The ground trembled beneath our boots. The air was no longer just wind; it was pure chaos.
From all sides, the Taranpus emerged from the shadows. Sharp claws tore the ground, eyes glowed like malignant embers, and the creatures' pale skins pulsed in sick, red patterns.
The forest tore itself apart with the beasts' leaps. The open field—which was once just a silent, fetid place—had transformed into a living, predatory hell.
Four of them charged at Sillys at the same time, drooling acid over the dead moss.
She didn't hesitate.
She raised her bow, taking a single, graceful step back. The wind swirled violently around her hands, and she fired.
*Shhhhhh!*
Four arrows of pure air cut through space simultaneously. The impact tore the monsters apart mid-air, shattering their bodies into a crimson mist that rained down on the diseased grass.
Meanwhile, I spun my spear in the exact center of the field.
Every strike I delivered was accompanied by a high-pitched hum, like steel tearing through thick fabric.
I used the wind's energy to amplify the blade's reach: each thrust released an invisible, pressurized cut that split the Taranpus in half before they even got close to my guard.
The dead earth beneath my boots quickly turned into a thick, macabre mire.
The ground simply couldn't absorb the carnage anymore, soaking down to the last root in a disgusting puddle that mixed vibrant red with the boiling black blood of the monsters.
The air lost its oxygen.
What flooded my lungs was a thick, suffocating, freezing stench of rusted iron and rotting flesh—a smell so absurdly physical that I could taste its acidic, metallic tang in the back of my throat.
It was a scene straight out of a freezing nightmare, the kind designed to paralyze the mind and make knees buckle in terror.
Any normal person would have frozen there.
But my body didn't freeze; instead, it burned.
The adrenaline swallowed the disgust and fear.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a desperate war drum, pushing the purest, wildest, and most intoxicating survival instinct through my veins.
That hell wasn't breaking me; it was turning me on to maximum voltage.
A few meters away from me, Sillys turned the very physics of combat into a sick joke.
A massive claw came down to crush her, but it only tore through a vacuum.
In a silver flash, the queen used the beast's scaly forearm as a ramp, running up the creature to launch herself backward against the dark sky.
At the apex of that reverse flight, her bowstring sang.
Three arrows of hyper-compressed light burst the skulls of three different beasts before her thin steel boots even touched the earth again.
And when they did, she didn't break rhythm.
Sillys dove into a fast, low roll.
Mud and black blood stained the flawless silver of her armor as she slid millimetrically beneath the attack of a colossal, enraged Taranpus.
The creature snapped its jaws in the air and spun its grotesque head, confused, drooling acid over the empty space where the elf had been just a millisecond prior.
The beast didn't even have time to blink.
Sillys had already risen on its back like a ghost, her bow replaced by the lethal gleam of her wind spear.
With a cold, surgical movement, she drove the spear into the base of the monster's neck, the silver blade bursting through the creature's throat in an explosion of boiling blood and silencing its roar forever.
The horde closed around me, a suffocating wall of mutant flesh and red eyes blocking any escape route.
Dozens of them leaped simultaneously, blocking out what little sky remained with gaping maws and sharp claws.
There was nowhere to run.
I lowered my center of gravity, digging my heels into the mud, and let the wind howl.
The black wooden shaft spun in my hands in an absolute blur.
The dense air spun with me, forming a loud, lethal vortex of pure atmospheric pressure.
I became the immovable axis of destruction. The exact eye of the storm.
Beasts tried to pierce the blockade, but ended up colliding violently against the invisible barrier of my spear, shattering and being spat backward in mutilated pieces.
One massive claw managed to breach the perimeter, passing millimeters from my cheek, so close I felt the creature's putrid, acidic breath.
My survival instinct should have screamed. Terror should have paralyzed me.
But instead, my lips curved, and my lungs pulled the air in hard.
A wide, predatory, and completely maniacal smile tore across my face, revealing teeth stained with dust and blood.
My vision focused in a superhuman way. The sound of cracking bones and tearing flesh stopped making me sick; suddenly, it sounded like macabre music, a heavy metronome dictating the speed of my spear.
Every perfectly placed strike, every Taranpus I threw onto the scarlet earth, sent a jolt of pure, electric, sick euphoria straight up my spine.
I was no longer the scared kid running for survival.
In that pit of mud and death, I felt terrifying and insanely alive.
A larger, more robust Taranpus leaped from the blind spot of the shadows and sank its fangs right into my right arm.
Its filthy teeth pierced the light steel Sillys had given me as if it were paper. I felt the metal rupture and my flesh burn under the crushing pressure of its jaw.
"SUKI!" Sillys screamed, terrified.
The beast began to shake me violently from side to side, like a loose piece of meat.
Its front claws tore into my side, splashing blood with every sudden movement.
I ignored the throbbing pain.
I firmly planted the base of my spear into the ground to anchor my weight and concentrated a dense, massive spiral of wind into my free left fist.
A roar tore from my throat.
With a monstrous punch, I buried my fist—propelled by highly compressed air—straight into the side of the creature's skull.
The impact echoed like thunder.
The beast's bones shattered under the force, and its body released my arm, flying dozens of meters through the trees until it disappeared into the dark forest.
My right arm weighed tons.
Hot blood soaked what was left of the leather and metal armor, dripping in a continuous, rhythmic flow onto the black mud.
But the pain was nothing more than a distant hum, drowned out by adrenaline.
I tightened my trembling fingers around the spear shaft. The second the wood touched my palm, the air around me responded, whistling furiously in a tight whirlwind against my boots.
A thought crossed my chaotic mind. That early morning, in the empty training courtyard, staring at the gouged pillars and the perfectly sectioned leaves falling through the air, I had promised myself I would give an epic name to that absolute cut.
I stared at the wall of red eyes advancing from all sides to devour me, and my exhausted smile widened, becoming sharp and predatory.
That was the perfect field test.
I dug my heels into the bloody earth, bending my knees and sinking my center of gravity until my thigh muscles burned.
I pulled a massive amount of oxygen into my lungs. This time, I didn't let the energy leak out like a shield.
I pulled it inward, compressing the aura against my own bones, thinning the wind blade on the spear until it hummed at an unbearable pitch.
I ripped off all mental limiters at once.
"TATSUMAKI!"
The scream tore from my throat along with the release of the energy. I threw the entire weight of my hips and shoulders into a brutal, uninterrupted rotary spin. The black spear vanished from existence, replaced by a perfect, deafening vortex.
The compressed air didn't just explode; it transformed into a colossal centrifuge of invisible, uninterrupted atmospheric blades.
The high-pitched screech of the wind breaking the sound barrier completely drowned out the beasts' roars.
The Taranpus that leaped toward me didn't even get the chance to touch the ground again. The storm's massive suction force pulled their heavy bodies into the air, dragging them inescapably straight into the invisible meat grinder.
Thick bones cracked and turned to dust. Tough leather was sliced like paper. Black blood, severed limbs, and dust exploded in a macabre, circular fountain, painting the trees and the sky in a lethal ten-meter radius.
The storm died as abruptly as it was born, leaving only the echo of a dry thunderclap in the air. The corrupted dust and the mist of blood took long, slow seconds to settle.
My knees gave out.
I fell heavily to the earth, panting in ragged, desperate gasps.
I was kneeling exactly in the center of a circular, deeply excavated crater in the swamp, clutching the open wound on my arm.
A silver flash landed without making a single sound beside me.
Sillys.
The elven queen, who until then had worn a mask of calculating, relentless coldness, had her lips parted.
Her pale eyes were wide open, sweeping over the ring of pulverized carcasses and absorbing in shock the absurd, lethal scale of the abyss my spear had just carved into the earth.
"Can you stay focused?!" she asked, quickly evaluating my bleeding.
"Of course, this isn't going to stop me..." I replied, flashing a savage, exhausted smile with blood-stained teeth.
More growls sounded from the shadows.
The horde seemed infinite, gushing from the trees like a black flood.
I went back to fighting, ignoring the pain. Now I used the wind condensed under the soles of my boots in short, explosive dashes, cutting, thrusting, and tearing through the air from one monster to the next.
Every movement I made was an uninterrupted kinetic explosion.
"We have to find where these pests are coming from!" she yelled over the crushing sound of combat.
"They don't end!"
"Can you go up and look from above?!" I shouted back, impaling a beast in mid-air and throwing its corpse against another.
"Can you hold the line alone?!"
"Of course I can!" I roared, spinning the spear once more and setting my stance.
"TATSUMAKI!"
The new, devastating gust of blades opened a scarlet clearing in the horde.
Sillys used the microscopic opening and launched herself upward with a monumental wind-boosted leap.
High up, floating for a brief, tense second under the sky, Sillys didn't just look at the ground; she read the forest.
Her eyes frantically tracked the continuous, black flow of the horde, mapping the epicenter of the swarm.
She observed the unnatural, rhythmic swaying of the treetops in the distance and the irregular tremors that made the earth pulse like a sick heart.
All the routes of that sea of blood and beasts converged on a single point of origin.
She raised her wind spear, her aura shining like a lone star in the darkness.
"FOUND IT!" her voice rained down like thunder, echoing over the carnage.
"A COLOSSAL HOLE IN THE ANCESTRAL TREE'S ROOT, TO THE SOUTH!"
There was no time to reply. The air around her simply imploded.
With a sonic boom that broke the sound barrier and ruptured the eardrums of the nearest beasts, Sillys dove diagonally.
She was no longer an elf; she was a silver meteor of pure divine fury plummeting from the heavens, leaving a trail of incandescent light through the branches.
The impact of her landing was abyssal.
The earth didn't just tremble; it tore itself apart from the inside out.
A massive shockwave swept through the southern forest, ripping the mud from the ground and shattering the ancient wood.
Colossal trees surrounding the hive's entrance couldn't withstand the pressure of the queen's landing.
The giant trunks, weighing hundreds of tons, snapped with a deafening crack of breaking bones and began to collapse.
They fell like wooden castles, crushing hundreds of Taranpus instantly beneath an apocalyptic avalanche of leaves, dirt, and black blood.
The dust wave swept over the swamp and hit my face.
I was left alone.
Surrounded by a sea of red eyes in the dark, while the world itself collapsed around me.
*Of course it's a hole,* I thought, sprinting at full speed south, my eyes locked on the absolute chaos of falling wood miles away.
*It's always a fucking hole.*
The route there turned into a hellish survival track.
The forest roared as the giant trees kept toppling in my direction.
I accelerated, the wind howling under my boots. I slid on my knees through the mud, passing beneath a colossal trunk that smashed the earth inches from my back, and jumped using the airflow to scale the roots that were being violently torn from the ground.
The Taranpus that survived the impact of Sillys' drop came in swarms, intercepting my path like a living, desperate wall.
They leaped from the collapsing branches, drooling acid, trying to drag me to death with them.
I spun the spear in continuous blurs.
I sliced open a beast's chest mid-leap and used its carcass as a trampoline to dodge another falling tree.
The battlefield was three-dimensional.
Every glancing blow I took made my body heavier, their claws cut like hot blades, and what was left of the left side of my armor was finally ripped away in a precise strike, shattering into useless pieces of greenish metal that fell into the mud.
*I guess learning to use a bow wouldn't be a bad idea for the future...* I grumbled mentally, feeling true fatigue starting to burn the muscle fibers in my legs, my breath growing short as I decapitated two more monsters that tried to bite my ankles from beneath fallen branches.
I vaulted over the last shattered trunk and finally saw the black abyss boiling between the destroyed roots.
I killed the last three monsters blocking the entrance with a continuous thrust, using wind repulsion, and, without hesitating for a single second, dove headfirst into the suffocating darkness of that tunnel.
The air inside that place hit me like a physical slap.
It was damp, sticky, and suffocatingly hot, saturated with the oppressive stench of decay and ozone generated by Sillys' aura ahead.
The ancient wood of that root didn't feel like a normal plant structure; it was a living, grotesque, pulsing tissue.
The thick, blackened bark walls contracted and expanded in a slow, heavy rhythm, like the diaphragm of a sleeping titan, causing black, pitch-thick sap to ooze through the cracks, sizzling faintly as it touched the muddy floor.
As I bulleted down the descent, the tunnel didn't narrow.
On the contrary, it opened up absurdly, revealing a monumental scale.
This wasn't a normal cave.
It was an entirely new biome, a forgotten, subterranean underworld stretching beneath the foundations of the Black Forest.
The ceiling was so ridiculously high that absolute darkness swallowed the top, leaving visible only the tips of other colossal roots crossing the void like suspension bridges in the dark.
A shock of tactical clarity hit me as I ran.
*So that was it,* I thought.
That network of hollow roots and massive caverns was the secret behind the Taranpus' terrifying speed.
They didn't march across the surface, crossing the dense vegetation and forest branches; they possessed a high-speed organic superhighway underground.
They traveled through the planet's very veins, which explained how they managed to emerge in swarms, out of nowhere, flanking and surrounding elven squads in a matter of minutes anywhere on the map.
Colossal footprints, deep enough to drown an entire elf, covered the damp soil.
Dozens of distorted, quadruped shadows moved frantically along the edges of the abyss, growling as they sensed my presence.
I didn't stop to fight the stragglers.
Because, echoing from the heart of that subterranean immensity, the sharp, metallic sound of uninterrupted combat rang out like a war metronome.
Shockwaves of freezing wind blew against my face every few seconds, bringing distant flashes of silver light that momentarily illuminated the vastness of that hell.
Sillys was already in the center of the nest.
And I was right behind her.
I focused the wind at my feet and shot like a missile through the descending tunnel.
When I reached the main chamber, the scene was a nightmare. She was completely surrounded by a wall of flesh and claws.
I advanced spinning the spear like a demon, carving a path through the beasts' blood.
Every thrust pushed the air in slicing waves that diced the monsters from the inside out, until I finally stopped shoulder-to-shoulder with my general.
"Are you okay?!" I shouted, blocking a massive bite with the weapon's shaft and kicking the beast in the snout.
"Yes!" she replied, her eyes locked on the enemies, never stopping her deadly dance.
"But these bastards don't stop spawning!"
"Any sign of the mother?!"
"Nothing!" the elf answered, frustration cracking her mask of ice.
"But this lair... it's immense," I panted, sweeping my eyes over the darkness of the cavernous chamber.
"She's here. I can feel the weight in the air!"
And then, abruptly, the normal Taranpus attacking us began to retreat.
They lowered their heads, grunting softly, and cowered against the cavern walls.
That was when true danger froze my spine.
"Why are they retreating now?" I asked, breath catching, the tip of my spear trembling slightly in my exhausted hands.
Sillys swallowed hard and raised her guard high, the mithril spear glowing intensely.
"This can only be the Queen's call..."
The sticky floor beneath our boots vibrated with seismic intensity.
And then, Sillys and I felt the weight of that force of nature.
It wasn't just a pressure forming on my back; it felt as if the underworld's very atmosphere had collapsed onto my shoulders.
Gravity seemed to contort and multiply, crushing my bones from top to bottom.
The air grew so thick it felt like cold, acidic sludge tearing down my trachea.
Every hair, every nerve, every primal instinct hardwired into my survival DNA screamed in absolute panic.
The loudest alarm my brain had ever sounded.
"SILLYS!" I roared.
In pure, raw desperation, I threw my entire weight against her body, pushing the queen hard enough to launch her out of the kill zone.
The exact moment her feet left the ground, death collided with my spine.
A living mass, hard and incalculably large, the thickness of an ancestral root fused with steel, smashed into me.
The force was so absurd it surpassed the speed of sound.
All the air in my lungs was ejected at once in a thick mist of blood.
My vision blacked out in a white flash of pure agony, and the colossal kinetic force turned me into the tip of an inverted meteor fired straight at the sky.
I didn't just smash through the cavern ceiling. I detonated the planet's crust from the bottom up.
Thousands of tons of earth, impenetrable roots, and solid rock were pushed up along with my body.
The surface of the Black Forest swelled violently and then exploded like a volcano shattering from the inside out.
The crater that opened was abyssal. A monstrous rift that swallowed the geography of the battlefield.
Kilometer-long trees, colossal titans of living wood that had supported that part of the forest for millennia were uprooted from the ground as if they were mere dandelions blown by a hurricane.
The massive trunks were violently ejected into the stratosphere, spinning out of control in the clouds before gravity pulled them back.
An apocalyptic rain of debris crashed down.
Trunks the width of mountains collided miles away in other corners of the forest.
The impact crushed entire clearings, flattened hundreds of Taranpus.
I was ejected from the center of that eruption of dirt and blood, bouncing across the scorched earth like a broken ragdoll until I rolled to a stop at the shattered edge of the colossal crater my exit had torn into the world.
The sound of the world simply... faded out.
I coughed up blood, lying face down in the dirt.
A high-pitched, continuous, and tortuous ringing flooded my hearing, drowning out everything else.
The mist of destruction hung so thick it almost blocked the morning light.
The forest suddenly plunged into an absolute, tomb-like, deeply terrified silence.
Every living being within a miles-wide radius had frozen at the cataclysmic scale of that single strike.
The sky that until then fought to illuminate the dust and chaos simply went dark.
The monster's rising mass eclipsed the morning light. From the glowing depths of the hole, black claws the size of boats dug into the scorched earth at the crater's edge.
The solid rock soil crumbled under her grip like wet sand, and then, she hoisted herself up.
She didn't emerge; she rose like a tectonic plate tearing through the crust of the world.
The Taranpus Queen.
It was an abomination of a scale the human mind simply refused to process immediately.
A living mountain range of flesh and armored scales like raw obsidian.
Millennia-old, deep scars crossed her carapace, not healed, but open and incandescent, pulsing with the glow of volcanic lava beneath the shadows.
Under the thick skin, muscles as thick as steel cables on a suspension bridge writhed continuously, rolling over each other like dozens of pythons trapped in a frenzy.
A torn, translucent, and flaccid amniotic sac hung from her colossal abdomen.
As she dragged herself to the surface, grotesque, underdeveloped pups—each the size of an adult wolf—slipped out alive and disgusting from that pouch.
They fell with wet thuds into the soaked mud and were born hissing, blind with hunger, tearing off pieces of their own umbilical cords with their teeth to start crawling toward us.
The Queen's dislocated triple jaw slowly opened, tendons snapping loudly, as rivers of fresh blood and thick, yellow, highly corrosive smoke dripped and melted the rocks beneath her chin.
A silver flash was ejected from the crater a second later.
Sillys landed hard beside me, dragging her boots in the dirt to brake her momentum. Her divine armor was scorched and stained with black soot.
Her breaths came in heavy, unrecognizable gasps.
The general's pale eyes—always so cold, unwavering—were now wide open in a shock of pure, lethal alert.
"THAT'S HER!" the elf screamed, wielding her spear with both hands, her voice almost breaking at the creature's magnitude.
The roar came next.
A sonic boom so deep, so primitive, and deafening that it made blood run from my nose.
The kilometer-high trees still standing at the edges of the destruction groaned and bent violently backward, completely stripped of their leaves all at once by the wind of that scream.
The stone earth cracked into deep spiderwebs under the crushing vibration.
I stood up with difficulty.
My bones popped, and the pain in my arm threatened to make me pass out, but I gripped the black spear even harder.
Sillys was already at my side, ready to fight, a monumental and divine bluish aura emanating from her body, finally releasing all her suppressed power.
"Suki, get out of the kill zone! Retreat!" Sillys' voice whipped the dense air. It wasn't a warning of concern; it was the absolute, harsh order of a general who knew exactly how fragile human flesh was in the face of that.
I clenched my jaw, tasting the bitter, metallic tang in my mouth.
I spat a thick clot of dark blood onto the destroyed mud at my feet.
The pain in my torn arm begged for distance, but the adrenaline and the hunting instinct burned much louder in my veins.
"No chance," I growled, my breath coming out in a harsh mist as I dug the soles of my boots into the unstable earth.
I spun the black wooden spear with my good hand. I forced the wind energy to compress around the blade with so much hatred that the aura formed an incandescent, screeching spiral, visually distorting the space around me with a high-pitched hum of invisible blades.
I lifted my face, flashing a lethal, red-stained smile as I locked my eyes onto the colossal mountain of teeth and acid smoke in front of us.
"We're going to shred this abomination. Right here and now."
*If we beat that, it'll be the biggest thing I've killed in all this time.*
I remembered the dragon that destroyed my village and how I couldn't do anything. That won't happen again. I won't lose my friends again.
When the Taranpus Queen took her first step, a crater opened beneath her colossal paw and a literal shockwave hurled mud, rocks, and dead trees into the air in a circular explosion.
I was thrown backward by the vibration, but I set off a violent blast under my boots to anchor my body.
*Don't let the mountain crush you!* I thought.
I slid swiftly beneath the debris storm, scraping my knees on the soaked mud.
I aimed for the exposed joints of one of her hind legs, focusing the wind blade at the tip of the spear into a single hyper-pressurized point.
When my weapon hit the monster's black scale, there was no sound of cutting flesh; the impact sounded like iron shattering against rough diamond.
Blinding orange sparks exploded, the recoil of the strike almost destroyed my wrist, and the blade barely left a deep scratch.
Before I could breathe, three truck-sized claws came sweeping horizontally through the air toward me.
I threw my body flat on my back in the dirt in a pure survival reflex.
The claws severed the wind inches from my face, tearing the air with a hollow, terrifying whistle.
The atmospheric pressure displaced by the simple movement of the paw was so absurd it swept me off the floor like a ragdoll, sending me tumbling uncontrollably through the bloody mud.
A silver flash intercepted death before the Queen could step on me.
Sillys was a furious comet.
She dove from the sky, driving her spear in a blistering dive straight into one of the open, volcanic scars on the monster's back.
The elven queen used the beast's own body as a springboard; she stepped on the incandescent scale, leaped with an acrobatic spin, and, mid-air, materialized her massive energy bow.
Sillys' firing rate wasn't that of an archer; it was heavy artillery.
In two seconds of hang time, she unleashed a barrage of hyper-compressed luminous spears.
The divine projectiles tore through the air and collided head-on against the monster's armored skull, detonating sequentially like high-impact grenades.
The air boiled with the smell of ozone and scorched scales. The flash of the explosion lit up the entire valley in a sickly blue hue.
I landed on my feet, skidding, breathless, waiting to see the creature collapse.
The smoke cleared rapidly.
The Taranpus Queen hadn't retreated a single, miserable millimeter; the carapace on her head was merely smoking black.
Her colossal red eyes pierced the curtain of dust, locking onto the still-falling Sillys.
Her triple jaw unhinged, and a roar of pure fury ruptured my eardrums, accompanied by a tsunami of yellow, acidic smoke that melted the earth around her, forcing us to fight on the extreme defensive against a nightmare that refused to bleed.
Far from our titanic nightmare, the main war drowned the elven army in an ocean of claws and teeth.
But there, under the rain of ash and dead leaves, Vandashi didn't show an ounce of panic.
He was military coldness incarnate.
"Wind Wall Formation!" Vandashi's callous voice cut through the horde's hellish chaos, guiding his squad.
The elite front-line elves stomped their boots heavily on the ground and raised their tower shields in perfect unison.
The compressed air around them formed a massive defensive spiral, repelling dozens of beasts trying to leap over the formation.
A perfect corridor of death opened through the middle of the enemy horde. Vandashi marched down the center, spinning his giant spear with geometric, relentless precision.
Every command was a bloody symphony: coordinated attacks, millimetrically calculated wind pushes, and an unbreakable discipline that ensured the line wouldn't break and none of his men bled in vain.
While Vandashi's vanguard advanced like a calculated, surgical machine, the eastern side of the battlefield operated on a radically opposite frequency.
Meticulous military strategy had been swallowed by the mass of enemies.
Group B was fighting completely cornered in a clearing of absurd density.
But, at the epicenter of that crush, Bigster Odássio sported an insane, mud-smeared smile.
He was no longer using his captain's spear; it had broken, and the weapon was too small for his fury anyway.
The elven giant had simply uprooted an entire smaller tree and was now swinging it through the air like a club of pure hatred.
The smaller Taranpus trying to jump on the back of his neck collided against the massive trunk and flew backward, shattered in the air like torn ragdolls.
Behind his wide body that functioned as a living wall, the line of archers fired in impeccable cadence.
Rains of wind arrows covered the skies, embedding themselves in the monsters and clearing the terrain.
"Come on, you bunch of useless runts!" Bigster roared, laughing at the top of his lungs as he smashed three monsters at once against the rock with the splintered tree.
"Today this damn forest is going to choke on its own blood!"
But not all the war was fought with showers of support arrows and shouts of heroic encouragement.
In the dark shadows of the rear guard, chaos had no rules or lines of defense.
Squad D, responsible for covering the infiltration flank, was plunged into pure, instinctive terror.
There, Laura fought almost entirely alone.
Her small platoon consisted of only a handful of scout elves, and none of them could—or dared to—match the crimson-eyed girl's absurd slaughter rate.
Laura's retractable claws gleamed an incandescent silver, slicing the space around her into dark, lethal blurs.
A Taranpus used the darkness to leap from a high branch straight into her blind spot.
Without even looking back, in a terrifyingly fluid motion, Laura bent backward, drove her bare hands straight into the free-falling beast's head, used the monster's momentum to rip its skull off with the spinal column still dangling attached, and kicked the decapitated carcass with such violence that it split a tree in half.
A rookie elf from her squad, completely broken by absolute terror in the face of that endless tide of claws, fell to his knees in the soaked mud, his fingers trembling uncontrollably on the shaft of his own spear.
Laura vanished from her spot and materialized in front of the elf.
She grabbed him by the collar of his armor with brute force and hurled him roughly behind her own back, planting her tiny but terrifying body as a living shield between the paralyzed boy and the jaws of death.
"If you want to live... stay with me!" she yelled, turning her pale face, now completely covered in splatters of black blood.
She was smiling.
It wasn't a gentle smile of hope.
It was the smile of an apex predator at the peak of its natural habitat.
A frenzy perfectly locked between sharp pain, blind fury, and insane ecstasy.
Her red eyes burned in the dark like two embers escaped from hell.
Every strike Laura delivered from then on was a masterpiece of pure savagery, bathed in a dark, brutal, and unshakable love for the survival of the terrified idiots marching behind her.
She laughed, as if all that carnage reminded her of something obscure from her past.