Wolf

This creature feels disgusting.

How can a creature made mostly out of bark feel so gross just to climb?

I continue climbing up the side of the creature while digging my claws into its slime-coated bark until I finally get to the red circle, only to realize that it’s starting to shine brighter and brighter.

“Oh,” I mutter after seeing a small red orb appearing in front of the ring. “That doesn’t look good.”

Almost as soon as I say that, the red orb shoots towards me, literally burning through whatever it touches in the process. Including the creature’s own vines and roots.

Why the ever living hell does a plant monster have a fire related power?!

After just a few seconds, the red orb reaches me and burns straight through my ice-coated armor and coat to burn a hole into one side of my gut and out the other. I barely manage to hold my grip on the monster thanks to my pain resistance skill, but I still vomit blood while watching more blood – along with my lunch – pour down out of the hole in my stomach.

Couldn’t it have at least cauterized the would like a normal flame would…?

I quickly build a small dome of ice around me attached to the creature for protection before focusing on healing my wound. At the same time, I glance back to find the red orb continuing on towards the ground, just to burrow into the ground, likely never to be seen again.

Looks like the thing doesn’t have any actual control over the orb, so there’s that at least.

I grunt again as I feel the outside of the wounds beginning to close up, only to grimace at the sight of my blood and guts piling up at my feet.

Great. At least my boots are coated in ice, so they won’t be too hard to-

My thoughts are interrupted when I sense the ice element in the air dissipating from the direction of the red circle, making me raise my head to see another red orb flying my way.

Shit.

I jump up from my small orb of ice before passing through the ice in the roof of the dome, allowing the red orb to easily pass through the dome and out the other side. However, my wounds worsen slightly in the jump, so I quickly make another dome of ice around me to let me continue healing myself.

Every new trick this thing pulls out is making me want to knock whoever posted that thread upside the head. But at the same time, without that thread, I’d be completely blind to this monster’s other details.

This process of dodging the red orb before sealing myself back off and healing continues over and over again until I finally finish healing my wound enough to continue my climb towards the red circle.

The instant the red circle launches another red orb towards me, I fling myself straight above the circle, letting the orb fly past where I was before I fall right above the circle and stab the claws on my feet and left hand into the bark again. I then focus on my right hand for the best control and spread out a large wave of ice element to envelop the red circle, freezing it in an instant.

At the same moment that the red circle freezes, I feel the monster begin to jerk back and forth even harder as a loud screech rings throughout the entire forest, making me raise the soundproofing on my headphones to the max.

I continue to push my ice element further into the ring more and more before realizing that at this point it’s practically being drawn in by the monster itself and spreading throughout its body.

My eyes widen, but when I look at the monster’s body, I quickly find it to be freezing solid.

Is it… killing itself?

What?

I blink for a second before thinking back to whenever the red ring would glow brighter. Back to how the area around the ring would grow hotter and hotter, just to cool down rapidly once it fires.

As if the heat was being drawn into the ring.

No way… the ring powers itself by sucking in all of the fire element around itself? But since it’s pulling in my ice element too, it seems to pull in whatever element comes into contact with it as well…

I jump off of the monster’s main body before making a nice little slide of ice to bring me all the way to the ground while I watch the monster freeze alive due to the ice element still being dragged out of my body by whatever that ring was.

Several seconds pass as the monster’s dying screams continue to echo throughout the area, along with the sounds of ice forming. Meanwhile, my ice element continues to drain out of me at an alarming pace. One fast enough that it makes me worry about whether it’ll drain me dry.

Eventually, it does drain me dry, and I’m forced to generate more ice element just to keep up with the drain, otherwise I get the feeling that it’ll start draining something else instead of my ice element.

After just a few seconds of this, I stop focusing on creating the slide, ending up in me free falling to the ground with my eyes closed while just purely generating ice element that immediately gets pulled into the monster.

Please have enough stamina for this…

The pull continues for nearly what feels like ages, long past the point where I landed on the ground. Which didn’t hurt anywhere near as badly as I’d have expected it would.

Eventually, I feel myself beginning to run out of stamina, so I hurriedly grab a stamina potion and down it.

This process repeats itself for what feels like hours, but probably isn’t as long as that, until I finally hear a chime in my head and am able to open my eyes again.

And the first thing I find…

Is a frozen wasteland for several kilometers around me.

I blink to myself for a few seconds before looking around and focusing on the large frozen body of the monster. Which basically looks like an ice statue of a gigantic plant.

Oh, and the red ring seems to have turned blue at some point. But it’s dead now, so that doesn’t matter.

Also, the ring seemed to have stopped pulling my ice element as soon as the creature died. So that’s a plus.

I look around for a few more seconds, just for my attention to be pulled to the sight of a nice and beautiful loot box.

A mythic one.