Chapter 144: The Night Is Young

The manifested flood of darkness rose into blades of grass, and the shadows collapsed onto those blades, reinforcing them far beyond anything a blade of grass had any business being.

Beyond that, Theo controlled the darkness the way one would control an ocean. He pushed the entire mass of it forward with the force of a sea bursting out of a broken dam, and now that sea had an edge.

It became a sea of grim obsidian blades, and it crashed against the unnatural darkness.

The sphere of darkness that had swallowed a wide circle of the forest trembled frighteningly. The elongated limb curled and sank lower, until it had almost slipped completely back inside.

The moment Theo saw the result he had magnified, he didn’t stand around to watch the damage unfold. He shot forward like a loosed arrow, eating up the distance, then stepped on a small stone and leaped straight into the air.

He landed on a branch and studied it for barely a fragment of a moment, using his eyes to tell whether the thing could hold the weight and power he was about to put through it.

’Nope.’

So he ran along the branch to the tree and used the trunk instead. Standing horizontally against it, he sank low, and before his soles could peel the bark away, he exploded into the air and twisted himself toward the sinking limb.

Raindrop was already poised behind him. As he closed in on the twist, he released a flurry of strikes that bathed the limb from the point of impact and poured down its length.

Theo used the momentum of those strikes for footing and balance, spinning endlessly with Raindrop and slashing at the creature’s limb from every side at once.

All of it happened in a single instant.

[The Mastery of Shadow Sword has increased]

[A new sub-skill (The Shadow Serpent Descent) has been created]

[This skill can be combined with Heavy Shadow Drop for perfect synergy and combo attacks]

As Theo dropped, he had no time to spare for the notifications. Even so, he was glad in his heart that it had worked out exactly the way he had suspected it would.

’Synergy attacks?’

He landed in a low crouch. The limb he had just dealt a hundred strikes went stiff, and several pieces of it slid loose and fell away, as cleanly as if a seasoned butcher had taken them off.

The darkness shimmered. For a moment, Theo felt something cold crawl under his skin, and his sight warned him in a hurry. His own darkness was moving back toward him, the scraps scattered by his last attack crawling home across the churned soil, while the shadows had vanished the instant their work was done.

It was another thing Theo had noticed. His shadows were never as stalwart as his darkness. Perhaps it was because they leaned so heavily on his mastery of Shadow Sword, while Darkness Manipulation drew on the evolution of his Soul Realm.

’Why am I thinking about that at a time like this?’

Theo very nearly bit himself. His thoughts really did have terrible timing.

Case in point, for the whole time he had spent thinking, he had stood there stiffly, watching the enemy’s darkness pull in on itself and compress into a single point right in front of him.

The thing began to rise. Thirty meters, and still climbing, it threw a shadow that ran the length of the devastated forest behind Theo and swallowed him whole.

Theo frowned and called on the shadows below, twisting his hand as if he were drawing them up from his feet.

And they answered. Inky obsidian water crept upward slowly, following the call of his hand.

It wasn’t only his will at work. Theo was actively using his imagination, and more often than not, that was what funded the proper use of a Class Skill.

His hand was pointing forward. And soon there were tens of spiraling javelins filling the air around him, all aimed at the creature emerging from the darkness. Or at the creature that was the darkness.

Then he released them. The javelins tore through the sky with vicious velocity and bombarded the creature, but every one of them sank into its darkness like iron rods driven into deep water.

Theo’s jaw tightened. His attacks were getting progressively more useless against this monster.

Almost at once, a volley of spikes flew out of the thing’s body at incredible speed. Theo’s eyes, of course, had caught all of it faster. He raised one arm and erected a barrier of darkness across his front arc.

The barrier sucked the spikes in, ate their velocity, and reduced them to harmless darkness, just as the creature had done to him.

Theo glared at it with a deep scowl.

’It’s going to be an annoying back and forth with this thing.’

Just as he prepared his next attack, something whistled out of the forest beyond. It carved a large hole clean through the creature’s chest, burst out the other side and shot into the sky, tearing open the dark clouds gathering overhead.

Theo’s mouth fell open. Only one person could have done that.

’Oh wow... that’s right, Asterion is quite strong.’

He almost felt stupid for forgetting, even for a moment, how strong the man truly had to be.

’I mean, he is 143.’

It worked. The moment the monster was struck, it turned to glare at whatever had hit it. But it couldn’t find anything. It seemed to be blind beyond its own darkness, and it had already drawn all of that unnatural darkness inward to form a gigantic body, like a giant slime monkey with an endlessly long tail.

The creature swung that massive tail, twice as long as the rest of it, across the forest, snapping trunks and sweeping them away with unbelievable ease.

Theo had to leap several times to dodge. Finally, seeing a clear opening, he leaped one more time, landed on the tail and dashed along it.

He dipped Raindrop into the creature’s slimy skin and ran the length of the tail at a blistering pace, the blade dragging a long, wet furrow behind him.

The distance from the tip to where the tail joined the body was unreasonably long. Theo guessed it was almost two hundred meters.

He was dealing a great deal of damage as he ran, and the creature let out a tormented scream that made the sky rumble harder.

But the night itself seemed sad tonight, carrying a forlorn weather with it. The breeze blew colder and more furiously, the sky darkened, and soon it began letting drizzle fall out of its embrace.

This new development went against every one of Theo’s plans.

At the same time, from far in the distance, Uthed was yelling:

"Mr Theo! Mr Theo!!"

He was waving a twelve-kilogram cooking gas cylinder.