Velik stood atop the corpse of a monster the size of a small castle. Its body was layered in plates of organic metal, thickest across its back, chest, shoulders, and skull, but all four of its legs were well protected as well. Even the inside of its mouth was durable, the leathery flesh having metallic fibers threaded through it that made it difficult to cut more than shallow surface wounds.

It had breathed out billowing clouds of fire and cracked the earth with every step it took, but it had been comparatively slow and never had a chance of actually hitting Velik. He’d finally killed it after half an hour of poking and prodding the monster from different directions once he found the thinnest plates were actually around its hips and knees. From there, it had just been a matter of bleeding it out, a process he’d greatly accelerated by blasting the limb off from the inside out with a series of [Dread Lance] explosions.

[You have gained 478 essence.]

That’s it? This was about the toughest monster I’ve found on this side of the sand sea!

Velik’s eyes scanned the mountain range, noting no less than twenty more of the things crawling across the slopes. If that was all the essence he could expect to receive for the effort, he wasn’t interested in killing them. There were no humans here for them to threaten, and he could easily find weaker monsters worth more essence.

If he’d had more time, it would have been a different story. They were easy to find and no real threat to him, thus making them easy essence. It was just that they were so damn hard to actually injure that it wasn’t worth the effort, not when he could go find some pack of worgs in the forest and wipe out a dozen monsters in the same amount of time for a few thousand essence.

He’d been stockpiling it since finishing off Tesir, and he was up to almost thirty thousand now. That would hopefully be enough for what he was planning, because he was almost up the mountain path now and, unless he turned back, he was running out of time. Part of him wanted to do exactly that. He could disappear into the wilderness for months or even years, slaughter countless monsters, and become an unstoppable force of destruction.

And in the meantime, the divine beasts would continue doing what they’d been doing for years. Their researcher would keep seeding his experiments in the Garden, skirting the rules the gods had agreed to by a technicality, ruining the lives of people just like Velik. He had the power to stop that right now.

Or at least, he planned to in a minute. He was stronger than when he’d fought Tesir by an appreciable amount, but that didn’t mean he was strong enough. However, skills merged together were stronger than the sum of their parts, especially with the unparalleled control over how those skills folded into one another that the LPS gave him.

[Duskbound] was the foundation. It defined him. Whatever else that dungeon seed had done, that racial subtype—now an essence configuration—had given him the power to survive as a child alone in a world full of flesh-eating monsters.

Almost as important, [Divine Wolf] was the latest step on a journey he hadn’t intended to take. Much like [Duskbound], it had given him the power to fight when the monsters had risen up beyond simple, unthinking engines of destruction. It was the whole reason he was thousands of miles from home, bringing the war to monsters that no mortal had any business challenging.

Those were the two most important ingredients, but he’d learned that his new version of the system could easily combine more than two skills. His initial idea of forming an all-encompassing defensive skill had grown to its current state, where he was looking to combine all of his most important skills into one ur-skill to end all others.

[The Wanderer’s Path] and [Magic Eater] were part of his new skill, both pieces he expected to slot in easily as a type of sensory skill. [Inevitable] and [Shadow Step] also joined the mix as his movement skills. If he could have, he would have kept building, but forcing so many skills into one was already stressing his LPS and his essence reserves, so Velik was forced to concede his efforts at that point.

The skills didn’t fold into each other instantly, nor did they take a few seconds to finish configuration like when he’d built new ones. Instead, it was a slow, drawn-out process that left Velik holding his breath as he stared at his system menu. In fact, it took so long that he started to wonder if he’d broken the damn thing trying to push it too hard. Only the fact that his essence reserves were still steadily draining away at a rate of several hundred a minute reassured him that something was happening.

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The first ten thousand essence vanished while the LPS worked, and the drain showed no sign of slowing down. By the time he’d lost twenty thousand essence, he was starting to get nervous. Did I not gather enough for this? It wasn’t like I had more than a guess of how much I’d need, but I thought I’d have at least twice as much.

His essence reserves ticked down past five thousand, then to three, then two. Finally, at one thousand two hundred and seventy-six, it stopped. Velik let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, then caught it again when he realized no notification had appeared.

Come on… Come on. Work, damn it. This is what the gods built you to do. Work!

[Saving new configuration: Sun Eater]

[Integrating new configuration.]

[Essence configuration merger complete.]

Velik didn’t need the notification to know the LPS had finished its work. He could feel it. Wild energy surged through him, urging him to move, to run, to chase, to hunt. He felt vital and alive in a way that defied explanation, and his whole body burned with a need to experience the new power he’d harnessed.

He looked up at one of the mountainous monsters, and with barely a thought, leaped into the air. He loped along with what felt like casual grace, but the distance that should have taken him twenty or thirty seconds to cross disappeared in a blink. It wasn’t until he slammed into the top of the monster, spear made of solid darkness leading his descent, that an echoing crack washed over him.

An instant later, a second crash rolled out through the air as the monster he’d struck was slammed skull first into the mountain it was clinging to. A second spear manifested out of nothing in the air next to Velik, then drove itself through the stone plates protecting the creature’s head. He didn’t even need to grab hold of it.

[You have gained 502 essence.]

Interesting. It’s everything I ever wanted [Phalanx] to be back when I first got it, and that’s not even part of [Sun Eater]. Some sort of parallel skill evolution, I guess.

Unlike the first one Velik had fought, this one succumbed to his attacks easily. It was strange; something about [Sun Eater] had drastically increased the power of the spears. It was too bad he didn’t understand essence configurations well enough to say exactly what that was. In that particular arena, the true divine beasts had him at a stark disadvantage. Fortunately, he had no intention of playing their games.

Being clever was useless in the face of monstrous, overwhelming force, and that was exactly what Velik was bringing to the battlefield. With a thought, he pulled up his status.

[Physical: 344]

[Mental: 261]

[Mystic: 220]

[Unspent Essence: 1778]

[Estimated Daily Upkeep: 704]

[Essence Configurations:]

[Sun Eater (1)]

[Dread Lance (9)]

[Seal of the Relentless (1)]

[Blood Toxin (1)]

His reserves were a bit low, and he wanted to pump a bit of essence into his new skills, but all that would depend on how many more monsters he could find between himself and his destination. He hadn’t crested the mountain pass yet, but he was close.

It wouldn’t matter if he didn’t get stronger, not really. He truly believed that, with this jump in power, he could have easily crushed Tesir. Eslaka wouldn’t have had time to interfere, not with how quickly that fight would have ended. As long as he built up enough essence to keep the LPS’s daily upkeep happy, he’d be fine.

Velik didn’t go out of his way to slay any more of the rockhide mountain climbing giant quadrupeds, but that was only because he’d scented easier and more plentiful prey deeper into the mountains. Eager to begin the next hunt, he ran through the sky while the sun fled ahead of him.

Shadows flowed in his wake, if only briefly, and Velik unconsciously slipped between the real world and the dark realm he sometimes walked. Each step pulled him deeper into the shadows. Every breath nudged him back out. Instead of fully committing to one or the other, he flickered through the air, the avatar of dusk balanced on the border of night and day.

The Gold Spire was the first thing he saw as he crested the mountain. It stood in the middle of a vast basin easily a hundred miles wide, seeming needle thin in the distance but in actuality half a mile thick at its base and probably ten miles tall.

Velik paused for a moment to take it in. He could be there in minutes, maybe less. This could be over before the sun set. Instead of charging ahead, he sighted down his next prey, a beast with six legs, armored leathery hide, and jutting plates running down its spine.

He was on it before it realized he was there, slipping in and out of the shadow world until he fully materialized on top of it, his deadly spear punching through its body and silencing its brief cry of pain.

The next one was only a quarter of a mile away. Velik flitted through the darkness, killing time and monsters while he waited for the sun to fully set.