Thick, hot blood plummeted in heavy ruby droplets from Darwin's swollen fist, hitting the gray dust of the pavement with a faint hiss.
Every strike from this human weapon was the result of a monstrous internal process: inside his forearm, bones were restructuring, becoming denser than granite, while his metabolism—overclocked to terminal speeds—flooded his veins with doses of adrenaline that would have stopped an elephant's heart.
Fortified muscle fibers, braided into taut cables, provided the explosive inertia he needed. One short burst—and the space between him and his opponent collapsed. The blow caught the cultivator square in the chest.
There was a dry, distinct snap of splintering ribs, and the enemy's body, suddenly weightless and void of will, was launched sideways like a ragdoll, leaving a trail of shattered teeth and a fine bloody mist in its wake.
"Filthy... freak..."
the man wheezed, clawing for air through punctured lungs before falling silent forever.
Darwin didn't spare the dying man a glance. He squeezed his fists so hard his knuckles turned white beneath the layer of stolen blood.
His senses were dialed to the absolute limit: he could hear the wind whistling through the alleyways and the rhythmic thrum of hearts belonging to enemies lurking in the shadows.
A portly cultivator standing ten paces away gripped the hilt of his broadsword with trembling hands.
His eyes, buried in folds of fat, glinted with a mix of fury and primal terror. Anticipating the inevitable strike, Darwin crouched low, shifting his center of gravity to his coiled legs, ready for another lunge.
But the fat man didn't attack. Instead, with a piercing shriek, he thrust his sword toward the sky. The blade ignited in a blinding, eye-searing light. A pillar of fire erupted from the tip, soaring into the heavens at terminal velocity. A hundred meters up, the signal detonated, shattering into a dozen black flames that hung suspended in the air.
The flare worked.
Darwin's body reacted to the danger instantly—every pore on his skin tightened, and the muscles in his back coiled in anticipation.
He lurched to the side, nearly shearing the skin off the soles of his feet. With a deafening whistle, just inches from his temple, a massive black arrow sliced through the air and hit the packed earth with a wet thud, sinking in up to the fletching. Darwin snapped his head up.
Perched on the roof of a four-story stone house against the smoldering sky stood a sniper—another henchman of the Black Flame Sect. His silhouette looked thin and brittle, but the aura of Qi radiating from him pricked Darwin's skin like a thousand white-hot needles.
"Dao Bei, are you so pathetic that you had to call in the seniors to deal with a regular mortal?!"
Darwin's voice, distorted by mutation, sounded like metal grinding against stone.
"Lord Yao, you saw this freak's speed yourself!"
the fat cultivator shrieked, spraying saliva.
The archer's gaze, cold and calculating, filled with murderous intent. To him, Darwin was nothing more than an interesting specimen for the butcher's block.
In less than a second, he notched a new arrow, drew the taut string made from some monster's tendons, and fired. Darwin prepped for a dash, his brain already calculating the evasion trajectory, but the arrow sailed past him.
With a dull thwack, it buried itself directly in the center of the fat ally's forehead. The demonic cultivator's face twisted in absurd shock—his own masters had sacrificed him just to create a window of opportunity.
The massive carcass toppled over, and his blood, laced with corrosive Qi, began to slowly eat away at the stones beneath him.
The archer showed zero remorse. He pushed off the roof's edge and, defying gravity, drifted into the air, buoyed by invisible currents of energy.
His expression turned mocking, almost tender. Pulling three jagged-tipped arrows from his quiver at once, he prepared to finally end his enemy's life.
Darwin felt something snap inside him. Reservoirs of hidden energy burst open, drowning his muscles in searing power. He kicked off the ground with such force that a crater formed beneath him. Rising ten feet into the air, he heard a dry tear—his clothes, already reduced to rags, finally gave way at the seams.
His new transformation showed no mercy to matter. Two massive wings, covered in skin as tough as Kevlar, snapped open with a powerful beat, thrusting him even higher. The archer, disoriented by the sight of this winged monstrosity, whiffed his shot. All three arrows went wide, and Darwin was already closing the gap.
In mid-flight, split seconds before impact, Darwin's right fist began to pulse and swell. It crusted over with a gray, bony shell, taking the shape of a massive war hammer. The air around the fist vibrated with the sheer density of the energy.
Darwin swung, but the archer used a Qi-burst to lurch away at the last second. The hammer-fist merely cleaved the air, creating a shockwave that blew out the windows of the nearest building. The cultivator tumbled back several meters, his face pale, but he maintained his distance.
Inside Darwin, another wet, squelching sound echoed. Bones snapped and fused back together. A second, smaller pair of wings tore through the remains of the meat on his back. Near his shoulder blades, small apertures opened—biological thrusters.
A dense, white-hot stream of pure bio-energy roared out of them like a jet engine. It gave Darwin a boost of insane acceleration. As he closed the distance, he watched the panic take root in the archer's eyes.
Shot after shot.
The archer fired frantically, hoping to shave even a fraction of a second off the pursuer's speed. Blurring over the city rooftops, they collided.
The demon-worshiper knew: distance was his only salvation. If this mutant caught him with those warped hands, he was dead.
Darwin thrust his hand forward, ready to crush the man's throat, when his senses screamed a warning.
A sharp chill. The ring of metal.
A giant, pitch-black chain whipped out from the ruins below, snagging his wrist. With incredible, truly demonic force, something yanked him down. Caught off guard, Darwin plummeted like a shot bird from a height of several dozen meters.
The impact was cataclysmic. A crater fifteen feet wide erupted where he hit, sending a plume of dust and stone shards into the sky. However, his reinforced body, braced with bony armatures, withstood the crash. Darwin snarled, trying to rise, but a heavy, massive frame already slammed down onto him.
It was a third cultivator—a hulking, fur-covered giant with chains wrapped around his forearms. His thick, knotted hands clamped onto Darwin's neck, grinding his head into the shattered asphalt.
"You're too durable for a mortal,"
the giant rumbled, his breath stinking of rot.
At that moment, the archer above took his best shot. A thin, Qi-enhanced arrow pierced Darwin's neck clean through, protruding from the other side.
Blood sprayed in a fountain, drenching the giant's face. The chain-wielder, seeing his comrade's success, squeezed even harder, trying to pulverize Darwin's windpipe.
Darwin's neck looked fragile and thin compared to the demon-worshiper's massive paws. Darwin's mouth fell open in a horrific wheeze, his eyes rolling back.
But it was a trap.
With a wet, nauseating crunch, a razor-sharp bone spike shot out from Darwin's open mouth. It punched through the giant's eye socket, burrowing deep into the brain and exiting through the back of the skull. Simultaneously, an incredibly potent paralytic venom flooded the enemy's system through the spike. In his death throes, the giant convulsed and went limp, releasing Darwin's throat.
The bio-jetpack on the mutant's back roared again. A jet of flame and compressed gas launched Darwin off the corpse, propelling him straight up toward the frozen, horrified archer.
CRACK!
The sound of shattering bone echoed through the district. Darwin slammed into his foe at high velocity, using his head as a battering ram. The archer's bow-arm was pulverized into splinters; forearm bones protruded through the skin. The cultivator opened his mouth for a silent scream, but Darwin, utilizing his extra wings and the residual jet energy, performed an impossible maneuver. He spun a full 180 degrees in mid-air, and his hammer-fist, laden with colossal kinetic energy, slammed into the archer's face.
The force was so monstrous the enemy's skull detonated. Half the archer's face turned into a bloody pulp, his eyeballs burst, and the man himself fell to the earth like a torn ragdoll, leaving only the fading whistle of his descent in the air.
Slaughtered. Both cultivators were dead. Darwin landed heavily, his wings twitching from the strain. He stared at their mangled, lifeless bodies, and a sudden weight pressed down on his soul.
Every enemy killed took a piece of his humanity, leaving only the cold void of mutation within.
But his reflexes didn't allow for melancholy. His body jerked instinctively to the side, narrowly dodging the lightning-fast strike of a heavy halberd aimed directly at his neck. The blade only managed to clip a lock of his hair. Counter-attacking without even turning around, Darwin swung his hammer toward his back, hoping to crush the newcomer's skull.
But the fist only cut through air. The opponent, possessing incredible intuition, had already retreated to a safe distance, having predicted the move.
"Such an interesting mortal... Hee-hee-hee..."
A soft, almost feminine laugh rang out, sending shivers down Darwin's spine.
"You killed three members of our Black Flame Sect, all at the second stage of core evolution... and you didn't use a single drop of Qi? I've never seen such a fascinating little boy."
Floating before him was a demonic cultivator in exquisite robes. He slowly twirled his halberd, its tip coated in a sickly green glow.
They began to circle each other in the air like a grotesque dance. One held aloft by Qi, the other by a bio-engine spitting clouds of steam.
"I'm at the peak of the second rank,"
The enemy continued, his smile turning predatory.
"I'm sure you've never faced a practitioner of this caliber. If you surrender now, we can skip the boring foreplay, and I'll give you a quick—"
LOUD CRACK
That sound silenced the monologuing cultivator forever. Before he could finish his pretentious speech, his head was impaled by a long bone skewer that had erupted directly from Darwin's arm.
The spike punched through, obliterating the frontal lobe and the back of the skull. The weakened body tensed for a second, frozen in an absurd pose as if it couldn't believe in such a pathetic and rapid death, then finally went limp, dangling from the biological spear.
"Dumbass. That's harassment,"
Darwin spat coldly.
It had happened in a flash. During the attack, Darwin's free hand had turned into a semi-liquid substance that functioned like a compressed spring. It had fired at the cultivator's head at supersonic speeds, hardening into diamond-like density only milliseconds before impact.
The blow landed while the opponent was in a state of total shock.
The loser's limp body slid off the spike like overripe fruit. With a flick of his wing, Darwin sent the corpse flying. The body smashed into the same four-story building already ravaged by the fight.
Upon the owner's sudden death, the wild, uncontrollable Qi stored in his core detonated.
A massive explosion leveled the building into a pile of stone and dust.
The broken body hit the ground, mixing with the debris.
Suddenly, a warmth that escalated into a searing heat surrounded Darwin. He watched as a bright orange ring of fire slowly tightened around him. One by one, new cultivators began to take to the skies. This time, their robes were heavily embroidered with black roses—the sect's elite. First one, then ten... soon the number reached thirty. Just as many stood below on the ground, forming a perfect circle.
Darwin's body responded to the threat instantly: his skin coated itself in a thin layer of transparent gel with a massive heat capacity. The ring of fire began to warp into a sphere, cutting off his escape.
"Burn,"
the group leader commanded, thrusting his hand forward.
The firestorm collapsed into a perfect sphere of flame with Darwin at the center. The temperature inside spiked to hundreds of degrees.
The air turned to plasma. It seemed as if the mutant's flesh should have turned to ash instantly.
But instead of screams of agony, there was only a deep chill.
A piercing, absolute cold began to radiate from the center of the sphere. The flames grew pale, losing energy and frosting over before finally crumbling into icy dust. Darwin snapped his wings—of which he now had three pairs.
Massive and snow-white, they looked like clouds against the setting sun. The remnants of the fiery prison dissipated completely, leaving him unscathed.
The lead cultivator's eyebrow arched.
His long fingers, adorned with gold rings, spread open, manifesting hundreds of fire spears around him. All the second-stage evolution warriors prepared for a decisive assault, drawing blades coated in dark energy.
Surrounded by a massive mob of enemies, Darwin hovered in the center like a fallen angel. His six wings whipped up powerful gale-force winds, knocking his foes off course. His hands returned to a human appearance, but it was just a mask.
A transparent gel flowed continuously from his fingertips. As soon as the droplets hit the surface below, the ground was encased in a shell of ice.
Plants died instantly, turning to dust from thermal shock. The volume of the gel increased, turning the ground beneath the mutant into a literal island of ice, expanding in all directions.
The fire spears ignited and lunged from all sides, swarming Darwin. The air filled with the sound of bowstrings snapping, roofs crumbling under the cultivators' feet, and stone shattering.
The battle—the real battle—was just beginning. The cultivators were certain of their victory, banking on their numbers and the sheer might of their techniques.
Darwin, a faint, barely perceptible golden glow began to spread—a harbinger that the fate of these enemies was already sealed.