Furio braced himself for impact as he flew upwards and smashed through the Darkwood trees, his trained, superhuman muscles and the mana encasing them allowing him to break through branches and bugs.

In the next moment, he was out in the open air, above the treeline.

Furio stopped flying when his wrench neared Fulmi, around twenty meters above the treetops.

He knew this was not going to be enough, and his suspicions were confirmed when he heard the shadowy leaves under him rustle.

With a practiced series of motions, Furio tapped Fulmi with his wrench again, bidding it to fly backwards, out into the clearing where there were no trees, no large, sturdy bodies to interfere with the Resonance Break.

Then, he used his index finger to tap the wrench while gripping it, sending him flying towards Fulmi.

Right in the nick of time.

The monster's enormous form smashed through the trees, huge, enormous daemonic wings unfurled to its sides, the wingspan of clawed, bat-like wings almost as large as the monstrosity itself.

With a gust of wind blowing behind it, the monster just barely missed swiping at Furio as he flew backwards.

Furio knew that in terms of speed, this makeshift flight could match or even exceed the creature's own flight speed.

After all, he shot his blades out like bullets, and when he pulled himself to them, he was treated as a projectile and became just as fast.

A half second later, Furio stopped abruptly again by Fulmi, fifty meters away.

Furio gritted his teeth as he condensed mana into his body. The sudden stop from bullet-like velocity to a standstill would have probably killed the ordinary man with whiplash, but he had trained his body to deal with this.

He glanced down – open, grassy ground. Swarms of insects, yes, but they were weak enough that they did not matter if they got caught in the Resonance Break. The Darkwood trees, though, were a different matter.

His eyes widened. The beast was already upon him, its enormous, plated fist drawn back and ready to smash his head clean off.

Furio reacted by grabbing the wrench and having it treat himself like a projectile, shooting himself straight down into the ground.

As a blur of movement, he flew right down, smashing into the ground with an impact that shattered the earth beneath his mana-infused legs and boots. Small insects around the landing zone flew up and broke apart from the force.

This monster was an adept flyer and easily in control of its body to such a degree that it could compensate for Furio's faster flight speed by predicting his linear movement patterns and moving before he did.

Furio knew the monster would be upon him again in the next moment. He gripped his wrench and tapped it with a finger, calling back Flambe from all the way back in the forest.

Powering even more mana into his legs, he used {Dash} and shifted five or so meters backwards in an instant, burning up grass and skidding across dirt with the high-speed movement.

The monster slammed into where Furio had been like a red and purple lined meteorite, blasting apart a crater twice the size Furio had made. Even the larger insects broke apart with the shockwave of force, their body parts and legs and shells all flying in the guts and debris-littered air.

The monster adjusted its sight to Furio, specifically at his legs, and he knew he had to make this work soon. If the beast could learn advanced martial arts techniques with just one or two demonstrations, it would know how to {Dash} very soon.

But Flambe was already here, the flaming, super-heated blade ready to slice into the monster's back while it was distracted by Furio. In conjunction with this, Furio tapped Edepu with his wrench, and the sickle sword shot out while lined with winds that sharpened its edge.

A two-pronged attack.

But without even turning around, the monster swiveled to the side at the very last moment before the blades pierced its heart, dodging both blades completely. In the very same motion, before Flambe or Edepu could return to Furio, the monster had grabbed the blades by the handles with three of its fingers on either hand.

The monster cracked open its toothy maw and swallowed the blades whole.

It oddly reminded Furio of when he walked the streets of the nearest town, Dwarka, it was, where he had seen street performers called Dervishes do tricks like swallowing blades and breathing flame.

And all of those streets full of performers and laughing children would be soaked in blood if Furio did not act now. He knew that the monster might spend some time digesting the coreforged blade, and so he took this moment to aim his wrench at the beast's center.

Furio activated Yeolgu again, its earthen scales rattling along each other and drumming up vibrations once more and shot it out to the monster's side, missing it so that it could not grab the blade.

The rattling sword shot straight into the thick of the forest, lost.

This left Furio only with Fulmi, a dagger not meant for close combat whose activation was useless because the monster could use {Dispersal} to vent out the lightning.

But all of this was according to Furio's plans. He could not have the monster grabbing Yeolgu. That blade had to be behind it.

"I have miscalculated the degree of your injuries if your aim is degraded to this degree," said the monster as it slithered towards Furio, slower this time, almost savoring his last moments. "Let me sense.

An erratic heartbeat, severe subconjunctival hemorrhaging that dyes your eyes red, and minor inefficiencies in movement indicative of no less than twenty-two minor fractures and extensive tearing in almost all major muscles bodies."

The beast clicked its mandibles, its six eyes staring down at Furio's panting, armless, bloody, and broken body. "Yet, you have mustered up a battle that has done well in smoothing over your grave insult of deeming me a mere 'familiar.'

I shall grant you consideration within the Collective. Consider it a great honor, degenerated human,"

Furio felt his body grow heavy. So very heavy as the last dregs of his mana faded from {Accel}.

The beast talking about his injuries made him feel them even more, and he knew that once his mana completely faded, he would stop moving entirely, maybe even just die when the adrenaline also abandoned him.

He still had enough strength for this, though. Thank the gods it did not cost any mana.

He held the wrench out towards the monster with a trembling arm.

"Bringing back the blade you ejected?" said the monster. "Such a primitive strategy did not amount to anything when you attempted it with the heat-generating blade. Yet, you-,"

A white light flashed from the wrench head. Sudden cracks lined the entire length of the wrench as a sound like shattering bone echoed through the air. Furio smiled, his teeth dyed red in his blood.

This was a nigh-instantaneous attack.

Using the magnetic tether the wrench had with his five weapons, Furio could activate Resonance Break, destroying both the wrench and a magical weapon to channel extremely destructive force through the tether linking the two.

A last-ditch attack as it sacrificed Furio's Ethera, and that would take three days or more to recover.

But days did not matter here.

It was just this moment that mattered.

A beam of white light shot out from the head of the wrench with a metallic ring as it began disintegrating, and so too would a beam have shot out from Yeolgu far away. Both beams sped towards each other, and in between, the monster would break apart.

"No," whispered Furio under his breath.

Somehow, the monster had sensed something wrong at the very last moment and had used {Dash} to push itself into the air.

Furio watched as the beam of light screamed with constantly fluxing metallic rings in front of him, missing his target entirely.

But then he saw…a portal? A small, circular, rainbow lined portal in the center of the raging beam.

Then, in the next second, another portal emerged above the monster and angled down towards its heart.

The beam shot out from that portal.

The moment the monster saw the portal, it must have understood what was to happen, and it twisted its body. The beam struck true, but instead of blowing apart its heart, it instead smashed through its left side.

The carapace cracked and bent as the beam struck, but not enough-

Furio screamed as he saw the attack work.

He willed the beam with as much power as he could, and his wrench shattered and disintegrated entirely in an instant, a final, powerful burst of light blasting apart through the monster's entire carapace layer and then shooting straight through the enormous, armored body, reconnecting with Yeolgu in the forest for half a second more before the magical weapon disintegrated with the wrench.

The light faded, leaving the Darkwoods and night to blanket the scene in shadow once more.

The monster fell to the ground with a heavy crash, kicking up a cloud of dirt around it.

Furio fell to his knees, completely spent, his entire body on the verge of just breaking apart.

Where had the portal come from? What- he knew what it was, it was, it was, but no, she had left, he knew it.

Vera's form materialized beside Furio, holding him.

"No…," whispered Furio. He coughed but still managed to get his words out. "No! You have to leave!"

"Even if we missed that beast's heart, a wound that size punching right through it will have it bleeding out or crippled," said Vera.

She grimaced as she saw Furio's missing arm, and she knelt down at slung his remaining arm over her shoulder, supporting him.

"No…why?" said Furio. His vision blurred as his mana faded, and the blood loss hit him, delirium starting to tug at the edges of his mind. "Why did you come back?"

"I never really left, my love," said Vera. "I used the short portal to move away, but I was not going to truly run and abandon you. I stayed in the area, at the edge of the battle, and I used [Mirror Sight] to track you.

When I saw what you were going for near the end, I knew I could help you without holding you back, so I came here.

Now, my love, just wait. I would want nothing more than to take you away from here this very moment with a short portal, but you are too injured to be on your own.

Just a little while, my love, hold on for a little bit, take deep breaths, try to flow your mana evenly and stop the bleeding, and then I can long portal you to the safe zone."

Vera stopped as she heard clicking from behind her. A distinctive clicking unlike that of the insects around them.

No, the insects had fled, leaving them alone in a patch of empty dirt and grass for they had sensed it before she had.

The monster was still alive.

"An injury of this caliber-," Vera turned to meet the voice.

A squall of wind rushed up from where the monster had landed, its raging red aura flickering high above it, lighting the area blood-red, and where that chaotic light stretched, every single insect fled, sensing the wrath of a higher predator.

"Is the gravest I have borne upon this primitive rock so far," said the monstrosity as he stared at Vera and Furio.

An empty hole the size of a human head sizzled from its left chest, blood pooling liberally from it, but the monster did not fall. "Was it like this? That emergency medical procedure the male specimen utilized to stem hemorrhaging from your arm?"

The monster raised a hand to its eyes, as if anlayzing it, and then shaped its red aura into the hand, swirling it, condensing it, and then slammed its palm into the hole gaping from its chest.

"Yes, this was precisely it," said the monster. It uncovered its hand.

"W-what?" stammered Vera.

Muscle began to swell and surge from the wound, stemming all bleeding and fusing the hole shut.

"But an incomplete procedure. Now to compensate for the loss of blood vessels and critical bone structures," continued the monster. The aura raging red around its body turned purple.

Gleaming purple outlines started to streak around the mass of muscle sealing the wound, forming into the shapes of veins and parts of ribs that must have been lost from the blow.

"Utilizing Sapia to create artificial internal body structures. The cost: a continual loss of mana. Yet, worthy of removing compromised combat capacity due to injury," noted the monstrosity.

"Out," said Furio. He pushed himself off from Vera, standing in front of her shakily. He had no weapons anymore. Only Fulmi, and that did not even work.

He had no energy to shout now as he trudged towards the monster's towering form. "Short portal yourself out again. Run this time. Run like you mean it.

This thing…grows stronger. Everytime it eats. Soon, nobody will beat it.

Tell the Adventurer's League.

Go."

Furio's eyes widened as he felt something jab into his back. He turned to see Vera had stabbed him with a dwarven syringe. The green liquid within it drained into him, and he felt temporary mana flow throughout his body.

"This…maybe I can stall for thirty seconds. Enough time for you. Go," said Furio. Yes, this was enough for her to escape if she short portaled herself out right now and used even shorter range teleportations like [Blink] as often as possible.

"That wasn't for me," said Vera.

Furio felt her hands on his bare, bleeding back. They were soft. Warm. He felt her lips on his neck, and as the monster moved, before he could even look back at her again, she had short portaled him out.

To the thick of the Darkwoods.

Two hundred meters away from the battle – the maximum range for an instantaneous short portal.

"No…no…no," Furio started to turn back to the clearing. If he used enough of the temporary booster mana, he could get back there in time, he could-

He shook his head, blood-tinged tears welling up from his eyes. No, she had wanted him to run with this last spurt of power.

It was the hardest decision of his life, and in a second that felt like it lasted an eternity, he decided to turn around.

And run.