Chapter 189: You Wear Scrapes And Hopes

Intelligence and sentience were a great asset to any creature, but they were also an endless source of distraction.

Elias had made a mistake that should have killed him; he had wrongfully assumed that the wolf would always remain a wolf and had not anticipated the sort of transformation it was capable of.

The Commander had told him that he would die here if he did not exceed his limits, and he had nearly met that fate, but the beast, cursed with the intelligence of men, enraged by the intense pain it had suffered, was going to see Elias suffer just as much, and such mistakes could not be done when fighting with someone like Elias.

He may not be the strongest, but it was hard to see someone who was as vicious as he was.

The beast had brought him close to its face, its motion pulling out Elias’s claws from its body, and it was smelling Elias, and for a moment, he thought that the Rune Beast must be smelling his pain.

Elias’s claws retracted into his body; his arms were essentially useless, as the claws of the beasts had basically sliced off all the muscles in his upper body. By all calculations, a Fury Forge like him was done, and this was the reason the Beast was waiting and savoring his pain.

The wolf drew Elias closer and began to slowly open its mouth, its teeths were at least six inches, and from what Elias saw it was about to do, his head was about to be bitten off.

A crazy part of him considered if he could die if his head was bitten off, and if he should allow it to happen?

Then he thought about it deeply as his head was slowly fitted into the mouth of the beast. ’Well, I think I would still be alive for a while. The Pillar of Sorrow is fused to my spine, so it should be hard to chew off my head, but not impossible. My consciousness would remain in my brain for a while, but if it chews my head, my brain would be destroyed. I guess my Ageless Echo is another copy of my consciousness, would it be able to exist if my true consciousness fell?”

Elias began to feel pain around his face and neck as the mouth of the wolf began to slowly close. He could hear a deep chuckle emerging from the chest of the beast; it was laughing.

“How amusing,” Elias thought, and the skin all over his head tore open, and as a porcupine, spikes shot out of his head, dozens of them.

The beast howled and choked as blood erupted from its mouth, which was shredded to pieces. It could not open its mouth wider to push out Elias, nor could it fully close its mouth to crush his head.

Elias roared and pushed his Will into his Ascendant Swarm; the spikes extending from his head pushed out further, and Elias felt the crack as multiple spikes shot into the creature’s brain, as a surge of Sanguine Resonance that stole the Alpha’s life force and fed it back into Elias’s body.

Purple spikes carved through flesh and muscles, and the Alpha’s grip loosened before it failed. Elias pulled his head out of the creature’s mouth; his face appeared as if it had been placed inside a blender.

They fell together, a tangle of blood and fur and shattered armor, the Alpha’s massive body crashing down on top of Elias, pinning him to the blood-soaked earth.

After a while, Elias opened his eyes and found the Alpha’s face inches from his own, its crimson runes fading, its eyes glassy and still. Dead.

Elias lay beneath it, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to do anything but feel the wet warmth of his own blood mixing with the beast’s, and the jagged ends of his broken ribs grinding together with each heartbeat.

For a long moment, he did not make any motion. Elias was too hurt and broken to move, but his body was a perpetual healing machine, and sounds of bones clicking together and muscles fusing resounded through the clearing, and for nearly ten minutes, he could not move.

Vitality: 3123 / 4517.

His vitality was falling as he was bleeding internally, the power of the Rune Beast was still working inside of him even after its death, and Elias shuddered, aware that without the power of Crimson Vein Dominion, he may not have survived this beast with his healing powers alone.

His healing could not passively stop bleeding from a source like the claws of this beast, and if he survived, it would take hours of recuperation, and this was a privilege he did not have in this place, as time was against him.

Elias felt a cool warmth wash over his body as the last of the bleeding effect subsided. The power of the Rune Beast seemed to have fed his Crimson Veins, and he would not be surprised to see that this legacy had grown.

With a flex of his will, Paradox Vessel opened, and the Alpha’s body began to dissolve, its mass pulled into the void pocket where it would be digested over days and weeks, adding to the Vein Completion of the Hollow Monarch Scripture.

At this point, only his Art of Stone still remained at zero percent completion, and Elias regretted losing his helmet; otherwise, he would not have suffered so badly, and he was sure the vein completion for this art would have grown a lot after enduring a battle against a Rune Beast.

Elias lay in the mud, staring up at the canopy, waiting for his body to remember how to heal, and as minutes passed, all of the internal injuries reached a tolerable level of healing, and for the scar tissue that filled his upper body, it would not be long before they fade.

When he could finally move, he sat up and looked at himself.

His armor was gone, destroyed by the Rune Beast. The cuirass hung in ribbons, pierced in a dozen places; his vambraces were shattered, their fragments scattered across the clearing, alongside the greaves that were crushed, barely holding together.

Elias looked down at his feet and noticed that his boots were gone entirely, lost somewhere in the chaos, and he did not know when he began to laugh,

“Look at me, wearing nothing but scraps and hope… but I am fucking alive, and it feels good.”

Elias pulled himself to his feet, swaying, and looked at the clearing. The Alpha’s blood soaked the earth; its pack members had either fled or were dead. He did not know. The carnivorous trees were still, as if even they respected what had happened here.

He suddenly felt a ripple inside him, and his Status Screen flashed.

Vein Completion (Void Scripture): 0.00012%

(Crimson Vein) : 35.008% [Abilities Upgraded]

Sanguine Resonance: +34 Vitality

Vitality: 3668/4551

It would seem that at the moment, Paradox Vessel had completely digested the Flesh Mauler and had given him such a pathetic amount of progress, but he hoped that the Rune Beast would push this higher.

Maybe he was supposed to be feeding something else to Paradox Vessel to enhance his Fury Forging, else he did not know how he was going to complete his Fury Forged flesh with the Void Scripture.

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