Given how little time they had and how much they needed to accomplish, Nick set a brutal pace. He drove the trio deeper into the untamed woods, far beyond the relative safety of the Crystal Forest.
The canopy above wove so tightly that day and night blurred into a perpetual, murky gloom. It was only because his senses were so finely tuned that the others consented to keep going, knowing he would warn them of impending danger they couldn’t see coming.
Though he was certainly pushing them to try to harden them, Nick had another goal in mind.
To trick the System, he needed to perform a Great Work. The System read the truth of a soul. After all, Rose was too firmly settled in her class for a simple illusion to work; the World would recognize the command in her blood, and the Shadow would pierce the veil.
No, Nick needed to build a narrative strong enough to contain a royal lineage.
He found his inspiration in an old Earth myth. A king far away from home, trapped in the cave of a one-eyed giant. To blind the beast and escape its wrath, the king surrendered his pride and declared his name was Nobody. When the blinded giant cried out to the heavens that Nobody was killing him, the gods ignored the plea.
Rose needed to become Nobody.
“You are still too reckless," Nick called out, perched on a low-hanging branch as the girl in question deflected a troll’s claw.
Rose gritted her teeth, sliding backward through the slick mud. Golden light flared along the edge of her steel, carving a clean arc across the troll’s thick forearm—not that it did much, since the monster’s regeneration was already healing it. "I am keeping my distance, but it keeps closing in!”
"You rely on raw power too much," Nick replied, ensuring with a whisper of wind that the words would reach her even as she kept fighting. “Your unique mana allows you great feats, but it has made you lazy. No swordsman of your level would attempt to fight a troll in a battle of stamina. Try to fight without it.”
"It will kill me!" she shouted, dodging a backhand.
"Then Devon will finish it, and we will bury you," Nick replied flatly. "Suppress the light and show me you are more than a brute. I’d be disappointed if that’s all Arthur could make you.”
She let out a frustrated scream, but the golden aura around her blade sputtered and died. The troll’s next strike clipped her shoulder, sending her sprawling into the muck. The beast lunged.
Devon intercepted it, catching the troll’s descending claws on his sword. His boots slid back an inch in the mud, but he managed to hold his ground.
Not wasting the opening, Sonya stepped out from the shadow of a rotting stump, hurling a glass vial that shattered against the troll’s face. A caustic green foam expanded rapidly, eating through the creature's eyes and nasal cavities.
The troll shrieked, blindly thrashing. Rose scrambled to her feet, spitting mud, and drove her mundane steel into the back of the creature’s knee, collapsing it. Devon stepped in and, with a two-handed swing, severed the neck, sending the half-rotted head rolling away.
With a grunt, he rested his sword against his hip and wiped a smear of dark blood from his face. He looked up at Nick, chest heaving. "You are pushing her too hard. She could have been killed.”
“I would have stepped in if that were the case,” Nick said, dropping lightly from the branch. He looked down at Rose, who was scraping acidic foam from her boots. "The Shadow will notice anything beyond a normal, if talented, swordswoman. You must understand and accept this truth if you want to survive.”
"I am a swordswoman," Rose shot back, her breath ragged. "I grew up with a training blade in hand. No matter who my father might have been, that’s all I am.”
That was the sole reason Nick thought this would work. If she had actually seen herself as a claimant to the throne, there would have been little he could have done.
Still, even just the embers of ambition she carried were dangerous. “Then act like one. To me, you look more like a status mage swinging a sword.”
She growled back but stayed quiet, and he took it as a victory.
The days bled into a grueling marathon of blood and exhaustion. They fought packs of massive Mudstriders, venomous centipedes the size of bears, and shifting lizards that could blend into the environment and spit poison gas.
Devon’s swordsmanship lost some of its polish, becoming more pragmatic. Sonya grew more efficient, using half the reagents to achieve the same lethality, and her level steadily climbed alongside her intended husband’s.
On the fourth day, the true face of the Green Ocean was revealed.
The wind died abruptly. The ever-present rustle of the canopy fell silent, leaving them in an eerie stillness.
Nick stopped, his hand shooting up. Devon, Sonya, and Rose froze instantly, knowing better than to question him.
A minute later, a shadow passed over the treetops, vast and swift.
“Hide under the roots," Nick ordered, pointing to the hollowed-out base of a massive tree. “Now. Do not try to interfere, no matter what you see or hear.”
The three youths scrambled into the dark recess, and only when he was sure they were safe did Nick step out into an open clearing and look up at the sky.
The canopy parted violently as the wind picked up and howled. A Wyvern descended, its wingspan easily clearing thirty feet, snapping ancient branches like twigs.
It was a creature of dark green scales, its elongated jaws lined with rows of serrated teeth that Nick remembered could bite through enchanted armor as if it were nothing.
This was a true Prestige predator, not a newly evolved one like the Behemoth.
It was also more powerful than he, with centuries of accumulated mana in its mighty body. When it landed in the clearing, its talons sank deep into the loam, and it fixed its slitted eyes on the lone human standing before it.
The beast let out a screech that vibrated through Nick’s bones, yet didn’t attack.
It’s challenging me. It must have sensed me using the wind.
Grinning back, making sure to bare his teeth in response, Nick engaged [Tempest’s Eidolon].
Though he wanted to, he did not draw the Shard of Human Ambition, for this was to be a contest of skill against an ancient dragon-kin.
Perhaps he could have won against its raw power with the Shard, wielding magics it had no hope of countering, but the challenge pricked at him, and he wanted to see how far he’d come.
The Wyvern struck first. It opened its jaws, inhaling a vast quantity of air, and unleashed a cutting wind capable of flaying flesh from bone and uprooting oaks.
Almost by instinct, Nick let the World lose its grip on him, becoming one with the ether and stepping out of the breath’s path as if it were a novice’s attempt, letting the destructive funnel tear a trench through the forest behind him.
He raised his hands, grasping the atmospheric pressure around the beast, but the Wyvern sensed it and moved, its wings snapping open as it launched itself back into the sky.
Nick abruptly inverted the pressure above its wings, triggering a violent downdraft. Deprived of lift, the beast crashed back into the mud, its jaws snapping in frustration.
It wasn’t hurt, no, but the humiliation of having its own element turned against it was great. It lashed out with a barbed tail, breaking the sound barrier as howling gales wrapped around it.
Nick manipulated the air density between them, creating a cushion of compressed gas that slowed the tail just enough for him to slip around the lethal barb. He rode the displacement, sliding along its flank.
The Wyvern roared, rearing up to unleash a second cyclone at point-blank range, too enraged by his daring to think.
Nick, on the other hand, felt as calm as always, letting the events pass him by as if he were a mere observer. He reached into the air, expanding the creature's jaws, bypassing the gale forming in its throat, and forced a vacuum.
With a heave that made him break a sweat for the first time since his rank-up, he emptied the air from the Wyvern’s lungs.
The beast choked. Its cyclone misfired, the sudden lack of oxygen collapsing the spellcraft inward. Gagging, it thrashed wildly as its internal pressure ruptured its air sacs.
Nick flew into its mouth at full speed, shaping a razor-thin slipstream of hyper-compressed air around his hand. He drove his arm forward, thrusting the invisible blade straight into the tissue beneath the beast's jaw, driving it upward through the palate and into the brainpan, where it exploded.
The wyvern’s bones and scales were so tough that the explosion was confined to its skull, although its brain was clearly severely damaged.
He was tossed aside, covered in gore, but managed to catch himself before he could slam into a tree.
The Wyvern stiffened, its slitted eyes spilling blood. A moment later, it collapsed, a mountain of green scales settling lifelessly into the muck.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You have defeated [Adult Wyvern — Lv. 117]
+4,200,000 Exp
Level up!
Feeling the rush of power, Nick exhaled. The fight had been brief, but it had taken a lot out of him. More than he’d expected. He was well aware that if they’d been in the air, the Wyvern wouldn’t have been so limited.
But then again, it chose to face me down here.
After he sent the call that it was safe, Devon crept out from the roots, his eyes wide as he stared at the carcass. "You killed it!”
“It’s not as impressive as it looks. Arthur did this too,” Nick replied, ignoring the deadpan looks as he drew a hunting knife from his belt. "Help me harvest the core and the venom sacs. We don’t have much time. The blood will draw scavengers, but the important bits are too valuable to leave out.”
They stripped the beast as fast as they could, with Nick storing the priceless alchemical reagents and the wind-aspected core in his spatial ring.
Although none of his three companions spoke, he knew they were thinking hard, having only just realized the full breadth of the gap between them.
It was something he himself had struggled with, so he stayed silent and let them have their time.
By the fifth day, they were exhausted, bruised and cut, with minor wounds that didn’t warrant potions, and operating on sheer grit, but Nick felt the framework of the ritual falling into place in his mind. He understood Rose's pain threshold, her reaction times, and how her golden mana manifested.
They were marching through a shallow ravine when something suddenly changed. The air turned crisp, almost as if they were back in the northern mountains.
Nick brought them to a halt as his senses flared, screaming in alarm.
A half-mile beyond them, the ravine opened into a small grotto. A bubbling brook cut through the white stone, its water perfectly clear. The moss along the banks was a vibrant, untainted green.
It looked like a sanctuary, yet Nick couldn’t shake off the dread he felt at the sight.
It was only because he was focusing on it so much, going so far as to call upon the World to show him the way, that he sensed it.
An aura radiated from the brook. It was an indifferent pressure that dwarfed the Wyvern, dwarfed Mantarys, and eclipsed even Marthas’s divine furnace. It was Ascended power, wild and uncaring, resting just beneath the surface.
It could kill him at will. It would, if he disturbed it.
The water rippled even though there was no wind.
"Do not speak," Nick sent through a tightly controlled whisper, willing his companions to understand how much danger they were in. "Do not make abrupt moves. Walk backward. Step exactly where you stepped before.”
They retreated carefully through the mud, inch by agonizing inch, back up the ravine. Nick kept his eyes fixed on the bubbling water, his heart hammering against his ribs, keeping his aura locked away in a lightless vault.
They walked backward for a full mile before the spring's scent faded, replaced by the forest's familiar smell.