Free Web NovelChapter 22: Tier 8
With one precise strike, the moon blade came down clean.
The bleed effect did the rest.
[You have slain a Serpent of Blood]
The tier 7 Demi-human dropped from Eric’s frame without a sound, its body hitting the ground in sections, the head separating from the neck at the point of impact and coming to rest a short distance away. The liquid markings that had been pulsing across Eric’s skin went dark immediately, the patterns fading mid-pulse, the connection severed at its source.
"You fucker!!!"
Eric’s voice came out raw, stripped of everything that wasn’t rage.
"Do you know what that cost me?!"
He was looking at the Demi-human on the ground. The thing he had found, the thing he had been building toward, the advantage he had kept hidden and cultivated carefully for exactly the moment it would matter. Gone in the space of a single swing.
Ethan didn’t give him time to finish the thought.
He pushed forward immediately, the moon blade already swinging horizontal, moving for Eric’s neck in the same motion that had just ended the serpent. No pause between kills. No shift in his expression.
Eric moved.
The Demi-human’s blood was still running through his veins, and whatever that connection had transferred to his body in the time they had been syncing hadn’t disappeared with the creature’s death. His speed when he stepped back was not entirely his own. He cleared the arc of the blade by a margin that shouldn’t have been available to him in his current condition.
The giant salamander appeared behind him in the same instant, its body dropping into position between Eric and Ethan, its mass filling the space.
Ethan’s eyes shifted.
Then two crystalline spheres dropped from above.
They had hairline fractures running across their surfaces, the shells already compromised, the compressed energy inside pushing against the cracks from within. They hit the ground between the three of them and the shells gave way simultaneously.
—boom!!
The explosion tore the ground open beneath the impact point, a column of displaced soil and pulverized stone punching outward in a wide radius. The force of it threw everything in range backward, the shockwave hitting Ethan across the chest and lifting him off his feet before depositing him several meters back.
Dust and grime hung in the air where the ground had been.
When it settled, three figures from Jacob’s family stood at the edge of the clearing, having arrived through the trees at the tail end of the explosion. They took in what was in front of them without speaking.
Ethan stood over Eric’s beaten and bloodied frame, the moon blade still in hand.
Behind him, Vlad stood atop the salamander’s corpse, the spear resting across his shoulder, the beast beneath his boots motionless.
The three did not move. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
[You have completed a majority of the required Evolution Requirements]
[Please proceed to complete your Evolution]
Ethan read the notification without looking away from the three. He reached into his coat and produced a vial of blood, turned it once in his fingers, then tossed it toward Vlad without a word.
Vlad caught it and drank it in one motion.
[Congratulations. You have fulfilled all requirements]
[Evolving all beings under your liege]
[Congratulations. Your Summon has achieved a significant change.... Vlad Tepesh has evolved to Vlad Dracula, Vampire Baron]
The energy came through the bond without warning.
It didn’t arrive gradually. It arrived all at once, flooding through the connection between summoner and summon and carrying Ethan with it, his own tier shifting in the same moment Vlad’s did, the breakthrough hitting him from the outside in rather than building from within the way he had expected it to.
One develops fengs and blood stained claws as his face went pale, while the others overall contenance grew, a rush of vitality rushing through his veins.
Tier 8. freewёbnoνel.com
Both of them had evolved.
[You have received a Skill]
[Black-Eyed Bat Evasion: Using your Dominion over the night and its creatures, you may turn into a swarm of bats for 5 seconds to dodge attacks and overwhelm your enemy]
He read it once.
Then he looked at the three from Jacob’s family standing across the clearing, and something in his expression shifted. Not quite a smile. The shape of one, but with nothing warm behind it.
—woosh
White Transit carried him across the distance before any of them had finished registering that he had moved. He came out of it directly in front of the nearest one, the moon blade already swinging forward.
One of Vincent’s companions reacted on instinct, driving his spear forward in a counter that would have connected cleanly.
Ethan dissolved.
The swarm moved through the spear’s path without resistance, dozens of shapes scattering and reforming behind the summoner in the space of a breath, and Ethan came back together with the moon blade already in motion.
Three exchanges.
One dead. Two down, breathing but not moving correctly, the kind of damage that didn’t resolve quickly.
He turned to finish it.
The sound hit him before anything he could see.
A deep rhythmic impact, heavy and consistent, the particular sound of large bodies moving through undergrowth at speed. It came from more than one direction simultaneously. He turned his head and the tree line to his left was already moving, branches snapping under weight that didn’t slow for them, shapes breaking through in ones and twos and then not in ones and twos anymore.
Beasts.
Not scattered. Not fleeing from something. Moving with direction and momentum, pushing toward the stronghold walls, the horde that had been advancing through the wastelands now inside the forest’s edge entirely.
"Of all the timing." Ethan pulled back without hesitating, his eyes tracking the nearest shapes as they passed. "This is genuinely terrible luck."
"We have to move. Now."
Hela appeared at his side, and the trace in her eyes was not the controlled irritation she usually carried. It was something closer to urgency.
She had used the window while Ethan handled Eric to climb high enough to see over the canopy.
Her mother was in the sky above the walls, engaged with a Demi-human, her attention fully committed. The horde had read that gap and moved through it. It was inside the forest now, the full mass of it pushing toward the stronghold in a spread that covered more ground than a defensive line could reasonably answer.
Within it, beasts up to tier 6 were moving.
And one of them had already adjusted course.
It was coming directly toward them.
