The moment my boot hit the dirt outside the glowing green barrier, the entire atmosphere changed.
Inside the Sage's boundary, the air had been crisp, smelling of pine and perfectly cultivated vegetables. Out here, the air was heavy, humid, and thick with the metallic stench of old blood and rotting leaves. The silence of the cabin was instantly replaced by the oppressive, suffocating sounds of the forest ahead.
I gripped the hilt of the Omnisword.
"Okay," I whispered, my voice sounding impossibly deep beneath the Beast Scarf. "I'm out. I am outside. No magical fence. Just me, a cheat sword, and a forest full of nightmares."
My heart pounded against my ribs. Not the frantic, panicked fluttering of the fat, useless kid I was yesterday. I was...excited! I wanted to fight, I wanted to hunt.
"Come on then!" I yelled, my voice echoing through the massive, ancient trees. "I know you're out there! Why are you hiding you pathetic cowards !!"
Rustle.
It wasn't a loud noise, but my senses were dialed to terrifying extremes. I heard the exact location of the movement in the canopy above me before I even looked up.
"Above," I muttered.
I didn't even bend my knees. I simply pushed off my back foot.
BOOM!
The dirt beneath my boot exploded, launching me backward a full twenty feet in a fraction of a second.
Where I had been standing a millisecond prior, three massive, horrifying creatures slammed into the earth. They looked like a cross between starved wolves and praying mantises—slick, hairless, pitch-black bodies mounted on six bladed legs, with jaws that unhinged all the way back to their shoulders.
"Appraisal!" I snapped.
[Nightstalker Crawler]
[Level: 220]
[Stats: [Aggressed]
"Two hundred and twenty," I laughed, the adrenaline suddenly completely overriding my fear. "HAHAHAHA That's right, come at me!!"
The three Crawlers shrieked—a sound like grinding metal—and lunged at me simultaneously. They were fast. To a normal human, they would have been nothing but black blurs of motion.
But to me?
It felt like they were moving through thick syrup.
"Too slow," I said casually.
My body moved entirely on instinct. I stepped smoothly into the space between the first two monsters. I extended the Omnisword and let the monsters' own momentum carry them through the blade.
Shhhk. Shhhk.
Two heads separated entirely from their bodies, sliding cleanly off their necks. The corpses crashed into the dirt behind me, instantly dissolving into black smog.
The third Crawler, realizing its packmates were dead, tried to pivot mid-air, raising two massive scythe-like arms to block me.
"Oh, we're blocking now?" I smirked.
I swung the Omnisword directly into its crossed scythes. I didn't even put my full strength into it. I just wanted to see how hard I needed to swing to kill it.
There was absolutely zero resistance.
The silver blade sheared through the creature's armored forearms, through its chest, and out its spine without so much as a metallic clink. The monster fell apart in two neat halves, turning to smoke before it even hit the ground.
"Wow," I breathed, staring down at the blade. "This sword is broken. It's actually, literally broken. I didn't even feel anything."
PING!
[Experience points acquired.]
[Experience points acquired.]
[Items collected]
"No level up yet," I muttered, shaking my head. "Guess Level 200s don't cut it anymore when my base stats are sitting in the thousands. I need tougher prey."
I didn't have to wait long.
The smell of the dissolving monsters and the noise of my brief fight acted like a dinner bell. The underbrush surrounding me began to shake. Red, glowing eyes began popping up in the darkness between the massive tree trunks. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
A massive pack of armored, bipedal lizards carrying crude bone clubs stepped into the clearing.
[Saurian Berserker]
[Level: 250]
"Thirty of them," I noted, a massive, unhinged grin spreading across my face beneath the dark scarf. "Alright. Let's see what else this armor can do."
I sheathed the Omnisword. It slid into the scabbard on my back with a sharp click.
"No sword," I called out to the pack, raising my armored fists, dropping into a perfectly balanced fighting stance courtesy of my newly acquired Martial Arts skill. "Let's throw some hands! Come on!"
The Saurians roared in unison, a deafening wave of sound, and charged me in a massive, stampeding horde.
I didn't wait for them. I shot forward, faster than even they could track. Reeled my fist back and punched forward as hard as I could.
CRACK!
BOOM!!
My fist didn't just break its ribs; it completely blew through its entire torso. The shockwave of the punch blasted out the creature's back, hitting the two lizards behind it so hard they were sent flying into the tree line like ragdolls.
"HAHA! YES!" I roared, the intoxicating thrill of absolute power taking completely over.
I ducked under a wildly swinging bone club, grabbed the Saurian by its scaly throat, and effortlessly threw its massive, five-hundred-pound body into a cluster of its friends. They went down like bowling pins.
"My turn to kick!" I shouted.
I channeled my focus into the Bloody Hinds. The dark metal leg armor hummed violently. I pivoted on my left foot and threw a roundhouse kick directly into the side of an incoming lizard.
BOOM!
The sound barrier shattered. The Saurian's body literally folded in half around my shin before being launched through the air at supersonic speed, snapping a three-foot-thick tree trunk cleanly in half upon impact.
"This is incredible!" I laughed, weaving through the horde. A massive smile on my face, I could see why characters like Garp and Natsu loved throwing punches instead of using swords. "Is that all you got huh!!! Come on I haven't even broken a sweat yet!!"
I danced through their ranks. Every step, every punch, every kick was flawless. My body was an instrument of absolute destruction. A bone club slammed directly into my shoulder—a hit that would have pulverized a normal human into red paste.
I didn't even flinch. My defense, combined with the Savage Scale armor, made the impact feel like I had been hit by a rolled-up newspaper.
"Was that supposed to hurt?!" I yelled, grabbing the club, ripping it out of the monster's hands, and smashing it over its own head. "Because it barely tickled!"
Within three minutes, the clearing was empty. Thirty Level 250 monsters had been reduced to a thick cloud of dissipating black smog and a massive pile of glowing loot drops.
I stood in the center of the carnage, my chest rising and falling slowly. I wasn't even breathing heavily. The Tomato of Super Strength had given me so much vitality I felt like I could do that for ten hours straight without breaking a sweat.
"Too easy," I sighed, stretching my neck. "System! This is too easy! Where are the heavy hitters?!"
As if the universe itself had heard my arrogant, stupid challenge, the ground beneath my feet violently lurched.
THUMP.
The ground beneath me shook.
THUMP.
The birds sitting on the branches above me scattered, fleeing into the sky in absolute terror. The air in the clearing suddenly grew incredibly heavy, suffocating.
"Okay," I muttered, my grin fading slightly, my hand automatically reaching over my shoulder to grip the hilt of the Omnisword. "I might have spoken too soon."
From the darkest part of the tree line, it emerged.
It was easily twenty feet tall. It looked like a grizzly bear, if a grizzly bear had been crossbred with a rhinoceros and then heavily mutated by dark magic. Its entire body was covered in thick, jagged, obsidian-like plating. Massive, crystalline spikes protruded from its spine, crackling with dark purple lightning.
"Appraisal!"
[Calamity Ursa]
Level: 480
Stats: [Unknown - Appraisal Level Insufficient]
My eyes widened. "Level four hundred and eighty. Stats unknown. Great. Perfect. This is fine."
The Calamity Ursa locked its glowing purple eyes on me. It opened its massive jaws, and a blinding orb of condensed purple lightning began to gather in its throat.
"Oh, you shoot lasers!" I yelled, dropping my center of gravity. "Of course you shoot lasers!"
VZZZ-BOOM!
A beam of pure, destructive electrical energy thicker than a car blasted across the clearing.
"Move!" my brain screamed.
I threw myself to the side, diving into a roll just as the beam annihilated the space I had been standing in, leaving a deep, glassed trench in the dirt that stretched for fifty yards.
I sprang back to my feet, drawing the Omnisword in a single, fluid motion.
"Hey, ugly!" I shouted, pointing the silver blade at the massive bear. "You missed!"
The Ursa let out an earth-shattering roar, the spikes on its back flaring with violent energy, and charged. Every step it took fractured the ground. It crossed the distance between us in an instant, raising a massive, armored paw the size of a dining table to crush me.
"Let's test this defense!" I roared back.
I didn't dodge. I raised the Omnisword horizontally, bracing the flat of the blade with my left hand, planting my feet squarely in the dirt.
CLANG!
The impact was bone rattling.
The sheer weight of the blow didn't cut through the sword—the Omnisword was indestructible—but the transfer of force shook my bones. My boots dug massive trenches into the soil as I was forcefully pushed back twenty feet, the ground tearing up around my legs.
My arms trembled violently under the weight. The bones in my forearms groaned.
"URGH!" I grunted, my teeth gritting hard. "Okay! You actually hit hard!"
The bear leaned its full weight down, trying to crush me into the dirt. Its purple eyes burned with raw, murderous intent.
I can't just tank this, my mind raced, processing the data at supercomputer speeds thanks to my Intelligence stat. It outweighs me by twenty tons. I need to use the armor.
"Let's see what this reverse scale does!" I yelled.
I deliberately shifted my grip, reaching my left hand across my chest, and forcefully tapped the singular, inverted crimson scale hidden on the pauldron of the Savage Scale armor.
The changed happened in an instant.
An explosion of blood-red aura erupted from the armor. A blinding, deafening wave of absolute, pure rage flooded my mind. It didn't override my consciousness, but it completely erased my physical limiters.
"GET OFF OF ME!" I bellowed.
My Attack stat surged, temporarily doubling. I shoved upward with explosive, terrifying force.
The Ursa's eyes widened in brief, primal shock as its massive arm was forcefully thrown off me, throwing the twenty-foot beast entirely off balance.
"My turn!" I screamed, the red aura flaring fiercely around my body.
I leaped into the air, the Bloody Hinds propelling me thirty feet straight up until I was directly level with the monster's face.
"Special Move!" I commanded the leg armor. "IGNITE!"
The dark metal of my boots erupted into a roaring, blinding vortex of magical fire. The heat was so intense it warped the air around me.
"EAT THIS!"
I spun violently mid-air, delivering a devastating, flaming roundhouse kick directly to the side of the Ursa's armored jaw.
KRA-KOOM!
The impact sounded like a bomb going off. The flaming kick shattered the obsidian plating on its face, sending a shockwave of fire rippling across its head. The massive beast was literally lifted off its feet, its head snapping violently to the side as it crashed into the dirt with an earth-shaking thud.
But it wasn't dead. Even with a shattered jaw, it desperately tried to push itself back up, purple lightning arcing wildly from its spikes in a panicked frenzy.
I landed softly on the grass.
"I don't think so," I whispered, my voice cold.
I took one step forward, and raised my hand. My item box appeared and I reached in to grab the absolute spear and pulled it put. Reeling my arm back I took a stance, the system appeared beside me revealing my spearmanship level. And I threw it as hard as I could.
The spear shot straight through the Ursas head like a cannon ball, it's entire head blew apart in an instant as the spear head dug a trench into the ground and came to a stop with smoke coming out the dirt.
The Calamity Ursa's massive body froze. The purple lightning fizzled out its headless neck. A second later, the entire twenty-foot carcass instantly dissolved into a massive, suffocating cloud of black smog.
I stood there, the Omnisword pointed toward the ground, the red aura of the Savage Scale slowly receding.
The heavy silence of the forest returned.
PING!
The golden light of the system flashed violently in front of my face.
[Massive Experience points acquired.]
[Level up!]
[Level up!]
[User has reached Level 102!]
[40 BP Added to User's Pool.]
I let out a long, ragged exhale, the sheer exhaustion of the intense focus finally catching up to me.
"Level one hundred and two," I breathed, looking down at the massive pile of glowing loot the Ursa had left behind. "Two levels from a boss that size."
I sheathed the Omnisword, the click echoing loudly in the quiet clearing. I looked at my hands, feeling the thrumming, undeniable power pulsing through my veins. The armor felt lighter.
"I'm strong," I whispered, a slow, genuine smile creeping across my face. "I am actually, super strong."
I threw my head back and let out a loud, echoing laugh that pierced the dark woods of the forest.
"IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT?!" I screamed into the dark trees, my voice dripping with absolute confidence. "BRING ME THE NEXT ONE! I'M JUST GETTING WARMED UP!"