After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 59: Beating & Farming

The wolf decided he didn’t want the lesson.

He broke sideways, kicking up a wall of ash, and bolted for the tree line. Fast. Faster than anything the Earth hunters could have followed, a grey streak weaving through the burning trunks.

’Running now?’ Aidan sighed. ’And here I was being polite.’

He reached out with electromagnetism.

Not at the wolf. At the ground ahead of him. He seeded a wide net of charge across the ash and snapped it taut, and the wolf’s next stride landed in a field that grabbed every scrap of metal on him, his claws, his buckles, his teeth, and yanked him flat mid-run.

The wolf hit the dirt face-first and skidded.

Before he could scramble up, Aidan was already there, one armored boot pressing him down between the shoulders, unbothered.

"You camp a whole world and beat up tired people for points," Aidan said, conversational. "And the second someone hits back, you run. That’s just embarrassing, buddy."

The lion chose that moment to be a hero.

He came off the ground with a roar that shook ash from the trees, gold mane bristling, both claws blazing with a peak Legendary technique that turned the air molten around them.

"GET OFF HIM!"

’Oh good. The other one still has fight in him.’

Aidan turned into it.

He didn’t dodge, didn’t guard. He shifted into Heavy Artillery Mode, and the Argon Exo-Armor bloomed open along his shoulder and forearm, panels sliding aside to bare a dense crimson core that whined as it spun up.

The lion’s molten claws came down.

Aidan’s counter came up.

He caught the strike on his gauntlet, let the Divine-10 Health eat the heat like it was bathwater, and drove the charged fist straight up into the lion’s chest at point-blank range.

The core discharged.

A lance of compressed crimson force punched clean through the technique, through the guard, and into the lion, hurling him up and back in a screaming arc. He crashed down forty meters away, carved a trench through the ash, and did not get up quickly.

Silence settled over the clearing, broken only by the whine of the armor cooling.

Aidan lifted his boot off the wolf.

"Up," he said. "Both of you. Go get your leaders, whoever’s actually in charge of your little clan. Tell them the tear’s spoken for now, and Earth’s hunters walk in and out whenever they please."

The wolf dragged himself upright, ash caked to the blood on his muzzle, staring at Aidan like he’d sprouted a second head.

"You’re not even Legendary," he rasped. "That aura is borrowed. Your real rank is Epic. I felt it before you put that armor on." His yellow eyes narrowed with something close to disbelief. "What kind of monster reaches peak Legendary strength through borrowed power at Epic-rank?"

"The kind you shouldn’t have poked." Aidan flicked a hand toward the tear behind them. "Run along. Message to deliver, remember."

The lion peeled himself out of his trench, one arm hanging wrong, and limped to the wolf’s side. Neither of them tried anything else. They’d felt exactly how that ended.

Together they backed toward the tear’s exit, never quite turning away from him, and vanished through the black slit.

’And there go the guard dogs.’ Aidan rolled his shoulders under the armor. ’They’ll be back with worse. Good. More to farm.’

[Arthur: You didn’t let me eat either of them.]

’They didn’t kill anyone, so neither did I. Fair’s fair.’ Aidan glanced up at the red sky. ’Besides, I’ve got a quest that needs ten dead Legendary Terrors, you can eat those.’

[Arthur: ...Terrors don’t taste good.]

[Jovan: They taste like regret and static.]

[Arthur: See? Uncle agrees. Terrors are gross.]

’You’ll survive. Now let’s find some.’

...

Aidan didn’t have to look far.

A Legendary-rank Terror Tear was a violent place, and this one churned with monsters. He struck out from the clearing, Arthur’s armor humming around him, and let the tear come to him.

The first Terror found him within the hour, a thing of black chitin and too many jointed legs, tall as a house, screeching as it burst from a fissure of purple light.

[Legendary-rank Terror.]

’One.’

Aidan met it head-on. He wove metal and lightning into a spear of charged force and drove it through the Terror’s central mass, then dumped a burst inside it. The thing came apart in a spray of dispersing black smoke.

It did not stagger dramatically. It did not roar a final defiance. It simply popped like a bad idea and was gone.

[Level up.]

[Level up.]

[Level up.]

The second and third came together, winged and shrieking. Aidan pulled them out of the sky with electromagnetism, slammed them into each other, and finished both with a spinning arc of wind-blade before they hit the ground.

He kept moving, kept killing, and the kill count ticked up in the corner of his mind.

[Legendary-rank Terrors slain: 3 / 10.]

He fell into an easy rhythm, the way he had in his own world, except here every kill fed his level and his stats instead of his inventory. He could feel it working. A slow, steady swelling of power with each Terror that dissolved, his Epic-rank foundation getting denser, richer, meaner.

’This is more like it.’ He cored a four-armed brute through the skull and moved on without breaking stride. ’A whole tear of free experience, and nobody left to bother me.’

[Legendary-rank Terrors slain: 7 / 10.]

[Level up.]

[Level up.]

[Level up.]

By the eighth, he was barely trying. By the ninth, he was eating a strip of Terror-adjacent monster meat he’d carved off something that had wandered in, chewing thoughtfully while a Legendary Terror charged him, and putting it down with a lazy backhand of pure burst.

’Yeah, that meat’s awful,’ he decided, spitting it out. ’Jovan wasn’t kidding.’

The tenth showed up bigger than the rest, a hulking, horned silhouette that clawed its way out of the largest fissure yet, radiating enough pressure to make the ash lie flat.

[Legendary-rank Terror. High-stage.]

’Number ten, and you brought some weight. Good.’

Aidan cracked his neck, and for this one he actually set his feet.

He layered everything into a single point the way he liked to, metal drawn dense, lightning threaded through, spin winding it into a howling drill, and he drove the whole thing into the Terror’s chest as it lunged.

The drill bored through and out the other side.

The high-stage Terror shuddered, its horned head tipping back, and then it unraveled into smoke from the wound outward, swallowed by its own dispersal.

[Legendary-rank Terrors slain: 10 / 10.]

[Quest 1 complete.]

[Reward acquired: 1 x Legendary Mystery Box.]

Aidan let out a slow breath as the levels rolled in, his stats climbing another notch, that peak-Legendary borrowed ceiling suddenly feeling a little less like a ceiling and a little more like a floor he was standing on.

’One down.’ He grinned inside the helm and turned toward the deeper heart of the tear, where a dull, sickly glow pulsed like a rotten heartbeat. ’Now for the core. Vaporize the tear, three more tickets, and the guild gets its mission cleared.’

He started walking toward that glow, unhurried, Arthur humming contentedly around him.

’Then I go home, spin eight tickets, and eat whatever Jiran’s cooking.’ He cracked his knuckles. ’Not a bad afternoon at all.’

Suddenly, Aidan’s ears twitched, his senses tingling.

He turned his head in the northwest.

"It’s him!"

"That’s the bastard who beat us!"

Aidan grinned.

’Alright, we got more guinea pigs to help us experiment and hone my combat.’