He tried again, this ti with a horizontal cut at waist height. Sa principle... induce vacuum, control the collapse. The second strike produced a sharper bang, like a gunshot in the jungle. A thick slab of iron-bark flew off and slamd into a nearby bush.
Sol laughed quietly, the sound low and thrilled.
He spent the next hours completely lost in the training refining the technique and experinting with more stuff.
Smaller swings for precision cuts. Faster transitions. Adjusting the vibration frequency of the Dreadwing Blade to tune the intensity of the pressure drop.
Each successful strike felt like bridging two worlds... his old knowledge and this new power... into sothing original.
He applied rotational kinetic energy to his footwork, using the Dreadwing’s speed to generate massive angular montum before snapping his hips into kicks that shattered boulders into dust.
He experinted with combining the silver "Free Use" essence into his strikes, trying on animals, realizing that if he could cut an enemy with even a tiny amount of it, the silver power would flood their nervous system, causing instant, paralyzing euphoria right before the golden energy incinerated their insides.
He was turning himself into a perfectly optimized, physics-based slaughterhouse.
...
Sol was preparing to test a vertical, gravity-assisted drop-strike when his newly evolved senses... enhanced by the Dreadwing’s predatory instinct... suddenly spiked.
He didn’t hear anything, nor did he see anything move.
The deep jungle was eerily, unnaturally still.
But now that he was a bit out of his exhilaration, his nose picked up a scent drifting through the heavy air.
Iron. Fresh, hot, human blood.
Sol’s experintal deanor vanished instantly.
The cocky grin died on his lips, replaced by a cold, predatory mask.
He beca a shadow, his footsteps completely silent in the muck as he engaged his spiritual anchors and lted into the dense brush.
He navigated a steep, muddy incline, sliding down into a narrow, shadowed gully about a few miles from his place.
And found them in a heap.
Five Veynar scouts. A deep-jungle patrol ant to map out the residual damage from the tide. They were all dead.
Sol walked into the gully, his jaw locking tight with a freezing, dark rage as he inspected the carnage.
And just by looking, he knew this wasn’t so beast attack.
Beasts leave a total ss; they chew the at, drag limbs across the dirt, or lt armor into slag with acid.
But these n had been executed with a professional, cold-blooded efficiency that made his stomach turn.
The scout captain was lying near the center of the gully, slumped against a mossy rock. But there were no arrows in his chest, and his throat hadn’t been slit by a conventional blade.
Instead, the captain’s skin was a horrific, bruised pitch-black. Sol knelt down, his fingers brushing the man’s shoulder.
The mont he applied pressure, the flesh beneath the leather armor gave way like warm, rotted grease... the underlying muscles had been completely, instantly liquefied from the inside out. A
round the neck and shoulders were deep puncture wounds. Four distinct holes, spaced wide apart, matching the grip of an unnaturally long, multi-jointed hand.
"Zeriths," Sol growled, his voice dropping into a dangerous guttural tone.
The yellow stalkers. The lanky monsters. He knew the lore of these freaks. They didn’t fight like the warriors; they were a hive-dwelling humanoid alien race who relied on ambush, freakish anatomy, and a disgusting, necrotizing venom injected straight through their hollow black nails.
He looked up.
The real insult was carved into the tree trunk right above the dead captain’s head. It was a statent.
Crude, deeply gouged lines ford the outline of a Great Heartwood tree being swallowed by a massive, jagged serpent.
The banner of the Zerith-Marauder Coalition.
Seems like the beast tide had been the appetizer.
Now, the main course was here.
They weren’t just sending frenzied monsters anymore; the enemy was sending their own highly capable killers into Veynar territory to bleed the tribe out from the shadows before the real invasion even started.
Sol stood up, the killing intent rolling off his black beetle carapace so thick that the nearby ferns physically withered, turned gray, and curled into ash. His Sun Core roared in his gut, the golden essence twisting together in a vicious, hungry knot.
"You want a war?" Sol whispered to the empty, blood-soaked gully. His silver-crimson eyes tracked a trail of light, uneven disturbances in the mud leading deeper into the rot.
They hadn’t even bothered to properly hide their tracks. They thought they were untouchable out here, protected by the dense canopy and their own terrifying reputation.
"I’ll give you a fucking massacre."
Sol didn’t head back to the village to report. He didn’t need to. The Warchief would figure it out soon enough when the patrol failed to return. Instead, he gripped the hilt of the Dreadwing Blade, his feet already moving.
He was going to find these "elites." And he was going to show them exactly what happens when you bring a bone-spear and venom to a physics fight.
...
Sol moved through the Great Orrath like a ghost made of obsidian.
With his Layer 2 Dreadwing spirit fully active, his perception of the world had completely shifted.
He wasn’t just looking at the jungle; he was feeling the thermal signatures, the displacent of air, and the latent essence vibrations of everything around him.
He could track the faint heat trail left by the Zerith squad as if they had left a glowing neon sign in the mud.
There were six of them. Moving in a standard tactical wedge, headed toward a rocky outcropping four miles to the east. They were moving with a jerky, twitching speed, utterly confident that no Veynar scout could catch them after the clean slaughter in the gully.
Sol followed from the high canopy. He leaped from one petrified branch to another, his movents silent, his presence completely masked by the "Free Use" silver essence. He had discovered that by wrapping his external aura in the viscous silver liquid, he beca entirely "invisible" to spiritual detection.
To any observer, he was just a blank spot in the world.
He caught up to them ten minutes later.
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