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

Chapter 60: Comedic Beating

They came pouring out of the northwest tree line like an avalanche with fur.

A dozen of them, maybe more. Beastfolk of every stripe, boar and bear and hyena and jackal, claws out, teeth bared, kicking up a storm of ash. And leading the charge, looking deeply reluctant about the whole thing, were his two old friends.

The grey wolf pointed a shaking claw at him.

"It’s him! That’s the bastard who beat us!"

’Aw, they brought the whole family.’ Aidan’s grin spread wide inside the helm. ’And here I was worried the afternoon would get boring.’

[Arthur: Master, there are so many of them.]

’I know, buddy. It’s like a buffet, except for punching.’

At the center of the pack strode a giant.

A black-furred wolf beastfolk, a full head taller than the rest, draped in so many trophy bones he rattled when he walked, radiating peak Legendary pressure and an absolutely colossal opinion of himself.

He planted a clawed foot, threw both arms wide, and inhaled for what was clearly going to be a very long speech.

"I AM VARETH BLOODFANG, CAPTAIN OF THE WOLFSHADOW WAR-PACK, AND YOU DARE LAY HANDS ON MY"

Aidan flicked two fingers.

Electromagnetism grabbed every bone trophy strapped to Vareth’s chest and yanked straight down, and the captain’s grand entrance became a face-first bellyflop into the ash, mid-word.

The entire war-pack skidded to a halt and stared at their leader eating dirt.

’Test one,’ Aidan noted, deeply satisfied. ’Villains fall over if you pull on their jewelry. Filing that away.’

[Jovan: Fortune foretold he would kiss the ground. Fortune is seldom wrong.]

[Arthur: Two out of ten. He didn’t even go airborne.]

Vareth came up spitting ash, eyes bulging with rage. "KILL HIM!"

The pack charged.

’Okay, real talk.’ Aidan rolled his neck. ’I need to hone a few combos anyway. And they volunteered. Let’s experiment.’

The boar reached him first, head down, tusks out, three hundred kilos of muscle at full gallop.

Aidan didn’t move. He just laid a patch of Epoxy on the ash in front of him and stepped aside at the last second.

The boar’s front hooves hit the patch and stopped dead. The rest of the boar did not. He folded over his own stuck feet, flipped, and planted his tusks into the ground so hard he stuck there, hind legs waving in the air like a very embarrassed flag.

[Arthur: Okay, that one’s a six.]

Two hyenas came in from the flanks, cackling that awful cackle they couldn’t seem to turn off.

Aidan caught the first by the scruff, and, because it was right there, swung him like a club into the second. They cracked together with a hollow bonk and went down in a tangled, still-giggling heap.

"Would you two stop laughing," Aidan said. "You’re losing. It’s confusing."

[Arthur: Combo hit! Seven!]

[Jovan: Fortune says the large bear is next, and that he is slow.]

The large bear was next, and he was slow.

Aidan had plenty of time. As the bear lumbered up with a raised paw, Aidan reached out with electromagnetism, found the iron greaves on the lion cowering behind him, and magnetized the two of them together back to back with a heavy CLANG.

The bear roared and tried to charge. The lion, welded to his spine, got dragged along backward, howling. They spun in a slow, furious circle, each pulling the other the wrong way, going absolutely nowhere.

"Teamwork," Aidan told them approvingly.

[Arthur: NINE. That’s a nine, Master.]

The grey wolf, to his credit, saw where this was heading and tried to quietly leave.

He got three steps before Aidan flicked a thread of Epoxy that glued his tail to the jackal beside him. The wolf lunged for the tree line. The jackal did not. The wolf’s tail did not come with him.

He yelped, spun, and got tangled with the jackal, and the two of them tumbled into the giggling hyena pile, which was now four beastfolk deep and getting worse.

’This is honestly relaxing,’ Aidan thought. ’It’s like tidying up.’

That was when Vareth Bloodfang got back into it.

The captain had scraped the ash off his snout and gathered his rage into an actual technique, black claws flaring with a peak Legendary shadow-art, the pressure of it flattening the ground for ten meters.

"ENOUGH GAMES!" he thundered. "SHADOW FANG RENDING"

He crossed the distance in a blur, both claws wreathed in tearing dark, and slammed the full weight of a Wolfshadow captain into Aidan’s chest.

Aidan let it land.

He didn’t shift into Titan mode. He didn’t even brace. He just stood there and let a genuine peak Legendary killing blow crash into his armor, and his Divine-10 Health absorbed it the way a wall absorbs a thrown grape.

The dust cleared. Aidan hadn’t moved a centimeter.

He looked down at the captain’s claws still pressed against his chestplate, then back up.

"You done?"

Vareth’s furious face slowly drained of everything except a very quiet, very deep dread.

"...What are you?" he whispered.

"Bored, mostly." Aidan poked him in the forehead.

Just poked him. One armored finger.

Vareth Bloodfang, Captain of the Wolfshadow War-Pack, left his feet, sailed backward across the entire clearing, and crashed through three ash trees before landing in a heap on top of his own war-pack, who had only just untangled themselves.

They tangled right back up.

[Arthur: TEN. TEN OUT OF TEN. He flew AND he took out his whole team.]

[Jovan: Fortune is weeping with joy.]

Aidan surveyed the clearing.

A dozen peak-tier beastfolk, the terror of this whole tear, reduced to a groaning, stuck-together, ash-covered pile of limbs and wounded pride, with their captain planted skull-first in the middle of it.

Not one of them dead. He’d kept his word.

’Now, presentation.’ He cracked his knuckles.

He walked over, and with a few lazy sweeps of Epoxy and electromagnetism, he stacked them. Neatly. A tidy, humiliating little pyramid of beastfolk, glued rump to rump and shoulder to shoulder, all facing outward, the captain crowning the top with his legs in the air.

Then he stepped back to admire it.

"Perfect." He nodded. "When your Divine-rank bosses at the Desmeral house ask what happened, this saves you the trouble of explaining."

The grey wolf, somewhere in the second row, made a small, defeated noise. "Please just kill us."

"Nope. That’s the whole point." Aidan patted the top of the pyramid, right on the captain’s upturned foot. "You didn’t kill mine. I don’t kill yours. But you did put my chef in a coma, so the two of us are going to be very, very even by the time I’m done using this tear."

He turned away from the sculpture and looked toward the deep heart of the tear, where that sickly glow still pulsed like a rotten heart.

’Right. Enough playing. Time to go pop the core, clear the mission, and cash in.’

[Arthur: Can we do that again on the way out?]

’If they’re dumb enough to line up twice, buddy, absolutely.’

He set off toward the glow, whistling, leaving a monument of stacked, sniffling beastfolk behind him in the ash.

Behind him, faintly, one of the hyenas started giggling again.

"Stop that. It’s getting on my nerves, and that’s bad news for you," Aidan called back without turning around.

The hyena beastfolk stopped, trembling, as an overbearing killing intent bore down on him.

He really just wanted to annoy this human who gave a humiliating beating to them, but the clear death he felt made him stop.

’Fuck! Who the hell is he?!’