Chapter : 609

He poured every last drop of his remaining Steel Blood power into his simple practice sword, the blade glowing with a faint, dark light. He dropped into a low, desperate stance, angling the sword upward, his entire body braced for an impact that he knew would shatter him.

This was it. A final, desperate, and almost certainly fatal, last stand.

The collision was not a clean, heroic impact. It was a messy, brutal, and agonizing reality.

The boar’s colossal tusk, a battering ram of sharpened bone, slammed into his hastily angled sword. The sound was not the clean clang of steel on steel, but the sickening, grinding shriek of metal being stressed beyond its absolute limit. His B-Rank Steel Blood, a power that could stop a normal sword in its tracks, was woefully insufficient against a half-ton of pure, kinetic rage.

The practice sword didn't just bend; it warped, it groaned, it threatened to disintegrate in his hands. The force of the impact was a physical shockwave that traveled up his arms and slammed into his shoulders, dislocating his left one with an audible, wet pop of bone leaving its socket. An explosion of pure, white-hot agony erupted in his chest, and he felt his ribs crack under the immense, crushing pressure.

He was thrown backward like a discarded ragdoll, his feet leaving the ground as he was catapulted through the air. He hit the hard, sun-baked earth ten feet away, a broken, sprawling heap of pain. The world dissolved into a swirling vortex of dust, pain, and the coppery taste of his own blood.

He had failed. The charge had connected. The last thing he saw before the darkness threatened to claim him was the triumphant, bloodshot eye of the boar as it wheeled around, preparing to gore and trample his broken body into the dirt.

But he was not alone.

A blur of pure, incandescent rage, a being of magma and inferno, slammed into the boar's flank with the force of a meteor strike. It was Iffrit. He had finally dispatched his own opponents and had seen his master fall. The controlled, tactical fury of the fire demon was gone, replaced by a raw, unrestrained, and protective loyalty that was terrifying to behold.

Iffrit’s colossal, flame-wreathed zanbatō rose and fell in a single, punishing arc. The sound of the impact was a wet, heavy, and final thump. The massive boar, the king of this herd, was cleaved almost in two, its life extinguished in an instant of overwhelming, retributive violence.

Silence descended once more. The battle was over. The last of the seventh herd was dead.

Lloyd lay on the ground, his body a symphony of screaming pain. His left arm was a useless appendage, and every breath was a sharp, stabbing reminder of his shattered ribs. He coughed, and a spray of blood painted the cracked earth beside his face.

He had won. But the victory felt hollow, a bitter, painful reminder of his own fragility. He had been so confident, so sure of his new, sustainable system of warfare. And in a single, brutal moment, a limitation he had never conceived of had brought him to the brink of a pathetic, simulated death.

The farming dimension was a training ground. But the training, he now understood with a terrifying clarity, was very, very real. The pain was real. The exhaustion was real. And the consequences of failure, of overconfidence, of forgetting the rules, were absolutely, brutally real.

He felt a cool, gentle touch on his forehead. He managed to crack open an eyelid, his vision swimming. Fang Fairy was kneeling beside him, her ethereal form radiating a soft, soothing azure light. The light flowed from her fingertips into his broken body, a cool, anesthetic balm that didn't heal the damage but numbed the worst of the agonizing pain. Her golden eyes, usually so calm and analytical, were filled with a profound, quiet concern. You were reckless, Master.

I was an idiot, he projected back, his thought a ragged, self-deprecating groan. Lesson learned. The hard way.

This place, this private dimension of power and progress, was a double-edged sword. It offered him a path to godhood, a way to accumulate the strength he needed to face the ghosts of his past. But it was also a place with its own, unyielding laws. It was a simulated reality, and some things—the deepest, most fundamental acts of soul and self—could not be replicated here. His ultimate power, his fusion with the storm, was a weapon he could only wield in the real world. Here, in his own personal training ground, he was limited. He was weaker.

Chapter : 610

This curious limitation was not just a minor inconvenience. It was a fundamental shift in his strategic understanding. It meant he could not rely on his ultimate trump card to solve the challenges of this dimension. He had to be smarter. He had to be more cautious. He had to rely on his wits, his command, and his tactics, not on a single, overwhelming burst of divine power.

It was a humbling lesson. It was a painful lesson.

But as he lay there, his body broken and his pride shattered, a small, grim smile touched his blood-flecked lips.

It was a good lesson. The best lessons always were. The ones that cost you something. The ones that reminded you that no matter how powerful you become, you are never, ever truly invincible.

The process of recovery within the Soul Farm was as strange and surreal as everything else in the dimension. There was no magical, instantaneous healing. His broken ribs did not knit themselves back together in a flash of divine light, nor did his dislocated shoulder snap back into place with a convenient, painless pop. The damage he had sustained was real, a direct and painful consequence of his own hubris, and the System, it seemed, was content to let him marinate in it.

What Fang Fairy’s gentle, cooling energy provided was not a cure, but a respite. The waves of soothing, azure light that washed over him acted as a powerful, supernatural anesthetic, dulling the sharp, screaming edges of the pain and reducing it to a deep, resonant, and manageable ache. It allowed him to think, to function, to move without his consciousness dissolving into a white-hot agony.

With her help, and the silent, brooding presence of Iffrit standing guard like a volcanic sentinel, Lloyd managed to painfully drag his broken body to the relative safety of the stone house that served as his dimensional sanctuary. The simple, arduous journey of a few hundred yards took him nearly an hour, every step a grim reminder of the price of his miscalculation.

Inside the stark, functional stone dwelling, he collapsed onto the simple cot, his body screaming in protest. The next few hours—or days, in the strange, distorted time of this place—were a blurry, monotonous cycle of rest and recuperation. His Echo, his tireless twin, continued its work on the Slime Plains, its progress a steady, comforting drumbeat of passive income in the back of his mind. He, however, was out of commission. The great hunter, the master strategist, had been benched by his own foolishness.

He spent what his internal clock registered as a full day just lying there, his mind a quiet, contemplative space. He analyzed his failure, not with anger or self-pity, but with the cold, dispassionate eye of a general reviewing the after-action report of a disastrous battle.

The limitation on his Soul Merge was the primary factor, the critical piece of intelligence he had lacked. But it was not the root cause of his failure. The root cause, he admitted to himself with a grim honesty, was his own escalating arrogance. He had become comfortable. He had developed a system, a rhythm, and he had begun to believe his own strategic brilliance made him infallible. The seventh herd had been a brutal but necessary corrective, a punch in the mouth from a universe that had no patience for gods who forgot they were still mortal.

His new strategy would have to account for this. He needed to build in more redundancies. He needed to be more conservative with his own energy expenditure. He could no longer afford to throw himself into the fray as the clean-up crew, the exploitation expert. His own physical form was now his most vulnerable asset in this dimension. He would have to transition into a pure command-and-control role, a true general directing his immortal legions from the safety of the rear.

It was a blow to his warrior's pride, but it was a necessary evolution of his strategy. Survival, he knew, was always about adaptation.

After a second perceived day of rest, the worst of the pain had subsided into a deep, throbbing ache. The micro-fractures in his ribs were beginning to knit, and the fierce inflammation in his shoulder had calmed. The natural healing processes of his physically enhanced body, accelerated by the ambient energy of the Soul Farm, were working, but they were slow. He was still far from combat-ready.