The silence that had descended upon the forest was not a natural silence. It was the silence that precedes a storm-or the moment before a guillotine falls. The chirping of deformed birds ceased. The hum of venomous insects was extinguished. Even the wind, which had been howling between the trees, seemed to hold its breath.
Dex felt a sudden chill run the length of his spine-not the chill of the air, but the chill of instinct. That sixth sense, honed in the cells of his former life where he had needed to anticipate the knife before it touched his skin, was now screaming in his ears: move, or die.
Dex did not turn slowly. Turning slowly is a luxury that only the powerful can afford. Instead, he threw himself forward in a rapid, rough roll across the muddy ground. The instant he vacated his position, the air behind him was split by a terrifying whoosh. A massive claw-coated in coarse black fur and ending in talons like steel daggers-slammed into the trunk he had been leaning against a single second before, shattering solid wood as though it were thin paper.
Dex scrambled to his feet, gasping, his heart hammering in his chest like a war drum. He retreated several steps to create a safe distance, his eyes sweeping the shadows around the pale circle of light. From within the dense fog, the entity that had tried to kill him emerged.
It was a Shadow Wolf-but no ordinary one. It was a magical beast of Rank D-, distinguished by a body as large as a bull, and a pelt of black fur that absorbed the light around it. But its most terrifying feature was this: it possessed two fully developed heads, and a third-malformed and grotesque-that jutted from its right shoulder. The six eyes of all three heads blazed with a malevolent violet light, and its acidic saliva dripped from between its long fangs, scorching the grass beneath its feet wherever it fell.
"Damn..." Dex whispered, his hand moving slowly toward his belt where the assassins' daggers rested. "A Rank D- Shadow Wolf on the outer fringes of the forest? This doesn't happen in the novel unless something has gone wrong with the Mana balance here."
Dex's new body was trembling. It was not fear in the conventional sense, but what he could only call body-fear-a biological response from the nerves of a young man who had never experienced real combat, a nervous system entirely unaccustomed to adrenaline surging at this intensity. He felt his muscles weaken and his breathing grow short and unsteady.
"Settle down," he told himself, forcing his iron will upon this trembling flesh. "You don't need strength right now. You need the prisoner's mind. Remember... the beast before you follows its instincts, and you possess knowledge."
Dex drew the two black daggers he had taken from Silvester's killers. Their blades were coated in a compound called Nyctophobia-a poison that afflicted the victim's nervous system with severe visual distortion. He gripped them firmly, shifting his hands into a reverse grip, the position that afforded him the greatest speed in close defence and short-range thrusts.
The wolf did not wait long. The central head released a silent howl-a magical sonic wave-that sent a sudden wave of vertigo crashing through Dex. In the blink of an eye, the beast launched itself toward him, shadows streaming in its wake like a black comet.
"It's too fast!" Dex thought.
Rather than attempting a direct block-which would have shattered both his arms without question-Dex employed a combat technique from his former life known as the Phantom Step. At the very last instant, he slid his left foot sideways, using the beast's own momentum against it.
The wolf swept past him like a freight train of fur and claws. In that fleeting moment, Dex extended his arm and drove the dagger into the beast's flank with all the force he could summon. The blade sank into flesh-but Dex felt a terrifying resistance. The creature's hide was reinforced by a layer of defensive Mana.
He had wounded it-but the cost was steep. The force of the impact numbed his entire arm, and the dagger nearly tore from his grip. The wolf stumbled briefly, then spun with breathtaking speed, all three heads snarling with manic fury. The wound in its flank was bleeding a viscous black fluid, yet the injury seemed only to make the beast more savage.
"The body is too weak... my muscular strength is barely ten percent of what I would need to kill this thing outright," Dex assessed the situation, wiping sweat from his eyes. "And the poison needs time to enter its bloodstream. I can't keep evading indefinitely-my heart will give out from exhaustion before it does."
Dex swept his gaze around him with lightning speed, drawing on his Reader's knowledge of Falus Forest's nature. He noticed, behind the wolf, several Willow-Sting trees-a species whose roots grew above ground and contained unstable Mana. When struck with sufficient force, they discharged a volley of defensive venomous thorns.
"This is my stage," Dex thought.
He began moving in a wide circle, feigning confusion and exhaustion. He stumbled deliberately, letting his breathing become audible and ragged, baiting the beast into committing to a final charge. The wolf, sensing its prey weakening, began gathering violet Mana between all three sets of jaws. It was preparing to unleash Shadow Breath-a long-range Mana attack capable of dissolving living tissue.
"Now!" Dex screamed inside his own mind.
Instead of fleeing-he charged directly at the wolf.
It was a suicidal move by any observer's measure-even the wolf appeared startled for a fraction of a second. The beast released its Shadow Breath, but Dex, with a flexibility he had not known this body possessed, hurled himself flat to the ground and slid beneath the wolf's belly, exploiting the forest floor's slick mud.
As he slid through coarse fur and the creature's foul stench, Dex did not merely pass through. He raised both daggers and channelled every last trace of Mana from his meagre Core, slicing through the primary Mana channel along the wolf's underbelly. The wound was not deep enough to kill, but it was precisely sufficient to sever the flow of Mana between the beast's heart and its hind limbs.
Dex emerged from the other side and did not stop. He sprinted directly toward the Willow-Sting trees. The wolf-its body ignited with the pain of the abdominal wound and its energy flow severely disrupted-spun wildly and launched itself into the air in a desperate leap, intending to descend upon Dex and crush him under its full weight.
The wolf soared, a mass of living darkness blotting out the pale sky above Dex's head. In that second where time itself seemed to hold still, Dex spun around. He seized his remaining dagger-which he had earlier fastened to a sturdy cord of cloth torn from his shirt-and hurled it. Not at the wolf. At the sensitive root node of the Willow-Sting tree the beast was about to land upon.
The dagger struck with surgical precision. The roots erupted in a violent defensive reaction the instant the wolf's body made contact with the ground. Hundreds of dense wooden thorns saturated with unstable Mana fired upward like automated bolts, driving through the wolf's body from below.
The beast let out a shattering cry that tore through the forest's stillness-a sound in which all three heads' voices merged into a single funeral note. The wolf collapsed, impaled upon the thorns, its black blood flowing freely, while the poison from the first wound Dex had inflicted finally took hold, triggering violent convulsions throughout its limbs.
Dex dropped to his knees, gasping violently, his lungs burning as though filled with molten lead. His face was smeared with mud and black blood, and his hands shook with a trembling he could not control. He looked at the beast in its death throes before him and felt something strange... not fear. Exhilaration.
He had won. Not through the power of magic, but through cunning, patience, and the cold exploitation of his surroundings.
Dex rose slowly, leaning against a nearby trunk. He walked toward the wolf, whose violet eyes were dimming with each passing second. He drew his dagger from the ground and stood over the central head.
"You are strong, creature," Dex whispered in a voice cold and utterly stripped of feeling. "Under different circumstances, you would have torn me apart without a second thought. But you made one mistake... you assumed I was simply 'a human.' I am not an ordinary human. I am the Reader-the one who knows where every killing blow falls in this world."
With a single powerful and precise strike, he drove the dagger into the wolf's central eye, penetrating directly into the brain. The beast's movement ceased entirely, and silence reclaimed the forest.
Dex sat beside the massive carcass and worked to steady himself. He knew that the body of a Rank D beast in a forest like Falus was simultaneously a treasure and a beacon-it would draw every predator in the vicinity within minutes.
"I need to extract the Mana Core and move immediately," he thought.
He used his dagger with practiced efficiency to open the wolf's chest cavity until he reached a crystalline sphere pulsing with a dim violet glow, roughly the size of a closed fist. This was the Shadow Wolf's Mana Core. He closed his hand around it and felt the raw, feral energy throbbing within.
For Dex, this Core was no mere piece of loot. It was his first stepping stone toward strengthening this feeble body. If he could absorb its energy by the correct method-and he knew the forbidden method described in one of the novel's side chapters-he could compress months of tedious conventional training into a fraction of the time.