'When are they going to get tired?!'
He had been running for nearly half an hour without stopping.
Fortunately, the buff from his Spectrum was incredibly effective. It took a long time for him to get exhausted, and he managed to keep up his masterful escape pace—but nothing lasted forever. Sooner or later, the buff would run out, and the killer dogs would catch him.
Serenity depended on the mastery of its user. Of course, Nova had been using Serenity for years, but that didn't make him an expert with infinite capacity to grant buffs to others.
The Aberrations were starving as they chased him. They had likely been waiting for this moment for a long time, watching Nova from the shadows, all ready for the night they would finally attack their prey.
Nocturnal beasts had that kind of behavior. They rested during the day and hunted at night.
'I can't waste seeds right now. My staff won't be enough. If there were five—or even ten—I could at least defend myself, but there are too many!'
His basic martial arts would work against a few, that was true, but they were simply too many.
Being a support automatically placed him in the role of the weakest—the one who had to be protected. Unless one was an Elite Empath or a Feeler, it was practically impossible to be self-sufficient in combat.
Nova was neither Elite nor anything close to a Feeler—he was a weakling whose only redeeming trait was that he could make the strong even stronger.
'Running blind is worse than I imagined. Where the hell am I even going?!'
The terrain was flat—there was no problem there; he wouldn't fall anywhere. The sand also seemed solid enough not to turn into quicksand, so that was one less concern. All he had to do was lift his feet high enough not to trip.
There was no quick solution to this predicament, much less a coherent escape plan.
The beasts growled, breathed heavily, and advanced behind Nova. Even without eyes, they were able to see him. They moved as fast as—or faster than—a Seventh-Level Empath. With that alone, it was clear there was no way to survive or escape.
'Shit,' Nova thought, his eyes widening as he stared at the ground. 'Not again.'
A faint energetic presence manifested beneath the ground. That could only mean one thing: there was more than one Aberration like the one from the beginning, and it was moving beneath them at that very moment—at high speed.
The dogs sensed that presence. They stopped dead in their tracks and backed away. Frightened, with their dark, ghostly tails tucked between their deformed legs, they fled in panic.
Immediately after, the sand beneath Nova's feet shifted, sinking as if he were standing on the surface of an hourglass.
Of course, he didn't stop to look.
'I'm not letting my bones get broken again. I'm still recovering!'
He ran as if there were no tomorrow.
By then, the Aberration had already emerged from the sand. It was exactly the same as the one Nova had encountered at the beginning, and that was a bad sign—not only because the bastard was even bigger than the previous one, but because Nova couldn't tell whether this beast was more dangerous or not.
Still, he ran. He didn't allow himself to stop. His body ached, his recovering bones creaked painfully, but he had to escape. Sometimes, the battles you didn't fight were the ones you won.
Nova was following that path.
'Huh?'
Crunch…
A faint crunch echoed. The sand beneath both of them shifted.
There was something else Nova hadn't taken into account. The first Aberration had been close to the surface, so there hadn't been any major sand collapses when it appeared. But the one behind him, listening to the movements above, had been hiding much deeper.
The sound of multiple beasts running across the sand had awakened it—but the one with the most energy would suffer the consequences.
Crrsh!
The sand collapsed, sinking and forming a path that opened up around and along the ground, like a miniature canyon tearing itself open into multiple cracks across the sandy expanse.
Completely in the dark, fleeing in desperation, Nova turned on his communicator and illuminated the path—only to realize that he was running on ground that was collapsing behind his boots.
'Ah—damn it!'
He didn't scream, nor was he going to, but he was thoroughly startled when he glanced back and saw the octopus-like monster moving within the massive fissure opening in the sand. It pushed the sand aside with its large carapace, dragging its tentacles agilely along the walls of the ever-expanding crack.
The beast chewed mockingly as it stared at Nova with a malicious grin. Its eyes glimmered beneath the darkness of its carapace in a faint whitish hue—a different color from the previous Aberration.
'It's catching up to me!'
The more he ran, the closer he came to falling into the fissure.
The sand kept collapsing behind him, sinking and slipping beneath the monster's tentacles. The pace of the chase was steady and relentless.
The bad news—just to make things worse—was that Nova didn't have infinite stamina. Even with the Spectrum enhancement, which granted physical, energetic, and Spectrum-related buffs, it wasn't enough to sustain him for long.
It was like the most basic law of thermodynamics: energy could neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed or transferred. What Nova was doing was simply wasting energy by buffing himself.
In the end, he would be more exhausted than if he had run for his life without Serenity's buff.
The Aberration stretched its tentacle toward Nova's foot.
Sensing the danger, he leaped forward to cover more ground, rolling to maintain momentum and barely avoiding the tentacle's grasp. Then he resumed running with long strides.
'Why don't you chase the dogs instead of me? There are more of them than there are of me!'
Of course, Nova couldn't understand this yet—he still didn't know how this kind of Aberration functioned.
'Screw it! I don't have a choice!'
He pulled out three more seeds from his pocket, clenched them tightly in his fist, and looked back. He couldn't see anything—but that would have been a hasty conclusion. What he could see were the glowing eyes of the tentacled monster.
'Here goes nothing!'
He raised his hand, ready to throw himself straight into the bastard's mouth—he had to stop to do it. As he did, he fell into the fissure, hoping the octopus would get the hint and kindly offer itself as a sacrifice to grow a nice blue tree.
As expected, the Sand Octopus was a thick-skulled idiot and extended its tentacles. It tried to grab Nova, but he kept falling endlessly.
'Huh?'
If the Aberration could express emotions or speak, it would have said the same thing. Both of them shared an unexpected fate.