/Third Person POV/
The forest had dissolved into a motion of blur, noise, shadows, and teeth as hundreds of goblins poured between the trees with their shrieks weaving through the air like static.
The ground shook beneath their weight, clubs beating the dirt, rocks flying, claws scraping bark.
And just ahead of that madness, half-buried in mud and blood, Arlen lay face down with his breath hitching against the earth.
The shattered bottle of the mana potion beside him bled into the soil, its blue glow flickering in and out as though mocking him.
A goblin stood in front of him, flashing its crooked grin with its club raised high, while the sound of its screech resounded more like a laugh.
Arlen didn't look up. He didn't think.
In that single heartbeat of panicked instinct, his arm jerked, and the spear was already in motion before the thought even formed, and somehow, through luck or the goblin's own dumb arrogance, the strike connected.
The point tore through the creature's chest with a wet crunch.
Its laugh caught in its throat, the sound choking into silence as it folded over him.
While Arlen didn't wait for it to fall, his leg kicked, his arms pushed, and his body moved before reason caught up.
Mud and blood smeared his face as he stumbled upright, breath ragged, and vision trembling at the edges.
His mana was gone now.
And what was left was just a fifteen-year-old boy staring at a wall of monsters too many to count.
His body turned by itself before breaking into a sprint.
Branches whipped his face as he zigzagged through the trees, feet slipping on roots and mud, while his body tried to outthink its own exhaustion.
He turned corners, ducked under branches, heard the shrieks chasing him closer each time, the pounding of hundreds of bare feet swallowing the ground behind him.
His lungs burned, his heart hammered, and still the sound of claws grew louder.
"Hey, system," he gasped, voice breaking between steps, "you got any ideas!?"
The reply came like a chime cutting through thunder.
-Ding!
{You have leveled up twice and have 2 stat points. Investing one in MP will refill your MP pool and increase it by 5.}
"Do it!" he spat, barely breathing the words out before his chest locked.
And a beat later, surge shot through him.
The shock made him stumble once before his legs caught again, breath dragging back into rhythm.
He felt it almost instantly, the flicker of power, that faint thrum of mana returning.
And the next instant –
-Crack!
Lightning crackled across his forearms once more.
"Round four!" He growled as his feet skidded through the dirt before he turned back toward the swarm once again.
His chest rose and fell fast, his face pale under streaks of blood and sweat, but his eyes, the violet in them burned fiercer than ever.
"Keep investing stat points into MP as soon as I run out," he said, his voice quiet but flat.
The system didn't respond, but its silence felt like agreement while Red lightning crawled into the spear until the air around him became distorted and wild.
And by the next heartbeat, the goblins reached him, snapping and closing their green maws in twisted hunger.
And Arlen charged, slamming himself into the horde with an explosion of red, with a spear cutting through them like a lightning storm.
He fought like a man possessed, each motion faster than the last, every swing heavier than reason allowed.
The pain of impact no longer stopped him; the recoil only pushed him forward.
The more they hit, the harder he swung, until the line between fear and fury blurred and vanished entirely.
His teeth were bared, his grin stretched wide, mixed with exhaustion and something darker, his face half-painted in blood which wasn't just green anymore..
And slowly it all became a rhythm: kill, send bodies to the inventory, move, breathe, kill again.
Until even those thoughts dissolved.
Then came a point when his laughter began deep in that rhythm, faint at first, barely audible amid the noise, but it slowly grew as the slaughter deepened.
It rose with each step, until it was louder than the goblins, more audible than the lightning, even more so than the screams of everything that wasn't him.
The system broke through the chaos.
-Ding!
{Overriding silent notification command.}
-Ding!
{Host's attention required.}
He didn't stop.
His eyes, once bright violet, were now green, reflecting the madness in the blood that covered him.
His grin twisted wider with his laughter snapping through the air like static as he drove the spear through another wave of goblins.
-Ding!
{Status: Critical. The host is infected with Goblin's Fester. Cause: Saliva through a Goblin bite.}
But his laughter didn't break; it only sharpened.
-Ding!
{Status: Critical. The host is infected with Goblin Fever. Cause: Goblin blood contact with open wounds.}
The lightning surged higher than ever before, tearing the air itself.
-Ding!
{Goblin Fever is overclocking Host's Core's natural MP regeneration by 150x and heightening feralism. Mana Regen far exceeding safe parameters. Host may permanently lose the Core and/or damage Circuits.}
-Ding!
{Host's attention required.}
But Arlen Hale couldn't hear the system anymore.
His laughter drowned everything.
His face twisted in ecstasy and agony alike with eyes blazing bright and feral, as though whatever made him human had burned out with the last of his sanity.
He wasn't fighting the goblins anymore.
He was slaughtering them.
And in the middle of that forest, surrounded by smoke and corpses and lightning, Arlen Hale looked less like a boy and more like something the monsters had accidentally summoned in return.
Seconds bled into minutes as the forest slowly became thunder made flesh with a roaring storm of claws and lightning.
And Arlen's laughter rolled through it all, wild and broken, drowning the shrieks of dying goblins.
Every swing cracked lightning through the forest, every step left a piece of scorched earth where grass used to be.
Yet the goblins kept coming, tripping over corpses, but every one that reached him met red lightning first.
With the Goblin Fever virus raging inside him, his mana regen swelled far beyond reason.
The mana poured through him like a flood far too big for its container.
His core was dragging in power at one hundred and fifty times the pace it should have, flooding his two circuits with mana beyond what they were ever meant to carry.
Yet still he pushed harder while the two frail channels in his body screamed as they forced fifteen points of mana a second through passages meant for ten.
His body wasn't meant to hold that kind of power.
But pain was somewhere far behind him now, buried under everything else.
There was no exhaustion, no fear, no thought.
All that remained was the rhythm: kill, move, kill.
Each swing split air and flesh alike as arcs of crimson lightning tore through ranks of green bodies.
The spear, half-shattered now, cleaved and burned, turning every step into another explosion.
Clubs cracked against his ribs. Rocks slammed into his chest.
A jaw latched onto his arm before disintegrating under the current.
He staggered, fell, bled, and rose again, laughing harder, swinging wider, until it all blurred together.
He killed until the ground itself became a swamp of green blood.
Even the trees were burning now, black silhouettes twisted in the glow.
And then, slowly, finally, came a point when nothing moved.
Except for the silence, the faint hiss of cooling flesh, and the echo of his laughter.
There he stood in the middle of the swamp of ankle-deep green blood, surrounded by mountains of dead goblins with a body split open in a dozen places, and a broken spear clutched in his hand.
His breath still came out in short bursts that sounded like he might laugh again if air allowed it, while lightning still raged around him.
And then -
-Tick.
A twig snapped somewhere to his right.
Arlen's head jerked toward the sound so fast it cracked.
His grin twitched wider as his body shifted into stance again,
And through the drifting smoke of the burning trees stepped a man, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, bald, with a body etched with old scars.
He had no shirt, and the pants he wore were little more than rags.
His brown eyes took in the scene of the mountain of corpses, the pool of green blood, the boy at the center of it all, still glowing red and laughing faintly.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low, edged with disbelief.
"Arlen…?"
But it didn't reach whatever remained inside the boy.
The grin of the thing that used to be Arlen stretched as he lunged spear first, and his mouth split in a hysterical laugh.
The man's expression hardened as he sidestepped easily, his movement sharp and precise.
"Damn it," he muttered, "I'll have to knock him out before he tears himself apart."
Arlen spun back, red arcs trailing off his skin, and leapt again.
This time, the man met him as his eyes began glinting yellow.
His right arm flared faintly with mana as he threw a punch that looked almost casual, but the impact cracked through the forest like thunder.
The punch connected with Arlen's chest like agony disguised as mercy.
And the impact sent him flying back, crashing through three trees, before the fourth finally stopped him.
The man slowly lowered his hand, flexing his fingers.
Turning them over, his brow furrowed as he saw faint red streaks crawling up from his knuckles in patterns like roots or veins burnt into the skin.
"Lightning scars," he said under his breath, almost laughing to himself. "That wasn't just any lightning… lucky you, kid. Bet your mother's proud."
Then -
-Boom!
A bloom of red tore through the trees where Arlen had fallen.
And the man's yellow glinting eyes hardened again.
"Alright, kid," he said, planting his feet as his jaw flexed, "… only one way to help you without blowing a hole through you."
And then his face changed.
The corners of his mouth began to pull wider… unnaturally wider.
The skin stretched until it split, opening red, and the teeth it revealed beneath weren't human.
Dozens of needle-sharp points lined the mouth that kept widening until it reached his ears.
He or it inhaled, the air bending inward with the force of it, his ribs expanding like a beast readying a roar.
While across the clearing, Arlen screamed and lunged again, lightning crackling wild around him.
Half the distance vanished in a blink.
And that was when the man let go.
The scream that left his mouth wasn't just sound… it was a sound weaponized.
A ripple burst from his throat, bending the air, warping light, ripping the ground between them like invisible shockwaves.
An irresistible pressure hit Arlen mid-lunge.
And his body once again snapped backward, blood spraying as he crashed through another trunk and hit the dirt hard enough to crater it.
The lightning flickered.
His laughter broke.
And for the first time since the madness began, silence took him.
While the man stood there, chest heaving, the monstrous mouth closed slowly until only a faint smile remained.
Arlen twitched once in the dirt with both his ears bleeding, eyes flickering violet through the green haze.
And with the last flicker of what was left of him, he blinked up at the figure through half-shut eyes and whispered.
"…Uncle Victor?…"
Then everything went black.