The wave of Shadow Hounds hit with the force of a landslide. The two standing warriors formed a frantic wall of steel, but the fifty beasts didn't care for self-preservation. They climbed over their own dead, a carpet of gnashing teeth and void-black fur.
The two injured warriors, despite their shattered armor and leaking ether, stood one last time. They fought tooth and nail, their halberds snapping and their fists becoming hammers. One warrior was buried under a dozen Hounds, his blue glow flaring a final, violent sapphire before he was torn apart. The second fell moments later, taking six beasts with him as his essence crystallized and then shattered into dust.
As they died, a physical weight slammed into Elian's chest. It wasn't a physical wound, but the Backlash of Broken Loyalty. Because they had died for him, the etheric bond snapped, sending a cold, hollow shiver through his soul. He felt their loss not as numbers, but as a part of his own strength being ripped away.
Driven by a mix of grief and survival, Elian and the two remaining warriors fought like demons. The Phase-Shard was a blur of liquid light, and the warriors, though covered in deep gashes and moving with heavy limbs, didn't stop until the last Hound's throat was crushed.
When the silence finally returned, the ravine was a graveyard of black ash and ichor. The two surviving warriors leaned on their weapons, their forms flickering—if they didn't receive treatment soon, they would follow their brothers into oblivion.
"Go back," Elian rasped, his voice sounding like it had been dragged over gravel. He reached into his Void Storage and pulled out the Grade-C Medical Facility Blueprint. "Take this. Return to the territory. Give this to the Scholar—tell him to channel ether into the center of the plateau. The structure will build itself."
The warriors looked at him, their eyeless helmets tilted in a silent question of his safety.
"Go!" Elian commanded. "I need to... I need to finish this."
He watched them limp away toward the protection barrier. Once they were out of sight, Elian turned to the sea of carcasses. His stamina was flagging, the "Tireless" state only keeping him from collapsing, not from feeling the bone-deep weariness of his first war.
He began the Extraction.
One by one, he moved to the Hounds. Extract. A notification flashed: [Lesser Shadow Essence gained.] He moved to the next. Extract. [Tier-2 Claw Fragment gained.] By the twentieth, his head was spinning. By the fiftieth, he had to sit down, gasping for air as the mental strain of processing so much raw data threatened to blow his mind. After a ten-minute break, he forced himself back up.
Sixty. Seventy. Eighty.
His silver sleeve was now glowing with such intensity it was almost painful to look at. The energy was backing up in his system, waiting for the dam to break.
Ninety-nine.
Elian reached the final Hound. As he pulled the essence from the corpse, the world around him went white.
[100/100 Extractions Complete.]
[Evolutionary Threshold Surpassed.]
[Congratulations: You have reached Star Level 1.]
The sensation was like being reborn. The exhaustion didn't vanish, but it was pushed back by a new, sturdier foundation. He felt his "vessel" expand, his body finally catching up to the 13-Star soul that inhabited it.
He sat on a rock, breathing heavily, and opened his massive haul to see the fruits of his slaughter. The list was staggering: hundreds of shadow claws, hides, and essence orbs. But at the very bottom of the log, highlighted in a golden-hued text that shouldn't exist for Tier-2 beasts, was a single item.
Elian's eyes went wide. He reached into his Void, and his hand closed around a pulsing, crystalline heart that radiated a heat even greater than the Beast Lord's.
[Item Identified: Primordial Summoning Core (Unique)]
"A summoning core..." Elian whispered, his hands trembling. "From a hundred low-tier extractions... it fused them."
A summoning core was the rarest drop in the Realm, the only way to bypass the standard scroll system and pull a high-tier entity directly from the Void. For a Level 1 Lord to hold a Core was a death sentence if discovered, and a godsend for a lonely territory.
Elian stared at the glowing orb in utter shock, the realization of what he could now bring into this world freezing the very air in his lungs.