Free Web NovelChapter 10: Little Bit of Venting
The wind dumped the Hunters into the air and held them there, a good fifty meters up, kicking and shouting.
Aidan ignored their noise.
He turned to face the horde.
Over a hundred Tier-8 Terrors poured down the slope and spread across the barren ground, each one a mountain of shell and horn dragging itself forward on four thick legs. The earth shook under them. Dust rolled in front of them like a tide.
’Right. Spiral Fan Blade.’
He’d just bonded with the thing. He could feel it in his head, screaming about cutting and shredding. The aspects were sitting there in his source, hot and ready.
So he raised his hand and reached for them.
Wind howled in his palm.
It spun.
’Yeah, like that, just push it for—’
The blade ripped out of his hand sideways.
’Wha—’
It missed the entire horde, carved a clean line through the burning trees on his left, and vanished into the dark. fгeewebnovёl.com
Aidan blinked.
’...Okay. Too much spin, not enough aim.’
’CUT! SHRED!’ the cartoon in his head shrieked.
’Shut up, I’m working on it.’
The horde was closing. Less than two hundred meters now.
He set his feet, narrowed his eyes, and tried again. Less wrist this time. More intent.
Wind coiled. Tightened. Screamed.
He threw it.
The Spiral Fan Blade tore forward in a flat, whistling arc, and this time it found a target.
The lead Terror, the biggest of them, lowered its horns and charged straight into it.
The blade went through the shell like it was wet paper.
The Terror split from snout to tail. Both halves slid apart, still moving, before collapsing into black smoke that smeared across the ground.
’Oh. There we go.’
Aidan grinned.
It was the wrong moment to grin.
Because five of the giant Terrors behind the first one had stopped. Their heads tilted back. Their shelled jaws cracked open, and inside each mouth a dense orb of crackling violet light swelled, brighter and brighter, until the whole barren ground glowed with it.
’...Huh.’
The orbs launched.
All five of them, straight at him.
Aidan didn’t even get his hand up.
BOOOM!
The world turned white.
The explosion swallowed him whole, a blast so violent it punched a crater into the ground and flung a wall of dust and fire forty meters in every direction. The rest of the horde came to a grinding halt at the edge of it, fifty meters out, shells rattling as the shockwave rolled over them.
Up in the air, the Hunters stared down at the smoking crater.
Nobody breathed.
The wind holding them up flickered.
"...He’s dead," someone whispered. "He’s dead, oh god, we’re going to fall, we’re—"
"That was five peak Tier-8 charges! Nobody survives that heads on! Nobody!"
"We’re dead. We’re all dead."
And the despair came back.
It crashed into Aidan’s skull like a hammer, all twenty-four of them at once, raw and screaming and total, because the one person who looked like he might save them had just been erased in front of their eyes.
The noise behind his eyes spiked into something blinding.
[Relentless Force: 51]
[Relentless Force: 58]
"SHUT UP!"
The dust blew apart.
Aidan stood in the middle of the crater, perfectly still, perfectly fine, not a single scratch on him. His made-up blue hair shifted in the heat. His red eyes burned through the smoke.
His shirt was a little singed. That was it.
His Health = Divine-10.
Five Tier-8 charges to the face, and it hadn’t even reached the point of hurting. It felt like getting flicked. Annoyingly, repeatedly, on the same spot, by something he couldn’t shut off.
The Hunters in the air went silent again. A different kind of silent.
"...What?"
"He’s standing. He’s standing."
"Who the hell is that?!"
"Blue hair, red eyes? I’ve never seen him before. He’s not from any guild I know."
Aidan wasn’t listening anymore.
He rolled his neck slowly and looked at the five Terrors that had fired.
Then he brought the Blood Hunter Knuckle Dusters together in front of his chest and smashed them once, hard.
CLANG.
Crimson light bled off the fangs etched into them.
’Fine. You want to play.’ Aidan’s vein popped.
He was angry, and he wanted to vent.
He charged.
The first sprint was ugly. He overcooked the wind at his feet again and nearly face-planted, catching himself with an awkward stumble that turned into a dead run. By the third stride, he had it. By the fifth, he was a streak of gold and crimson tearing across the fifty meters before the Terrors could so much as turn.
He hit the nearest one fist-first.
The Knuckle Dusters caved its skull in, shell and all, with a crunch that echoed off the cliffs. Black blood sprayed and refused to clot, the wound tearing wider as the Bleed aspect took hold, and the toughness of its whole body dropped under his next hit like wet cardboard.
It dispersed before it finished falling.
The horde reacted. They swarmed him, a wall of horns and shell closing from every side.
Aidan met them head-on.
He was clumsy at the start. He swung too wide, left himself open, took a horn to the ribs that should have gutted a man, and instead just shoved him back a step and made him angrier. But his body was learning. Every punch landed a little cleaner than the last. Every dodge came a little earlier.
He ducked under a charging Terror and drove an uppercut into its jaw, snapping its head back so hard the spine came apart.
He grabbed a horn, planted his feet, and threw the entire creature into three of its own kind, scattering them like bowling pins before crossing the gap and stomping each one to smoke. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓
He vented.
Every strike had weight behind it that had nothing to do with the Terrors. The promise. The ring. The darkness. The lives. The eye. The fact that he had thrown himself away for someone who walked off without him. All of it went into his fists, into his knees, into the brutal mechanical rhythm of killing.
Punch. Throw. Kick. Crush.
A Terror lunged for him, empowered, fast, and lethal. He caught it mid-air, slammed it down, and pulped it.
Two charged his back. He spun, drove a knuckle into each, and let the Bleed and Break do the rest as both crumpled and dissolved.
The Hunters above had stopped trying to understand it.
"He’s just... punching them. With his hands."
"No talent display, no weapon art, he’s just punching them to death."
"What is he?"
Aidan didn’t care what they thought he was.
He cared that the noise was getting quieter.
With every Terror that turned to smoke, a fraction of the despair flooding his skull went out, like someone turning down a dial one notch at a time. The Relentless Force ticking up in the corner of his mind slowed. The grinding hum behind his eyes thinned.
It felt good.
Not the killing, exactly. The quiet.
The last cluster tried to flee back up the slope. Aidan whipped a Spiral Fan Blade after them, aimed properly this time, and the technique scythed through the whole retreating line in one clean pass.
Smoke. Silence.
The barren ground was empty.
[Side-Quest Completed. Reward has been sent to your inventory.]
He stood in the middle of it, knuckle dusters dripping with black blood that hissed and faded, chest rising and falling, and for the first time since he’d woken up in that bed, his head was completely, blissfully clear.
Aidan closed his eyes and breathed it in.
’...There it is.’
Peace.
Even if he’d had to beat a hundred monsters to death to get it.
The wind holding the Hunters lowered them gently to the ground, a safe distance away. They landed on shaking legs, staring at him, none of them daring to come closer, all of them trying to figure out whether to thank the man or run from him.
Aidan glanced at them.
They were alive. The despair was gone. Job done.
’And I’d rather not answer questions.’
Arthur was still cast out, locked in the exotic space until Aidan left.
So he reached up and tapped the side of his face, where the Dread Light Mask sat invisible against his skin.
A thousand mana drained out of him in an instant. He barely felt it.
His outline shimmered, blurred, and vanished.
"Wait, where did he—"
"He’s gone. He just disappeared."
"Was that even real?"
"Dumbass, we are alive. So yeah, he was real."
Aidan was already walking, unseen, toward the dim shimmer of the tear’s far wall, the way back out.
He stepped through, and the cold blackness swallowed him before spitting him outside.
Then, he quietly flew up before summoning Arthur.
Grrrr....
It was not a roar or a growl from Arthur. It was Aidan’s stomach.
"Well, I think we might need the Tier-10 food sooner than later."
[You have inefficiently wasted your stamina. You have 43 hours before your body starts eating itself for sustenance. Eat plantlife or meat of Tier-10 or above as soon as possible.]
’What 43 hours? I am hungry as hell. Need to eat now.’
"Let’s go back, buddy. We’ll have to ask Beatrix to find some Tier-10 food for us."
"Roar!"
