The monster clicked its mandibles, nodding in some kind of warped appreciation before it focused on Stella, almost as if beckoning Furio to show what the weapon could do.

With that, Furio took the initiative.

He powered up Stella, and the light emanating from its core shone intensely bright, easily overpowering the Darkwoods and shining the light of what seemed like the sun for the first time in centuries in the shadowy forest.

He began to rotate his wrench, swinging the flail head rapidly around him.

The head blurred into a comet-like streak of gold, and every single insect in the vicinity moved away in primordial fear, for Stella was crafted from a relative of the Shinchu, a millennial beast hailing from Xin that deviated from other monsters in that it existed only to devour other monsters.

It was said that the Shinchu, a monstrous moth the size of a mountain, would consume five thousand monsters in the morning, then five thousand more at night.

But Furio did not have the means to possess a coreforged weapon from a true millennial beast.

No, this was from a much weaker relative, a firefly variant, and yet, it was still powerful enough to put down even B-ranked monsters.

For monsters grew stronger with age.

The older they were, the more they feasted and grew and the more their primal density accumulated.

Stella completely circumvented that defense, dealing exponentially more damage the higher a monster's age and primal density was.

And there was no doubt about this: this monster must have possessed a great degree of primal density and age.

Intelligence was one of the main markers of a strong, aged beast, and Furio could tell from its speech and its eyes, those ever moving, ever analyzing eyes, that this thing was highly intelligent.

One strike from Stella, and this monster would blow apart from the inside out.

Furio swung the flail at the monster, and the golden chain clinked and rattled as the shining flail head soared out.

The monster evaded, using {Accel} of its own to enhance its movements.

Furio could not believe this.

{Accel} was nothing special. One of the first and most basic mana forms out there.

Even monsters could use it to a degree as it was highly intuitive to just push mana into the body to boost power, but it was in the basics where technique showed the greatest differences.

The gap in efficiency between the {Accel} of a master martial artist and a beginner was like that between the dirt and the sky.

And there was no doubt about this, even with a red origin of Chaos, a mana affinity that was hard to keep under consistent control, this monster's {Accel} with its smooth, controlled form, the stability of the flickering red aura that wrapped so evenly around the monster's musclebound figure, reached the level of a veteran fighter.

Furio swallowed down his disbelief and sped up his own {Accel}, manipulating the wrench with the slightest of movements to push the flail head up or down, tracking the monster.

With each rotation of the flail around himself, it sped up, and by now, the power-

A Darkwood tree trunk, a massive thing that must have had a diameter approaching five meters, groaned as the flail cut straight through it as if it had never existed at all, slicing the thing apart and collapsing it.

Countless insects on the forest floor burned apart, exploding as the mere light of Stella, not even the head itself, grazed them.

But the monster kept up with Furio's top speed.

Furio eyed the monster intently, with every passing moment marked by the whoosh of the flail and the clink of its chain spinning around him and lashing out at the monster, aiming at the head or heart with precision.

The monster evaded with expert movements.

It craned its body to the side to avoid overhead blows.

It flattened itself to the ground to dodge decapitating sweeps.

It slithered low and punched itself off the ground to escape swings meant to slice off its tail, and then in the very same moment, shrunk its muscles and twirled in the air to dodge another strike meant to try and strike it in mid-air when it was supposed to be less maneuverable.

All movements boosted with {Accel}, and the movements themselves were fundamentally efficient and masterful.

Despite this thing being a monster, the movements, they reminded Furio of a martial artist.

A master of a craft.

An artisan.

As a martial artist himself, Furio had to quell a sense of pure admiration, to shove down a repulsive notion that he was witnessing art unfolding before his eyes painted up by a body monstrous and inhuman - a body that was never meant to practice martial arts.

In just three seconds, Furio had attacked nearly thirty times, slicing down three enormous trees and carving out countless lines of burning gold on the forest floor, but the monster remained unscathed.

Furio assessed the monster.

It did not waste mana by expending it out of its body in the form of a {Sense Aura} to try and predict Stella's trajectories.

It instead seemed to have another way of superhumanly predicting the flail's movements, allowing it to focus its mana solely on empowering its body.

What it was, Furio did not know, but he just needed one strike, and he was willing to sacrifice anything to get that one blow in.

He turned up his {Accel} even higher.

Blood poured from his mouth, nose, and even eyes, and every single one of his damaged muscles and bones creaked as they pushed themselves beyond their limits.

There was no point saving anything now: he would tire out before the monster did, and when he could no longer keep up this speed, the monster would have a chance to move in and strike.

The monster sensed the immediate shift in Furio's output. Both of its arms flashed purple as it stared at the incoming head of the flail.

Furio knew what this was. A Sapian force attack. Force Hold. He smiled.

He knew it would not work.

The monster seemingly did not know this, but coreforged weapons were almost like Ethera constructs – they were extensions of their wielder's own body.

The mana that flowed from the wielder flowed too into the coreforged weapons, and so any direct attempted manipulation on them was highly ineffective.

And at Furio's current speed that reached beyond his limits, even one wasted movement meant the monster would suffer a hit.

Furio suppressed the urge to keep his burning, bloody eyes from blinking as he saw the shining flail slam into the creature's armored chest.