Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

’Shit!’

Atlas cursed in his mind the moment he saw both their bodies start glowing. Spirit Instinct was already active and the danger alert firing through it was not a warning this time — it was screaming. The Spirit fluctuations forming between their two bodies were building into something that could rip him apart at this range. He had no time to think about it. He activated Crowbeast Wings and pushed upward as hard and as fast as he could.

The wings had barely carried him a few meters above the ground when it happened.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The blast swallowed everything. Atlas, the surrounding area, the trees lining the outer walls of the ruin, the ground itself. Trees uprooted from the force of it. The surface cracked beneath with sounds spreading outward in every direction. The shockwave hit the ruin walls and damaged sections of the stone. The entire blast rose upward and outward like a mushroom, smoke filling a radius of a thousand meters in seconds.

A few moments passed as the shockwave spread and the initial force receded.

A figure emerged from the smoke, flying upward, but the body balance was completely off. It swayed left and right as it climbed higher, unstable, until it cleared the top of the smoke cloud and came into open air above it.

Atlas.

He looked down at himself first.

His lower attire was torn apart from the blast. His boots were gone entirely, blown off his feet. His left leg was intact. His right leg was not — the flesh and bone below the knee had been blasted away. Regenerative Hide had already activated and the process of rebuilding had started. New bone was forming where the old had been destroyed, flesh stitching itself back over it from the inside out. The pain of it was present and clear. The upper half of his body had no damage beyond the clothes, which were shredded from the chest down.

His face was untouched as even the mask was still in place. The hood had been blown back and was hanging behind him, his hair pushed back and loose from the force of the blast.

He looked down at the destruction below him.

A crater sat where the fight had been. The smoke was still thick enough to cover most of it. The damage spread across a full kilometer in every direction from the point of detonation.

His eyes were cold as he looked at it.

The pain from his leg was there. The point of impact had been close enough that if he had been one second slower with the wings he would have been at the center of that blast. The only things that had kept him alive in that moment were the wings activating in time and the will behind that activation — the same will that had kept him moving since the Eternal Ruin, the same rage at every Human that had tried to use him or remove him since then.

The Scythe in his hand hummed softly.

Atlas looked at it for a moment without saying anything. Then he turned his eyes back to the smoke below.

’Crowbeast Wings saved me at the last second And...looks like increasing Spirit to 40 has made it possible to hold them for longer than before.’

He had confirmed that much at least.

He stayed in the air while the smoke cleared, being careful now in a way he hadn’t been careful enough before. He had made a serious mistake going into this fight and he understood exactly what it was.

He had treated this like a fight with monsters.

Monsters had power. Some of them had intelligence too — the black monster from the Eternal-Class Ruin had looked at him in a way that made it clear something was working behind those invisible seeming eyes. But the problem was that he had never actually fought something that intelligent before. He had survived the Eternal Ruin through the Codex and desperation only.

In this case the Humans...Humans were different. The two assassins — Feras and Levin, the names he had heard when they were following him while he was concealed back in Lumivale — had experience, trained instincts, coordinated tactics, and the ability to make decisions mid-fight based on what they were observing. He had gone into this thinking he could handle two A-ranks the same way he handled monsters in a ruin. He had been wrong about that and the blast that had taken his leg off was the result of it.

He noted that and set it aside for later.

His leg had finished regenerating by the time the smoke below had thinned enough to see through. He drifted downward slowly as the time limit on Crowbeast Wings reached its end. The black phantom wings behind him faded and disappeared as his bare feet approached the ground.

Through Spirit Instinct he could already tell that neither of the two assassins was breathing. No Spirit functioning in either body. No danger signal coming from the area below. But he activated Sense Nullification anyway before he touched down. He was not going to let his guard drop based on an assumption again, regardless of what his senses were telling him.

He landed on bare feet. The remaining smoke hung around the area like fog, thin enough now to see through clearly. His senses were sharp enough to read the space in detail regardless.

He stepped forward toward where the bodies should have been.

His eyes narrowed as he walked.

Something was wrong with what he was seeing.

He kept walking And then...he saw it.

Two bodies were lying side by side in the center of the crater. But they were not the bodies of the two assassins.

They were monsters.

Atlas’s eyes widened.

The two shapes on the ground could barely be called bodies anymore. They had been reduced to meat. Dark fur was scattered across the crater floor along with broken bones lying across what remained of the main mass, which had been split roughly in half and soaked through with blood. Dark claws were scattered separately from the limbs they had belonged to.

Atlas came closer and looked at the area around the bodies.

Feras and Levin were not there.

He looked at the two monster corpses again. Then at the space around them. Then back at the corpses.

”What...in the hell?”