Fulgarin – Level 139
Mawbound – Level 143
“Huh. This isn’t looking very good,” Thalion muttered after identifying the leaders of both remaining groups.
“I’m going to burn them alive for what they did to my party,” Ryan hissed through grinding teeth. His aura flared violently, so intense that it even scorched Thalion, who was still in the form of the Crippled Eclipsari. Dark tendrils continued to erge from Thalion’s body, greedily devouring the corpses scattered around them.
What irritated Thalion most was how flawlessly the two enemy groups were working together.
Had they already made a deal?
It had to be the case—otherwise they would have turned on each other by now. Or perhaps they simply weren’t confident they could defeat Ryan. On second thought, Ryan had chosen to kill the devil leader instead of attacking these two groups directly. And there really weren’t that many of them left.
For a Chosen, finishing them should have been trivial.
Unless Thalion’s earlier assumption had been completely wrong.
If Kaelir had been here instead of Ryan, Thalion couldn’t imagine either group surviving more than a few minutes.
“Ryan,” Thalion said carefully, “you still have plenty of fuel left in the tank, right?”
Ryan snapped his head toward him. “Of course I’m at full strength. What kind of stupid question is that?”
Thalion paused, then asked the real question.
“Then why did you help ? Don’t get wrong—I appreciate not being chased by the devil anymore—but why not kill those two instead?”
It took Ryan a mont to process that.
Then he nearly exploded.
“Because everyone else was already dead, and the devil was wide open! Killing him gave an easier fight than taking on fifteen enemies at once!”
…Okay. That actually made sense.
Maybe I should test how well those two groups really work together, Thalion thought.
The enemies continued to advance.
The translucent, serpent-like beings—the Mawbound—glided forward roughly ten ters above the ground. The Fulgarin simply walked, crackling faintly with residual lightning. Both groups moved at the sa pace, side by side.
“Hey,” Thalion called out loudly, “I’m just curious—how exactly are you planning to split the loot? There’s quite a bit of treasure in all those spatial amulets.”
No response.
Thalion sighed and decided to escalate.
He pulled out the ice crystal and placed it on the ground in front of him.
The effect was imdiate.
Ryan’s heat vanished in an instant as frost crawled across the battlefield, coating tal, stone, and corpses alike. The sudden shift drew every eye toward the crystal. Thalion quickly returned it to storage before anyone could react.
Greed flared openly now.
The Mawbound leader writhed in place, its translucent body rippling with agitation. Both factions halted, clearly reconsidering their approach.
“It seems this creature may be right, Ulnyx,” the four-eyed Fulgarin leader said slowly. “We should renegotiate. Also… what race is that thing?”
Another Identify brushed across Thalion.
Then the Fulgarin’s eyes widened.
“An… E-Eclipsari? What the hell is sothing like you doing here? Did you cripple yourself just to enter the tutorial early?”
Identify after Identify slamd into Thalion.
The Mawbound leader spoke next, its voice sounding like fingernails scraping across slate.
“It seems you went too far by crippling yourself and are now stuck in E grade. Am I correct?”
Thalion couldn’t tell if the creature was grinning, but when three long tongues slid out of its massive circular maw and licked across the strange flesh around it, he took it as amusent.
“Ulnyx,” the Fulgarin leader said calmly, pointing at Thalion, “that spatial amulet will be mine.”
Thalion frowned.
That was odd.
This form didn’t even wear the amulet.
Can they see it? Or is it normal that shapeshifters drop all their loot after dying?
But they think I’m a crippled Eclipsari, not a shapeshifter.
Eh, whatever.
Next, they’re going to fight each other over the amulet. This is working out far better than I anticipated. Thalion congratulated himself internally.
“You can have the spatial amulet,” Ulnyx screeched, its massive mouth filled with jagged teeth. “But I want to eat his body and fuse with the darkness affinity. I have never seen sothing this pure.”
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Its aura exploded outward violently.
“Ha! That’s not how this is going to work,” Ryan laughed beside Thalion.
For once, the Chosen was absolutely right. This was the worst-case scenario.
“Whatever. Let’s just kill them already,” Thalion said, letting his power rise until it reached the sa intensity as during the fight with the devil. “We don’t have much ti, and there are still a lot of islands left. You saw what abilities they used, right?”
“The monster—this Ulnyx—swallows elental skills,” Ryan replied, his grin widening as his aura flared higher. “The others fight with lightning. They shoot it, shape weapons out of it, the usual. I’ll take them if you don’t mind.”
Swallowing elental skills… This was bad.
They looked like lee fighters to Thalion, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to make direct contact with that translucent skin.
“Hey, Ulnyx!” the Fulgarin leader shouted. “Don’t even think about eating him before he spits out the amulet. I still have enough poison to make your life hell.”
“Yes, yes,” Ulnyx hissed eagerly. “Now let’s get to work. I want his body.”
“Good luck, Thalion!” Ryan laughed mockingly. Then his deanor snapped from amusent to pure hatred as he shot straight toward the Fulgarin.
Thalion, anwhile, used his tendrils to catapult himself backward, away from the intense heat and the approaching attackers.
Maybe this matchup… might actually be good.
If the poison wasn’t bait.
The others shouldn’t know what form he had available.
“Stop running from , Eclipsari,” Ulnyx hissed from behind him. “I want to eat you.”
Before shifting forms, Thalion needed answers.
He turned mid-slide and exhaled a wave of umbral miasma straight at Ulnyx, who was flying toward him with its mouth wide open.
A powerful suction ford.
All of the umbral miasma was swallowed instantly.
Thalion watched closely as the darkness flowed through the creature’s translucent body. Then sothing strange happened. Runes appeared around the absorbed darkness, rotating and compressing it until it vanished completely.
A secnd later a thin black line ford along the creature’s outer flesh.
“Yes… more… MORE!” Ulnyx roared, accelerating even faster.
Now it was becoming difficult for Thalion to maintain distance, even with constant tendril-assisted movent.
But there was one last thing he needed to test.
As a wyvern, he wouldn’t be able to evade sothing this fast.
While sliding across solid stone, Thalion grabbed a massive rock and hurled it at his pursuer.
He half-expected it to be bitten cleanly in half.
Instead, the stone ripped chunks out of Ulnyx’s body—only for the flesh to rebound and snap back into place, as if was made of rubber.
That was enough for Thalion. It was ti to go on the offensive.
Thalion stopped retreating and swung at the beast with his claw. Ulnyx ignored the attack entirely and opened its maw unnaturally wide, trying to swallow him whole.
That was the mont Thalion shifted.
Where the Crippled Eclipsari had stood, a massive wyvern erged, the claw already mid-swing.
The sunlight returned instantly, but instead of shadow, the wyvern released a poisonous stench so potent that the other Mawbound froze in place.
For the leader, help ca too late.
The massive claw slamd Ulnyx straight into the ground.
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