Chapter 71: let’s hunt

Riven took a break. He had been running on aura since the fighting began, and he was beginning to feel the strain. Not that he was running out of aura, but his head was shouting with pain.

It was one of the disadvantages that Necromancers have. The ability to control so many summons at once takes a lot of mental energy.

So Riven climbed up a big tree to relax. He maintained only the Grave Knight and let the four undead fall while Spartacus also disappeared.

He checked the ranking, and he was still in rank eleven, but Jasper was catching up fast. Riven grunted. “I’ll deal with that later. The best part of this place is that the students are far away from each other. Just how big is this forest?”

He settled himself down, and slowly his body began to relax. He was staring at the leaves when his eyes started to close. His body sagged, and before he knew it, everything went dark.

When Riven opened his eyes again, he found himself in a place filled with darkness. At first, he thought he was dead and was being dragged through the dark place again, but he soon realized that nothing was dragging him.

He blinked and looked around, and he froze. His eyes went wide, and his gut clenched. His stomach rolled. “Ysmera?”

There, sitting on a tree stump, was his sister. She was staring at him with bulging eyes that were dead and clouded over but still aware. Her hands were severed and danced around her like kids at play.

Her bloody mouth opened. “Riven. You… betrayal. You forgot… me.”

Riven was rooted to the place he was standing. His hand tightened on nothing, and he had to repress the feeling to summon his sword.

His eyes narrowed, because when he saw his sister, his first thought was that Vaelith was there somehow, but he didn’t feel anything. Riven couldn’t feel any aura at all.

His head began to scream danger. The last thing he remembered was staying atop a tree and trying to relax, so how did he get there? Mixed with the fact that he couldn’t feel any aura, it meant that the scenery was a fake. An illusion.

His jaw clenched, and anger flashed in his eyes. “This… how dare you use my sister for cheap illusions!” he roared, and aura surged out of him in shocking waves.

The illusion shattered like cheap glass, falling into fragments. The darkness was wiped away, replaced by another type of looming darkness.

A massive jaw opened in front of him, fangs gleaming wetly with dark saliva. He realized that his connection to his Grave Knight was already snapped, and the Knight destroyed and vanished.

Riven didn’t wait.

His body, already tensed with the anger that was flowing through him, threw itself forward, his sword burning with green aura.

He threw himself directly into the maw of the monster, shouting, “Heed me!”

Suddenly the mouth of the monster got darker. The smear of shadow that spewed from Riven opened up, and Spartacus leaped out. He stood between the jaws of the monster and simply held the upper jaw up as if it were nothing.

The monster clamped down forcefully, but Spartacus was as straight as a sword. When the monster realized this, with Riven still in its mouth, it began to shake its head with vigorous strength.

Meanwhile, Riven, inside the mouth, was trying to get his footing while trying not to breathe in the air. The monster’s mouth smelled like dead flesh, and it was uncomfortably hot.

With the tongue wiggling around in the mouth, Riven was finding it hard to stay put. He swung his sword and cut into the tongue, directly cutting it in two.

Blood sprayed and splattered him, but at least the twitching part of the tongue wasn’t disturbing him.

Then the monster roared, the blasting sound almost rupturing his ears. The monster began to jump around, its huge body crashing into trees, head shaking in an attempt to remove the pest invading its mouth.

Then the monster suddenly stopped. It raised its forearm with sharp claws, trying to tear Spartacus away. But Riven finally stopped playing around and jumped up, his sword piercing into the monster’s skull from the inside and straight into the brain.

The monster stiffened, and then it fell dead to the ground. Riven grimaced as he crawled out, wiping saliva from his body. The smell from the monster’s stinking mouth was still clinging to him. “Just how do I get this out, Spartacus?”

But the undead had no answer. Riven cursed some more, and then he faced the monster. The monster was a skinny four-legged beast. Its skin was bright red, its bones pressed tightly against its skin, and there were jutting bones lining the spine.

What Riven liked most about it, though, was its size. The monster was a massive thing. A single bite would crush a human. “What a tricky bastard. All it had to do was conceal itself, then put its target into illusions and simply eat them. Must be one of those monsters with higher points. Ah, said it, look here, the guy has a whole seventy points to itself.”

He put his hand on the monster’s head, and his smile only grew. “Well then. Now you work for me.”

Green light spilled from his hand and spread above the monster, soaking into its body and binding it to Riven. It was the strongest and biggest monster he’d ever bound to himself. “Heed me.”

The monster was slow-moving. Its body shuddered before it finally shot to its feet, dead eyes staring at Riven, who grinned back. “What do you think, big guy? It’s time to hunt.”

Riven dismissed Spartacus and focused only on the monster, and the two of them shot away into the forest at hurricane-like speed.

And yet for all that the monster was big, it ran in the forest like a rat. Its skinny body had a way of rubbing against the trees without making a sound and slipping between gaps that it shouldn’t.

Riven chuckled. “If you were not this silent, then you would have long been dead from starving. Come, let’s hunt.”

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