[System Alert: Level 1 Void-Stalked Scavenger Terminated]
[Harvesting Essence... Analysis: Corrupted Mana]
[Soul Fragment Acquired]
The orb didn't wait. It shot forward and sank right into his chest.
The cold moved inside him. A total freeze. His left eye burned so hot his legs stopped working. He hit the granite hard on his kneecap and grabbed his face. The world turned into a spinning mess of purple and black. The Black King's rot was fighting for his core.
"Is this... what it feels like?" he choked out. His voice sounded pathetic in the dark.
"Glorious Ascension." That's what the snobs back at the Spire called harvesting a soul. Warm. Divine.
Garbage. Eating a soul felt like swallowing a fistful of dry ice. Just a heavy, hollow ache settling deep behind his ribs.
And then came the panic.
His Vazio didn't just open; it shattered outward. The shield was gone, violently replaced by a radar he couldn't turn off. Suddenly, he was feeling everything. Blind worms thrashing in the dirt beneath his boots. The frantic, shivering heartbeats of birds miles away.
And... beneath him. At the base of the boulder.
Three more.
Of course. The first kill was just the dinner bell.
The heat in his left eye didn't fade. It spiked. The corrupted soul-fragment inside him was twisting his senses, bleeding into his optic nerve. Color drained from the Elinor Woods in a single, sickening heartbeat. The vibrant greens and chaotic browns washed away into a flat, dead, monochromatic gray. Just stone and thick, choking mist.
Except for the stains.
Through the solid rock, through the wet curtain of fog—he saw them. Three jagged, pulsing clots of bruised violet heat.
Not Scavengers. No, these didn't have that frantic, starving-dog twitch. They moved together. Seamless. Silent. Predatory.
Seekers. Void-Stalked Seekers.
The abyss didn't send these out to clean up rot. These were the hounds of the Incision, bred for one specific purpose: to hunt down and butcher anything carrying even a drop of uncorrupted mana.
"Three," Leonardo whispered.
His breath hitched in the freezing air. His ribs screamed.
Run if it's more than one. Grandpa's voice echoed in his head, painfully clear.
Right. Run where? He glanced around. The western ridge wasn't a plateau; it was a diving board made of sheer rock. Three hundred feet straight down into the canopy. The Seekers had already cut off the only path down. He was stuck on a granite pedestal. Trapped.
A metallic screech tore through the fog—like rusted iron dragging across stone.
The first Seeker hauled its massive bulk over the eastern ridge. Long, multi-jointed limbs hooked deep into the granite. It had no face. Just a smooth, pitch-black dome of chitin, split right down the middle by a vertical, gaping maw. Rows upon rows of translucent needle-teeth gleamed, dripping saliva that hissed as it hit the rock.
Left. Right. The other two slid out of the mist.
A perfect crescent.
They didn't rush him. They paced. Twitching. Circling.
Click-click-trrrr. They were talking. The low-frequency vibration hit Leonardo like a physical blow, heavy in the air, making his teeth ache and his eardrums throb.
Stand your ground. Focus. Leonardo gripped the Sting low by his side, reverse hold. The newly swallowed soul-fragment was fighting him, thrashing violently against his Vazio. The sheer spiritual friction was making his vision swim with black spots, but he forced himself to look at the geometry of his death.
Right: a sheer drop into absolute darkness. Left: a wall of ancient, lightning-struck pines, roots weaving an impassable net. Center: get flanked, get shredded. Three seconds, tops.
"You want a hole in the world?" he muttered.
His voice was dead. Flat. It didn't even sound like him. His left eye flared, a bruised, unnatural violet that matched the very monsters circling him.
"I'll give you one."
The Descent
He didn't retreat toward the cliff. In a move that completely defied every biological survival instinct hardwired into the human brain, he exploded forward. He charged directly, aggressively, at the massive Seeker holding the absolute center position of their crescent formation.
The Seeker in the center clearly didn't expect a suicidal, highly aggressive frontal assault from a meager Level 1 human. It hissed violently—a deafening sound exactly like highly pressurized, boiling steam escaping a ruptured industrial valve—and reared high back on its hind legs, raising its massive, scythe-like forelimbs to effortlessly decapitate the boy as he rushed in.
But Leonardo wasn't aiming for a killing blow—not yet. He was playing with the absolute physics of their massive weight and his own lack thereof.
Just a millisecond before the creature's incredibly sharp scythes swung down in a lethal arc to claim his life, Leonardo dropped his entire center of gravity to the absolute floor. He didn't just slide on his knees; he completely, instantaneously collapsed his physical weight into a hyper-fast, kinetic, forward roll, passing directly and flawlessly between the beast's towering, spindly, heavily armored legs.
The smell of the rot beneath the creature's abdomen was utterly deafening here—a physical, suffocating, impenetrable wall of stench that made his eyes instantly water with burning, acidic tears and his throat close up in a desperate gag reflex.
As his back rolled seamlessly under the creature's massive thorax, he drove the Sting viciously, forcefully upward. He didn't thrust deep enough to secure a kill—that would instantly anchor his blade in the beast's thick cartilage, halting his forward momentum and leaving him trapped beneath its crushing weight. Instead, he dragged the razor-sharp edge of the Earth-Tier metal hard across the chitin, leaving a long, incredibly jagged, weeping laceration directly across the creature's softest, most vulnerable underbelly plates.
The Seeker shrieked—an impossibly high-pitched, localized, ultrasonic vibration that instantly cracked a nearby layer of brittle shale and sent a shockwave of pain straight through Leonardo's skull.
Leonardo didn't pause for even a fraction of a second to admire his handiwork or check the damage. He expertly used the remaining momentum of his roll to spring violently back to his feet.
He was exactly where he had calculated he needed to be: already at the extreme, crumbling edge of the rock chimney. The vertical, yawning drop completely swallowed the ambient moonlight, offering nothing but an abyss of shadows. Behind him, the other two uninjured Seekers had instantly recognized the sudden deception and were closing the distance incredibly fast. Their communicative clicking rapidly escalated into a frantic, incredibly angry, deafening strobe of noise as they rushed to avenge their wounded pack member.
"Catch me," Leonardo whispered softly to the empty, howling void below.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't look down to check for a landing. He threw his physical body violently backward over the edge of the abyss.
For one terrifying, highly elongated, infinite heartbeat, there was absolutely nothing. There was only the freezing, rushing, violent roar of the mountain air tearing past his ears and the stomach-dropping, purely biological terror of weightlessness as gravity aggressively claimed him.
Then, his flailing, desperately reaching left hand violently found a jagged, highly protruding outcrop of sharp flint protruding from the chimney wall.
His fingers literally screamed in pure, unadulterated agony as they took the full, sudden, violently jarring weight of his rapidly falling body. The joints stretched to their absolute breaking point, threatening to pop instantly from their sockets. But Leonardo forced his mind into the absolute maximum limit of the Void State. He didn't just hide his presence; he mentally, forcefully dampened his own kinetic shock, actively fighting the laws of physics. For a fraction of a highly crucial second, he made his physical body as unnaturally light, as completely devoid of mass, as a cast shadow.
Directly above him, the heavily wounded Seeker that he had just slashed across the belly lunged completely mindlessly over the edge of the cliff. The creature's agonizing pain and highly aggressive predatory rage had completely overridden its advanced spatial caution. It tumbled wildly, blindly, into the narrow, vertical chimney, its massive, spindly limbs scraping desperately, frantically, and completely uselessly against the sheer, vertical rock walls as gravity dragged its heavy bulk downward.
Leonardo, currently hanging precariously by one burning, bleeding hand exactly ten feet below the upper rim, waited for the absolute perfect, mathematical microsecond.
He swung his hanging body forcefully toward the inner rock wall to build violent, pendular momentum. As the massive, rapidly falling Seeker plummeted directly past his position, Leonardo kicked off the granite wall with both of his heavy boots, launching himself outward, directly toward the descending creature in mid-air.
He slammed brutally, squarely into the Seeker's armored side.
Despite his relatively small, human frame, the sheer kinetic impact, combined with the extreme confines of the space, successfully pinned the flailing, shrieking beast hard against the opposite, unforgiving wall of the narrow, descending rock chute.
The Sting, firmly gripped in his right hand, easily and instinctively found the highly compromised, weeping gap he had carved in its belly just seconds earlier on the surface. Leonardo drove the matte-black blade in with both hands, using the immense, compounding, inescapable gravitational force of their shared, deadly fall to bury the metal incredibly deep into the absolute center of the Seeker's corrupted core.
The ancient, microscopic silver runes heavily etched on the dagger flared so intensely, so violently bright, that they momentarily turned the pitch-black, suffocating chimney into a blinding, localized pillar of white, holy light.
The Seeker's internal mana—highly distorted, incredibly massive, and darkly corrupted—was aggressively, violently sucked into the blade in a howling, metaphysical whirlpool of energy.
Leonardo physically felt the massive, terrifying creature go entirely, limply dead beneath his boots. Its heavily armored, previously impenetrable exoskeleton rapidly lost its internal structural integrity, instantaneously shattering into millions of harmless, weightless gray flakes before the heavy beast could even hit the bottom of the deep ravine.
Leonardo desperately, blindly grabbed for a thick, protruding tree root jutting out from the rock face as he continued to fall rapidly through the thick cloud of resulting ash. His arm violently jerked, the shoulder nearly dislocating entirely from its socket, as he came to a sudden, highly jarring, swinging halt against the cold cliff face.
Far below him, the remaining ashen flakes of the second beast vanished silently and completely into the thick, swirling mist of the Elinor floor.
He hung there suspended by one single, trembling arm, desperately gasping for oxygen that completely refused to fill his burning lungs. His left eye was actively bleeding a single, thick, luminescent violet tear that tracked hotly down his freezing, dirt-streaked cheek.
He had two massive, highly corrupted souls violently churning inside his small chest now, aggressively fighting a localized, deeply spiritual war against his remaining humanity. The Vazio was struggling to contain the overwhelming pressure.
But as he tilted his head to look upward, the harsh reality of the Elinor Woods crashed down on him once more.
Silhouetted menacingly against the dark, starless, bruised purple sky, the remaining two massive Seekers were peering directly down into the vertical chimney. Their deep sensory pits were glowing with a highly murderous, persistent, and incredibly concentrated crimson light, locking entirely onto his exact position.
The hunt wasn't over. It had only just moved into the deep.