[Herald of Collapse quest: Kill the [Elite] [Corrupted] Ferrinox]
The notification blazed in the corner of every hunter's vision just as the hunters finished encircling the beast.
No one stood too close.
They ford a wide, uneven ring around the Herald, weapons raised, boots planted on cracked asphalt, every face tight with fear and focus. Burnt-out cars and broken shopfronts frad the battlefield, while smoke and ash drifted through the air in slow, dirty sheets. The street had gone quiet in that terrible way that only happened before sothing catastrophic.
At the center of the circle stood the Ferrinox.
It looked like a nightmare carved out of iron and flesh. Its body was huge and low, thick with brutal muscle beneath a tallic hide that shimred dark blue-black under the firelight. Raw mana pulsed beneath that armored skin in thin, glowing lines like molten veins trapped under steel. Its head bore three horns, one thick spear jutting from its snout and two larger curved horns rising from its brow, giving it the shape of a living siege beast. Each breath it took ca out as a violent huff, steam and black vapor pouring from its nostrils as if sothing inside it burned too hot to contain.
Then it stamped once.
The road cracked.
A jagged web of fractures burst out beneath its hooves, and several hunters nearest the front line stumbled from the shock. Those hooves did not just carry weight. They carried seismic force. Every shift of the Ferrinox's body made the street groan under it.
Corruption had twisted it even further.
Jagged black growths split through sections of its plated shoulders and spine. One eye glowed a savage gold. The other had collapsed into a ruined socket, leaking thick black fluid down the side of its face. Violet mana bled from seams in its tallic hide in thin, ugly wisps. When it turned its head, slow and deliberate, it did not look like a monster trapped by hunters.
It looked like a predator deciding which prey to kill first.
The Ferrinox lowered its horns and huffed again, deeper this ti, more nacing. Several hunters flinched. One took half a step back.
Then a voice cut through the silence.
"Ripper."
It was not shouted. It did not need to be.
The word slid over the battlefield, cold and final.
At once, heads turned.
Hannah stood beyond the ring of hunters, young and slender, black hair floating around her as though so unseen current held it aloft. Purple aura leaked from her eyes in soft, ghostly streams that curled upward like smoke. Her face was pale and still, but the power gathering around her was anything but gentle. It gathered at her feet first, then climbed her body in ribbons of shadow and violet haze.
For the first ti, the Ferrinox reacted.
Its golden eye snapped toward her.
Then the street exploded with purple smoke.
It burst from the cracked ground around the Ferrinox in spiraling columns. At first, it looked like vapor.
Then it took shape.
Hands.
Long-fingered, shadowed psionic hands began tearing themselves out of the smoke by the dozens. So clawed up from the asphalt. Others unfolded directly from the air around the Herald. More slid beneath its body and surged upward, wrapping around its legs, throat, horns, and torso in violent, grasping waves.
The Ferrinox roared.
The first hand seized its horns and held.
More clamped around its forelegs. Others sank into the seams of its tallic hide, fingers pushing through armor-like flesh as though probing for sothing buried deeper. The beast bucked hard enough to shake the street, but the hands only tightened. Purple smoke thickened around its body until the Herald looked trapped inside a storm of grasping limbs and shadow.
Then the hands began to pull.
-
[Ripper lvl: 6] Summons unseen psionic hands that seize the target and violently tear them apart, dealing massive physical and ntal damage over a short duration. [Cooldown: 10 minutes]
Warning: ntal backlash is possible when the target's will is stronger than anticipated.
-
The Ferrinox's roar broke into sothing uglier. A higher, more desperate scream ripped out of it as its golden eye widened with raw panic. Blood spilled from its nostrils. Then from its ears. Then from the corner of its remaining eye. The ntal damage hit as brutally as the physical, and the beast lurched as if sothing invisible had hooked into its mind and begun ripping from the inside.
Cracks spread across its tallic hide. Mana flared bright beneath the fractures, then ruptured in bursts of violet light. Flesh split open along its shoulders and ribs. One of its forelegs was dragged half out of its socket with a hideous wet crunch. It slamd its hooves down, trying to break the grip through sheer force, but more hands erupted to replace the ones crushed or thrown aside.
One hand forced its way into the ruined eye socket.
Another split open the seam beneath its jaw.
Several more dug into its ribcage and pulled in opposite directions.
The left brow horn tore free first in an explosion of black blood and sparks.
The Ferrinox bellowed and staggered, but the hands around its chest and spine had already anchored. The ribcage began to open. tallic hide peeled back in jagged strips. Muscle cords snapped. Bone cracked, bent, and split as the Herald was pulled apart in every direction at once.
The hunters surrounding it did not cheer.
No one spoke.
The brutality of it was too complete.
One foreleg tore free entirely and slamd onto the asphalt several feet away. The torso split wider. The Ferrinox took one last stumbling step before the hands on its hindquarters yanked backward with rciless force.
Its body ca apart.
Black blood, raw mana, shattered hide, and torn flesh sprayed across the street in a storm of gore and violet mist. What remained of the Herald collapsed in a mangled heap, still twitching as the psionic hands continued tearing for another breath, then another, until nothing was left intact.
Only then did the shadow-hands dissolve.
They sank back into the purple smoke, and the smoke thinned, leaving behind silence and ruin.
No one moved.
No one even seed to breathe.
Then the heavens answered.
A golden pillar fell from above in total silence and struck Hannah where she stood. Light poured over her body like molten sunlight, swallowing the drifting purple around her eyes. Notification panels burst into existence one after another, bright and impossible in the smoke-stained dark.
-
[All wounds have been healed!]
[All negative status effects have been cleansed!]
[You have leveled up! 29↑]
[You have leveled up! 30↑]
[1x Elite Rank gift box has been added to your inventory]
[3x Mid-grade Health Potions have been added to your inventory]
[New title has been acquired: Herald Slayer]
-
The light remained for several long seconds, then faded into her.
When it was gone, Hannah still stood in the middle of the ruined street, whole again. Blood and gri still stained her clothes, but no injury remained on her body. Her black hair drifted slowly back down around her shoulders. The last of the purple aura, escaping from her eyes, weakened into faint wisps.
Still, nobody approached her.
The hunters stared at the remains of the Ferrinox.
Then they stared at her.
Not with admiration.
Not with relief.
With unease.
One lowered his weapon only after several slow seconds. Another looked at Hannah, then at the gore-strewn street, and unconsciously stepped back. A woman near the edge of the circle stared at her as though trying to decide whether Hannah had just saved them or revealed herself as sothing worse.
That silence lasted until footsteps crossed it.
Sato ca from behind and placed his hand on her shoulder.
"Good job." He said, without looking, and walked past her towards the monster.
The words were simple. Flat. Practical. He did not linger on her. He did not ask if she was alright. He kept walking, already focused on the Herald's remains and whatever ca next.
Hannah remained still.
Around her, the looks did not change.
They watched her as if she were no longer one of them. As if the thing that had just torn an Elite Herald apart with invisible hands could not possibly still be human. She felt it in every second of silence, in every averted gaze, in every expression that tightened when she looked their way.
Slowly, she turned from them.
Her lips parted, and sothing soft slipped out under her breath, too quiet for the others to hear.
-
Hannah sat alone in the middle of a large room.
Darkness clung to every corner of the room, making her seem even smaller.
She sat on the floor with her knees pulled tightly to her chest, head buried against them, both hands clamped over her ears as though she could still shut out the sound of tearing flesh, screaming tal hide, and the silence that had followed. Her black hair spilled around her like a dark veil, hiding most of her face. Now and then, her shoulders trembled.
No one else was there.
At least, not until she slowly uncovered her ears.
Her breathing was uneven. Careful. Fragile.
Then she lifted her head.
Her mother and father stood in front of her.
She froze.
For a second, they just stared at her.
"Don't stare at
like that."
They stood only a few feet away, close enough to touch, close enough to break her all over again. Familiar. Impossible. Their faces were exactly as she rembered and sohow worse because of it. Because she rembered too much. Because she rembered too little. Because so part of her had wanted this and feared it equally.
Her lips trembled.
"I said, don't look at
like that!"
The instant the words left her mouth, the floor beneath her split apart.
A violent pulse erupted outward from where she sat, and the concrete exploded into a crater beneath her. The impact thundered through the room, deep and brutal, sending fractures racing across the floor in every direction. Jagged cracks spider-webbed outward beneath her mother and father's feet, tearing through the concrete with a sharp, relentless sound, as if the room itself could no longer contain what she had tried so desperately to hold inside.
Hannah remained at the center of it, trembling, eyes wide and angry, as the ground continued to break around her.
Reviews
All reviews (0)