FREE USE in Primitive World

Bran didn’t panic; he remembered Sol’s training from earlier. He dropped his hips, shifted his center of gravity low into the mud, and angled his shoulder-shield upward.

The hound hit the sloped bone-lining and glided right off his back, losing its balance completely. Before it could recover its feet in the muck, Torin lunged forward from the side, driving his heavy bone-knife straight through the soft skin beneath the dog’s jaw, severing the vocal membrane before twisting the blade into the spine.

”One down!” Torin hissed, his face splattered with red fluid. ”Keep the circle tight!”

Kael was right behind them, using a short, heavy wooden club to smash the muzzle of another hound that tried to bark from the high weeds.

The wood made a dull thud, shattering the beast’s nose and forcing it down into the dirt, where Kael quickly finished it with a neat knife-strike to the throat.

On the right flank, Kira was also moving with lethal precision. She didn’t just stay on the ground; her feline spirit allowed her to leap onto a low-hanging ironwood branch, her eyes tracking the rear rows of the pack.

A large hound in the third line stopped its charge, its chest cavity expanding as it prepared to let out a high-pitched pack alarm howl to alert other hounds to be carefull.

Kira’s pupils shrank into tiny slits. TWANG.

Her bowstring snapped without a sound. The heavy obsidian-tipped arrow tore through the grey mist, entering the hound’s open mouth and driving straight down its throat, pinning its vocal cords directly to its vertebrae.

The beast let out a muffled, wet choke, collapsing into the ferns as blood leaked from its jaws.

She didn’t stop to watch; her fingers blurred across her quiver, launching three more arrows in rapid succession, pinning the throats of three more leaping hounds before they could make a sound.

Down in the mud below her branch, Zeyra was executing her role with a frightening, obsessive ferocity. She didn’t have her green snake spirit awake yet, but her mid-stage Layer 1 physical strength was cycling beautifully. A layer 1 hound, which Sol didn’t even bother to defend against lunged at his exposed lower back while he was busy snapping the neck of a flanker.

Zeyra exploded from the side, her body moving with a liquid, snake-like fluidity as she intercepted the beast mid-air.

She caught the hound by its ears, using her entire body weight to violently slam its head straight into a deep mud hole. SPLAT.

She didn’t use a knife; she simply held the dog’s snout deep in the thick, suffocating swamp muck, her eyes wide and unblinking as she watched the bubbles rise.

Her fingers dug deep into its neck, her internal essence forcing the beast down until its limbs went entirely stiff.

”Nobody touches his back,” Zeyra whispered to herself, her face completely dark with a terrifying, protective heat as she rose to meet the next target.

Tala looked at terrifying side of Zeyra and quietly moved a bit further away from her, and continued the killing.

Sol was completely in his element in the center of the slaughter. He stepped into the thickest part of the horde, where five hounds tried to swarm his legs. He didn’t flinch. He reached down to his left hip and drew the Dreadwing Blade.

The high-frequency vacuum effect along the sapphire edge flared with a tiny, sharp ZIIING that was completely swallowed by the ambient rustle of the jungle. Sol executed a fast, low-sweeping circular strike.

The invisible, vibrating kinetic edge sliced through the morning air, parting the front legs and throats of all five hounds in a single, seamless rotation. It looked as effortless as cutting through soft river reeds.

The five beasts collapsed into the mud simultaneously, their severed limbs twitching silently as their life force drained away into the grass.

By now, The Alpha had recovered and suddenly realized that its entire pack was being butchered. Within minutes, more than twenty of its finest Layer 2 hunters had been turned into silent heaps of dead red meat in the mud. The small humans weren’t the preys; they were the real predators.

The giant alpha let out a snarl, its red eyes burning with a massive, terrifying beast essence. It ignored the smaller spirit warriors on the flanks and fixed its gaze entirely on Sol.

The bone-ridges along its spine began to glow with a dull, bloody crimson light, its massive thighs bunching as it gathered its Layer 3 power for an explosive charge.

The ground violently buckled as the alpha launched itself forward, covering the fifteen-pace gap in a single micro-second. Its massive jaws were open wide, filled with thick, jagged bone-canines that could crush a rock-shield to powder, aimed directly at Sol’s torso.

”Sol! Move!” Kira shouted from the branch, immediately launching an arrow at the beast’s eye. But the alpha’s dense Layer 3 bone-ridges deflected the arrow easily, the bone tip shattering against its skull.

Seeing the beast move, Sol didn’t move backward, nor fdid he try to dodge. His silver-crimson eyes flashed with a dark, predatory amusement.

As the massive alpha met his gaze, Sol dropped his center of gravity flat to the ground, executing a fast, forward slide directly under the beast’s lunging underbelly.

While sliding through the wet mud beneath the giant hound, his right hand flipped the Dreadwing Blade completely out of its sheath. The sapphire blade hummed with full high-frequency power, its vacuum edge completely silent but carrying a terrifying kinetic force.

Sol drove the blade upward, slicing a clean, horizontal line straight through the soft, hairless skin of the alpha’s underbelly from chest to hind legs.

The molecular chainsaw effect cut through the thick muscle tissue and internal core linings like warm grease.

Red fluid and internal organs erupted from the massive gash, splattering across Sol’s black Rockhorn carapace as he slid out from the back of the beast.

The giant alpha crashed heavily into the mud behind him, its internal organs completely severed, but its dense Layer 3 vitality refused to let it die instantly.

It twisted its massive, scarred head around, its split-mouth opening wide to let out a massive, pack-wide distress howl that would shake the entire valley.