It was all futile.
Despite working himself to the bones, bathing in the blood of countless monstrosities called Nuntius for years and grinding his teeth to dust in the process, he still found himself helplessly resisting the jaws of death.
He cursed the Nuntius, he cursed himself, and he cursed the world even more for making him weak.
F**k. If I only had that damned high-tier soul glyph, if only I was lucky enough…!
The only warmth embracing him at the moment is the heat radiating from the burning headquarters of Babylon, one of the last bastions of humanity against the monsters ravaging the lands of Eledora.
Decades of resistance and hope are gone in a flash, all in the hand of the towering Nuntius that looks down on creation like insignificant insects.
He looked up to the face of what will bring his demise.
This is just too unfair.
Towering at ten meters tall, it's not the biggest of the Nuntius that he had ever met. Hell, he even killed bigger ones before in no sweat. But this one seems different, it's too otherworldly, and as he would put it…
"The epitome of despair," he weakly mumbled.
The creature looked like a woman with pale gray skin, almost as lifeless and gray as stone statues. Her face is covered by a fleshy veil held by a pair of giant hands sprouting from her forehead like horns. Skeletal structures sprout from its back shaped like a giant bone halo. Overgrown tumors riddle its lower body, and as it drags its body across the ground, blobs of flesh and blood fall out only to be regenerated in seconds.
In a split second, the creature opened its mouth and a fleshy appendage resembling a barrel lurched outward.
Sh*t. It's another one of those attacks!
He quickly unsheathed his sword and placed his finger on its tip as he closed his eyes.
Santelmo! Tengu!
Upon calling his Santelmo glyph, blue flames surged from the blade of the sword. He leapt forward and swung the sword with his strength multiplied by invoking the Tengu glyph.
He managed to slice off the cannon of the creature, but before he could blink, it regenerated even bigger than before.
Sylph!
A gust of air forcefully blasted him off from mid-air to avoid the monster's point blank attack. At that exact moment, a huge stream of crimson energy decimated everything in sight. The blast triggered multiple more explosions, as facilities that caught fire had explosives in them.
The man clicked his tongue at the damage dealt. He called the winds to land him safely on top of the debris where he could see the monster eye to eye.
He looked back at the ruins and saw people from the lower strata still scrambling their way through the smoke and flames, tripping over each other and screaming.
To be fair, he's not sacrificing himself for the people. He's not martyr enough to do that, he could care less about people he had never known. He wanted to be a hero, but not through pointlessly sacrificing himself for the common folks because of pity.
He gritted his teeth and called forth the blue flames once again. This time, the flame did not shoot out but rather, it thinly enveloped the sword. He was conserving whatever's left of his mana because he didn't have a surefire way of taking down a Nuntius with such ridiculous regenerative power.
If they hadn't just abandoned this place…
No. If only I had a stronger glyph with enough force to totally obliterate that son of a gun!
Despite having low-tiered glyphs, he made it out as one the strongest glyph soldiers of the first generation through sheer determination and acute battle sense. However, with the recent developments in glyph research, he found himself as an old relic of the past.
The existence of a high-tier glyph invalidated years of his grueling training. And to top it off, his special constitution rejects the existence of powerful glyphs. Even the least-talented commoner can theoretically accept up to mid-tier glyphs, and he can't.
Which is why he's making the choice of sacrificing himself.
If he can at least save tens of potential mid-tier glyph holders by sacrificing one feeble life, then he'd gladly do it.
He's not doing this out of reckless sympathy, he judged that this would be the better choice for the world.
"Strangely enough, I feel good about this," he said as he brandished the sword against the monster.
The flame-enchanced sword easily cut through the tentacles as he ran towards the Nuntius, but no matter how much he lopped off, they kept regrowing.
Tsk! No choice, then. I'm going all in!
He focused all of his willpower on his sword, a storm of spiraling blue flames raged from it.
Not enough!
All of a sudden, his hair started losing its color and cracks started appearing on his body like broken porcelain. His eyes glowed blue and the skin on his face tore off, revealing his set of teeth that started to grow like canine fangs.
He has started to exceed the threshold for allowable manifestation of glyph power, he's risking his life for one final attack.
"God, I should get some sorta reward for this…right?!" He screamed at the sky.
The flesh cannon once again lurched from the face of the Nuntius to unleash another devastating beam.
He leapt forward and threw himself against the monster. He swung his sword, unleashing a swirling mass of firestorm that decimated the face of the monster. However, the monster's face regenerated faster than it burned.
Ahh, f**k. I failed, didn't I?
That was his last thought as a newly-formed flesh cannon shot at him and erased him from existence.