Becoming a Monster

Chapter 493: Chapter 492: A Dark Exchange

With the fight over and his changes fully settled, Noah had already undid his fusion with Arachne.

He was now preparing to choose a soul for Eve, and out of all the humans available, he was left standing by a timid Fenrir.

In Noah’s hand was a core covered in saliva. The owner of that core wasn’t hard to imagine.

It belonged to the old man.

Out of all of them, this was the one he had nearly ruled out of using without hesitation, because if not for the priest’s ability to summon the archon, then the old man would have been the strongest among them by a clear margin.

There was no doubt about that in Noah’s mind, since his control, execution, and overall presence in battle were something the others simply did not match.

That alone made his soul far too valuable to use so lightly, because Noah would have preferred to keep it and use it for something greater.

If anything, he would have rather merged it with one of his creatures or extracted one of the man’s abilities and implanted it into them instead, since the return from that would have been far greater in the long term.

That option was even more tempting when he realized that, since his spirit had gone through a massive growth, the amount of Fallen he could make had increased yet again.

That was what made the decision harder than it should have been, especially when he considered what he had already lost.

When Noah assessed the battlefield after everything ended, he had checked each of their souls with his Eye one by one, and that was when he noticed something that didn’t make sense. The priest’s soul was gone, and the cleric’s was gone as well.

They weren’t damaged or weakened, because they were simply gone.

When he went to touch their cores, they shattered with almost no resistance, as if there was nothing left holding them together, and even before they broke, he could already tell there was nothing inside them.

This was the first time he had seen something like that, and it didn’t feel natural in the slightest.

It felt as if something had taken their souls the moment they died, leaving behind nothing but empty shells, although another possibility lingered in his mind, one that he couldn’t confirm yet. It could have been something tied to their connection with God.

Either way, it wasn’t something he could ignore, and he knew he would need to understand it the next time he encountered it, because he had no intention of believing that this would be the last time.

That discovery forced him to make a decision he didn’t want to make.

At first, it came down to two people, Roy and the shield warrior, because from what the fight had shown, the two of them appeared to have the least potential. They didn’t stand out in the same way as the others.

However, that assumption didn’t hold once he looked deeper into what they actually possessed.

Roy was weaker in terms of combat ability, and he couldn’t compare to the old man at all, but that wasn’t what mattered in this case.

What mattered was that the two of them shared something that immediately caught Noah’s attention, and that was a flame-based trait.

It wasn’t just similar, because it was nearly identical in nature, yet clearly different in potential.

The old man’s ability was called Ignited Flame, while Roy’s was Pyre Flame.

That difference alone told Noah everything he needed to know, because this was the first time he had come across abilities that shared the same foundation while existing at different levels, and it didn’t feel like a coincidence.

It made him wonder if the two were related, or if this world had its own version of bloodlines, where abilities were passed down and refined over generations to reach greater heights.

Because of this discovery, that made Noah reconsidered choosing between Roy’s soul, because Roy’s trait was clearly stronger, which meant his soul held more value in that regard.

That alone placed Roy above the old man in terms of what Noah could gain from him.

Which meant the choice now came down to another two: the shield warrior and the old man.

Noah’s grip on the core tightened slightly as his thoughts returned to the warrior, because at first, he had dismissed him completely due to the fact that the warrior’s two abilities, refinement and optimization, didn’t seem impressive on the surface.

However, that impression didn’t last once the fight began.

Noah had watched him closely after that, not just the way he moved, but how his abilities interacted with Arachne’s attacks, and that was where everything changed.

The man’s shield had drawn his attention more than anything else.

Every strike that came near it was redirected and drawn toward it, and that effect extended to attacks that should not have been so easily influenced.

That alone was already abnormal, but it still shouldn’t have been possible to that extent.

Arachne’s attacks were not something that could be redirected so easily, and the priest’s enhancement had only strengthened the man himself, not the shield, which meant the answer wasn’t with the priest.

It was with him.

That revelation was enough for Noah to understand how the man’s abilities functioned, because he wasn’t strengthening himself; he was refining and optimizing the equipment he wielded, pushing it beyond what it should have been capable of.

That was what changed how he saw the man’s potential.

In the right hands, that ability wouldn’t remain limited to what the warrior showed.

Noah’s gaze lowered slightly as he applied the thought to using it for himself, because his staff had already started to fall behind. Not because its ability was weak, but because the increase it provided had become too small to matter.

But that could change.

If he could refine it and optimize it beyond its current state, it could become something entirely different.

And if he could push it even further than the warrior ever could, then its value would increase beyond what it was originally meant to be.

However, he also understood the flaw in that line of thought, because he could only take one skill. From what he had seen, the warrior’s abilities did not function properly on their own, since they were meant to be used together.

That meant there was only one way to fully obtain their value, and that was to fuse the soul with himself.

That thought was discarded immediately because Noah would never consider merging such a weak soul with his own, no matter how promising the abilities were.

That left the core in his hand as the most resourceful option.

He had intended to hand it to Eve, but instead, she guided his hand down and had him place it on the ground in front of her, right beside Diablo’s empty core.

It was only then that she materialized something Noah had nearly forgotten about, as the grimoire emerged from her body without opening. Instead, that same dark energy began to leak out from the depiction of Diablo’s skull etched into the cover.

The mist seeped from the hollow eyes and mouth of the skull and slowly spread outward before settling over the old man’s core. The moment it made contact, the soul was pulled out.

Noah wasn’t surprised by that part, but what followed caught him off guard.

”N-no... no! God, save meeee!”

The voice came from within the mist itself, filled with panic as the soul struggled against something it clearly could not resist, and Noah’s gaze hardened as he shifted his attention between the energy and the grimoire.

He had taken souls before, yet he had never seen one react like that, which made the nature of that power far more unsettling than he expected.

His attention then moved to Eve, wondering if the grimoire’s nature disturbed her at all, but what he saw was the complete opposite, because she was smiling without hesitation.

Of course, she was, because she wasn’t focused on what was happening to the soul, and instead, she only cared about what came after.

Diablo.

The soul was dragged fully into the skull on the cover, and for a brief moment, everything went still before the skull shifted slightly, its mouth moving as a faint red light appeared within its empty sockets.

The mist poured out again and spread directly over Diablo’s core, lifting it from the ground as it pulsed faintly within the energy, and before Noah could fully process it, another stream of mist emerged from the grimoire and moved toward the nearest body.

Roy’s.

Noah reacted immediately as a tendril shot forward and pierced straight through Roy’s chest, retrieving the core before the mist could settle over the corpse.

He wasn’t sure if the core would’ve remained untouched, but he wasn’t willing to gamble on losing another prime resource.

The moment the energy touched the body, the flesh began to dissolve as if being stripped away rather than decaying, leaving behind nothing but bone.

Those bones were lifted and carried within the mist toward Diablo’s core as it pulsed with growing intensity.