliding helplessly past her. With a subtle shift of her weight, she would pirouette away from the other’s charge, her frost-coated rapier a blur of silver, leaving a long, shallow, and exquisitely painful cut along its flank.
She was not trying to kill them with single, decisive blows. She was dismantling them. She was a surgeon, systematically cutting tendons, hamstringing legs, leaving a trail of small, debilitating wounds that bled their strength and their will to fight. Her movements were a beautiful, terrifying ballet of death. The two powerful beasts, who had been a coordinated hunting unit, were reduced to clumsy, bleeding, and increasingly frustrated individuals, their rage growing with every failed attack.
The final Stalker, a younger, more reckless member of the pack, had hung back, its intelligent eyes watching, trying to process the impossible scene. It saw its packmates being systematically, brutally, and efficiently annihilated. Its pack instincts, the very core of its being, screamed at it to flee. But a deeper, more primal rage, the fury of a predator that has been made to feel like prey, took over.
With a final, desperate howl, it ignored the deadly dancer and charged the source of the most brutal, direct violence. It charged Lloyd.
Lloyd, having just dispatched his second kill, turned to meet the new threat. He saw the beast coming, a grey, snarling missile of pure, suicidal rage. He braced himself, his bladed gauntlets flashing in the dim light.
But he was not alone.
A blur of silver appeared at the edge of his vision. Rosa, who had been engaged in her own deadly dance, had seen the threat. In a move of breathtaking, selfless, and perfectly timed intervention, she abandoned her own fight. She launched herself forward, her body a low, graceful arc. She slid across the rocky ground on a path of her own created ice, a maneuver that was both a defensive slide and an offensive strike.
Her rapier, a needle of pure, deadly frost, shot out. It did not aim for the charging Stalker’s heart or throat. It aimed for its front leg. The blade punched through the thick muscle and sinew, a perfect, crippling blow.
The Stalker’s charge collapsed. Its front leg buckled, and it tumbled head over heels, crashing to the ground in a pained, ignominious heap, just feet from Lloyd.
The last two Stalkers, seeing their final packmate fall, their will to fight finally, completely broken, turned and fled, their powerful forms vanishing into the grey, rocky landscape as silently as they had appeared.
The battle was over.
Lloyd stood amidst the carnage, his chest heaving, his body screaming with the strain of the brutal, physical fight. He looked down at the four dead beasts, at the dark, steaming blood that was already beginning to freeze on the black rock. He then looked over at Rosa.
She stood twenty feet away, a solitary, silver-haired figure, her rapier held loosely at her side, its frosty aura having already dissipated. Her own breathing was ragged, a fine sheen of sweat on her pale brow. She looked… magnificent. Terrifying. And completely, utterly self-sufficient.
His cold, tactical assessment of the mission had to be updated. His initial fear, that she would be a liability in this spirit-sealed world, a fragile noblewoman he would have to protect, was a catastrophic miscalculation. The woman who stood before him was not a liability. She was a weapon. A different kind of weapon from himself, one of grace and precision against his own brute force, but a weapon nonetheless. A competent, efficient, and lethally effective variable in the brutal, unforgiving equation of their survival.
He gave a single, short nod, a silent, professional acknowledgment of her skill. A sign of respect from one soldier to another.
Chapter : 978
She met his gaze, and for a long, profound moment, they simply stood there, two survivors in a world of death, the unspoken acknowledgment of their new, brutally forged partnership hanging in the silent, cold air between them. The first trial was passed. But the mountain was far from finished with them.
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The aftermath of the battle was a pocket of grim, panting silence in the oppressive quiet of the mountain. The bodies of the three Ridge-back Stalkers lay cooling on the black rock, their dark blood a stark, visceral testament to the brutal, efficient violence that had just occurred. Lloyd and Rosa stood apart, each in their own space, their chests heaving as the fire of adrenaline slowly gave way to the deep, aching fatigue of a life-or-death struggle.
Their unspoken partnership, forged in a shared objective and baptized in the blood of their first trial, was now a tangible thing. It was not a bond of warmth or affection. It was the cold, hard, and brutally efficient understanding of two professional soldiers who had just confirmed the other’s competence in the field. He was the hammer, the brute force instrument of overwhelming, close-quarters violence. She was the scalpel, the artist of terrain control and precise, debilitating strikes. Together, they were a surprisingly, terrifyingly effective killing machine.
But their moment of grim satisfaction was fleeting, a single, fragile heartbeat of relief before the mountain decided to remind them of their true place in its primordial, unforgiving hierarchy.
The new threat did not come with the silent stealth of the Stalkers. It came with the force of an avalanche, the sound of a world being torn apart. A deep, guttural roar, a sound so powerful it seemed to shake the very foundations of the mountain, echoed from the dark, twisted forest that bordered their rocky clearing. It was not the roar of a simple predator; it was a declaration of absolute, territorial dominance. It was the voice of a king.
Trees, ancient ironwoods that had stood for centuries, began to splinter and fall, their massive trunks snapping like twigs. A new, far greater threat was coming, and it was not going around the forest; it was coming through it.
Lloyd and Rosa, their brief respite shattered, instantly fell back into their defensive, back-to-back posture. Their eyes were wide, not with fear, but with a new, profound sense of awe and dread. They had just defeated a pack of formidable, Tier-4 level beasts. The thing that was coming, the thing that treated a forest of ironwood like a field of tall grass, was of a different order of existence entirely.
It burst from the tree line, a behemoth of muscle, fur, and rage that seemed to suck the very light from the clearing. It was a Monolith Bear, a creature of myth, the undisputed apex predator of this spirit-sealing environment. It was twenty feet tall at the shoulder, a walking mountain of black, shaggy fur and corded, impossibly dense muscle. Its hide was not just thick; it was interwoven with plates of what looked like solid granite, a natural, impenetrable armor. Its claws, each one the size of a short sword, were not made of keratin, but of jagged, unpolished obsidian.
Its power was purely, absolutely physical. Yet, it radiated an aura of overwhelming pressure, a crushing weight of pure, primal dominance that was easily equivalent to a Transcended-level spiritual beast. This was what evolution created in a world without magic. A perfect, biological engine of absolute, irresistible force.
The bear’s small, intelligent, and utterly malevolent eyes fixed on them. It saw them not as a threat, but as an annoyance. An infestation in its territory. It let out another, deafening roar, a sound that was a pure, unadulterated promise of annihilation, and it charged.
Its charge was not the loping run of a normal bear. It was a thunderous, earth-shaking avalanche of fury. The ground trembled with each of its massive, pounding steps. It was not just fast; it was a force of nature, a living battering ram that was coming to erase them from existence.
“Ice!” Lloyd roared, his voice a sharp, tactical command. “I need ice! Slow it down!”
There was no time for a complex plan. Their only hope was to disrupt its unstoppable momentum, to turn its greatest asset, its overwhelming force, into a liability.
Rosa did not hesitate. The exhaustion from the previous fight was forgotten, burned away by a new, desperate surge of adrenaline. She became a blur of motion, her hands a graceful, weaving dance. She poured her will, her entire remaining reservoir of Void power, into the ground before them.