Chapter 34: [34] : Silas’s Trump Card, Blood-Crazed Wendigo

"Your turn," Declan said softly.

His voice wasn’t loud at all. But in the dead silence of the Ashen Bog, it carried perfectly over the massive fifty-meter crater.

The seven hundred remaining soldiers of the Apex Hounds didn’t move an inch.

They were supposed to be the elite. They were max-geared and highly paid corporate enforcers who spent their days bullying normal players and locking down servers.

Now, they were just a mob of terrified gamers staring at a guy in a pitch-black trench coat.

Silas stood at the front of the formation. His silver tactical suit was no longer pristine as it was covered in the digital blue blood of his artillery crew.

The three hundred men that had been standing right behind him were just gone!

They had been crushed into a literal singularity and deleted from the game’s code.

Silas’s jaw hung completely slack. His professional and cold demeanor was broken into a million pieces.

He looked at the smoking crater and then looked at Declan.

"What... what did you just do?" Silas stammered as he stepped backward. His boots slipped in the bloody mud.

"That was a localized black hole! That’s not in the physics engine! You can’t do that!"

"I just did," Declan replied casually.

He rested the massive dark iron shaft of the Warden’s Halberd on his shoulder. The tiny black sphere inside the axe head was still spinning and humming with a heavy energy.

Panic immediately started to spread through the corporate army.

The shield wall broke. Several heavy knights dropped their massive tower shields into the mud and actually turned around to run.

"Hold the line!" Silas screamed, his voice cracking.

He pulled out his magically amplified megaphone again.

"Nobody logs out! Nobody runs! If you run, Apex Paradigm will zero out your real-world bank accounts! You’re under contract!"

That stopped a few of them, but the fear in their eyes was undeniable.

They were looking at Declan like he was a glitch that was going to reach through their screens and kill them in real life.

Silas knew he was dead meat.

If he went back to Director Sterling and reported that he lost three hundred men, failed to secure the Sanctum Core, and lost the Relic-tier Mana-Breaker Cannon, he wouldn’t just be fired.

The megacorp would ruin his life!

He had to kill Player V. He had to wipe this arrogant hacker off the server.

Silas reached into his inventory. His hand was shaking violently as he pulled out a small glowing red crystal encased in a golden cage.

Declan narrowed his eyes. He didn’t know what the item was, but it gave off an incredibly foul and oppressive aura.

The air around Silas started to smell like rotting meat and dried blood.

"You want to break the rules?" Silas hissed, his face twisting into an ugly and desperate sneer.

"Fine. We can break the rules. Apex Paradigm owns the developer tools. We own the backend. You think you’re the only one with a cheat code?"

Silas crushed the golden cage in his hand.

The red crystal broke into pieces!

[System Warning: Unauthorized Entity Summoned.]

[Emergency Protocol Breached. Level Hazard Exceeds Zone Limits.]

A massive pillar of blood-red lightning crashed down from the dark bruised sky.

It slammed directly into the mud right in front of Silas. The shockwave knocked the front row of the Apex Hounds flat on their backs.

Declan didn’t flinch, but he gripped his halberd tighter.

The red lightning faded, leaving behind a thick cloud of crimson smoke.

A low wet growl echoed from inside the smoke. It sounded like a predator that hadn’t eaten in a hundred years.

A massive hand reached out and swiped the smoke away.

It wasn’t a player. It was a monster!

It stood easily twelve feet tall. Its body was sickeningly thin, with pale grayish-blue skin pulled tightly over jagged protruding bones.

Its arms were entirely too long and ended in massive claws that scraped against the mud.

Its head was a bare deer skull with giant jagged antlers, and its eye sockets burned with a frantic starving red light.

A system tag appeared over its head.

[Target Information]

↳ Name: Blood-Crazed Wendigo

↳ Level: 40 (Corporate Sealed Boss)

↳ HP: 150,000 / 150,000

"Level 40," Declan muttered.

"Kill him!" Silas shrieked from behind the monster, pointing a shaking finger at Declan. "Tear him to pieces!"

The Wendigo didn’t roar. It just vanished!

Declan’s eyes went wide. The thing didn’t teleport. It was just so incredibly fast that the game’s rendering engine struggled to draw its movement.

A heavy gust of wind hit Declan from the right. He barely had time to react.

He hauled the +30 Warden’s Halberd off his shoulder and swung it horizontally to block.

The instant he started the swing, his mutated trait activated.

[Weight of the Warden]

The halberd’s mass increased by five hundred percent. It became a four-hundred-pound wall of dark matter.

Clang!

The Wendigo’s massive claws slammed into the iron shaft. The sheer kinetic force of the monster’s charge sent Declan sliding backward through the mud.

His Spiked Striders dug deep trenches into the earth, stopping him after ten feet.

Declan gritted his teeth. He immediately went on the offensive.

He swung the massive halberd down in a vicious arc, aiming right for the deer skull.

The heavy weapon tore through the air, creating a sonic boom. It was a guaranteed one-shot if it landed.

But it didn’t land.

The Wendigo simply wasn’t there. It shifted its weight and blurred to the left.

The halberd smashed into the mud, sending a geyser of toxic sludge fifty feet into the air and carving a massive trench in the ground.

Before Declan could pull the heavy weapon out of the dirt, the Wendigo slashed him across the chest.

Three massive claws raked against his pitch-black Predator’s Coat. The +10 mutated leather sparked wildly.

The fifty points of flat defense held up against the razor-sharp bone, but the kinetic impact was terrifying.

Declan was thrown backward like he had been hit by a speeding truck. He tumbled through the mud, rolling twice before springing back to his feet.

He checked his health bar.

[HP: 85 / 100]

"Okay," Declan spat out a mouthful of muddy water. "It didn’t cut me, but the blunt force trauma still transferred fifteen damage. Good to know."

The Wendigo shrieked, frustrated that its prey didn’t split into three neat pieces.

It dropped to all fours and charged again, moving in completely unpredictable jagged zig-zags.

Declan realized his mistake instantly. The +30 Warden’s Halberd was a weapon of mass destruction, but the massive weight increase on the swing made his attacks too predictable.

It was perfect for hitting a slow giant World Boss or a tightly packed formation of terrified players.

It was completely useless against a Level 40 speedster.

’Too heavy. Need speed,’ Declan thought.

He didn’t bother trying to swing the halberd again. He opened his digital inventory and willed the massive polearm away.

In the exact same second, he summoned his secondary weapon.

The +20 Carnage Cleaver materialized in his right hand. The jagged blood-red blade pulsed with a hungry light.

It was short, light, and built for a close-quarters brawl.

The Wendigo leaped into the air, bringing both clawed hands down in a crossing strike meant to decapitate him.

Declan tapped into his class stats. His base Agility was 70 thanks to the Eclipse Sovereign class, and his Mythic ring added another 20.

With 90 Agility, the world around him seemed to slow down just a fraction.

He didn’t use Void Blink. He didn’t want to burn through his stamina too early.

He just sidestepped.

The monster’s claws slammed into the mud right where Declan had been standing a millisecond prior.

Declan stepped directly into the Wendigo’s guard. He was right up against its pale bony chest.

He brought the Carnage Cleaver up in a rapid brutal slash.

Schwing!

The mutated red blade sliced through the thick unnatural hide of the monster’s ribcage. Dark corrupted blood sprayed out.

[System Ability Activated]

↳ Trait Activated: Hemorrhage. Drains 50 HP per second.

The Wendigo let out a confused gurgling shriek. It swung its massive arm backward, catching Declan in the shoulder.

Declan took the hit. He used the momentum to spin out of the way, landing gracefully a few feet back.

His health ticked down again.

[HP: 70 / 100]

The monster paused, clawing at its own chest.

The Hemorrhage trait was unblockable. Digital blood was pouring out of the shallow cut on its ribs like a broken pipe.

Its massive 150,000 health bar ticked down by 50 points, then another 50, then another 50.

But it wasn’t enough even if he activated Blood Burst.

A drain of 50 HP a second was an instant death sentence for a low-level player. But for a Level 40 boss? It was just a highly annoying paper cut.

"Yeah, that’s not going to cut it," Declan muttered as he wiped his chin.

The Wendigo realized the bleeding wasn’t stopping. Its glowing red eyes locked onto Declan. It was absolutely furious now.

The boss stopped moving in zig-zags and just rushed him in a straight terrifying line of pure aggression.

It was time for a messy ugly brawl.

Declan gripped the Carnage Cleaver with both hands. He couldn’t rely on a one-shot kill this time. He was going to have to fight for it.

He grinned as he felt the adrenaline spike.

"Come on then, ugly!" Declan yelled.

The monster crashed into him, and the swamp dissolved into a blur of clashing red steel and slashing bone claws.