Chapter 68: Failure

The pitch-black maw of the cavern swallowed the remaining shards of light, plunging the narrow ravine into a suffocating, freezing dark.

The heavy smell of ancient mold and stale, copper-tinted blood hung thick in the stagnant air currents, making the vast underground vault feel terrifyingly like the inside of a dead beast’s stomach.

Thomas stepped completely past the threshold, keeping his stride measured and level as his boots crunched softly against the slick, bone-strewn ground. His right eye continued to flare aggressively with a brilliant, glowing golden light.

Right at the very center of the deep cavern, Julian’s bleeding mana trail violently spiked into a pulsating dome of deep violet energy.

Thomas followed the trail straight up a massive, sloping mound of earth, and what he discovered inside left him thoroughly surprised. Pinned roughly five meters off the ground against a dense network of bleeding black roots was Julian. The proud Julian of House Carter was completely out cold, his polished silver armour heavily cracked and smeared with thick swamp grease. A heavy, pulsing cocoon of wet, sinewy silk was wrapped tightly around his limbs, actively feeding on his mana.

And standing right beneath the cocoon, actively siphoning Julian’s mana through a wet, pulsing root conduit, was the monster.

A true predator of the uncharted territory slowly unfolded its colossal, arachnid-like frame from the shadows, dropping down onto the ground with a sickening, wet splash. The beast was an absolute nightmare to look at. It possessed a massive, armored lizard-like torso that shimmered with a slimy, blackish-green hue, but its lower body erupted into eight long, multi-jointed insect legs lined with razor-sharp chitinous barbs. A cluster of of six glowing red eyes sat squarely on its flat head, blinking rhythmically as it siphoned the pure violet energy straight into its core.

The moment the beast’s gaze locked onto his frame, the faceless silhouettes inside the grey fog outside let out a synchronized, deafening scream that vibrated directly inside Thomas’s skull.

Then, a soft, chillingly human voice followed.

"Well, what do we have here?" the voice asked, sending absolute, bone chilling waves of adrenaline directly down Thomas’s spine.

Thomas’s eyes went completely wide as saucers under his spectacles. In his entire fifteen years of living, he had never once heard of a wild mana beast capable of human speech. The frantic, weeping illusory whispers outside the ravine he had firmly ruled them out as a secondary combat ability, not an absolute proof that the actual biological source of the illusion was a talking mana beast.

"Why do you carry the scent of divinity, child?" the mana beast asked, its dual toned voice carrying an unsettling weight that seemed to freeze the surrounding air.

Thomas’s fingers tightened inside his pockets, his mind racing to understand the anomaly.

’System, what grade is it?’ he demanded mentally.

[ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ]

* Target Matrix: Evaluating mana beast grade and type...

* Progress: 5%

"What the hell are you?" Thomas asked, his voice flat but trembling slightly despite his efforts to maintain his smooth mask.

The colossal beast completely withdrew its burning gaze from his uniform jacket and slowly looked up toward the ceiling. Thomas followed its multi eyed gaze, but there was absolutely nothing up there other than the rough, jagged black stone of the cavern roof. Yet, looking back at the monster, its six bulbous eyes seemed to pierce straight through the solid bedrock, looking far beyond the mountain walls toward an unrevealed horizon.

"What am I," the beast muttered softly, appearing genuinely confused as its mandibles clicked rhythmically. "Oh. I remember now. A failure. That is exactly what my master called me."

With that sudden, agonizing declaration, the entire atmosphere inside the subterranean vault violently shifted. Fat, heavy tears began continuously falling from its six glowing red eyes, dropping into the dark puddles below, while a sudden, howling wave of freezing gale force winds picked up out of nowhere inside the cavern. The sheer kinetic displacement rattled the hanging conduits.

Squelch.

Up against the bleeding black root matrix, Julian, who had been completely out cold from the siphoning, slowly opened his bare ebony eyes.

The beast suddenly retracted its weeping gaze from the ceiling and locked its eyes back onto Thomas with a sudden, bloodthirsty focus. "If I devour your flesh, I might be a single step closer to permanently shedding off the veil of a failure," the monster whispered, its tone turning into a malicious weight. "It appears the light has not yet abandoned my soul."

Seeing the sudden, erratic change in the beast’s emotional state, Thomas knew with absolute certainty that if he did not come up with a tactical plan fast, the monster was going to kill him before he could even move his leg muscles, judging by the sheer, law defying mana presence it exuded. Thomas was racing against a catastrophic clock. If he did not terminate the mana beast immediately, Lina’s shallow Grade D core was going to completely empty out from the exhaustion outside, leaving her to die in no time

"Wait! Before you devour me, could you at least let my friends go?" Thomas immediately blurted out, as he tried to negotiate for time.

The massive mana beast tilted its flat head sideways, its multi jointed insectoid legs twitching in surprise. "Why would I ever do that?" it asked in return, its eyes flashing with pure confusion.

Thomas did not know how to answer that question. He was struggling against the sheer pressure of the bloodlust, so he immediately said the first desperate thing that came to his mind. "If you let them walk back to the campsite, I will let myself be devoured completely willingly. I won’t fight back."

The beast completely paused. Thomas’s pitiful, muddied appearance, his wet linen shirt, and his worn out shoes reflected deeply in the dark depths of its ancient, multi eyed gaze.

Then, the monster let out a loud, terrifyingly heart wrenching laugh that echoed violently off the stone walls. Thomas stood entirely stunned, his muscles frozen as the talking mana beast laughed at him.