Caustic vapor sizzled against the Moss Oni’s face. To a mortal creature, the acid would have melted flesh from bone. The goblinoid simply grunted, raising a corded forearm to wipe the burning liquid from its eyes. The acid left a blackened smear across its cheek, a mere superficial sting.
Yeah, that’s not gonna do much, sorry to say. Prestige beings are quite a bit tougher than mortals, especially when their whole thing is resilience and brute strength.
The Oni roared and lunged, abandoning its club for its bare fists.
Devon stepped into the breach, his longsword raised. He assumed the Crescent Guard, a stance designed to deflect a superior downward strike. In Grandmaster Xander’s training rings, the form was impenetrable. Here, in the slick, blood-soaked soil of the Green Ocean, the stance’s rigid perfection became a fatal flaw.
The Oni’s fist crashed into Devon’s blade, and while the steel held, the ground gave way, and Devon slipped as his center of gravity collapsed.
The monster drove its shoulder forward, aiming to crush his ribcage.
Nick watched the impending blow with cold calculation, then decided it required his intervention. He summoned a single thread of kinetic force and wove it into an invisible cushion between Devon and the Oni.
The beast’s shoulder struck the kinetic barrier, and the force of the blow shattered the shield, but the momentary resistance bled lethal momentum. Devon was thrown backward, crashing through a patch of wet ferns, gasping for breath but unbroken.
“It’s not another swordsman, Dev,” he called. “Don’t treat it as if it were.”
That was his brother’s greatest problem. He was too accustomed to fighting other warriors, having trained mostly with noble squires and knights in Alluria.
Nick had no doubt that, in time, he would have been able to adapt his style. Perhaps that was even the reason Xander had left him here, rather than getting him out of the city during a politically tense time.
But House Crowley was growing too quickly, in both prestige and power, and there was no time to let things take their natural course. Devon, as the Heir, needed to improve now.
Rose darted in from the left. She had watched Devon fall, analyzing the Oni’s overextended posture, and seemed to have a plan, judging by the way her muscles burned with mana. Her class fought her every step, but she no longer tried to force the explosive speed of her royal bloodline.
Instead of lunging, she planted her boots in the muck and waited for the Oni to turn. As the beast pivoted, bringing its vast bulk around, Rose held her blade at an upward angle, bracing the pommel against her hip.
The monster impaled its own thigh on her steel, the sheer weight of its motion doing the work her lost speed could not.
Black sap sprayed across the ground, and the Oni howled in genuine pain for the first time, backhanding the air where Rose had stood a second earlier. She was already rolling through the dirt, abandoning her stance to avoid the crushing blow.
That was when Sonya came in. Apparently having determined that direct damage was impossible to deal with her brews, she drew a vial filled with pale liquid and hurled it beneath the Oni’s wounded leg.
The glass shattered, and a violent bloom of alchemical frost erupted, coating the slick soil with ice and trapping the limb.
The Oni raised its other foot to crush the offending ice, but Sonya moved with sudden grace. She gripped her iron-shod staff, her aura flaring, and Nick knew she was about to use another of her skills.
She swept the base of her staff over the frozen ground, gliding above its surface and leaving a faint residue, before leaping back to avoid the monster’s retaliatory swat.
With no one to interfere, the Oni planted its foot and tried to crack the prison, but the ice offered no friction, and its leg shot outward, tearing the wounded muscle further.
Knowing that cleverness alone wouldn’t do the trick, but unwilling to let it go unrewarded, Nick added his own push, sending a blunt spike of kinetic mana to help the monster along.
The towering goblinoid crashed onto its back, shaking the forest floor with a wet snap as its wounded leg snapped.
Devon scrambled out of the ferns, eager to seize the opening.
He ran with a predatory grace that Nick recognized as an advanced form of the [Stalking Gait], letting his boots slide through the mud. When he reached the fallen monster, he leaped and delivered a descending strike.
It was another formal technique, the Piercing Crane, but Devon altered the angle mid-flight, letting the slick terrain guide his hips rather than fighting it. Combined with the movement art, his rigidity vanished, replaced by fluid lethality.
He fell like a comet, wreathed in mana, and drove his sword precisely into the cluster of roots at the base of the Oni’s thick neck.
The blade sank to the hilt, and with another explosion of power, Devon twisted the steel, severing the spinal column.
The beast stiffened, its yellow eyes rolling back into its head. A final, gurgling breath escaped its tusks, and the Moss Oni went limp.
Nick watched its soul fade into ether, while a blue prompt materialized in the corner of his vision.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You have participated in the defeat of [Moss Oni - Lv 100]
+480,000 Exp
It was a fraction of what he required to reach Level 103, a mere drop in the vast ocean of his progression, but considering how little he’d had to interfere, it was still a good haul.
Devon slumped against the corpse, his chest heaving, his face splattered with black blood and brown mud. Rose walked over, retrieving her sword from the beast’s thigh, her hands shaking slightly from the adrenaline. Sonya stood at the edge of the frost, hair in disarray, and a rare, fierce smile touched her lips.
“That was better," Nick said, walking into the clearing. “You’re learning that not all is as easy as it seems in training, and that when facing creatures such as these, improvisation is just as good as practice.”
In truth, none of them would have survived without his aid. The gap between Prestige and mortals was simply that vast.
The Oni’s mere presence would have overwhelmed them, and even without that, its resilience would have won the day.
Yet, they’d managed to kill it, and that was worth a lot, both in exp and true experience.
He crouched beside the Oni, drawing his hunting knife to extract the core. "This was the alpha of this territory. For the next week, we’ll hunt smaller beasts. You will face nothing else of this tier, but you will fight until all these lessons have become second nature.”
Indeed, as promised, for the next seven days, the deep fringes of the Green Ocean became a grueling crucible. Nick marched them through stagnant swamps, dense thickets of thorn-vines, and suffocating, fog-choked hollows. They hunted beasts in the upper eighties and low nineties— terror birds that hunted in coordinated packs, amphibious mud-drakes that ambushed them from the dark water, and venomous arachnids the size of draft horses.
Nick remained the silent guardian, deploying subtle barriers and the occasional gust of wind to deflect lethal blows, but he forced the trio to bleed for their victories.
Some might have called him cruel, but seeing the transformation in their combat dynamics, he felt more than justified.
Devon gained five levels over the course of the week. The raw stats bolstered his endurance, but his true growth lay in his technique. The duelist who had fought on the pristine grounds of Alluria died in the swamps. He learned to incorporate the environment into Grandmaster Xander’s swordforms. A slip in the mud became the setup for a low sweeping strike. A deflected parry flowed naturally into a brutal pommel strike. His movements lost their academic stiffness, becoming a continuous dance of adaptation.
Sonya flourished. She stopped treating potions and her class skills as separate tools. She learned to use her [Sweep] ability to forcefully redirect clouds of toxic vapor into the gills of mud-drakes, or employ [Immaculate Polish] on the scales of charging beasts, causing them to lose their footing and crash into the trees. She became the anchor of the group, controlling the battlefield so Devon and Rose could execute.
Rose, perhaps, fought the hardest battle. Stripped of the golden mana that had defined her entire life, she had to rebuild her instincts from the ground up. Nick watched her fail repeatedly during the first three days, taking bruising hits from razor-birds as her muscles lagged behind her mind's commands. But by the fifth day, the frustration gave way to a new level of precision. She learned to read the subtle twitches in a monster's musculature, initiating her strikes a half-second earlier. She conserved her energy, relying on positioning and the natural leverage of her blade.
She was no longer a blunt instrument whose advantages allowed her to steamroll anything, but a methodical executor.
The only allowance Nick made was for their rest. Every second night, he guided them out of the depths of the Green Ocean and into the Crystal Forest, where, under the watchful shadow of Akas, they could relax and recover.
The massive mastiff would bound through the glowing undergrowth the moment he sensed Nick’s presence, his fur shimmering with power. These days, it was the size of a warhorse, but he possessed the temperament of an overgrown puppy, tackling Nick into the iridescent moss and demanding roughhousing.
He wrestled with the familiar, using just his raw strength to match it, laughing as Akas playfully chewed on his leather bracers.
As Devon, Sonya, and Rose collapsed around a crackling campfire to tend their scrapes and roast whatever game they had caught, Nick found his own moments of practice.
When the hound eventually curled up to sleep, he turned his attention to his magic. Reaching the Prestige tier had vastly expanded his reservoir, but he needed to refine his subtler applications. Raw destruction was easy; precise manipulation required practice.
He sat cross-legged beneath a towering amethyst tree, experimenting with his [Emakimono] skill. At the Expert rank, the spirit imprinting allowed him to bind complex concepts into physical seals. He picked up a smooth, white stone and traced a sequence of glowing blue kanji across its surface, imbuing it with the concept of Weight.
When he tossed the stone to Devon, his brother caught it, only to have his arm dragged instantly to the ground as if he had caught a cannonball.
The stone itself had not changed mass, but the conceptual seal forced the World to treat it as though it weighed three hundred pounds.
Nick spent hours carving seals of Silence, Friction, and Fragility into strips of bark and river stones, filling a small pouch on his belt with conceptual traps.
He also refined his kinetic spells. The basic barriers and invisible fists that had served him in his early levels were blunt instruments, and while [Crest of the Thunderbird] would always be superior, his time in Toneburg had taught him the value of having different kinds of protective magics available.
He drew inspiration from the myths he’d read on Earth, knowing just how effective that could be with his current power, weaving kinetic threads into interlocking chains, basing their esoteric structure on the legend of Gleipnir, the silken ribbon that bound the great wolf Fenrir.
The resulting spell was not a rigid wall of force but a fluid, adaptive restraint that tightened automatically upon sensing resistance, sinking into the ether to bind the target's spirit as well as their limbs.
He tested the chains on Akas. When the mastiff woke, he found himself bound by invisible ribbons and struggled fiercely, his legs churning the dirt. The harder the beast fought, the tighter the binding held, until Akas let out an indignant huff and lay flat, waiting patiently for Nick to dissolve the spell.
“I sure hope that’s not part of our training,” Devon said with a tired glare.
Nick chuckled, shaking his head. “Oh no, don’t worry. I have something else in mind for this.”