Chapter 50: Plague Bloom
The screaming hadn’t even fully died down when Lily’s head snapped toward the deeper treeline, her wings stilling mid-motion.
Malrik caught the shift immediately. "What is it?"
"Movement," she said, and for once there was no theater in her voice at all. "A lot of it. Coming from the north ridge."
He focused past her, feeling the presence rippling through the ground the moment she said it — dozens of signatures, tight together, moving in a coordinated line rather than the scattered wandering of ordinary Morveth.
"Rank?"
Lily’s eyes narrowed, tracking something he couldn’t quite see yet.
"Awakened. All of them."
A pack that size, all Awakened-Rank, moving together like that isn’t random wildlife behavior. Something’s herding them, or they’re herding themselves toward something worth defending.
Either way, it didn’t matter. He felt something close to satisfaction settle into his chest instead of alarm.
"Good," Malrik said. "That’ll speed things up."
Lily blinked at him before a proud, amused smile spread across her face.
"Naturally, my master" she said with quiet arrogance. "They are nothing more than a swarm of Awakened-Rank insects. Hardly worth your attention."
He ignored the comment and turned toward the Spider Queen, who had gone still the moment the numbers registered, green eyes fixed on the same distant ridge.
"Your turn," he said. "Show me what you can actually do."
She lowered herself into a deep, deliberate bow, forelegs folding with a precision that looked almost ceremonial.
"It would be my honor, master. Allow me to erase every last one of them."
She rose and stepped forward, past Fenrir, past the smaller spiders still fanned out behind her, until she stood alone at the front of the group. Slowly, she raised both forelegs.
The ground in front of her split open with a soft, wet sound, and something black began pushing its way upward — a flower, easily three feet tall, its petals a deep, glistening obsidian that seemed to drink in the dim forest light rather than reflect it. A faint, malevolent energy pulsed from its center, visible as a thin shimmer in the air.
She didn’t stop at one.
Ten more tore through the soil in rapid succession, forming a straight, deliberate line stretching out in front of Malrik and the rest of the summoned host.
"Master," the Queen said without turning around, "please step back. You don’t want to be caught inside the Plague Bloom’s range."
The name alone was enough to pull the memory forward, the skill description surfacing in his mind exactly as he’d read it days ago.
[ Skill: Plague Bloom ] The user’s venom evolves into a living plague. Whenever a poisoned target dies, its corpse releases a Plague Bloom that infects all enemies within a 15-meter radius. Each infected target suffers continuous Poison Damage and reduced Vitality. The plague can spread repeatedly as newly infected targets perish.
Right. That’s not a skill you want to be standing next to when it goes off.
"That’s genuinely terrifying," he muttered, already retreating. "The infection chains off every kill — it just keeps spreading as long as something’s left to die."
He and the rest of the Souls pulled back roughly twenty meters, well clear of the black flowers now standing in eerie silence along the treeline.
"Let’s see what an Epic-Rank Awakened boss skill actually looks like," Malrik said quietly.
He didn’t have to wait long.
Seconds later, shapes broke through the undergrowth — roughly thirty of them, built like tigers but wrong in every detail that mattered. Fur the color of wet ash, eyes burning a violent red, fangs too long to fit properly behind their jaws. They moved fast, faster than anything he’d fought so far, closing the distance in a blur of claws and muscle.
The moment the first of them crossed into the flowers’ range, the Queen raised her forelegs, unhurried, almost bored.
All eleven flowers detonated at once.
A black cloud erupted outward, rolling through the trees and swallowing the entire clearing in a haze that stretched the full fifteen-meter radius, thick enough that Malrik lost sight of everything inside it within a heartbeat.
Then came the screaming.
It wasn’t the roar of a predator anymore — it was something raw and animal, pain without direction. Shapes staggered out of the black haze, still recognizably tiger-shaped, but their bodies had already begun to rot in real time, flesh sloughing away in wet strips, legs buckling as their speed collapsed to nothing.
The Queen didn’t wait for them to fully die.
She stepped in front of whatever had managed to stumble clear of the cloud and, with almost lazy precision, spat a thick strand of webbing from her mouth.
The moment it touched a target, the creature froze in place — not restrained, fused, its body locked mid-stride as the acid coating the strand began eating through skin and muscle in slow, deliberate waves.
Malrik watched from the back, and for a moment, he simply forgot to think.
This isn’t a fight. It’s not even close to a fight.
He’d braced himself for a real confrontation — something that would take minutes, force him to commit resources, maybe even step in personally. Instead, in under a single minute, the Queen had gone through nearly thirty Awakened-Rank Morveth like they were an afterthought. Anything that survived the plague cloud got dissolved by the web. Anything that survived the web never made it that far to begin with.
One-sided doesn’t even cover it. This was an extermination.
Lilith watched the scene unfold before letting out a soft, delighted laugh.
"Not bad, I like her style, master" she said with an amused smile. "Those flowers when they burst... what a beautiful sight."
Malrik didn’t even bother responding.
He had long since accepted that discussing morality—or anything remotely sane—with a battle-crazed Demon who genuinely appreciated creative torture was a complete waste of time.
"...Right," he said out loud, mostly to himself. "I got too caught up watching that to actually check anything."
If she just cleared out that many Awakened-Rank kills in one go, the experience alone should be enough to push me — push all of us — well past where I was.
He pulled up his status, already half-expecting the jump, and still wasn’t fully braced for what he saw.
Name: Malrik Vesperion
Rank: Mortal
Level: 50
Class: Soul Binder
Class Rank: Epic ★
Talent: SSS-Rank — Infinite Evolution
Strength: 88 (7↑)
Agility: 99 (7↑)
Constitution: 93 (7↑)
Intelligence: 241 (7↑)
Free Attribute Points: 35
Soul Contracts: 41/ 50
The last time he’d checked, he’d been sitting at Level 43. Now every stat had climbed by seven points, clean across the board — one per level, exactly as expected — and thirty-five Free Attribute Points sat waiting, untouched, on top of whatever he still hadn’t assigned from before.
But none of that’s the actual headline.
Level 50.
A slow smile appeared on his face.
This is it. The Advancement quest should finally—
Before he could finish the thought, a new notification unfolded in front of him.
[Scanning User’s Class...Scan Complete]
[Class: Soul Binder]
[Advancement Requirements: Complete]
[Please select the difficulty level for your Rank Advancement Trial.]
Behind him, the black cloud was already thinning, the last of the dissolved Morveth reduced to nothing more than dark stains soaking into the forest floor.
Malrik stared at the notification for a long moment, feeling something settle heavily in his chest that had nothing to do with the corpses around him.
Well. Here it is.
"Let’s see what an Epic-class Advancement trial looks like."
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