[Acquired Movement Boost — Lv. 109]

[Acquired Apocalypse Canvas — Lv. 78]

[Acquired Apocalypse Canvas — Lv. 79]

[Acquired Apocalypse Canvas — Lv. 80]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 143]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 144]

[Acquired Profound Toxin — Lv. 199]

Just one more level of Profound Toxin and he would hit level two hundred… And it had better give him something good.

Eik remained silent, refusing to answer Oru's question about his companions. Instead he simply glared, trying to stretch the moment as much as he possibly could get away with. No matter what he said, it would sound like a lie anyway.

Oru rolled his shoulder. Had he begun to feel the effects of the toxin already? The mounting tissue damage would make it easier to open new wounds.

Eik watched Oru carefully, the S-ranker's glowing eyes staring back. The moment they flickered away toward the corridor leading to the stair to the upper floors, Eik threw up a wall of crystal to block Oru's path there.

Several more layers reinforced it from the back as Oru charged, Eik right on his tail.

When the Devourer shattered it and found another shell layer waiting behind it, he growled and sought an alternative route, tearing through the temple walls as if they were made of paper.

Frantically, Eik threw up more shells, but it was a matter of time before Oru made it past. Time he couldn't allow.

Abandoning the defensive strategy, he pumped every buff and drug to the maximum, body glowing bright blue as flame-like exhaust leaked from every inch of his skin. For the first time during the fight, Eik pushed Movement Boost to its limits as well, the short activation duration for the most powerful effect allowing only a small window to act.

In an instant, Eik was on Oru's back, driving a hollow needle of crystalline toxin into the now weakened spot on the S-ranker's back, moving as fast, or maybe even faster, than Oru himself. Before he could be thrown off again, he injected a few drops of that hyper concentrated Profound Toxin that he had also used on the dragon back in the Crucible damage output test.

That would speed up the bastard's demise.

Motes of darkness enveloped Oru's arm as he whirled on his feet, striking Eik squarely in the chest with a bestial roar of fury. The needle broke off in the wound and melted into liquid and flowed into Oru's system along with the rest that still clung to his body.

Eik must have blacked out from the impact, because in the next moment of consciousness, he was falling helplessly through the cool night air, a massive hole in the side of the great spire of the Arch Temple growing smaller and smaller as he fell. There was no sign of Oru the Devourer within.

Shit. Shit! Shit!

The strike had completely stolen away his breath. And no matter how desperately he tried, he simply could not draw in any air to fill his lungs. Like a drowning fish he fell toward the rooftops below.

No… No!

In the distance, he saw the chaos of the battle by the wall. Andihar's titanic form was easily visible, the golden armor making him stand out like a stubborn nudist at a black tie event. Blood streamed down the gleaming plates. Was the powerful elf injured? How many S-rankers were there in Luna besides Oru?

Still cultist streamed through the streets below, eager to prove their devotion by protecting their twisted society from the outsiders.

The octuplets who had been imprisoned by Gih the Madman would be somewhere down there. Or were they dead? Would anyone have been interested in keeping them alive after Gih was gone?

There was no time. It wouldn't be long before Andihar and Gul would be forced to order a retreat.

Intense frustration and shame at his failure flashed through Eik's body. The one part of the whole operation that he had been in charge of was lost. Eik wanted to cry.

At home, they were all waiting to hear of the victory. Waiting to hear that success had been a given from the start.

Vendekaabe had told them all he knew. They knew what the next step had been for the oracle before they had even left Earth. Something called the Life Harvesters. She hadn't had the power to attempt it and, in the end, Andihar and Gul had convinced Eik that they didn't either. At least not on this expedition.

It would have to wait for an operation with a larger force. It just wasn't feasible, however urgent it felt. It would be suicide with no gain.

Stolen story; please report.

Eik had argued against the two S-rankers, insisting that they could manage both the rescue of the oracle and to further dismantle the cult's imminent ritual by destroying the things Vendekaabe called Life Harvesters. He had been so full of confidence.

And now, here he was, having failed miserably at just the one task.

Apocalypse Canvas still raged above, the pulsating light bathing the city in blue. Crystalline shards of varying sizes continuously rained down upon the forces on the ground causing injuries and taking lives.

And the levels followed.

[Acquired Movement Boost — Lv. 110]

[Acquired Apocalypse Canvas — Lv. 81]

[Acquired Apocalypse Canvas — Lv. 82]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 145]

Even as he fell, Eik stared. Where was it?

Where was that last tick of Profound Toxin?

He crashed through a roof and crushed a table standing against a wall. He groaned as he tried to sit up but his midsection refused to obey him. Hannan, Sinki, and Wapan'aksh were about to die upstairs and he was whining about being unable to catch his breath.

No matter how you looked at it, Oru must have gone easy on him. With the reverence the S-ranker had for the cause of Moon Shall Swallow and the Arch Temple, it made sense that he would be careful when fighting inside the spire.

In that case. If Eik couldn't get to Oru, maybe he should have Oru come to him. While his body might have been too hurt to move properly while recovering, his mental control over Profound Toxin was as good as ever.

More of the green Panacean Quintessence flowed about his body, enveloping him completely as it continued the healing and knitted his nearly severed arm back together. Cradled, he was lifted into the air to see the Apocalypse Canvas.

The crown of Monarch's Will hung high as he redirected the ocean to launch one of the colossal blades toward the spire of the Arch Temple, a second blade following immediately. A third was beginning to emerge as the first crashed into the spire somewhere around the eighth floor.

Huge and reinforced as the temple was, the one blade wasn't enough to topple it, but it took out a sizeable chunk of the structure, proving that it could be felled. The second made contact at the tenth floor, expanding and adding to the damage of the first.

At this point Eik knew enough about magically reinforced materials to understand that constructing an entire temple to be super durable wasn't something one just did. Such materials had a tendency to interfere quite heavily with other magical manifestations and mechanisms, making it unpredictable and often not worth it considering how much it could hinder crucial day to day operations.

As the third blade struck, Eik could somewhat stand on his own again, the floating toxin setting him back down on the destroyed roof.

Screams of pure horror erupted from the streets as the cultists realized that the seat of their cult was crumpling before their eyes.

The tower was falling.

Eik had briefly worried for his three allies inside the spire, but it was definitely safer for A-rankers to fall through a storm of rubble than face down an S-ranker.

Whether the oracle could take of herself within the falling spire was not quite as clear, but desperate times called for desperate decisions, or something along those line. And even if she could not, he was confident in the ability of his team to take care of her. If only they had found her in time…

The final strike Oru had delivered to his midsection was taking much longer to heal than the other injuries he had suffered. Even the severed arm was coming together quickly in comparison. Although it hurt terribly to do so, he stood up straight and drew in a deep breath. He roared at full long, his voice bouncing across the many roofs.

"Oru! I'm down here! Do you see your precious temple crumple to dust?" he shouted up at the collapsing spire. The collateral damage as it impacted the city below would be immense as well. "When I am done, Luna will be nothing but a wasteland!"

Yet another new army of Living Manifestations streamed out of him, gathering into smaller version of the quadrupedal. "Find them," Eik commanded, his troops scattering, their malleable bodies allowing them to flow through even narrow gaps in the rubble. "If you locate my team or the oracle, rescue and evacuate. If it's Oru… bait and attack."

There was a risk that he might regret those orders. Still waiting for that final level of Profound Toxin to tick in, not to mention that the worst of his injuries still pained him, he all he could do was hope to level up in time.

"Oru!" he roared again, using large limbs of toxin to rip rubble away from the wreck. "Oru, you coward!" His heart was galloping away in his chest. It felt like he was calling for death to come claim his life. Toxic aura unleashed at full power drew attention to Eik big time and, hopefully, drew some of it away from Sinki, Hannan, and Wapan'aksh so they could make their escape.

It would help Hannan who would already be doing everything she could to keep their presence hidden from Oru's bestial senses.

Both to support his allies still fighting at the wall, but also to hopefully earn that final level, Apocalypse Canvas was already back to terrorizing the cultists below.

Suddenly, from somewhere deep within the mountain of debris a massive boom rumbled through the ground, sending pulses of movement through the whole thing. A howl reverberating from the depths announced a blast that sent fragments of stone and wood high into the night air.

The pile undulated and shifted as a massive arm of long black fur reached out followed by Oru's form rocketed up and out. As he hung in the air, he looked around, immediately locating Eik even as Profound Toxic beasts trailed him out of the rubble, snapping at his feet.

Without even looking, he kicked them into oblivion and shot forward to get at Eik. Having expected, Eik had more than ten solid layers of shells which he enveloped his while body in, intermittent layers of gel between them to reduce impacts.

With Eyes of the Beast, he observed the moment of impact through the eyes of one of the Living Manifestations but it was his own body that felt it. And he hadn't been wrong. The damned bastard had been holding back inside the temple. The power he now demonstrated was completely different from before.

A couple of hits without the many layers to protect him would surely be enough to end his life.

Eik Accelerated the entire structure, propelling himself backward at explosive speed, the blast catching Oru in the face, but by the time he came to a rolling stop and got back on his feet, the S-ranker was already on top of him.

[Acquired Profound Toxin — Lv. 200]

Finall—

He was forced to activate peak strength Movement Boost again, nearly reaching the cooldown of the skill, and leapt back, but the Devourer stuck to him, the ripples from his claws tearing open his stomach and dumping blood on the ground as it was ripped up fifty meters behind him as if by subterranean chain detonations.

An image of Sinki's face flashed through Eik's mind as his own consciousness failed, followed a split second later by the three of them, Wapan'aksh carrying a human-sized bundle on her back, running full tilt from the rubble a hundred meters to the north.

Oru's eyes snapped to them, and he bared his teeth, leaping for them.

"No!" Eik breathed, the injury making it difficult to raise his voice.

He couldn't let them die.

[Skill evolution available. Skill available for evolution: (Unique) Profound Toxin]

[Choose one]

[Profound Toxin — Infected Trail]

[Profound Toxin — Profound Unity]

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