Chapter 55: The Harvest
The second agile creature came from the left side. Nathan spun the scythe around his own body. The blade cut the creature at the neck. The head fell to one side. The body fell to the other.
```
SOUL HARVESTED
HP RECOVERED: +140
```
The third and fourth arrived simultaneously from the front.
Nathan advanced two steps.
The scythe moved as if it had a life of its own. One horizontal blade. One vertical blade. The two creatures split into four parts.
```
SOULS HARVESTED x2
HP RECOVERED: +280
```
The fifth agile one tried to attack from behind.
Nathan didn’t turn around.
He simply tilted the scythe backward with his right hand—the handle’s tip passing under his armpit—and the blade appeared behind him at exactly the creature’s neck height.
The creature fell without having come within a meter of him.
```
SOUL HARVESTED
HP RECOVERED: +140
```
The four large ones with stingers arrived last. In formation.
Nathan looked at the formation for half a second.
Then extended his left hand.
*Soul Pulse.*
The wave that came out this time was different from the previous ones. This one was dark green, with the density of fog, and filled the entire width of the passage. It crossed the four creatures simultaneously. They didn’t stagger.
They fell.
At the same time.
All four. With their stingers lowered. With their black eyes already empty before touching the ground.
Nathan lowered his hand.
```
SOULS HARVESTED x4
HP RECOVERED: +560
Bearer status:
HP: 1,260 / 1,420 (recovered at 89%)
Motor function: 100%
Status: transformation stable
```
Nine creatures on the ground.
Silence.
And at the far end of the passage, ten meters away, the leader stood alone.
With the divine fruit already digested. With half the fruit’s power absorbed into its system over the previous minutes. With the certainty that it had been about to win and was now about to lose everything.
It looked at Nathan.
Nathan looked back.
And smiled.
Not the tired smile from the stomping. Not the cynical smile from the early days.
A new smile.
Empty.
Annoyed.
The smile of someone who’d been stomped on for hours and now held in his hand a tool specifically designed not to forgive.
---
Nathan walked toward the leader.
One step.
Another.
The scythe hanging at his side. The black tunic swaying slightly although there was no wind. The green mark on his forearm glowing brighter with each step.
The leader retreated half a step.
Stopped.
Set its shoulders in a combat stance. The stinger rose above its head. The claws opened.
"Hunter," the leader said in its guttural voice, now slightly strained. "I don’t know what you are now. But you’re still mortal."
Nathan kept walking.
"You’re going to come with that weapon. I’m going to attack you. You’ll see. I’m still stronger."
Nathan kept walking.
"Don’t underestimate me."
Nathan kept walking.
He stopped two meters from the leader.
Smiled with the same annoyed smile.
The leader didn’t wait.
It lunged.
The stinger came from above with the specific force that had killed adventurers over the centuries the creatures had been in the dungeon. Nathan moved his head to the right exactly the necessary centimeters. The stinger passed beside his left ear. It embedded in the stone floor with the force of a metal strike.
Nathan smiled wider.
The leader withdrew the stinger. Struck with the claws of its right hand. Nathan raised the scythe’s handle. The claws impacted against the handle. All three shattered with the sound of bone against material harder than bone.
The leader screamed.
Nathan smiled wider.
The leader attacked with its left hand. Nathan spun around. The stinger came again from above. Nathan dodged it again. The leader roared with frustration. Attacked with its elbow. Nathan dodged. With its shoulder. Nathan dodged. With its hip. Nathan dodged.
Each attack perfectly evaded with minimal margin.
Each evasion accompanied by the same empty smile.
The leader retreated three steps.
It was panting.
Nathan hadn’t attacked once.
"What are you doing?" the leader growled.
Nathan tilted his head.
"Watching you," he said.
"Attack."
"I’m thinking."
"ATTACK."
"Soon."
The leader roared and lunged again. With all accumulated force. Stinger, claws, bite, entire body. All simultaneously.
Nathan dodged everything.
With the smile.
With his dark green eyes fixed.
With the scythe still unused.
The leader stopped a meter from him.
Panting.
With all three claws of its right hand broken. With one side wounded from crashing against stone in a failed move. With the stinger dripping poison that hadn’t managed to inject into Nathan because Nathan simply wasn’t where the poison should have entered.
The leader breathed three times.
And then, with a voice specifically different from all the previous ones, with a mix of rage and something dangerously close to fear:
"Stop mocking me, Hunter."
Nathan kept smiling.
"Take me seriously."
Nathan nodded slowly.
And the smile faded.
Abruptly.
The green eyes focused.
His body posture changed.
The scythe straightened.
And Nathan said, in the calm voice of someone who’d finally decided to end the conversation:
"Fine."
Two words.
The leader heard them.
Processed them.
And in the exact moment it processed them, every muscle in its body paralyzed simultaneously. The two meters eighty of corrupted humanoid mole turned into a statue. Its black eyes opened wider than was natural. The stinger, which had been raised in attack position, drooped.
The leader began to tremble.
Unable to move.
And its eyes, which until that second had been the eyes of a dominant hunter, were now the eyes of a creature that was specifically watching its own death walking toward it.
Nathan advanced a step.
The leader didn’t move.
Nathan advanced another.
The leader trembled more.
Nathan reached the leader.
Raised the scythe. With both hands. Above the humanoid mole’s head. The green blade glowed brighter. The handle warmed slightly in Nathan’s hands.
The leader looked up at him.
In its eyes, specifically, the specific question of someone about to die who still doesn’t understand how they ended up here.
Nathan looked down at it.
Without a smile.
Without cynicism.
Without exhaustion.
Only the final gaze of the Grim Reaper doing what the Grim Reaper existed to do.
And he brought the scythe down.
---
From the leader’s point of view, the scythe came down fast.
Too fast.
It saw the green blade descending from above. Saw the wavy edge. Saw the inner glow. Saw its own distorted reflection on the green surface for a fraction of a second.
Then.
Its vision split in two.
The left half of its visual field tilted to the left side. The right half tilted to the right side. The two eyes, now on two different heads, continued sending signals for the next three seconds to a brain that no longer existed as a single entity.
The leader saw, during those three seconds, two versions of the dungeon simultaneously.
The left half falling left.
The right half falling right.
And in the center, at the point where the divided body was only now finishing splitting, the explosion began.
---
The explosion was green.
It came from the exact point where Nathan had cut. It expanded in a perfect sphere that consumed everything within a ten-meter radius. The leader’s body disintegrated into dust. The stone floor sank. The passage walls widened outward with the force of a magical detonation that consumed physical mass and returned it as raw energy.
Nathan stood at the sphere’s center.
It didn’t touch him.
The energy surrounded him, passed through him, and was absorbed by the Seal mark. The black tunic billowed. The scythe vibrated. The handle grew warmer.
When the sphere finished expanding, it dissipated like green smoke that coiled toward the passage ceiling and disappeared.
Nathan lowered the scythe.
He stood in the center of a crater.
The crater measured approximately twenty meters in diameter. Perfectly circular. With walls smoothed by the explosion’s force. At the crater’s edge, the original carved-stone passage was now melted stone fused into irregular shapes.
Nothing remained of the leader.
No body. No stinger. No three broken claws. Nothing.
The System appeared in Nathan’s field of vision.
```
PRIMARY THREAT: ANNIHILATED
SOUL HARVESTED
Type: Major Corrupted Predator
HP RECOVERED: +1,200
MASSIVE SOUL PULSE EMITTED
Range: Entire dungeon structure.
Message: Predator Alert.
Effect on remaining creatures: forced dispersal by survival instinct.
TRANSFORMATION COST CALCULATED
Bearer’s original reserve: 1,420 HP
Transformation consumption: 1,320 HP
Resulting HP: 100 / 1,420
Status: FIT TO SURVIVE UNTIL
FOUND OR RECOVER ENERGY
ON OWN.
EMERGENCY TRANSFORMATION — END
REVERTING MANIFESTATION
RETURNING CONTROL TO BEARER
```
Nathan felt the change.
The scythe in his hand began to dissolve into green threads that rose toward the ceiling and dissipated.
The black tunic disintegrated into fragments that fell around him and disappeared before touching the ground. Beneath it, Nathan’s original clothes were there. Torn. Dirty. Stained with blood and dust. But present.
The gauntlets dissolved.
The Seal’s glow on his forearm gradually dimmed back to its usual tone.
And Nathan’s dark green eyes returned to his everyday eyes.
Which blinked once.
And again.
And with the second blink, all the weight of the stomping, all the weight of the poison, all the weight of two hours of combat and transformation and annihilation, crashed onto his body at once.
His legs buckled.
Nathan nearly fell to his knees.
At the edge of the crater he’d just created with a single strike.
He was, specifically, exhausted.
He heard a voice.
At the far end of the passage. Behind him. Fifteen meters away.
"Nathan."
Nathan recognized the voice instantly.
He turned his head slowly back.
And there, standing in the passage, with tears still not dry on her cheeks, with the stone already dissolved after the second use, with the Yeva mark on her forearm still emitting a faint glow, was Liaraen Sael’thoryn.
Watching him.
Nathan looked at her for a full moment.
Then, with a voice barely audible, with the small, tired smile as always, he said the only word left in his vocabulary:
"Sprout."
And he faded.
He fell forward at the crater’s edge. His eyes closed before his body hit the ground.
Liaraen ran.
The fifteen meters closed in seconds.
She reached Nathan’s side. Knelt. Lifted his head with both hands. Felt for his pulse at his neck with trembling fingers.
Weak.
But present.
Alive.
She exhaled.
And in that moment, in the silence of the deep pre-Pantheon dungeon passage, with the crater still smoking behind them and with the massive Soul Pulse alerts probably still dispersing the remaining creatures through all levels of the complex, Liaraen lowered her head until it rested against Nathan’s shoulder.
And for the second time that day, without dignity, without aristocratic containment, without the courtly training that had taught her for sixteen years not to do this, she began to cry.
But this time the crying was different.
It wasn’t desperation.
It was relief.
Comments