Chapter 142: Help the Infected
[You have gained 500 EXP] x10
The impact pulled the attention of all the infected. They had all lost their buff now and would have to resort to the use of their own strength. The ones closer to Ren charged in fast. Ren shut his eyes and took a deep breath, his chest rising. Crimson flames exploded from him in a stream. He spun around as he unleashed the flames.
The infected were engulfed in the flames instantly, their bodies turning to ash in mere seconds before they could even scream. When he was done, all the infected that had rushed at him were already dead.
The system kept chiming with notifications of him gaining EXP. Ren decided to silence it for now and focus on what they had to do.
He turned and found Liam fighting against a few infected skillfully.
"Count Liam, there is a way to reverse this, but it would mean being very careful," Ren said.
"Wait, what? There is a way to reverse it and you did not tell me earlier?" Count Liam said as he placed his palm on the head of another and blasted it completely off.
"Yeah, it’s extremely hard and, in the current situation, might not be the best route to go," Ren stated. He weaved to the side as one infected lunged at him, then grabbed it by the back of the neck, pushing its head down with an explosive force that shattered the ground on impact.
Ren looked up at Liam. "Listen close. I’ll say it once. Push the infected to the edge and force them to take on a full spider form where the human’s hands emerge from their center, then attack only the spider parts and kill it, freeing the human."
Liam paid close attention to every word.
"Everyone, you heard him. Now let’s help these people rather than killing them. If it proves too hard, we will find another means."
’He is a pretty good leader. I’ll have to give him that,’ Ren thought to himself as he got back on his feet. He turned to see the infected rushing his way. He knew that to push them to the edge, he would need to attack hard and still not harm them too badly.
"Alright, then try this." He unleashed Primordial Roar, the blast massive and compressed. It slammed into them, hurling them back through the air, each one slamming into the ground hard.
They came back faster than they went down.
The ones the Primordial Roar had scattered were already pulling themselves off the ground and coming back in from multiple angles simultaneously, spreading out to deny him a clean center point, the coordination of it not thoughtful but instinctive, the spider’s influence pushing them toward patterns that made them harder to deal with as a group.
Ren raised his hand.
The gravity manipulation took three of them off the ground at once, lifting them into the air before they could close the distance, and he sent them back the way they came with enough force that they hit the far wall and the ground and each other before they stopped moving.
They got back up.
He kept the smile on his face.
"Persistent," he said, to no one in particular.
More of them were transforming now, the forced pressure of being pushed repeatedly triggering the spider’s defensive response, the human shapes beginning to split and expand as the spider forms took over, legs tearing through clothing and skin as they emerged, the infected losing their human appearance one by one as the battle continued.
Ren let them come.
He watched the first one complete its transformation, the spider form rising fully, massive and multi-legged, the human visible at its center with eyes that were somewhere between present and gone. He pulled the Soul Eater.
The blade moved fast and clean, taking the first leg at the joint, then the second, then working through the rest in a continuous motion that kept him moving around the spider rather than standing in front of it, each cut deliberate, targeting the spider’s limbs and leaving the human at the center untouched.
The spider shrieked.
The form collapsed inward and the human dropped to the ground, conscious, breathing, the spider influence gone from their eyes.
Ren was already moving to the next one.
The pattern repeated. Another transformation, another set of legs, another clean separation of the spider from the person it had been using. Then another. Then another after that, the Soul Eater working through each one with the same precise efficiency, the drain in the blade pulling the life from the spider components without touching what was human.
Each freed person hit the ground the same way, gasping, disoriented, blinking at the world like they were seeing it for the first time after a long time somewhere else.
Ren worked through them steadily.
Across the street, Liam had taken the instruction and was applying it with the focused adaptability of someone who had changed tactics mid-battle before and had not needed to be told twice. He fought with the controlled precision of a trained leader, pushing the infected hard enough to trigger the transformation while holding back enough to leave the human inside intact.
He glanced over at Ren between engagements.
Watched the Soul Eater move through another spider form, clean and effortless, the entire sequence from transformation to human freed taking less than ten seconds.
A thought crossed his mind that he did not particularly enjoy having.
He could not defeat this dragon. Not in any honest assessment of the gap between them. Whatever Ren was holding back in the way he moved, in the ease he carried through all of this, the actual depth of it was something Liam could not fully see the bottom of, and that was while Ren was actively choosing not to use it.
A dragon was a dragon.
Prideful. Capable of deciding on any given day that the arrangement no longer suited them.
Liam filed the thought away behind his expression and went back to the fight.
But he did not forget it.