It was as if everything in the arena had gathered to make one moment: the moment of falling.
Ashen's bones were shattered, his skin cracked, and his blood flowed in rivers over the black dirt. The blows he took left no part of his body intact, and every breath felt like a knife driven into his lungs.
But the greater horror was not the wounds... it was the terrible truth he finally understood:
There was no escape.
Death waited for him in every possibility.
If he killed the deformed giant, he would collapse with the same reflected injury, shattering as the monster did. If he failed, death at the hands of that warped body was inevitable.
He laughed...
At first the laugh was hoarse, mixed with the blood that ran from his mouth, but it quickly turned into a mad cackle that echoed among the drums.
A laugh that carried no hope, but an announcement of absolute despair.
He raised his head and watched the giant approach with heavy steps, each thud like thunder announcing his end. Still, in his eyes there remained only a black spark glowing, an intent that would not die.
He shouted, his voice rolling like a storm among the drums:
"If death is my fate... I will not let it be clean! I will drown this world in blood, I will make it writhe in suffering, I will make its screams rise to the sky! If I must fall, I will fall laughing, watching ruin crawl over everything!"
The savage drums at the edges of the arena thundered louder, as if answering his bloody declaration. Each beat was no longer just a sound but an arrow piercing his mind, digging up the buried brutality inside him.
But instead of destroying him... he reached out his hand, opened his bloodstained fingers, and absorbed that very brutal intent that tried to strangle him!
The arena air turned into imagined red rivers, a疯狂 bloody intent rushed at him like whirlwinds, sank into his chest and seeped into his veins.
His body trembled... then shook more and more until his veins seemed about to burst.
The three runes emerged:
The Bear Fist rune, carved on his arm, glowed with congealed blood.
The Blood Crocodile rune on his chest rippled like a chain of cursed scales.
The Sky Leopard rune on his legs turned his legs into leopard limbs covered in bloody fur.
The runes mixed with the absorbed brutal intent and began to overflow with madness.
A sound like the howls of beasts rose from inside him: a bear growling, a leopard howling, a crocodile screaming, until the arena seemed filled with a hellish forest of primal sounds.
Ashen screamed, and his scream was not human but a terrifying roar, the moment of the beast's ascension.
He transformed.
His body reformed, flesh splitting, bones rebuilding, claws lengthening, fangs growing, skin peeling away to make room for bloody scales.
His right arm swelled into a bear's arm, his left shoulder formed a row of red scales like a crocodile, and from his back a pale leopard shadow emerged, its eyes gleaming with blood.
He had become something else...
An absolute blood beast, a mixture of the three: a colossal bear, an accursed crocodile, and a savage bloodthirsty leopard.
Power exploded inside him.
Mass, speed, hardness, and a healing ability that made his wounds close at a terrifying rate. Every reaction became instant, every perception savage.
But with this power came the curse:
No human consciousness remained. Only one instinct remained: to kill.
All that was rational vanished, all technique dissolved, and he became governed by a single intent.
His sole target was the deformed giant.
Ashen, now beast, roared with a voice that combined bear's bellow, leopard's howl, and crocodile's scream, shaking the ground.
He bent his body and then launched forward with terrifying speed, a mountain of blood charging through the forest of drums.
The deformed giant, which had seemed an undefeatable monster a moment ago, found itself for the first time taking a step back.