MONSTER PROTOTYPE — BYLESTYR

SKILLS

LEVEL

Fire Creation

3

Fire Manipulation

3

Temperature Manipulation

3

Lifeforce Manipulation (Body Augmentation)

3

Momentum Manipulation (Force Transference)

3

“...”

Lukas stared at the information in surprise. This… this was what he was capable of if he pushed his skills to the zenith? And this was just Level-3? He knew that Level-3 required 5000 units of Soul Capacity, compared to the meager 500 units of Level-2. Even so, this Bylestyr wasn’t an amalgamation of the power and skill of ten muspel, but way, way more than that.

The rise wasn’t linear or multiplicative.

It was exponential.

And if this was Level-3, then a Level-4, which required 50000 units of Soul Capacity… What kind of demons were those?

It boggled the mind.

Add skills from BYLESTYR to PRIME HOST?

“Uhm, yes?”

Adding skills from BYLESTYR to PRIME HOST

Initiating Transfer…

Deactivating Monster Prototype SVARTALFAR

Initiating Consciousness Shift

Enact

“WHAT? NO—”

He tried to resist, but he was unprepared for the pain of this sudden assault. Worse, he was unprepared for his gravity technique flickering out of existence, as the control over his body was grabbed away from the SVARTALFAR prototype to himself. The sudden shift in his situation dropped his combat mode, allowing Prophylaxis to set in, also setting his nerves on fire. The invisible aerial platform beneath his feet vanished, and Lukas plummeted downward like a stone, completely under the inexorable power of gravity, down where a crimson, fiery death was awaiting him. He relentlessly tried to focus on reactivating the prototype or trying to use the Gravity skill, but nothing seemed to work. It was almost as if his power had fled right as he needed it most.

Multiple Level-Ups in Sequence Detected!

Addition of Multiple Level-3 skills to HOST BODY registered.

Level-Ups mandated to complete the process.

Shutting down temporary body functions.

Lukas couldn’t give a damn. Here he was, barely clinging to consciousness. The shock and the intense pressure he had subjected himself to was disorienting him, and he could taste blood in his mouth and realized that it was a bad sign, especially with the recent Regeneration and the Anomaly’s attempts to rejuvenate him. His limbs felt boneless, and there was no way he could stand up on his own power. With the Omphalos choosing to shut down his functions, all he could do was keep falling and hope of surviving with his brain intact upon impact. Everything else he could heal, but he kind of needed that to live…

Ha. Live? What am I worrying about that for? He wondered deliriously,

Initiating Level-Ups.

ATTRIBUTE

CHANGE IN PARAMETERS

Level

+3

Soul Capacity

-

Maximum Lifeforce Output

+7550

Replenishment Rate

+600

Maximum Mana Output

+7550

Mana Synthesis

+600

And that was not all.

Assimilating newly gained skills.

Altering HOST BODY to establish perfect synchronicity with new skills.

Establishing bodily changes with LEVEL-3 Lifeforce usage baseline.

Establishing parity with Divine Corruption…

What—?

Establishing Evocation System with Level-3 Mana Usage baseline

Enacting…

The rest of his thoughts vanished as his eyes burned in their sockets like living coals, with lifeforce and mana rushing through him in torrents unbelievable. The strength, the power, the abilities — it was more, way more than he had ever felt, and he felt control of his body returning to him, He covered his face at the overload of power and physical strength, felt something being born from him, shaped by his will and molded by the Omphalos within him. He felt it wash around him in a single instant — lifeforce, fire, earth, water and ether swirling around him, felt them to be a part of him as his world went white for an instant. He closed his eyes from the euphoria of strength and power within, and a terrible joy surged through his heart at the feeling.

Close.

He heard Inanna’s voice resound around him.

Inanna—

Not mine to use, whispered her voice sibilantly in his mind as it faded away.

His feet hit the ground.

Lukas opened his eyes.

The muspels were staring at him with absolute surprise. Several of the monsters were staring at him with open-mouthed fear and awe, and that made him smirk. Lukas thought back to the attack that had one-shotted the bylestyr. He had no doubts about the identity of its perpetrator, just a lingering question. If she had such weapons in her arsenal, what else did she have?

The answer to his reveries came in the form of the sound of… beating wings?

Before he could even react, the very air around him began shaking, softly at first, but soon violently, as though he were sitting on rail tracks with a freight train approaching him from behind. It filled the air with a discordant hum that grew and grew in intensity until Lukas squeezed his eyes shut in discomfort at the sound.

Then, all at once, everything simply… stopped. The shaking air. The terrible hum. Everything. The silence was so silent and complete that the loudness of his heart beating startled him in his ears. He opened his eyes, and failing to curb his curiosity any longer, he looked up.

And up.

And up.

In the sky.

And yet, he couldn’t really fathom what it was he was truly gazing at. He could only stare, transfixed, at the four pairs of wings, each as dark as the blackest night, larger than the size of a bus, and the elemental manifestation of all that was cold and dark in the world. He saw claws. He saw the body. He saw the crystallized center of this… leviathan, and in its middle—

Stood Tanya.

“I…” said Lukas, “have absolutely no idea what I’m looking at.”

The leviathan opened its beak.

“██████████████ ████ ██████”

The sound that came was less like noise than it was like being thrown into an enormous vat of petroleum. Instantly, Lukas felt like there was no way to get a good breath. There was pressure against all of his skin and pain in his ears, reminding him of that one very bad dive in the swimming pool. It took everything to not clap his hands over his ears, fall to his knees, and scream.

And then the avian vanished, and Tanya practically teleported in front of him. Lukas idly noticed how her golden blonde hair was all but white right now. Her oceanic blue pupils had turned a fierce white, and frost and something else was covering her entire figure like armor. Winds spun around her, coiling protectively like a lover’s arms. For a moment he feared Inanna’s spell had failed and the Frost-Queen was back. If that was so, he’d be in deep trouble. Level-Up or no, there was no way he could fight that demoness and win.

“Ah,” she drawled, “you’re still alive.”

“Surprising, right?” He shot back, “And you got a new look.”

The smile on her lips was warm, and calming, in contrast to the sheer wrongness she exuded. Her eyes seemed to glitter with amusement.

“I didn’t think the Frost could take over again,” he said seriously. “Looks like I was wrong.”

“No,” she cocked her head idly. “It’s… not in control. I’m still me. Only… less inhibited, which is wonderful. It’s far too long since I’ve had time to… how do I put it? Put my hair down? Things in the outside world are so… fragile. At least here I can enjoy myself a bit.”

Her tone was musical, and beautiful and wrong, reminding him of the murderous psychopath he had faced in the anomaly. He really hoped that she was still in her senses. As good as it was to have her wind kami on his side, he’d rather not face the Frost Queen again, not in such a condition.

“It was so unfair, you know,” Tanya complained, dark amusement ringing in her voice. “Sending me away with those insects while you had all the fun… No, no, that won’t do. That won’t do at all.”

Her words rippled across the battlefield, the undeniable weight it held gave pause to the monsters surrounding them. In a split second, the air around Lukas writhed, merging with a twisted black mist forming…

The silence that fell upon the terrain was almost as deafening with intensity as every eye there that gazed in shock at what was that they saw.

This. Lukas reminded himself. This is what Aeromancy is capable of.

Wind-blades.

They hung in the air, held up by invisible hands, by the dozens, by the hundreds they numbered. Enough to match every single monster and more. They lined up row over row, spanning across the circumference of an invisible circle, with himself and Tanya in the center. Lukas didn’t need to be a sensor to know that each and every one of those blades had as much impact strength as the Dranzithl’s corrosive blows.

“Now then…” said Tanya impishly. “Let’s continue.”

…

…

The muspel army tossed wave after wave of clubs and fire torrents, but for every single attack they could muster, another dozen wind blades flew at them to match it. However, while a single blade was more than a match for their clubs, the same could not be said for the reverse. The price of two or more was needed to be paid to deflect a single blade, and that was without counting for the implosion of pure power that followed. They were miniature vacuum bombs, capable of generating an extremely high temperature explosion, followed by a severe vacuum that pulled in everything within its immediate vicinity.

The toll began to tell.

Gained +1374 Experience!

Gained +2741 Experience!

Gained +1198 Experience!

And so on.

The rules were simple. It didn’t matter if he was the one doing the kill or her. Both of them were too close to each other for the world to determine which of them did the task, and hence, awarded both of them with ample amounts of Experience. Experience that led to yet another thing.

You have crossed the Threshold Barrier.

Level-Up Initiated!

You have crossed the Threshold Barrier.

Level-Up Initiated!!

….

….

And so on.

Level-Up Delayed until PRIME HOST is not in combat

2 LEVEL-UPs in sequence.

One thing was given. This borderland mission was proving to be intensely rewarding. He’d need to volunteer for more of these in the future.

Lack of Combat detected.

Initiate Level-Up sequence?

“Yes.”

As his body underwent massive changes within, every single Level-Up bringing him closer and closer to his skill tier, Lukas idly watched the monsters react to their sudden change of circumstances with commendable alacrity. More and more flanks appeared, trying to overwhelm them with superior numbers, and harried at them with an unnatural precision, hurling bursts of flame and force with steady accuracy. More than that, they fought with the strength of desperation, knowing that the odds were hopelessly stacked against them. Even then, they died in their attempts, risking their lives for death blows that were meant to have wounded if not decapitated their tormentor.

All of it was depressingly futile.

And then Tanya amped things up.

She raised her right hand upward. More specifically, her index finger.

And on its tip, something flickered.

It danced, a tiny wisp of wind and black mist so tiny that Lukas had to strain his eyes to see it. A spark, smaller than a single grain, hung in the air, right above her finger tip. Even the mana held in it was so insignificant that it was all but undetectable, lost in the ambient mana saturating the terrain. Even as he watched it, the grain flickered and wavered, as if it were a candle flame about to puff out any second.

Tanya looked at him. “Remember what I said about control? Here. Watch.”

The wind orb doubled in size.

Again.

And again.

And again and again.

Like a balloon held under a faucet, the spinning orb of wind and dark mist expanded, swelling as it doubled with each passing heartbeat, until a spinning ball of pure darkness the size of a cannonball floated in mid-air, glowing with all the majesty of a black sun.

Alarm bells rang in Lukas’s head as he took in the amount of mana in that little sphere, and realized what that represented. The power wasn’t spectacular, he was certain he could dish out more power than that without too much effort. But to see it restrained like that, held in complete stasis? Now that was something else.

And then Tanya flicked it off with her finger.

Faster than any mortal eye could track, it shot through the air, a black beam of light tearing its way through the closest muspel and pierced through its head, right between its eyes like a bolt of lightning.

And then the creature exploded.

It didn’t so much as faze the orb as it leaped towards its next victim.

And so on.

Gained +3149 Experience!

Gained +2271 Experience!

Gained +5116 Experience!

She turned to him. “And you! Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to join?”

Lukas cocked his head, his Level-Ups already done with, and smiled. “I thought you were doing fine.”

Tanya smiled. It was a cruel thing. “If I have to share the Experience from the kills with you, you better bring your weight into this.”

Across the horizon, he could see more of them arrive. Ifrits, muspels, creatures of all shapes and sizes. Out of the terrain, out of the lava pools, flying at them from the skies — reinforcements were arriving in every direction. It was like the borderland itself had declared war against them, and was pulling in all the stops.

All lingering doubts vanished from his mind.

“Mori was right,” Lukas murmured, “they won’t let us out of here. It’s like that Crypt of Fiendish worms all over again.”

Tanya gave him an inscrutable look. “You and I remember that place very differently. Say, how about we make a game out of this? I get everything to my left. You, to your right. Let’s see who gets to the portal faster.”

“Shouldn’t take too long,” Lukas said, feeling Blob shift into the familiar axe in his right hand. “Let's make this interesting? Only close combat and low to mid-ranged explosions allowed. Getting hit is instant disqualification.”

Tanya rolled her eyes. “Sure but….” she paused, as four pairs of ethereal wings exploded behind her back.

“Can you keep up?”