Chapter 177: Battling the Lycan

ROARRRRR—!!!

The lycan suddenly let out an ear-piercing shriek that forced Kaelen and the other candidates to instinctively clutch their ears and subconsciously step back to create distance between them and the lycan.

But even after a minute, the lycan hadn’t stopped or slowed down to catch its breath, making everything around it vibrate fiercely.

The air turned hazy, and the ground trembled like a minor earthquake was happening. But this made Kaelen frown as he focused his attention on the trembling earth beneath his feet.

For some reason, he found the trembling familiar. Not from an earthquake back on Earth, but specifically from his battle with Felix when the colossal Titan activated a death cry that summoned every beast within hearing range.

A similar skill was likely being used now, and the trembling earth wasn’t just from a beast stampede. It was also coming from underground. Not one, not two, not three.

The burly man roared in anger and suddenly shot forward for the screaming lycan. "It’s time that you shut up," he yelled as he flexed his arm to deliver a punch at the injured lycan’s jaw.

"Watch out," Kaelen warned as he quickly leaped back from the spot, and a second later, the ground sank in to reveal a row of spiralling teeth that lunged forward for him.

He had been quick to escape its range of attack and didn’t hesitate to leap back a few more times to create a safe distance between them.

The burly man wasn’t so lucky as he was directly in the center of the emerging sandworms. Before his fist could land, the earth beneath his feet sank and dropped him into the jaws of the sandworms with no foothold to change trajectory.

It snapped its jaw around him before everyone’s gaze as it lunged upwards, but before it could make its descent to burrow itself underground once more, Kaelen appeared above it with his blades raised above his head.

The sandworm could barely react when Kaelen decapitated its head, and its body dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

He didn’t stop to inspect the kill notification and was already on the move for the second one that was headed into the ground, and flashed his blade across its body, incapacitating it in two. The third was already gone before he could move, and the trembling beneath their feet slowly disappeared.

But before anyone could relax, several beasts broke out of the forest, charging straight for them. Kaelen didn’t stand his ground against them and simply leaped back to create distance once, before holding his ground there without any intention of fighting just yet.

The other candidates’ guards shot up, and they took their battle stances, only for the stampeding beasts to completely ignore them and the screaming lycan and charge straight for the dead sandworms.

It was just like Kaelen had speculated from the earlier battle.

The sandworms were cowards who avoided the death places of their own to save their heads. Two dead sandworms should be enough to keep them at bay.

While the beasts would always choose the sandworms’ carcasses over hunting the low-nutrition candidates till they were done feeding.

But all this depended on if the lycan’s death call controlled them mentally to do nothing outside its will. Kaelen had just confirmed that wasn’t the case at all.

In other words, the lycan was all theirs for as long as that sandworm carcass kept the beasts busy.

The lycan seemed to have realized Kaelen’s plan and stood on its mostly healed hind legs as it grabbed the nearest beast to it and ripped off its head in one clean bite, then devoured it.

It didn’t stop there and went on to the next beast already presented to it, which, before it could struggle, was already in its maws with a sickening crunch.

As the lycan devoured more beasts, Kaelen quickly realized its wounds were starting to heal at an incredible speed, and subtle changes were happening around its body.

"It’s about to evolve," Elyndra pointed out from the side, and as those words left her lips, the lycan dropped the beast it was devouring and hunched over on its back as its bones began to reconstruct themselves and its skin began to expand.

A roar suddenly came from the midst of one of the feeding grounds, and the burly man burst out holding a beast between its jaws as he flexed his arms till he tore them apart like a barbarian.

He roared angrily again and grabbed a nearby beast and flipped it towards the evolving lycan. The lycan raised its paw as a new set of deadly claws sprouted and tore the beast apart before it could even reach it. But behind the beast which had been thrown as a decoy was the burly man, who ducked the claw swipe and charged straight into the lycan before slamming his shoulder into its guts.

The lycan’s feet only moved back an inch before it stood tall like a nightmare, staring down at the man pushing with everything he had.

The lycan raised its terrifying claws above its head, blocking the view of the twin moons, before bringing them down on the burly man locked onto its waist.

Several daggers suddenly flashed across the night and struck the lycan’s hands, lodging deep into its ironclad skin and making it miss as it cried out in rage and agony.

Its eyes immediately locked onto the ice-blonde woman, Lucy, who had thrown the daggers, and charged forward ferociously, not minding the burly man who was knocked to the side like a ragdoll, heading straight for Lucy, who kept throwing her knives at it.

Each throw was on point and did damage, forcing the lycan to raise its arms to protect its face, which enraged it further as it closed the distance between them in an instant as it let out an ear-piercing roar, with its fangs dripping with venomous saliva.

Kaelen was surprised to see that the woman didn’t move an inch from the spot, and neither did she show any signs of fear, but before he could wonder why, the short guy, Felix, who’d been ignored by the lycan, had barely moved when he appeared in between Lucy and the lycan and threw his foot forward at lightning speed, his hands hidden inside his pockets.

Kaelen was about to internally cuss the guy for showing off at a time like this when even the burly guy hadn’t fazed it with his entire body, but was stunned when the lycan froze on the spot as the foot connected to its gut. Before he could blink, the lycan was sent flying several feet, while Felix calmly lowered his foot and tilted his head slightly to move the hair that had fallen down to his face.

’...Huh?’