Chapter 42: Lion VS Lyndwyrm III

Kren’s hair suddenly began to glow, and the sight alone was enough to make the alpha Lyndwyrm pause mid-strike. Kren felt it too — his hair lengthening, spreading down past his shoulder blades, all the way to his waist, glowing brighter with every inch it grew. The alpha let out something close to a dismissive hiss, apparently convinced Kren was just making one last, pointless attempt at survival. Whatever he was attempting, the alpha had no intention of giving him the time to finish it.

Its massive head snaked downward again — but by then, it was already too late.

What had been wild white hair moments ago had grown past anything resembling ordinary hair, settling instead into something that could only be called a mane. As the Lyndwyrm lunged to strike, that mane surged outward, expanding violently until it draped across the entire stretch of the beast’s back. The Lyndwyrm shuddered, feeling both pain and a sudden, vicious drain hit it almost simultaneously.

Realization dawned a half-second too late. Kren’s white hair blazed so bright it looked as though the evening sun had somehow folded itself into a midnight moon. The alpha squeezed its one remaining eye shut, flinching away from the glow — right as the pain and the drain both deepened into something far worse.

Kren, meanwhile, felt a flood of Aura pour into him. Aura, and something deeper than that — something woven into the Lyndwyrm’s very existence, something SinfulMane was tearing free as though it weighed nothing at all. The patch of hide beneath him darkened in an instant. The alpha let out a pained shriek and staggered back, more of its ruined entrails slipping loose as another wave of agony tore through its throat.

But Kren felt something else entirely — a sudden burst of strength, sharp enough to remind him he still had a way to save himself. He summoned [Spirit of the South Wind], the tattoo on his chest flaring to life. A visible stream of pale blue air rushed up into his lungs, sinking deep into bone and torn tissue. The first thing he registered was his spine snapping back into proper alignment with a loud, audible crack.

The alpha shuddered violently, a wave of crushing lethargy spreading through its massive frame. It staggered backward on unsteady legs, drifting dangerously close to the edge of the rock shelf beneath them both.

CRACK!

Kren grunted through the pain as his ribs snapped back into place one after another, his lungs finally filling properly with air again. The sudden clarity was enough to catch the alpha’s last, desperate move — one clawed limb swinging wildly at him in a final attempt to finish this.

[Spirit of the West Wind]

Kren rolled clear off the alpha’s back, narrowly escaping the swing as the beast’s own momentum threw it further off balance. Part of its already-ruined serpentine body slid over the shelf’s edge. Kren watched from where he now lay on solid ground, eyes locked with the Lyndwyrm’s single remaining one. It let out a soft, broken whimper, its gaze desperate, utterly unwilling to accept an ending like this.

Gravity didn’t care.

It slid the rest of the way off the ledge, pained screams trailing behind it as it fell the remaining distance down the mountain alone. For a moment, Kren simply lay there and listened, the wind still howling around him, the alpha’s panicked cries echoing for another two or three seconds before cutting off all at once with a thud loud enough to reach him even from this height.

"Damn it all to hell. I’m going to need some serious time off after this."

He rolled onto his back, his whole body still screaming in protest as the last of his summoning spells ran their course. He was still badly injured — terribly so — and the use of Sinful Mane had left his Aura in a genuinely messed-up state. He couldn’t call on another spell even if he’d wanted to; his Aura responded sluggishly, bloated with volume and still struggling to properly absorb everything it had just torn free of the alpha.

[The Path of the Sovereign Is One of Challenge, Trials, and Victory. You Have Faced Insurmountable Odds, Relying on Courage, Skillful Tactics, and Steady Command. And You Emerged Victorious. For Defeating a Foe Three Cultivation Realms Above Your Own, You Have Been Awarded a One-Time Bonus of 150,000 Sovereign Points.]

Kren nearly shot upright off the ground. A fresh wave of pain slammed him right back down, but it did nothing to dampen the excitement now roaring through his chest. The system, as it turned out, wasn’t finished with him yet.

[The Path of the Sovereign Is One of Responsibility, Action, and Protection. You Have Defeated a System-Touched Beast, and Your Use of Sinful Mane Has Usurped System Authority, Bloodline Purity, and a Significant Volume of Aura. Your Sovereign Beast System Is Now 50% Toward Level 1! System-Level Interface Unlocked! Bloodline Grade Upgrade Cost Reduced by 20,000. Aura Attribute Upgrade Cost Reduced by 10,000!]

Kren had noticed this particular pattern building for a while now — the system quietly cutting costs whenever he managed something genuinely significant. But that single line, buried in the middle of it, stopped him cold. The system itself was only at Level 0? It was already doing this much at zero? What exactly was waiting for him past that threshold?

He forced himself not to get too swept up in the excitement to notice the detail sitting right in front of him. ’Defeated a system-touched beast.’ Did that mean the alpha had carried a system of its own? Or had it simply been tied to someone else who did? He had no way of guessing, and it wasn’t as though he could walk down and ask it directly — not when it was almost certainly reduced to little more than pulp at the base of the mountain by now.

[You Have Slain an Alpha Lyndwyrm. +40,000 Sovereign Points.]

Exhaustion finally caught up with him all at once, darkness crowding in at the edges of his vision. Kren let it take him without a fight, slipping under into blissful unconsciousness with a wide, satisfied smile still fixed on his face, every last trace of pain fading quietly into the background.