Chương 116: A Monster’s Soul

Crimson sparks began rapidly forming into the sword Lloyd gripped in his hand — a familiar sight by now, though still oddly mesmerizing, one that reminded him each time just how foreign this whole world had become to him. Taking the weapon in both hands, he aimed the blade straight at the Mushroom Wolf, frozen a few meters ahead of him.

The beast scraped a clawed paw across the rocky ground of the island, gouging deep, ragged furrows into it, ready to lunge at any second, long, viscous strings of drool dripping from its half-open jaws and hitting the ground — the sight alone enough to summon a genuine, sticky sense of dread.

"First island, and it's you already. Guess I'm just lucky." Without hesitation, the wolf bolted forward and charged at Lloyd, closing the distance between them in a matter of moments — within a couple of seconds, its gaping jaws, lined with yellowed, broken fangs, were less than a meter from his face. Lloyd shoved off hard to the side, dropping into a roll and feeling the rocky ground scrape painfully against his elbow through the thin fabric of his outfit.

Before the beast could properly land and turn for another attack, Lloyd was already right behind it, surging forward and thrusting out his hand, along which thin, neon-glowing lines had begun spreading, snaking beneath his skin like living things. And then his palm sank straight into the Mushroom Wolf's wet, disgustingly slick fur, as though it met no resistance whatsoever.

The whole world seemed to freeze in place — the sounds vanished, the wind died down, and the wolf itself hung suspended mid-leap, as though someone unseen had hit pause. Lloyd's hand passed unimpeded through the creature's body, slipping past its ribs, past internal organs whose very existence in this distorted thing remained anyone's guess, until it finally reached the very center, where something small, fragile, pulsing with its own faint light lay hidden. Its soul.

"There you are." A monster's soul looked nothing like a human's. In people, it appeared to his inner sight pure, perfectly white, only occasionally marked by thin, pulsing black lines running across its surface, like swollen, inflamed veins. In monsters, though, the soul looked entirely different — utterly black, slimy, repulsive to look at, like a clot of long-festered rot, pulsing slowly to some alien, inhuman rhythm.

Lloyd had seen it so many times over the past week that he should have grown used to it by now, but he never quite managed to fully stomach the sight — just looking at that black, oily-gleaming substance sent unpleasant chills crawling across his skin, a faint, nauseous lump rising in his throat. The one thing that truly united the souls of monsters and humans alike was their fragility, an almost imperceptible fleetingness, as though either kind might crumble to dust at the slightest careless touch.

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"Then again, maybe that's just because so far I've only ever seen the souls of low-rank Players and monsters," a fleeting, detached thought crossed his mind as his fingers carefully closed around the fragile, alien clot. Lloyd winced faintly the instant his fingertips brushed against the soul — that single point of contact sent a wave of small, unpleasant chills crawling across his entire skin, as if he'd plunged his hand into cold, stagnant water.

Letting out a heavy breath, he closed his fist around the soul, feeling it give way beneath his grip with an almost repulsive, viscous resistance. The world around him instantly regained its colors and sounds — the wind whistled in his ears again, the ceaseless Vortex droned somewhere in the distance — but the wolf itself remained unable to move so much as a centimeter.

It thrashed violently, its whole body shaking as if in the grip of rabies, fur bristling, jaws bared in a silent snarl, yet it couldn't break free of the invisible hold, continuing to convulse in place as though it had slammed into an unseen wall. Meanwhile, more and more of those thin, neon-glowing veins kept surfacing across Lloyd's own body, snaking up his arm toward his shoulder.

"Well, holding down a monster's a lot harder than holding a person," he noted to himself, feeling his strength steadily draining away with every second of this standoff. He abruptly opened his fist, yanking his hand free from the beast's body, and the wolf, not yet fully registering that its ability to move had returned, froze for a split second in a dazed, almost comical stupor — but that split second was more than enough.

A sharp whistle cut through the air as the sword swung, and Lloyd brought the blade crashing down onto the beast's skull with all the force he'd built up over the fight. But the blade, sinking into the dense, sore-riddled flesh, lodged itself halfway through the skull, failing to finish the job.

Lloyd immediately planted his foot on the wolf's convulsing body, pressing the sole of his sneaker against its trembling flank, and, throwing his full weight into it, wrenched the stuck blade free, feeling a warm, sticky trickle of black blood run down the hilt at once. Giving the beast no chance to recover, he swung again immediately, bringing the sword down in a second, even more powerful blow — but this time too, the blade only sank a little deeper into the wound, still failing to sever the head completely.

After that second, nearly bone-crushing strike, the wolf finally collapsed to the ground, its whole rot-eaten mass going limp, a fresh wave of thick, foul-smelling black blood pouring from the wound on its head and spreading across the island's rocky ground in a dark, creeping stain. The sword sliced through the air with a whistle once more, this time finishing the job — one precise stroke severing the Mushroom Wolf's head from its body entirely.

Dark, near-black droplets of blood sprayed upward in a small fountain, some of them reaching all the way to Lloyd's face, leaving a few small, warm flecks on his cheek, which he wiped away with the back of his free hand without even thinking about it. The wolf, for its part, let out one final, barely audible, rasping breath, and then finally went still, dissolving into the motionless, lifeless mass of flesh now lying at Lloyd's feet amid the flattened, blood-stained, rocky ground of the island.