FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 264: Chapter 264: Stepping Into Battlefield

The Great Badger froze entirely mid-bite. The towering yellow phantom outline surrounding its massive body instantly shattered into a million dissipating sparks. Its one remaining glowing eye rolled completely backward into its skull.

The colossal mammal statued. It held its terrifying, blood-soaked posture for one long, suspended second, before crashing heavily onto its side in the mud. Completely, utterly dead.

Sol, sprinting through the brush a hundred yards away, felt a sudden, profound, terrifying emptiness hollow out his chest.

The heavy, sprawling silver tether in his mind… the psychic connection that had linked his soul to thousands of ants…. abruptly, violently snapped.

The mental backlash hit him like a physical Stone‑club, dropping him hard to his knees in the dirt with a violent nosebleed. Sol’s connection with the Ant Queen was broken, meaning she had died too.

Sol couldn’t help but feel a fleeting pang of sorrow for the massive insect that had followed his orders to the bitter end, but he didn’t have time to mourn.

Back in the valley, the fight between the lower-level beasts had reached the “kill everything” stage. With their Lords dead and the Hive Mother gone, the remaining lackeys completely lost their minds. It was a senseless, screaming massacre.

Slowly, agonizingly, time passed, and the deafening noise of the meat grinder began to calm down.

Sol had climbed high into a nearby Void-Oak, observing the purgatory from the safety of the branches. Almost ninety percent of the combatants had died. The valley was a literal lake of blood and acid. The few remaining, heavily injured Badgers and Dreadwings finally came to their senses, realizing the sheer futility of the slaughter, and limped or crawled away into the deep jungle.

The battlefield was finally, unnervingly silent.

The deafening, earth-shattering clatter of the meat grinder had been completely replaced by the wet, heavy sounds of settling mud, dripping blood, and the violent hiss of cooling acid pools.

Sol slipped down from the high branches of the petrified Void-Oak, his boots hitting the saturated, crimson earth with a morbid squelch. He stepped into the absolute purgatory, moving with a cruel, unyielding rhythm.

The sheer scale of the carnage was staggering, and equally sickening, but he didn’t hesitate.

When a half-melted Layer 2 Obsidian Commander twitched weakly in his path, its mandibles clicking in a dying reflex, Sol simply drove the heavy tip of his spear cleanly through its skull without breaking his stride, giving it the peace. When a crippled silver-backed Badger tried to drag its ruined body away, he crushed its windpipe with a casual thrust, to remove any unexpected surprise.

Sol picked his way through the smoking, vitrified glass and melted stone at the dead center of the massive crater. The ambient heat here was still stifling, warping the air in shimmering, toxic waves.

There, resting in a deep depression of its own ruin, the colossal, shattered corpse of the Lord Dreadwing loomed before him. Up close, it didn’t look like a biological beast of the jungle; it looked like a crashed, sapphire alien spaceship that had violently plummeted from orbit.

The sheer, impossible scale of the Layer 3 Sovereign was breathtaking. Its elongated thorax, easily the length of a commercial airplane fuselage, was plated in thick, iridescent chitin that shifted from a deep, oceanic blue to a toxic, glowing violet depending on how the diffuse morning light hit it.

But that flawless, aerodynamic armor was now a landscape of absolute devastation. The Great Badger’s phantom claws had completely caved in the lower half of its body, leaving a gaping, jagged crater of crushed exoskeleton and ruined internal organs.

Thick, glowing blue fluid… the highly concentrated, volatile hemolymph that had fueled its supersonic flight… leaked sluggishly from the deep, splintered fissures. It pooled into the charred dirt, popping and hissing with a sharp scent of ozone and copper as it reacted with the ambient air.

Its four massive, crystalline wings, which had once hummed with the terrifying power to shatter the sound barrier, were violently snapped near their muscular bases. What was left of them had been reduced to thousands of glittering, useless shards, scattered across the bloody mud like a broken stained-glass window.

Sol slowly walked past its massive, scythe-like front legs. Each one was the size of a steel girder, the razor-sharp, serrated inner edges still dripping with the melted, bubbling silver fur of its enemy.

He finally stopped right in front of its terrifying, aerodynamic head. The Dreadwing’s massive compound eyes, containing thirty thousand microscopic lenses that had previously burned with a toxic, calculating light, were now completely dark and hollow. They reflected nothing but the ruined, purple-tinged canopy above, a dead mirror to the purgatory it had helped create.

Sol stood entirely still before the dark, multifaceted eyes of the fallen apex predator, the heavy silence of the crater pressing in on him.

He slowly reached into his leather belt pouch, his blood-stained fingers brushing against the cold, smooth surface of the pure Blood-Jade. It was the designated, foolproof native tool for extracting a beast’s soul before it dissipated into the ambient essence of the Great Orrath.

But as his grip tightened around the crystal, he stopped. He didn’t pull it out.

He remembered the alternative method of subjugating a spirit, a brutal, metaphysical contest of wills that the native vanguards rarely attempted without catastrophic risk. But compared to the natives of this primitive world, Sol possessed a massive, unfair advantage. He had a transmigrator’s mental fortitude… a soul that had literally survived the crushing, infinite void between worlds.

He also possessed his ’Free Use’ Domination power, fueled by the ethereal Silver Liquid in his heart. It was a power that specialized entirely in the absolute manipulation and subjugation of the mind and soul.

It would be so easy to just flood the Dreadwing’s corpse with Silver Liquid and take what he wanted.

No, Sol thought, his hand dropping away from his pouch. The Silver Liquid is too tyrannical. It doesn’t just conquer, it devours.