Chương 58: I have a bone to pick with this one

The rest of the team was caught off guard by Oliver's sudden attack.

"Damn it, Oliver, not again," Luca hissed breathlessly before they all followed him outside. Oliver had already crossed the backyard, sword drawn. He unleashed his [Gravel Burst], spraying pebbles and dirt at the surprised Beasts, hitting both Bear and Spider directly in the face. Bear was somewhat slow to react, wiping the dirt out of his eyes with a grunted curse, but Spider skittered away as soon as he realized they were being attacked. Rat reacted the fastest.

His disgusting grayish-pink tail sprouted from his backside and lashed out. Oliver reacted with a well-timed [Stone Skin]. The tail slapped him right across the chest, but it did no damage. The attack pushed him back a few feet, though, giving Bear the chance to join the battle.

"Olly, focus on Bear!" Evan shouted at his friend.

"I'll take Rat. Cat, Luca, keep an eye on Spider." He'd sprinted toward Rat before he remembered his [Teleport] was blocked inside the Estate's borders, meaning to easy way to dodge. Rat whirled around and lashed out with his tail, and Evan awkwardly threw himself to the side, avoiding the attack but landing on the ground. Rat laughed cruelly.

"Already cowering in front of me, boy? We just started." Anger welling up inside him, Evan jumped back to his feet. Just a split second later, the rat tail slammed into the ground at exactly the spot where he'd just been. Evan struck it with his sword and managed to leave a bloodied gash on the tail. His plan was to sever it, but he'd take what he could get. Rat hissed, reeling back and retracting his tail. Evan didn't waste any time. He used what little momentum he had and flung a [Comet Shot] at Rat.

His enemy dodged with surprising quickness, avoiding the golden projectile by an inch, but at least he was caught in the shower of sparks that rained down after the [Comet Shot] had hit the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, Evan saw that Bear had sprouted three long claws on each hand and was lashing out at Oliver. Spider was at the edge of the courtyard, shooting silvery spider webs in Catriona's direction, but thankfully the nimble archer avoided them with ease. Rat's tail twitched.

"Ouch," he said, touching the side of his face where the [Comet Shot]'s sparks had left a dozen blistering marks.

"That hurt." And then Rat pulled his sword and lunged forward. Evan parried, but he was quickly driven backward. He knew he could not keep up with the man in a sword fight. Rat was simply the superior sword fighter, so he would have to rely on his skills instead. He needed to get some space between himself and Rat. Desperately parrying a flurry of sword attacks with both his sword and his [Starlight Shield], Evan struggled to find enough focus.

He had to concentrate hard to channel enough mana to activate his new skill, but when he finally managed to trigger his [Super Nova], the results were impressive. Rat was engulfed in a blindingly golden explosion before the blast threw him back at least ten feet. Evan, just as the last time he'd triggered [Super Nova], was completely unaffected. With grim satisfaction, he watched Rat land flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. A few feet away, Oliver was still battling it out with Bear.

A clash of brute force, but the enraged Oliver was more than capable of keeping up with his much larger opponent. Oliver's rank up after the Earthwyrm fight had leveled the playing field between them. Catriona had managed to hit Spider with an arrow. The shaft was still sticking out of the man's thigh. As retribution, Spider summoned a tidal wave of hand-sized spiders. The sight made Evan's skin crawl, but Luca came up with a way to deal with them. Using [Tidal Wave], he simply washed them away.

He needed several attacks before he'd drowned the entire army of spiders, but he got them all before a single one could reach Catriona. For a moment, Evan thought they had the upper hand. They'd closed the rank gap with the beasts and had gained a talented new team member. He felt confident that they could defeat their enemy this time. It was a fleeting feeling. Almost as soon as the thought that they were about to win this fight crossed his mind, Bear unleashed an absolutely eardrum-ripping roar.

The sound seemed to bore right through his skull, making his brain feel like it had been stabbed with an ice pick. The pain brought him to his knees. He pressed his hands against his ears, but the soundwave seemed to vibrate through every bone in his body. His vision was going black at the edges, and he fought hard not to slump over and land face-first in the sandy ground. His friends weren't doing much better, and Catriona seemed to have lost consciousness altogether. That roar attack turned the tide.

From behind, Spider shot his web at Oliver. The silvery threads wrapped around his body, immobilizing him. Oliver, still stunned from the roar, was unable to break free of his constraints. Then Spider sprayed out another army of spiders. Fewer this time, Evan noticed through the clouds of pain. Hopefully that meant Spider was running out of mana, but that made no difference for Luca, who was the spider army's target. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Luca, just as dazed as the rest of them, tried to stomp them, but there were too many and they were too fast. Soon they were crawling all over him, forcing him into a bizarre dance of slapping, swatting, kicking, and stomping to keep the spiders off him. Despite his best efforts, Evan's system threw out one notification after another at him.

[Luca Kamano has been afflicted by Spider Poison] [Luca Kamano has been afflicted by Spider Poison] [Luca Kamano has been afflicted by Spider Poison] [Luca Kamano has been afflicted by Spider Poison] Luca used his cleansing ability on himself, but he struggled to keep up. From the status screen, Evan could tell the spider poison afflictions were piling up and Luca's health was draining at a concerning rate. And then there was Rat. He'd heaved himself back to his feet while Evan had been incapacitated.

His senses slowly came back to normal, and he tried to catch Rat off guard with another [Comet Shot], but with his brain still feeling like it had been stabbed and scrambled, his aim wasn't great and Rat easily avoided the golden light projectile. Rat's face was twisted into a rage-filled grimace.

"Spider!" he barked. His companion instantly knew what was expected of him, and moments later, Evan felt sticky spiderwebs wrapping around his body. He tried to fight them, but that just seemed to make them pull even tighter. The threads cut painfully into his flesh. His sword was wrapped in too, close to his body at an awkward angle. His hand was still around the hilt, but with not even half an inch of wiggle room, he had no chance of doing anything useful with it.

Panicked, Evan searched the backyard for his friends, for someone who could get him out of his predicament, but Catriona was still unconscious, Oliver was bound by the same spiderwebs as him, and Luca had just dropped to his knees, sickly pale and sweating. The spiders started to dissipate into black smoke, but they had left hundreds of tiny bite marks on Luca's body. Bear stepped over the immobilized with a cruel grin and leaned down to look at Evan.

A tooth was missing and blood was running down his chin, making the huge man look even more like a wild animal.

"Rat, can I crush his skull in? With my bare hands?" he asked, but Spider stretched out his arm and held him back.

"Careful, you fool. Didn't you see the blast he used on Rat at the beginning?" [Super Nova]! Evan had completely forgotten about his newest ability. Could he blast free of his spiderweb bindings with [Super Nova]? He felt like he could, but he would need to time it very well. He needed to catch all three of the Beasts in that explosion, because otherwise, even if he managed to free himself, he'd be doomed. There was no way he could defeat them with all his friends down.

"So what are we going to do with them then?" Bear asked, anger apparent in his voice.

"Do we just leave them here and report to the Professor that we have a security problem? How did they get past the hounds and the statues anyway?"

"We can't just leave them here," Rat said.

"That girl over there might wake up any minute now. We need to dispatch them now and report back once we've dealt with them."

"Are you sure you want to kill them?" Spider asked.

"Maybe the Professor has some… use for them?" The vague words were enough to send a shiver of fear down Evan's spine. He had a pretty good idea of what use the Professor might have for them. He could see the pile of barely covered, disfigured human bodies from where he lay, and he wasn't keen to join them. Breathing felt hard. He wasn't sure if it was panic, or the spiderwebs wrapped tightly around his chest.

"Maybe the others, but not this one," Rat said. Evan couldn't see him, but he could hear the cruelty in his voice.

"I have a bone to pick with this one. He's mine. And I have a very fitting idea for him." Before Evan could contemplate what terrible fate his enemy might have in mind for him, Rat whipped his tail around. It slammed into Evan's side, hurling him across the sand. He skidded a few feet before he toppled headfirst into the hole Bear and Spider had dug. He braced himself for the impact of landing at the bottom of the hole, but instead of hard ground, he landed on something soft.

The relief was very fleeting, lasting only a split second until he realized he'd landed right on top of a dead body.

"Grab your shovels," he heard Rat say at the top of the hole.

"Bury him alive." Somewhere from above, he heard Oliver shouting.

"Stop it, you bastards. Let him be. Evan! Evan!" Evan struggled against his restraints, rolling to his side, and found himself face to face with the corpse. In life she must've been a beautiful young girl, but now one half of her features were distorted into a gruesome mask of flesh and bone.

Her left eye was larger than his fist, bulging out of the skull, her cheekbone was caved in, and several extra teeth that reminded him of boar tusks had sprouted from her jaw, boring right through the skin and jutting out at random angles. The sight was enough to make him retch. He'd seen his share of body horror during his time as a nurse, nothing as bad as this, but his past experience with the unpretty aspects of the human body was what got him through.

He clung to the thought he'd clung to during nursing school. He reminded himself that this was still a human being. Instead of the bulging eye and bizarre teeth growing all over her lower face, he focused on the right half of her face. The one that still looked like a normal human girl. He stared into her eye, the one unchanged by whatever the Professor had done to her. It might have been blue once, but it was hard to tell now that decay had already set in.

Looking at her transformed the feeling of horror and disgust into something else. Rage. White-hot, burning rage, rising like a tidal wave. He gritted his teeth. His heart was drumming and his thoughts sharpened. He needed to get out of this hole, he needed to kill the Beasts, and then he needed to stop the Professor. Anger-fueled determination pumped through his veins, and Evan channeled it into the only medium he had. His mana. The magical power inside him felt more palpable than ever before. More controllable.

With gritted teeth, he concentrated on the mana flowing through his body, focusing it, steering it into his arm, into his hand… and then into the hilt of his sword he was still gripping tightly. He could feel how the blade pressed against his chest, warming, heating until it was searing hot. The edge of the blade started to glow, and the spiderwebs tightly wrapped around his body just sizzled away.

String by string, his confinement burned away until he was able to expand his shoulders and rip it all the way through. He was free. Swinging his sword over his head, he leaped out of the hole with a power he hadn't thought himself capable of. He landed on top of Spider before the man even had a chance to look up, and brought his sword down a powerful overhead strike. The blade, still glowing bright red, cut into Spider's shoulder and carved halfway through his chest. Bear and Rat both whirled around.

Rat reacted fast, trying to slam Evan back into the hole with his tail. Evan saw it coming at him. He pulled his sword free from Spider's slumping body and parried the tail strike. To his own surprise, the glowing blade cut the tail right off. Rat recoiled, yanking back his tail stump with a howl of pain. Evan didn't give him any chance to nurse his wounds. He dashed forward, ducking under Bear's claw-studded fist. He was now right between the two remaining Beasts, only a few feet away from either of them.

This was his chance. Mana was still pumping through his body like bubbling lava. He collected all of it, channeling it right into his chest, and then he pushed it all into [Super Nova]. The blast was at least twice as big as the ones he'd managed to trigger before. It was hard to see because everything around Evan was swallowed by the bright white light of the explosion. He felt all the pent-up magic burst out of him, and the feeling was almost cathartic.

When the light faded, his mana pool was completely empty, for the very first time since he'd bonded to his affinity crystal. The Beasts, all three of them, including the already cleaved-in-half Spider, were dead.