Mechanically, all heads turned to the wilderness into which Eik and Chop had disappeared to finalize Eik’s X-rank evolution.

  For the first few moments, nothing happened. Less than nothing as a matter of fact. It was as if the world stood still, held in place by the massive pressure in a death grip. But it didn’t last long.

  Briefly preceded by a low, quaking rumble, a virtual tidal wave of glittering azure rose up above the trees, ascending at speed as its true size was gradually revealed. Meter by meter it grew, until it completely obscured an entire grouping of large mountains on the horizon.

  All of the gathered people, S-rankers and low-rankers alike, stared in open-mouthed horror, the fear of death creeping in through every pore in their skin. The spawn of the Lord of the Moon stood frozen as well, its entire body quivering as if something trapped inside was trying to break free from a suit of solid steel.

  Up and up the blue mass rose and even when it pierced the miasma and then the clouds above it simply kept extending upward.

  “Wh-Wh…” someone managed to stammer but didn’t get further. A sharp gasp interrupted their words as the head of a titanic doomsday beast plunged back down through the clouds.

  Now that they were looking at the thing again, it was unmistakably a serpent, but it was just so… damned big that one would have to be insane to jump to creature as one’s first assumption. Its head blotted out the miasma-ridden sky and cast the entirety of the massive Dayarunar estate grounds and the surrounding districts in deep shade.

  And its mountain-sized azure eyes were trained right at their little group.

  “Is… Is that…?” Mn’Toakh breathed, recognizing the familiar hue of Profound Toxin. Her greatbow had slipped from her fingers and tumbled into the grass at her feet. Despite the horrifyingly spawn of the Lord of the Moon they were facing, she didn’t seem to have noticed it yet.

  “Dad!” Goo and Bin shouted together, hopping and waving enthusiastically as they tried to get their father’s attention. “Dad, we’re down here! We’re right here!”

  In one moment, the immobile world serpent gazed down at them from kilometers away, and then, in the next, the tip of its snout was a mere dozen paces above their heads. As if hanging suspended from the sky, it looked straight down at them.

  “Daddy’s back!” came the familiar voice from somewhere above, and a couple of seconds later, Eik dropped down from on top of its head.

  Bin and Goo were in his arms in an instant. He held back from hugging them back, afraid that his newly acquired powers would prove too difficult to control. That could become… ugly.

  Ihasu looked like she wanted to run over and join them but she still couldn’t quite get her body to obey her mind. Gul and Andihar simply looked on in relief.

  Mn’Toakh, P?lse, Balafo, Kalavax, and the rest of the Awakened warriors who had come to fight against the spawn all had expressions of utter disbelief etched on their faces. Their eyes kept shifting between Eik and the colossal serpent still hanging in the air like an omen of the end.

  “What… in the world is going on here?” the first to regain his ability to form a coherent sentence, P?lse, asked. Despite the incredulity baked into his tone, his voice was small and reserved, as if he wasn’t quite certain what kind of reaction he could expect to his question.

  Despite being an S-ranker himself, he now behaved like those of low rank speaking fearfully to high-rankers.

  Eik looked up as if noticing the gathering of Awakened warriors for the first time since coming back. “P?lse, Mn’Toakh, Balafo, Kalavax! Not to mention a good number of other faces I recognize!” he said with a pleasant smile. “Your presence here warms my heart. We need to band together against the threats on the horizon.”

  “Okay, yeah, that’s great and all,” P?lse said, still glancing at the spawn of the Lord of the Moon who was still standing unmoving in some bizarre manner of standby. “But just what is going on here? What happened to you? And…” he said with hesitation as his eyes inadvertently sought the world serpent. With how close it was, he could barely see its eyes properly even if he put his neck back. “what is that?”

  “That…” Eik said and swept an arm toward the beast. “is my new snake. I actually just caught him recently. I’ve been trying to think of a name for him.”

  “We should call him Spaghetti Jones, dad!” Bin exclaimed, pulling out that name as if she had been prepared for this exact situation all along.

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  “Actually, I believe his name was Spaghetti Jones, if I’m not mistaken,” Eik said, immediately pivoting into her idea. Because why the hell not? She had obviously inherited her excellent naming sense from him.

  “I… Okay, whatever. I don’t care,” P?lse said with a sigh. Now that he had seen for himself that Eik was the same annoying oddball that he had always been, a lot of the initial trepidation he had felt had faded. “What happened to you? Is this you doing? What the hell is going on?” he asked with a glance at the still frozen spawn.

  Eik’s eyebrows shot up when his gaze fell on the rotund spawn as if it was the first time he had noticed that it was even there. “Oh, shit, right. That thing is still here. That’s the one that was going to kill my children, wasn’t it?”

  Nobody said anything as he sauntered over to stand in front of the creepy bastard. Its wide and wicked grin was stuck in upturned excitement but the moment he let off some of the aura pressure it immediately fell hard, the corners of its mouth lowering so far that they almost touched the jiggly line of its jaw.

  The ugly creature flinched as it realized that it had been released from the spiritual choke hold, prompting a shout from Mn’Toakh. “Eik, what are you doing? That thing is dangero—”

  Not letting her finish, the spawn whirled forward, attempting to maneuver past Eik and head straight for the two kids it had just seen the man embrace.

  Unfortunately for it, a hand with fingers that might as well have been made of indestructible steel seized it by the wrist so quickly that there was not even a hint of visible movement to react to. “I see you trying to get to my kids again,” Eik said, any sign of good humor gone from his voice which was now frigid and grave. “I would much prefer if you refrained from doing that ever again.”

  Effortlessly, he dragged the monster further away from his family. It struggled against him but it looked more like a three-year-old trying to stop an Antonov cargo air plane loaded to the brim with iron. Eik was utterly unaffected by its attempts.

  “You know,” he continued, not even bothering to look at the thing. “I am tempted to keep you alive to study your abilities and your unmistakable connection to that rat bastard called the Lord of the Moon.”

  “Eik,” Mn’Toakh hissed when she realized what he was about to do. “If we have this opportunity right now, then we really should use it to learn more about th—”

  “No,” Eik stated simply. His tone leaving no room for discussion on the matter. “This one is now aware of my relationship with my kids. I can’t risk keeping it alive. We already know how the spawn of the Lord of the Moon behave. They seek to torment us—and this one knows how to torment me. It has to die.”

  “She’s right,” P?lse said. “This could prove to be a serious advantage that might even allow us to turn the tides of this damned war! We need information! It's a risk worth running!”

  Eik's eyes crackled with fury as his aura sent a jolt through P?lse. “Nothing is worth that risk. We can use the next one. The previous one itself told me as much. They are endless.”

  “Listen, please!” Mn’Toakh tried again. “We can make sure that nothing happens to your family! We’ll keep it securely!”

  “I can’t trust that. Anything could happen. It’s not worth it.”

  She bit her lower lip in frustration. “Just… At least reconsider.”

  Eik was quiet, his blue eyes boring into hers when the spawn of the Lord of the Moon suddenly launched into another attack, this time exploding toward the low ranked family members of the estate workers.

  Before anybody else could even realize that something was happening, Eik’s entire arm disappeared. None of the usual indicators of activation of Backflow, True Toxic Harmony, or any of the other personal boosting skills that Eik used flared up. The natural strength of his body of the X-rank equivalent Supreme Divinity of Toxin was all he was running on right now.

  Not even bothering to look at the monster, his arm reappeared at his side shortly after which the spawn’s entire body was vaporized into a fine mist that drifted languidly into the wind.

  “Sorry not sorry,” he said and walked back to his family, Ihasu finally seeing her chance to jump into his arms. “I will never run the risk of them getting hurt,” he spoke into her shoulder although the words were directed at Mn’Toakh and P?lse. “But don’t worry. I will catch the next one for you as a special treat.”

  “Are there more in Gimleh now?” she asked, a shadow of concern appearing on her face.

  “Not that I can tell, and I can tell a lot now,” he reassured her.

  “What about the path they took to get here?” Andihar broke in.

  Eik clapped him on the shoulder. “Good point. I had kind of forgotten about that. I’ll find it.”

  And with that, he gently extricated himself from Ihasu’s arms and looked up into the sky.

  “What are you going to do?” Kalavax asked, his twin shields already on his back again.

  “Just, uuh… Hey, Spaghetti Jones, move a little bit, would ya? I can’t see anything,” he shooed with a wave of his hand. The snake obeyed, its leviathan body moving with absolute, spine-chilling silence, as if it was made of air.

  A sphere the size of a basketball manifested in Eik’s palm. Nonchalantly, he lobbed it skyward and when it reached its apex a couple of hundred meters above, it burst into an army of thousands of Living Manifestations that scattered in all directions.

  “They’ll find the path soon. And Spaghetti Jones is a good boy, so I’ll send him to destroy it.”

  Thalandi was the next to speak, finally asking the question that had been on everybody’s mind. “Have you… Have you truly reached X-rank?” Even though they had just witnessed a being against which they had been hard-pressed to put up a good fight be utterly annihilated with such ease that it was almost comical, X-rank was a realm so far above reality that most had thought it to be nothing but a myth.

  And now a man many of them had known since he was a common, low-ranked greenhorn, stood before them, having supposedly broken through to that realm. Anything but skepticism would have been foolish.

  “Pretty sure, yeah,” he said with a nod.

  “What does that mean?” Bin asked.

  Eik lifted up her and Goo and spun them around. “It means that it’s time to fight back.”

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