Chapter 81: The First Wave (5)
Elsewhere on the battlefield, Malrik was cutting his way toward the walls.
The bull-shaped Morveth was still there, hammering at the barrier Lilith had woven from her High-Rank Law. With every swing of its axe, cracks spread across the shield’s surface like veins splitting open, and the pale light bleeding through it flickered a little more with each impact.
Malrik stopped at a distance and watched.
Raw strength alone is cracking a High-Rank barrier. That’s not an ordinary Morveth.
There was no room to guess here. He opened his status screen in silence.
[ Name: Malrik Vesperion ]
[ Rank: Awakened ]
[ Level: 23 ]
[ Class: Soul Binder ]
[ Class Rank: Epic ★ ]
[ Talent: Infinite Evolution (SSS) ]
[ Strength: 161 (23↑) ]
[ Agility: 172 (23↑) ]
[ Constitution: 166 (23↑) ]
[ Intelligence: 464 (23↑) ]
[ Free Attribute Points: 250 ]
[ Soul Contracts: 217 / 250 ]
[ Skills: Gravity Field, Heavy Domain, Gravity Crush ]
[ Class Skills: Death Bullet, Soul Resurrection, Soul Storage, Soul Calling, Corpse Explosion, Soul Rend ]
His eyes went to the contract count first. Two hundred seventeen. The number had climbed hard since his sudden strike on the Morveth horde in the forest.
His level had jumped to twenty-three, too — not bad at all, especially considering he wasn’t splitting experience with one soul or two, but with two hundred seventeen of them at once.
Then he looked at the free points. Two hundred fifty, waiting to be spent however he chose.
His Intelligence already sat at more than double every other stat, so he ignored it for now. What he needed today was strength, speed, awareness — no room for mistakes in front of something Fallen-rank.
He put a hundred and fifty into Strength, fifty into Agility, fifty into Constitution.
Warmth swept through him with the last point.
He clenched his fist. The change was real, physical — denser muscle, lighter limbs, the world around him snapping into sharper focus than it had held seconds ago.
But that alone wasn’t going to be enough.
He called something up from deep inside his soul — a black, gelatinous mass that moved and wrapped itself around his wrist like it was alive and aware, then froze into the shape of a simple dark bracelet. Nothing about its plain look suggested what it actually did.
The next instant, a far bigger wave crashed through him — every stat doubling at once. His body went feather-light. His senses doubled until the world seemed to redraw itself around him with details he’d never noticed before, and even the mana inside him felt like a sea with no floor.
And all of this change was thanks to Lucris’s Skill, Black Shroud.
Malrik looked at his new Attribute , which seemed to belong to an entirely different person rather than someone who had reached the Awakened Rank less than a week ago.
[ Strength: 622 (×2) ]
[ Agility: 444 (×2) ]
[ Constitution: 432 (×2) ]
[ Intelligence: 928 (×2) ]
[ Free Attribute Points: 0 ]
Still might not be enough.
Malrik closed the screen and stared at the Morveth still fighting near the walls, the marks of its blows clearly visible across the cracked barrier behind it.
Its raw physical strength was terrifying indeed.
The creature stopped hammering the shield abruptly, as if it had caught the scent of something more interesting.
It turned, slow, and its two small red eyes locked onto Malrik.
It didn’t speak right away. It just studied him — the size, the stance, the spear slung across his back.
Then it laughed, a deep, dry sound with no warmth anywhere in it.
"I expected the one responsible for those walls." Its voice was heavy, unrefined. "Instead they sent me a child wearing a pretty princess’s face."
Malrik didn’t answer immediately. He was still running the numbers — how much punishment this thing could take, how much of its raw power he’d actually have to survive.
"A pretty princess’s face?" He looked at it for a beat. "If you’re trying to flirt, I’m flattered, but you’re really not my type."
The creature’s pupils widened slightly — not with anger. With something colder. Curiosity.
"An Awakened, speaking to a Fallen like this." It raised one axe, almost lazily, like it was enjoying the show. "Either you’re remarkably stupid, or nobody’s told you how many Awakened it usually takes to bring down one Fallen."
"Someone already told me."
"And you came anyway?"
"I did. I was curious whether a Fallen actually lives up to all the reputation." He shrugged. "So I came to check for myself."
A short silence followed. Then the amusement drained completely from the creature’s face, replaced by something closer to genuine focus.
"Very well, then."
It moved.
There was no warning. One instant it stood ten meters off; the next, both axes were already falling from opposite angles, aimed at his skull and his side at once.
It wasn’t one strike. It was two, timed so that dodging either meant walking straight into the other.
Fast. Faster than I expected for its size.
Malrik didn’t try to avoid it cleanly — there wasn’t time for that. He twisted his torso and caught the first axe on the shaft of his spear at a hard angle, redirecting it instead of meeting its full weight head-on.
The trick half-worked. The first axe skidded off its mark.
But the second one landed.
His shoulder took the blow through his light armor. Pain detonated up his arm and into his jaw, and his body was thrown several meters through the air before it hit the ground and rolled twice before he managed to stop himself.
Damn this thing — even a glancing hit hits that hard?
He got back up fast, ignoring the sharp throb spreading through his shoulder. Not broken — he knew that much from the shape of the pain — but close.
The Fallen hadn’t moved from its spot. It stood watching him, some flicker of curiosity mixed into the way it studied him now.
"Still standing." Its tone carried something close to surprise. "Most Awakened fold after the first hit."
"And I was expecting more from you," Malrik said, still catching his breath.
He didn’t smile this time. The pain was still echoing through his bones, and his voice had gone flatter, more serious than it had been seconds earlier.
If I meet it head-on with raw strength, I lose. It’s still stronger than me, even with Lukris doubling my attributes.
There wasn’t room to argue with that conclusion. There’d been no technique in that last hit, no feint, no calculation — just brute force moving faster than it had any right to. All this thing had was its body.
Which also means it has no idea how to fight someone who refuses to meet it head-on.
The Fallen charged again, this time with a single horizontal swing, one axe sweeping in a wide arc aimed at his midsection.
Malrik didn’t try to block it. He dropped under the swing entirely, felt the pressure of displaced air rush across his back, and used the momentum of the dive to drive forward, spearhead first into the side of the creature’s knee.
The tip struck skin as hard as iron. It skated off, leaving nothing behind but a thin scratch, barely visible.
Damn. Its hide alone is tougher than an Awakened-Rank spear can handle.
The Fallen spun with a speed that shouldn’t have belonged to something its size, and swung the butt of its second axe — not the blade — straight at his chest.
There wasn’t time to fully retreat. Malrik raised the spear’s shaft in front of himself at the last second, trying to block or at least soften the blow.
CRACK.
The spear snapped in half.
Whatever force remained slammed into him anyway, and he flew again — farther this time, crashing into a pile of scorched debris before he finally stopped moving.
Then he coughed, a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth.
Damn... I think I just cracked two ribs. Maybe three.
Breathing suddenly hurt. He looked down at the broken half of the spear still in his hand, then up at the creature advancing on him now, slow and deliberate, like it was savoring every second of it.
"Your spear’s finished." Satisfaction colored the Fallen’s voice. "Is it your turn now?"
Malrik pushed himself up slowly, leaning on the broken spear like a crutch, blood still running from the corner of his mouth.
Meeting it head-on isn’t going to work. I need distance.
"You reach conclusions fast," he said, voice tired but steady, and tossed the broken half aside.
He raised his hand.
Death mana condensed in his palm, slow and focused, gathering into a dark, pulsing mass — something closer to a small heart beating in a rhythm no living thing should have.
Death Bullet.
The black mana packed itself into a bullet far larger than any version of the skill he’d used before.
It launched with a low, keening whistle, cutting through the air faster than anything the Fallen had seen from him yet.
The creature tried to twist away — too slow, or maybe it simply hadn’t expected an Awakened to have anything moving this fast. The bullet caught its left shoulder, punched through thirty percent of its physical defenses, and detonated inside the flesh in a bloom of hungry death mana.
For the first time, the Fallen roared in genuine pain — no theater in it at all.
It staggered back two steps, glancing down at its shoulder where the flesh had already started rotting black around the wound’s edge, dead before a single drop of blood had even fallen.
"What kind of sorcery... is this?"
First real wound. Malrik didn’t let himself smile. The injury was small against something this size. Not enough on its own, and he knew it.
He scanned around fast. Around the walls lay dozens of ordinary Morveth corpses from the first wave — some he’d killed himself, some killed by his contracted souls — scattered across the scorched ground like a tragic field of charred meat.
He raised a hand toward the three corpses nearest the Fallen and pushed his will into them.
Corpse Explosion.
All three detonated at once, each one carrying half the combat power it had held while alive, throwing overlapping waves of flame and shredded flesh around the creature from multiple angles before it could fully retreat.
Black smoke swallowed the area. The Fallen emerged from it with only minor damage, staring at Malrik now with a mix of fury and something closer to disbelief.
It stared at him in a long, heavy silence.
Whatever mockery had lived in its eyes before was gone.
"Was that you?"
"That explosion, that night..." The Fallen’s stare didn’t waver, all the earlier sarcasm burned out of its voice. "That was you, wasn’t it?"
"No," Malrik said, putting on an innocent expression, his breath still ragged from the pain in his ribs. "Sorry, but I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about."