Every second was precious, but Velik still spent them studying the man. He was a divine beast, after all, and it would be the height of stupidity to expect something that old and that powerful to be felled by a simple ambush. He undoubtedly had ways to protect himself, and Velik needed at least a rough idea of how to breach those defenses before he struck.

Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have a clue what he was looking at. The man’s mana was woven into knots around him in some sort of amazingly complex pattern. Each knot was different, unique, maybe, and the only thing Velik knew for certain was that they individually represented more mana than most humans had total. There were hundreds of them, so presumably this particular divine beast had deep reserves and probably specialized as a mage.

The man finished his clippings and plucked at one of the knots, manifesting something that looked like a two-foot-long insect with massive, translucent wings. It grabbed at the basket’s handle with its legs, then fluttered off, quickly vanishing into the distance. The man watched it go for a moment, then shook his head and laughed.

“It’s not often my test subjects deliver themselves to me,” he said aloud. “But I appreciate you saving me the work.”

Velik froze, becoming so still he didn’t even breathe simply to keep his chest from rising and falling. He was well aware that it was possible for those with sharp enough senses to hear air streaming through a person’s nose or even their heart beat. Up to this point, his reliance on traversing the shadow world reflection had kept him undetected, but it seemed the time for stealth was at an end.

Or else it’s a bluff. Maybe he just randomly spouts crap like that. Or maybe he’s talking to the flowers.

The man looked right at Velik.

Okay, maybe it’s not a bluff.

Velik slipped out of the shadow world and stood on the trail, barely a hundred feet away from the divine beast. “You’re the one who runs the experiments around here? You planted the dungeon seeds in the Garden? Zelamir?”

The man simply grinned at the accusation and said nothing.

Mana built up in Velik as he stepped forward. An ambush might be out of the question, but he was fast and strong. He could still surprise a divine beast, especially if this one was as focused on magic as Velik suspected he was.

“Nothing to say?” Velik asked.

“What would you like to hear?”

“Just trying to confirm who I’m talking to.”

“Yes,” the man said with a laugh. “Congratulations. I am your creator, the one who lifted you up from the dull muck of your existence and created something wholly unique.”

That was all the confirmation Velik needed. He threw himself forward, every step clearing twenty feet as he conjured a spear. Mana flashed around Zelamir, and just as Velik crashed into the divine beast, there was something else in the way.

It was tall, bulky, with skin like stone. Elemental, Velik’s brain registered. But it hadn’t risen up from the ground. It had simply appeared from nowhere. He refused to believe it was so fast that he couldn’t track its movements.

The spear had pierced fully through the elemental, but it had fully stopped him by using its own body as a shield. The stone slabs were already coming apart, crumbling as the elemental died, except that Velik quickly realized they weren’t just falling to the ground. Instead, they swept over him in an attempt to bind him in place.

Zelamir was making a mistake if he thought he was just going to capture Velik. That was a handicap the divine beast couldn’t afford, one that Velik was more than happy to capitalize on. He darted backwards, well out of the collapsing elemental’s range, then took one step into the air to go right overtop the doomed monster.

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A root leaped from the ground to snatch at his ankle, easily fast enough that Velik couldn’t just outrun it. He pivoted in place, spinning his body fully as a new spear materialized in the air next to him. It dove unerringly into the ground, plunging through the dirt and piercing a monster lurking there.

Just like the elemental, that hadn’t been there before. In fact, even as Velik reoriented himself and adjusted his ascent to pass over the rapidly collapsing mound of stone, he noticed two new monsters appear on either side.

One was a beast on four legs, its back full of foot-long spines. The other was another plant, though this one appeared to have a mouth with attached poison sacs for spitting. Both launched their attacks simultaneously, but neither was fast enough to trace Velik’s movements. By the time venomous saliva and biometalic needle reached where Velik had been, he’d already stabbed Zelamir.

The spear plunged into the man’s chest, but instead of drawing out a spurt of golden blood, it simply burst apart into black wisps of smoke. Zelamir’s face never lost its smirk, not even when Velik crashed into him.

“You’ll need to do better than that if you want to actually hurt me,” the divine beast chided. “But go on. Let’s put you through your paces. It’ll help me establish a baseline for future experiments.”

New monsters appeared all over, and Velik was finally close enough to see the truth of it. Every single knot wrapped around Zelamir was a monster waiting to be released. A single tug from the divine beast’s mana was enough to summon another reinforcement to the battlefield. Velik wasn’t fighting one enemy; he was facing a thousand.

And they weren’t weak, either. Something around level 100 wasn’t a terrible threat to him these days, but he still didn’t want to fight dozens of them at once. If Zelamir decided to go all out, Velik would be buried in moments.

Can I disrupt the summon somehow? Eat the mana or just break his focus?

The answer to that was a simple, ‘no.’ Over the next three seconds, Velik tried anything and everything he could think of. He hit Zelamir hard enough to knock down one of those mountain crawlers, and the monster just affected a painfully fake yawn and brushed a strand of loose hair behind his ear. Spears fell to pieces, even when three or more attacked at once. [Dread Lance] collapsed on itself before Velik could even launch the attack.

All the while, more and more mana knots flashed like twinkling stars as they summoned an army of monsters. Velik was forced to break off his attack just to whittle down the numbers before they overwhelmed him. In that respect, at least, he had a measure of success. Flesh parted easily before him, regardless of whether it was wood, meat, stone, or anything else. It was only Zelamir himself that Velik couldn’t land a hit on.

This isn’t right. It’s too much mana, far more than any of the other divine beasts, and I can’t sense any mana besides the summons. He shouldn’t be able to resist physical attacks and magic so completely, not like— The monsters. They’re a distraction to keep me busy!

It was the ebb of his own mana reserves that finally tipped him off. He was spending mana liberally, but [Sun Eater] should have been refilling that as he killed monsters. The instant he realized it wasn’t, he figured out that he wasn’t actually killing anything at all. It was an insidious illusion, mostly because he felt like he was getting mana infusions with each kill. It was everything he expected, including the sensation of unchecked notifications.

But his essence total hadn’t risen, and his mana reserves kept shrinking. None of it was real, which meant that whatever was in front of him probably wasn’t the real Zelamir. That realization shattered the illusion completely, revealing the truth of things. He was still in the garden, but rather than fighting for his life, he stood in a field of black-petaled flowers that had started to grow up his body, each one with its own small needle reaching out to latch onto him. They were siphoning his magic from him and injecting him with some sort of drug.

“Now that is impressive,” Zelamir said, his voice coming from everywhere and nowhere. The divine beast himself was nowhere to be seen. “I’ve never had a subject wake up from a dream of death before. Of course, I’ve never placed a divine beast inside a field of death poppies, so… I guess we’re learning new things today.”

Even though he’d broken the illusion, Velik still struggled to move his body. Whatever the flowers did, however they’d captured him so quickly, it was a complete restraint. But Velik knew the trick to dealing with poison: more mass.

It had been a while since he’d needed to assume his alternate form. In truth, once he’d gained the stat boosts from it permanently, he’d stuck to human shape. He was far more comfortable fighting that way, especially since it allowed him to use a weapon. The additional bonus of not having to taste what he was killing couldn’t be understated, either.

Mana rippled through him, and the flowers tried to steal it. But it was too much, too fast, and they’d failed to completely engulf him before he’d broken the spell. In a single surge of power, Velik the human vanished. In his place stood a great wolf fully twenty feet tall at the shoulder, his fur obsidian black.

The flowers hung off him like rags flapping in the wind. They squirmed, trying to reestablish their hold, but Velik simply lowered his head and breathed out a [Dread Lance], annihilating the whole patch of them. Then he raised his nose to the air and breathed in, seeking the scent of his prey.