Free Web NovelChapter 232: Overpowered
"Whoa!"
The first wolf died before Luke even registered the decision to move.
It had come from his left, low and fast through the undergrowth, and his Domain caught it at roughly four meters out.
Not a warning exactly. More like a pressure change, a sudden wrongness in the air at the edge of his awareness that his body answered before his mind could process it.
He pivoted and his elbow came down across the back of the animal’s skull at full force.
The crack was sharp and absolute. The wolf dropped and skidded through the dirt and did not move again.
Luke stood over it and stared at his arm.
That had not been intentional. He had meant to redirect, to get a read on his speed before committing to anything.
Instead his body had simply produced a response and the wolf was dead before the thought finished forming.
"This is insane..."
He exhaled slowly.
Too fast. The body was ahead of him.
He needed to stop thinking in terms of what he used to be capable of and start learning what he actually was now.
Three more entered his Domain from different angles before he finished the thought.
Not good, he wasn’t keeping his gaze on his surroundings.
The closest lunged for his throat. Luke caught it by the jaw with one hand, momentum and all, and the snap of its neck was immediate.
He let it fall and was already turning. The second came in low, targeting his legs, and he brought his knee up and met its skull on the way in.
*Thud* *Crack*
The third he simply sidestepped and drove two fingers into its temple as it passed. It rolled twice and went still.
Four wolves. Combined, they had not lasted ten seconds.
Luke stood in the resulting silence and tried to find something useful in what had just happened.
’I am...simply someone else.’
The Domain was tight. Four meters, maybe five on a clear night when nothing was obstructing the aura. It was not some sweeping radar that gave him the whole battlefield.
It was more like a second skin, a border drawn just beyond arm’s reach that registered intrusion with immediate clarity.
He knew the angle, the speed, the rough size of whatever crossed it. Nothing more.
Which meant anything patient enough to stay outside it and wait was still a problem. freeweɓnøvel.com
He filed that away and kept moving.
He heard the bears before his Domain found them. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm
Two of them, massive and dark-furred, foraging along a depression in the earth about thirty meters ahead.
His enhanced senses painted the picture clearly even in full darkness. The individual shapes of them moving between the trees.
The low wet sound of one of them pulling something apart. He could see them the way he might see something standing directly beneath a lamp.
He approached without bothering to conceal himself.
The larger one caught his scent at around fifteen meters and turned. It took in the sight of him for exactly one second before charging, and when it charged it was committed, all weight and speed and fury, the kind of charge that had ended other things in this dungeon before tonight.
Luke set himself and let it come.
It hit him like a wall falling.
He went back two full steps, heels digging lines into the dirt, and his bones rang with the impact. But he was still standing.
He gripped the bear’s right shoulder with both hands, let the momentum pull him slightly sideward, and redirected the weight.
Eight hundred kilograms of animal went over and down, the ground shuddering at the landing.
Before it could orient itself he was already on top of it, one knee on its neck, and he drove his fist down once at the base of its skull with something close to real effort.
A dull crack rang
The bear went still underneath him.
He stepped off and faced the second one.
This one was smarter. It had stopped its charge mid-motion and was circling, head low, eyes tracking him with the cautious intelligence of an animal that had just watched something kill its companion without getting hurt.
It moved in a wide arc, staying just outside the range where he might reach it in a single step.
Luke watched it complete half a circle.
Then he stepped in fast.
The bear reared up and his Domain spiked with the shift in its weight and he was already ducking under the swing of its paw.
He got inside its guard, both hands finding its ribcage, and pushed. The force he put into it was less than half of what he’d used on the first bear.
The animal skidded, traveled sideways through the air, and hit a tree trunk with a sound like a sack of wet grain. It collapsed at the base of the tree and groaning in pain.
The hunter ended the job by stomping on its skull.
Standing there, Luke looked at his hands again.
He was going to keep doing that. Misjudging the output. The feedback from his muscles was lying to him, telling him light was light and moderate was moderate, when in reality moderate was already somewhere beyond what he had previously considered extreme.
He would learn it through repetition.
The night gave him no shortage of subjects.
"Haah... let’s see..." He tried summoning a weapon when he sensed movement in the bushes.
A streak of silver brilliance stretched into a straight line, but nothing meaningful took shape.
Luke clicked his tongue and ducked beneath the ape’s incoming paw.
The monster stood at least seven feet tall and was agile enough to launch another attack the instant the first one missed.
Luke sidestepped and effortlessly avoided the follow-up frontal strike as well.
The ape wasn’t satisfied. It unleashed a relentless barrage of attacks one after another.
Kicks, punches, knees, elbows. It used every part of its body in an attempt to land a hit.
However, it made one mistake.
Throughout the entire exchange, the ape had remained within the reach of his domain.
And within that space...
"I am impossible to defeat," Luke murmured.
Suddenly, he seized the ape’s outstretched arm and hurled the creature over his shoulder as though three hundred kilograms weighed nothing at all.
Thud
"KHRIEEEK!"
The ape shrieked in pain as its massive body slammed into the ground.
Luke wasn’t finished.
He stomped on the ape’s shoulder and tore its arm from the socket with alarming ease.
"KHRRREEEIK!!"
The monster screamed in absolute agony, its body thrashing wildly across the ground.
Luke winced at the sound before materializing the silver staff once more and driving it straight through the center of the ape’s head.
The cries ceased.
And so did the monster.
Luke exhaled a sigh and tossed the arm away and looked at the stick in his hand which had stretched a little longer but still couldn’t be regarded as a weapon.
[Host, this is your first few minutes of using this physique and you are already doing quite fine.]
Luke nodded, "Right." Shaking his head, he dismissed the weapon and decided to focus on what he came for here.
Synthia.
