A disc of shattered obsidian and thinly misted blood exploded outwards like the accretion disc of a black hole, and where the monster’s head had once been, there was now an empty stump. The monster shuddered violently, but the battle was far from over. E Rankers in general were incredibly hard to kill, and ones that had blended with an aspect of the natural world, even harder. The beast had transcended the limits of its flesh, and was now akin to a living volcano. It could draw power from the bowels of the earth, and heal through the most devastating of attacks.
Only, Sam was far from finished either. The pattern for Rage of a World Unbound traveled down his hammer once more, and was used a second time. There was no spear of lava in the way now, and it struck the snake in the center of its neck, burrowing down into its body.
The entire creature came apart at the seams, shafts of pure energy tearing its skin apart from the inside out. Chunks of molten flesh fell to the ground like rain, and within the span of a second, the beast was dead. Sam looked down at its corpse, almost surprised at its weakness. Then he shrugged, and moved on.
***
The next beast to fall to his hammer was the elementally enhanced spider. The creature had been the size of an elephant, squatting within the midst of a city of webs. Thousands of smaller elementals, spiders wrought from the fabric of the night itself, had scurried back and forth across the webs, searching for prey. Sam had found his Domain to be immensely potent against such foes, and as they were mere F Rankers, he could obliterate them from reality with a mere thought.
Unfortunately, his ability was useless against the E Rank spider, and he had been forced to rely on his weapon. The monster was far more agile than the serpent or the bear, and with its webs, its ability to move was greater than Sam’s in that area. His only advantage was teleportation, which, truth be told, was quite an advantage at that. Some of the webs had been imbued with spatial energy, preventing him from teleporting through them, but the cost of doing that for the entirety of the web would have been prohibitive, and as such, he simply found his way around in a different manner.
The battle was more of a game of cat and mouse than anything else, and although it took longer than the fight against the serpent, it was even easier. A single use of Rage of a World Unbound had turned the beast, and the webs for a few miles in every direction, into ash drifting on the wind.
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In hindsight, Sam could probably have erased the monster from existence, regardless of its webs, but he had been unsure of the interaction between his skill and the spatially enhanced webs of the spider. There had been a slight possibility that attacking them would have sent the attack hurtling back at him. Sam wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he suspected his most powerful skill would severely wound, if not outright kill him.
In any case, with the spider dead, he moved on to the final monster, the strongest of the lot.
The planet of Gravos was mostly a dry world, with a single ocean that took up only a small portion of the planet’s surface area. Within that ocean dwelled legions of abyssal beasts, dwelling in the dark regions of the deep sea. Higher up, shoals of F Rank and G Rank monsters swam, erupting into feeding frenzies if anything weaker came near. It reminded Sam of his time in the System manifested floors of the Tower, in the Endless Depths floor.
He stood on the ocean’s edge, water lapping at his armored boots. Looking into the depths, even his E Rank perception could not pierce all the way to the bottom. Things coiled and swam within the dark waters, many of which were truly massive.
With a grimace, Sam looked down at the chunk of pulsating, still warm flesh that he had gripped in his hand. The still beating heart of an Peak F Rank monkey he had slain earlier that day, it was meant to be bait for the drake that lurked in the ocean. If the bait failed, he had a dozen more in his storage device. It was a grotesque tactic, but one that he would need to lure the monster out of its watery home.
Sam teleported again and again, until he was hovering over the center of the ocean, where a massive whirlpool roared, spraying spumes of foam hundreds of feet into the air. The ocean itself was easily three or four thousand miles wide, but compared to the larger planet, it was tiny. Gravos’ diameter was measured in the tens of thousands of miles, and the surface was correspondingly vast.
Within that whirlpool, reportedly, lived the drake that was his target. Hoping that his Skill Branch in luck that he had picked would kick in, Sam dropped the heart into the center of the raging spiral of water.
It quickly vanished from view, swallowed up into the hungry abyss. A few minutes passed, with no change in the water. Just as Sam was about to drop another heart, the water boiled up, and a massive head breached the surface. Draconic in shape, with two horns jutting from its brow, the head was the size of a small building. The horns were made out of swirling water, and warped the air around them.
The creature stared at him with eyes as blue as the sky, before sniffing at the air as if searching for more of the delectable hearts Sam had provided. More of its form rose from the depths, a long, sinuous body with eight legs jutting off its sides. Its scales rippled like the waves themselves, moving in strange patterns along the lengths of the beast’s body.
