As it turned out, [Blood Toxin] was gross overkill for the average monster. Most of them didn’t survive the first blow, similar to Velik’s time on the frontier hunting things that were half his level and only gaining a level every six to eight months because of it. Being efficient in that environment took a different set of skills, but he wasn’t willing to abandon the ones he’d already created.

He was pointing his build toward hunting divine beasts, and if that meant taking a bit longer than it otherwise would have to find weaker prey, that was a sacrifice he was willing to make. If he’d had a head for numbers, he probably could have broken down how much essence he was averaging from each kill and determined whether it was worth spending it to create different, temporary skills.

He wasn’t that worried about it. The truth was that [Inevitable] kept him moving far faster than he ever had before, [Magic Eater] made it possible for him to keep using the skill without ever stopping, and [Divine Wolf] kept him in fighting shape, not to mention giving him the physical power to crush absolutely anything and everything he came across.

Every day, his impression of the world beyond the boundary changed. Near the sky bridge Eslaka had taken them to, the monsters had been powerful and numerous. The massive amount of essence he’d received from Morgus had given him the strength he needed to survive those early encounters against monsters that would have been level 100 or better back home. They were even stronger by Tesir’s mountain, but weaker as Velik got closer to his next destination.

Now, twenty thousand essence honestly didn’t feel like that much. A few days of diligent hunting could net him that. But it had gotten him started, and Velik was starting to see why the Garden existed in the first place. Without the ability to steal essence from his kills, he’d be stuck having to accumulate it naturally, and he doubted the average person lived long enough to reach even a small fraction of the level some of these monsters were.

To be sure, there were creatures as low as level 20 or 30, but all it took was a single monster at level 80 to wipe out a city even now, with the system empowering everybody who lived inside its borders. Out in the wilds, humans were a prey species that survived by reproducing quickly and scattering in every direction.

The real question is why the gods took such an interest in us in the first place?

That was an answer Velik suspected he’d never know, nor was it particularly relevant to his mission. He’d fulfilled his deal with Morgus in slaying Tesir, at least to some extent. The divine beast was dead, and Velik had arguably played an important role in that. He’d fought Tesir, made him bleed, and drained his mana. Eslaka might have done more to end the fight, but Velik’s role hadn’t been minor, and it was his hand that struck the killing blow.

He was satisfied with that, if for no other reason than it was too late to change how things had played out. Tesir was dead; Torwin was avenged. That just left one more goal: to fulfill the system quest Morgus had given him. He technically didn’t have that quest anymore, having lost it when he’d transitioned to his limited personal system, but he’d been planning to kill whoever’d scattered those dungeon seeds around. Zelamir, he reminded himself.

If anyone else got in his way, well, that was why Velik was hunting down other monsters for their essence. Next time he fought a divine beast, he didn’t want it to be a struggle. He wanted to put it down like the monster it was. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be that crazy fire bird. She was far stronger than she pretended to be, and he didn’t need or want her interference in his next fight.

* * *

Eslaka flew freely, each flap of her wings shedding everflame below to scorch a trail across the land. Countless lives were consumed in the conflagration, a small portion of their essence harvested and grafted onto Eslaka’s own reservoir. Already, she was half again as strong as she’d been a few days ago. And it wasn’t just the relaxing of partitions in her mind that had finally allowed her true personality to come to the forefront, though that had certainly helped.

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Zelamir’s little experiment with the wolf boy probably wouldn’t be strong enough to take out Reisha, but he’d do a fantastic job softening the leader of the Council of the Divine up. If Eslaka was quick enough, she might even capitalize on the confrontation similar to how she’d weakened Tesir so that she could get a good look at essence harvesting.

She flew west and north, not stopping her flight for anything. It would have been far faster to take a sky bridge to her destination, but that would have prevented her from collecting all that delicious essence. Eventually, though, the others were bound to notice the trail of destruction she’d left in her wake pointing at her obvious goal.

The sun was just coming up when she saw the first buildings. Made of coral and grown into their shape by the fish-finned monsters that lived there, their tips poked out of the sea at low tide, casting a pink gleam across the water where the sun hit it. It was an entire city, nestled in a hundred-mile-wide strait between the mainland and a massive island off the coast, every inch of it filled.

Shurga’s domain.

It galled Eslaka that the serpent lord could beat her, not because she was stronger, but because so many of her abilities revolved around water. They didn’t have a rivalry so much as Shurga was the bully Eslaka couldn’t stand up to, and the centuries of humiliation and thinly-veiled threats ended today.

Burning feathers drifted away, borne on magical winds. So hot were their flames that when they struck the water, instead of being snuffed out, they continued to burn while clouds of steam rolled away. The strait would have absorbed a handful of feathers without issue, but Eslaka didn’t stop at a handful.

Thousands upon thousands of them rained down, a storm of burning cinders that struck the water and sunk under the waves. Burning white pinpricks of light filled the water as the feathers continued to burn, too hot to be smothered and only increasing in number. The water started to boil, and a steam cloud filled the air.

Then the essence poured in as the monsters living in the strait were cooked alive. Some of the more powerful ones probably escaped, fleeing to the open sea where the water was cooler or even onto land if they were capable of that. Eslaka didn’t care about those. The essence was nice, but it was just a bonus.

Shurga came surging out of the steam cloud in her serpent form, all two miles of her. Blue and green coils looped round and round themselves as she rose out of the water, a thousand feet into the air until her head was clearly visible. She glared up at Eslaka, eyes full of venom and hatred.

“So you’ve finally cracked,” she spat out. “I thought Reisha had put you in your place, but apparently not. Fine. I don’t mind taking a turn snuffing out your little rebellion.”

Water rose up in a wave, pulled not just from the strait but from the sea around it. Eslaka could sense hundreds of thousands of little essence points in it—monsters caught up in the struggle of titans who would be crushed without notice or care. Her magic caught them up as they died, providing fuel for her pyroclastic shell.

The water washed over her despite her being thousands of feet overhead. It twisted into a spout to reach her, but even then, more and more was rising up below it as Shurga attempted to drag her down into the depths. That was her usual tactic, to pull Eslaka into her domain where fire and wind magic were all but useless.

Only this time, the flames held. Eslaka burned like a star in the sky, and instead of fleeing the approaching tsunami, she dove straight into it. Water burst apart around her as tendrils of fire lunged forward. More water crashed down on her, attempting to drown her, to extinguish her flames, but Eslaka was too strong now. She just kept pouring more mana into it, kept fortifying her spells with stolen essence.

Shurga sensed the approach, but, perhaps unbelieving of what she was seeing, was too slow to react. Looking like a tic latching onto a bear, Eslaka struck the massive sea serpent. Her claws dug in, shredding scales that had once seemed impossibly thick, and letting golden blood out into the water where it didn’t burn up immediately.

“Impossible!” the great serpent bellowed in pain and rage. “You can’t do this! You can’t challenge me here!”

With a sudden surge, Eslaka tore through the hundred-foot tube of flesh that was Shurga’s body, reducing her victim’s length from two miles to a little over a thousand feet. That wasn’t enough to kill Shurga, not even close, but it proved that Eslaka was the dominant power in this battle. The serpent writhed in agony while summoning powerful currents to rip the fire bird’s talons out of her flank, but no water touched Eslaka while she worked.

She felt it the moment Shurga died and released a massive cloud of essence. Greedily, Eslaka drank it in, stealing as much as she could for herself before it all dissipated into the world. It didn’t double her power. It wasn’t even as much essence as she herself had held before she’d copied Velik’s essence harvesting ability. The process was still too inefficient for that.

But her most hated rival was dead. And with that, only three true divine beasts and one experiment remained. Eslaka rose back into the air and surveyed the ruined strait now full of floating chunks of meat and dead coral bleached white. It was a good hour’s work. If she hurried, she could make it to the Gold Spire in time to profit from the next battle, too.