The air was heavy.
Not with fog, and not with blood,
but with something coming.
Something not born in this world.
Ashen stood in the middle of the field. Half his body had been opened in the second round. His muscles were torn, the flesh of his shoulder hung by a single bloody thread, and every breath cut into his chest like a knife.
But he stood firm.
His eyes shone with the color of ancient blood.
His heart pounded in his chest like war drums waiting for an execution.
Dust was still falling from the sky like ashes of a giant corpse, and the stone crust of the ground had not yet closed after the previous impact.
Then…
The air shook.
Dum – Dum – Dum – Dum
They were footsteps.
Footsteps of a beast.
Footsteps of something bigger than death itself.
The rocks trembled…
and the ground split as if retreating in fear.
The giant emerged from the red vapors.
But…
this was no longer the same monster.
Its missing face was slowly regenerating, pieces of flesh growing over exposed bone like hellish plants.
The human faces on both sides of its head twitched, stretched, and opened silent mouths as if screaming…
but without sound.
Its four giant arms rose.
The two front hands were covered in blood up to the elbows,
and the two back hands were turning black, as if something was burning inside them.
Then…
Light rose.
Bloody lines cut through the darkness like cracks in the sky.
Spell circles,
curved,
twisted,
written in a language no human knew,
formed in the air above the giant's head.
Circles over circles…
connected to each other like a network of living veins.
As for Ashen…
He felt something he had never felt before:
A power… not just the monster's power.
The power of other people.
People who were eaten, swallowed…
people whose voices vanished forever.
And now… their power was waking inside the beast.
But the giant did not wait.
It released a low cry,
like a growl buried under layers of flesh.
The spell circles rose into the sky.
A moment of silence…
Then—
Space cracked.
Not a metaphor.
Literally.
As if the sky had been stretched over red fire…
and someone tore it open with a claw.
From the crack…
the first blade came out.
A massive blood blade ten meters long.
Its tip was serrated,
its middle pulsed like a vein,
and every point on its surface dripped with dark red poison.
"What the hell, isn't that our sect's spell… how is it casting it?"
the leader of the Blood Blade faction muttered in madness.
"Is it… is it possible that this creature can use the spells and abilities of the ones it devours…? But why do its spells look twisted and filled with madness?"
the elder asked in shock, not knowing if he was speaking to himself or to the people around him.
"What in the heavens is the Corpse Refining Sect planning?"
the leader of the Bloody Hands faction shouted in fear and terror.
But none of these questions mattered now.
The giant blood blade fell directly over Ashen.
Ashen jumped back—
The impact site exploded and turned into a crater ten meters deep, the shockwaves shaking the rocks around him.
Then
the second fell.
Then the third.
Then…
The sky exploded.
Dozens of blood blades fell at once.
They looked like rain made of axes from ancient giants.
Each blade carried enough power to destroy an entire stone temple.
Ashen ran.
The air behind him was being sliced apart.
The blades tore the ground like colossal knives peeling layers of earth.
A blade fell behind him—
the ground exploded,
the shockwave hit his back,
the bones under his skin cracked,
the sound like a demonic symphony playing the melody of blood.
The blades did not stop.
Kooosh!!
A blade split a stone pillar twenty meters tall and cut it cleanly in half.
Boom!!
Another fell on a rocky hill and erased it as if it had never existed.
The sky turned into a red nightmare.
Ashen raised his arm over his eyes, but a massive blade passed only centimeters above him, its edge slicing part of the blood scales on his shoulder like paper.
Blood scattered.
But Ashen did not stop.
His body moved between the blades like a fragment of bloody light.
Every step left a crater.
Every leap crushed the ground beneath him.
But…
there was nowhere to run.
The blades multiplied.
Multiplied…
multiplied…
falling like endless rain.
The giant watched from afar…
with half a deformed face…
and a smile that could not belong to any human.
It lifted one hand…
and clenched its fist in the air.
Suddenly—
five blood blades gathered above Ashen…
turned toward him…
and then
fell at once.
Ashen roared,
not a roar of pain…
but the roar of a beast waking up:
"Rrraaaaaaaah!!!"
And he disappeared under a full torrent of blades.
The sky closed over him.
Rocks exploded.
The ground turned to ash.
Dust rose hundreds of meters high.
Ashen emerged cracked like a ceramic doll, wondering whether to end the fight or enjoy it more.
The giant monster
did not give Ashen a moment to think.
The giant… the creature that had been only a deformed body moments ago… began to show something else.
Something beyond deformity.
Something beyond horror.
The monster raised its four cracked arms… opened its mouth full of mismatched teeth… and exhaled the world in the color of blood.
In one instant—
a dark red fog rose from its body, with the smell of rotten iron.
It was living fog.
Fog that pushed aside the air… exhaled poison… and carved stone like teeth carving bone.
The stone forest… the one that survived the rain of blades… began to peel.
The stone trees melted layer by layer, as if the fog was dissolving them like fire dissolves flesh.
Ashen felt the heat of the fog burning his skin before it even reached him.
His flesh complained.
His blood boiled.
His bones screamed.
But this was only the beginning.
The giant's vertical eye—the eye that cut through its face like a wound—glowed with a wild light.
A light not like magic… but like a spiritual exile from hell.
As the air trembled around it, the fog curved… tightened… twisted…
as if it was giving birth.
Suddenly—
The void howled.
A wolf… then two… then ten… then fifty.
Wolves carved from toxic fog, their jaws dripping blood instead of saliva, their eyes black holes leaking red sparks.
Each one breathed poison capable of dissolving stone.
Each one moved with the speed of raging wind.
Ashen could no longer see the ground.
He could no longer see the sky.
He could see nothing except
waves of fangs rushing to tear him apart alive.
The giant gave Ashen no chance.
The heavenly blades it summoned earlier did not disappear… they hovered above, shaking slowly as if waiting for the signal.
The wolves closed in around him.
And the ground… began to split.
From the cracks…
bloody arms emerged. Hundreds of them—
each one a meter long,
each ending with red claws dripping poison,
each moving with an angry will whose only purpose was to tear Ashen apart, crush him, and devour his flesh.
The giant was not satisfied.
It wanted to crush Ashen from every direction at the same moment.
Suddenly—
The howl of calamity!!!
It was not just a sound.
It was a shockwave that blasted through the fog like a hammer.
Ashen felt it pierce his eardrums, explode inside his skull, and shatter something within him.
The bones of his chest broke in an instant.
His left knee trembled until it almost dislocated.
Before he could regain balance—
The monster's giant eye focused its light.
A bloody flame.
Then a line of light.
Then a beam of pure destruction.
It tore through the fog.
Tore through the air.
Tore through the stone forest for dozens of meters as if it were clay.
A beam that melted rock the way water melts salt.
Ashen twisted at the last moment, but the beam passed near him, grazing his shoulder…
and a graze on Ashen was not like a graze on anyone else.
The flesh split instantly…
the bone appeared…
and the blood vaporized.
The blades began to fall from the sky—
one… two… five… ten…
each one shaking the ground on impact, breaking rocks, scattering blood and molten stone.
The wolves attacked from all sides.
Arms grew from beneath his feet, grabbing him, pulling, trying to drag him down.
And the giant… watched.
Waiting for Ashen to bleed… to suffocate… to explode.
Hell—
all of it—
was unleashed to kill him.
And yet…
In the middle of the blades…
in the middle of the fog…
in the middle of the screams, the wolves, the arms, the beam, and the molten stone…
Ashen was standing.
Breathing.
Looking at the giant without concern,
as if he was not the prey—
but the hunter.