Chapter 277: Prowling Darkness
"This arena really is compensation with teeth," he muttered.
The challenge had not brought him back to the ravine because it did not need to. It had built a cleaner version of the Dark Beast’s preferred territory and dropped him into the center of it before he could ignite so much as a spark. In darkness, the creature gained speed and damage. In darkness, its entire body almost vanished from his sight even with the Basilisk Eyes helping him. In darkness, it could shift position through shadows and let its aura slowly wear down anything unlucky enough to survive the first few attacks.
But there was a second part to the ability.
Under sufficient light exposure, the opposite happened.
Kael’s hand slowly left his bleeding shoulder.
"So, I do have a shot," he said.
A low growl rolled through the arena, vibrating against the stone beneath his boots. The beast had not immediately attacked again, which made it more dangerous rather than less. It had tasted his blood. It had confirmed its claw could rip through him. Now it was circling, waiting for him to slow beneath the exhaustion of its aura before striking somewhere fatal.
Kael could already feel it. The air around him carried a heaviness that was not physical weight, a dragging pressure in his muscles that encouraged every breath to become slower and every reaction to become late. If he tried to remain patient and trade small dodges with this thing, it would not matter how stable his body had become during training. Eventually the Dark Beast would force the mistake it wanted.
The beast wanted its prey to think that being prudent is wise. It never is.
He brought his gauntlets together.
The first strike rang out through the cavern with a hard metallic clang.
The Fire Rune answered.
A bloom of orange flame crawled over his right fist and surged along the reinforced mechanism of the gauntlet, light spreading across the immediate ground around him. The darkness recoiled from the glow, not vanishing entirely, but thinning enough for Kael to make out the beast’s outline more clearly. It had stopped prowling.
Kael slammed his fists together a second time.
This time the chain link connecting the gauntlets caught the runic current and carried the heat across. The second fist ignited, fire rolling around both gauntlets until he stood with two burning hands lowered at his sides. The light was not large enough to illuminate the entire cavern. Beyond several meters, the arena still belonged to shadow. But inside the reach of his flames, the effect was immediate.
The Dark Beast drew its head back.
Its shoulders lowered in a different way than before, not preparation for a confident attack, but a reflexive recoil from something it hated. The layer of darkness clinging to its hide thinned where the firelight reached it, exposing patches of matted black fur and dense muscle underneath. For the first time since the challenge began, Kael saw the creature not as an untouchable shadow stalking prey, but as flesh forced briefly into view.
The notification had been honest.
The light weakened it.
Kael smiled despite the blood dripping from his shoulder. "Now you’re less enthusiastic."
The Dark Beast answered with a hiss so deep it seemed to scrape across the cavern floor. It stepped backward, maintaining the distance where Kael’s flames could not fully touch it, and the darkness around its body thickened once more. Kael did not let it settle. If the creature wanted darkness, then giving it time to choose the shape of the next attack would be idiotic.
He rushed forward.
The flames around his fists streamed behind him as he closed the distance, transforming his movements into brief flashes of orange against the black arena. The Dark Beast did not charge to meet him this time. Instead it shifted sideways, body flattening as its paws touched the deeper shadow cast along the stone floor. Its outline sank instantly, not like a creature ducking beneath cover, but as though the darkness had become liquid and swallowed it whole.
Kael halted before overcommitting to empty ground.
The beast was gone.
No, not gone.
His eyes caught the smallest irregularity in the shadow behind him. A section of darkness that moved against the flame’s flicker rather than with it, forming claws before the rest of the creature had fully emerged. Shadow Shifter had not simply made the Dark Beast invisible. It had moved the bastard from one portion of darkness to another without making it cross the distance in between.
Kael twisted just as the creature exploded upward from his rear.
The two massive claws came in from either side, trying to catch him between them before the fangs finished the kill. The first instinct in his body was to throw himself backward and escape the reach entirely, but his shoulder still burned from the lesson he had already paid for. Even a graze from those claws cut through armor. Retreating from a creature almost twice as fast in darkness would only leave him at the end of its full swing.
So Kael did the opposite.
He stepped in.
The jaws opened above him as he threw his body forward, passing into the narrow space between the sweeping claws before they could close. For a single terrifying instant, he was directly beneath the Dark Beast’s chest, close enough to smell its rancid breath and see the thick cords of muscle beneath the dark fur of its torso. The darkness wrapped around it resisted the fire coating his hands, shuddering like cloth caught too close to flame.
Kael planted his foot, twisted from the hips, and drove his burning fist upward.
The uppercut struck the Dark Beast beneath its ribcage with enough force that the impact flashed through the cavern. Fire compressed against flesh for the smallest fraction of a second, then surged outward around Kael’s fist, lighting the creature’s underside as the strike emptied its lungs in a violent choking sound. The beast’s body lifted from the ground, its front limbs flailing wide as the punch ruined the attack it had believed would kill him.
It flew backward and crashed hard against the stone, rolling once before digging its claws into the floor to stop itself. Its mouth opened, but instead of a roar, only a harsh cough escaped it. The great prowler wheezed, chest spasming as it struggled to recover the breath Kael had forcefully driven out of it.
Kael lowered his smoking fist and watched closely.
The blow had landed.
More importantly, it had hurt.
But again... It didn’t die. That was one of Kael’s strongest punches, it could easily turn stone to dust, but here, it merely made the beast lose its breath for some time.
He had not broken the creature apart the way he had done to the Stone Maw. He had not expected to. This thing was an actual hidden boss, built around speed, assassination, and an advantage so extreme in the dark that one careless exchange could end the challenge. But its ribs had yielded under his fist. Its breath had broken. It could be injured, it could bleed. It could die.
The Dark Beast looked toward him, and the way its posture changed sent a different kind of caution through Kael.
It no longer considered him helpless prey.
The creature coughed once more, then its body lowered into the darkness beneath it. The flames around Kael’s hands pushed back the nearest shadow, but beyond that narrow circle the cavern remained vast, black, and connected. The Dark Beast did not try to leap at him in anger. It sank away completely, returning to the hunting ground where its speed, its shifting, and its patience were still at their most dangerous.
Kael adjusted his footing, keeping both burning fists raised as he slowly turned in place. The dragging pressure of Prowling Darkness had not vanished. It still weighed against his limbs, slowly taxing his body while the beast disappeared from sight. He had won one exchange and learned the most important fact of the fight, but the creature had learned something as well.
Fire hurt it.
His eyes could catch it when it moved close enough.
And striking him head-on was no longer safe.
Somewhere in the outer darkness, claws scraped softly against stone before becoming silent again.
Kael felt his smile fade into concentration.
The Dark Beast was prowling once more, and this time it knew exactly what it was hunting.
For a brief moment, nothing happened, even Kael thought it strange. The beast simply remained hidden in the darkness, no amount of waiting was going to pull it out. For a time Kael thought, what if the beast simply remained within the shadows until Kale could no longer move from the exhaustion aura?
Wouldn’t that be a shitty way to die?
Panic was about to start rising in Kael’s mind before he shook his head. He was used to panic, and was used to suppressing it. And was used to overcoming it. Days and months of being thrown into a deep river where he could do nothing but hold his breath and fall down like an anchor taught him one thing.
A calm mind exhausts much less powerfully than one that is frantically thinking of escape. A mind that is able to think is a mind that is capable of reasoning and survival.
And right now, there was only one thought in Kael’s mind.
"If you like to hide in the shadow so much..." He raised one fist up, "Show me how you’ll hide when there is no shadow left!" and he struck the ground down.
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