==

As the thick of Darkwoods forest growth, all those accursed black trees and twisted grasses and vines home to everything filthy that crawled, drew close to Furio, he powered mana into his legs, and with a final push, blasted himself forwards, right into the darkness.

Insects all around him blew back from the force of the leap, some of the bugs directly beside his feet even blowing apart from the simple shockwave forced out from the movement.

In a battle, a real fight where he had nothing to hold him back, the monsters of this area, all these bugs and goblins, were absolutely nothing to Furio, dying simply from the collateral damage of his movements.

But as Furio sailed past two tree trunks and skidded down on dirt, he knew what he was about to face was something far, far beyond what this place was supposed to muster up.

Visibility here was near zero, and simply generating light with his mana was inefficient.

Furio focused his mana instead on maintaining a {Sense Aura} field around him, his senses adapting to the near complete darkness by honing his hearing and touch instead.

He did not overly engage the aura because there was so much interference here, so much random movement, instead only honing it enough to make up for his lost sight.

And he was no stranger to darkness.

Areas like this with no light were no stranger to adventurers, not to mention a four-star one like him.

Even as a relatively inexperienced four-star adventurer, Furio still knew what it was like to fight in absolute darkness where no normal human could ever have survived.

A week in an abandoned Tallon mine dealing with Morians – mutated, curse-ridden and flesh devouring humans – along with more overgrown bugs had taught him that much.

It was where he first met Vera, too. He pushed down rising memories of the time, how he had argued so much with her when they got lost in the mines, how as the days passed, they realized they were similar threads wound from different cloths; his woolen, hers silken.

Emi had not been there because she was sick, and he had to take the dangerous, multi-day mission to pay up enough coin for them and for a good healer. Vera was there adventuring to prove to her younger siblings that there was another life than the ones forced down their throats by her parents.

Distractions.

Furio gripped his wrench tight as he sensed movement. He tuned his senses so that it would ignore the chittering and crawling of the insects, and in doing so, he registered two unique auras and the physical bodies attached to them.

One of them, massive, powerful, and of a kind he had never felt before, started to power up a sizable amount of mana as its physical form wound up a stone at him from behind a tree trunk.

'That won't work on me, not at this range where I can sense all of your movements', thought Furio as he powered up mana into his legs, turning them glowing green as he used {Dash}, instantaneously rushing behind the tree trunk.

Furio's eyes widened as his senses painted up the image of a monstrosity unlike any he had encountered in front of him.

Almost three meters tall. Covered in what at first glance seemed like a full suit of white-plated armor lined with protruding spikes. A serpentine lower body.

Enormous coils of muscle lining a human-like upper body that promised nothing but overwhelming force, and, as he sensed an inhuman face with six eyes and enormous horns, a likeliness that this thing would not hold back on using that power.

Furio reacted on pure instinct, slashing his wrench horizontally across to gut the beast.

Fulmi was a short dagger with a coiled design unsuited for direct damage, but Flambe, a longsword far deadlier, still orbited the wrench, and with his swing, the heated blade also mirrored the movement and arced forwards.

The monster reacted with lightning quick reflexes, swerving backwards with its serpentine body to dodge the swing by a hair's breadth and then undulated its body forwards in the very same motion, abusing its huge frame and range to unleash an enormous, red mana infused punch.

The hairs on Furio's neck stood on end as he sensed massive threat from the punch. He held up his wrench as a shield, infusing it in a sheathe of mana to both absorb force and deflect the blow.

If he was desperate or caught by more surprise, he would have had to use {Guard}, and because his Flow origin was unsuited to that type of defense, he likely would have sustained a near fatal injury and gotten blown back.

But Furio deflected the punch without much issue, and in the thick of melee combat, he could sense even greater that this monster was, well, a monster through and through.

The armor plating it had on was not forged metal but pure carapace of a quality far, far higher than anything the Darkwood insects possessed.

Furio would need some serious firepower to punch through that much carapace.

"Gah!" Furio immediately pushed himself backwards as he felt pain stabbing from his side. He felt the warm rush of blood trickling down his ribs and he steadied his breathing.

The monster had stabbed him with a series of spider-like legs that unfolded from its back in a sudden instant, surprising him. Though with his sharp reflexes, he had managed to avoid his lungs from getting punctured.

Wounds deep enough to bleed, but not lethal.

Furio could deal with this, but this…this monster. He sized it up again, taking in the huge, fluxing waves of mana pouring out from the creature, forming into a malevolent, red-tinted aura.

A magical beast.

Good, Furio had ways to deal with them. The older they were, the more primal density they had, the better. He just had to switch out weapons to Stella, but even with the anti-monster flail, he would find it difficult to punch through that much armor.

Not to mention those spider legs. Six different additional angles of attack. Fast reflexes. Speed and power.

This monster was an absolute physical powerhouse.

Oddly, though, he could not sense any true intent from it. It seemed to radiate a sense of…calm?

Killing intent, yes, but no real hate, no real powerful emotion.

Then this thing must have been a familiar. A construct programmed for simple purposes.

It did not match the profile of any monster he had known, and he had studied and memorized almost all that the Adventurer's League had compiled information on down from the type of every single different variant of giant bug to the most unique and mighty draconids and millennial beasts.

That meant the likelihood was high that this monster was custom-made. It looked like an amalgamation of different parts too, part daemon, even, which explained the second aura nearby.

A daemonic one. Though Furio had never encountered one in person, he had trained to sense their presences.

That one must have been the master of this familiar.

Furio sensed the monster attacking again. Furio powered up Fulmi. The six segments of the coiled dagger opened up, and the blue flesh of the Shockstripe Eel embedded between the segments roared out a massive field of electricity.

Furio did not hold back. He fully activated Fulmi as he shot it out from the wrench to buy space and time.

The dagger whistled forwards, surrounded in an ever-growing field of arcing electricity that burnt up everything it touched, starting several fires.

The League would berate him for causing a fire, but they would understand if he had to go all out against a C-rank threat like this. No, maybe even higher. C+, maybe.

And a C-rank threat was already enough to threaten the lives of several villages, even a smaller town.

The monster dodged to the side, and in that time, Furio slotted in Flambe to his wrench and turned to the second presence hiding behind another tree, about twenty meters away. It stepped out just a little from its cover, baring a shoulder, and he did not miss the chance.

Furio ejected Flambe from his wrench, and the blade blasted forwards like a shining orange missile in the dark.

With {Dash}, Furio followed quickly behind the blade's trajectory, and when he saw what he hit, his eyes widened for a moment.

Flambe stabbed into a young girl's shoulder, skewering right through and searing the wound around it. The force of the blade dragged the girl backwards several dozen meters until it pinned her to the thick trunk of another Darkwood tree.

Furio held down a pang of pity as he saw the daemon girl, no older than what must have been fourteen, twist her face in pain and try to touch at the heated blade. The way she did not scream, it reminded Furio of Emi.

"Dispel your familiar, now!" shouted Furio. "And turn yourself into the League!"

He knew he should have killed her right then and there, there was no real crime in killing daemons for it had been years since they had left the Common Body where the Common Laws laid down by the gods for all races applied.

But still, he could not muster the will up at the moment.

A severe mistake.

The daemon girl's right arm lit up in purple, and Furio felt several rocks and branches slam against his chest.

A surprising amount of force that he had not expected from someone as young as her, and he did not guard against it properly, spinning once in the air before he righted himself, landing on the forest floor ten meters back.

Furio turned around immediately, knowing he was close to the monster familiar again. He sensed it eleven meters ahead.

A sizable distance – it had intentionally created space between itself and him.

"Disappointing," came a voice.

Male in timbre. A smooth, well-enunciated voice that spoke Terran with perfect, conventional pronunciation bare of any accentation.

Almost too perfect.

A voice that did not belong to a monster, but more to an academic, though the deep, unnatural rattle underlining it foreshadowed an utterly inhuman side that would have made anyone's goosebumps stand at attention.

Furio held down surprise. The monster spoke to him. A flash of purple from its left arm.

If Furio remembered right, he knew this was Sapia. The Inhera of the Daemons, and yet, what were Daemon kind doing here?

They were almost extinct, their entire home realm of Zerul turned into an undead wasteland and the remainder of their people scattered throughout the realms as desperate refugees or, in worst cases, as prisoners.

The complete absurdity of the situation slowed Furio's reactions.

Something from above came down.

"Fuck," said Furio as he found himself completely wrapped up in a web of silk.

The monster had spun up a web somehow, lining it across the branches of the forest canopy, and lured Furio in deeper and deeper, abusing his emotional volatility to get him into this location to entrap him.

The webbing was strong. Arakka-grade silk, maybe even better.

If he had just one arm free, he could have mustered up enough strength or willed another weapon out of his back to cut through. But he was completely immobilized, the webbing holding him in suspended animation from every limb.

Furio grimaced, taking in a deep breath to make sure all his muscles were relaxed. There was only one way out.

"Like the others, you consider me an anomaly beyond your reason, and thus, you relegate my presence to that of subordination. A 'familiar' as you would so call it. In essence, the creation of a tinkerer," said the monster as it drew near, all its many claws readied to butcher.

"You wished to challenge me directly, and yet, when you surmised there was a path of least resistance available to disable me, you discarded the opportunity to engage in glorious combat.

You are as pathetic as the vast majority of your kind, degenerated human, and you will find far better purpose within the Collective."