“Yeehaw, baby!” he bellowed, leaves and twigs whipping him across the face as they came out of the earth. “I’m riding a fuckin’ hydra!”

  Hurt as it was from his attack, it wasn’t particularly fast but it still beat the hell out of walking on his own. Almost like a cartoon, the hydra used its powerful tail as something halfway between a whip and a spring to propel its considerable body tens of meters above the tree tops with each leap.

  “Forward! Go faster! Faster!” he yelled, slapping the beast’s tongue. Somehow his words seemed to reach it because it put even more effort into it. Long whiskers extended from the sides of its snout and he gripped them in each hand to steer.

  The hydra was completely and utterly terrified of him.

  Trees flew by in a blur as they rapidly approached one of the towering monoliths. Thirteen smooth stones were burning a hole in Eik’s rucksack of holding. It had taken this long to finally get to a point where he could actually find out what this dumbass tests was even about, and that had him in a mood that could be best described as royally pissed off.

  “Whoever’s up there, we’re going to murder them,” he roared to the hydra, tucking extra hard on its whiskers. “Got i—”

  An ear-splitting explosion took the monster square in the side at the split of its eight heads. Eik was thrown bodily from the hydra’s mouth as it let out a wail of pain and surprise.

  His face a portrait of rage, the purple Profound Toxin coursing through him suddenly surged out to create a semi solid structure in front of his eyes. It extended up to cover his forehead and down and around his chin. The face part looked like an eerie voodoo ritual mask, strange patterns swirling and pulsating as he moved, seeming to follow his face only lazily and almost unwillingly.

  “You!” he bellowed at the beast as he fell toward the ground. “Get whoever did that! Sic! Sic ‘em!”

  Eyes lost in the churning face of the mask, the hydra hesitated before diving in the direction of the attacker. But before it could get to them, Eik saw several additional projectiles slam into it, two impacting a neck each while the rest pummeled the body.

  There were both fiery bolts that exploded on collision as well as needle-sharp icicle that spread glinting white sheets of ice anywhere they hit.

  At speeds that belied its injuries, the hydra continued to advance, its remaining heads lashing down with extreme velocity and force to strike at something unseen on the ground among the trees. On the way down, Eik tore through several thick branches back first. Only barely managing to right himself in time, he landed feet first on the ground.

  “Shit!” he cursed and set off toward the hydra from where booms of combat reverberated through the forest. Swallowing a dose of Potion of Mighty Strength class 2, his Backflow status allowed him to run like a bullet.

  Backflow derived from Visage of Death clearly didn’t empower his strength nearly as much as the standard blue version did, but it was still a massive boost when combined with other sources.

  Almost as if a switch had been flipped, the gleeful madness had faded in favor of a white-hot rage. That wasn’t quite as fun as the madness had been. Shit. Shit. Shit! An involuntary roar tore its way from his throat as he leapt for the still fighting hydra’s back.

  He slid across its scales as it went in for another attack but the undulant movements of its serpentine form bumped him up into the air, causing him to overshoot the target and sailing over a woman facing the hydra.

  Their eyes met and for a brief moment she looked utterly stunned to see him. The trail of toxic liquid trailing his path through the air, however, quickly changed that expression to panic as she leapt backward to avoid the falling substance while simultaneously sending a bolt of concentrated flame upward.

  Another projectile — this one made of ice — whistled straight past Eik’s head, white vapor pouring out of it even as it flew. As quickly as he could manage, Eik raised a crystalline shell in anticipation of any additional shots but none came before he sailed out of her line of sight, crashing down behind a copse of trees.

  Her right shoulder, rib cage, as well as the entirety of her upper arm was a mess of blood, staining her armor and undershirt and dripping into the grass. Bite marks along the edge of the stains were a testament to the hydra’s remaining strength. It was definitely a beast mightier than most of the challengers here, regardless of how weakened it had become after suffering from Profound Toxin.

  The moment he touched down, he dashed back, drawing the wakizashi from its sheath with a hollow hiss as he trampled through the copse of trees, shattering a thick branch in his way with a sharp elbow quick as lightning.

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  The woman never had time to react to Eik’s assault, preoccupied with the gigantic hydra as she was. A quiet gasp was all she could utter as he drove the sharp, slender blade up into her hip, almost directly up toward her torso. Most of her upper body was covered in armor, but he found a slim gap between her back plate and the segmented metal skirt that protected her butt and pelvis.

  Blood poured out as he ripped the blade free in one smooth motion, five little Living Manifestations scuttling in through the newly opened wound.

  She tore free a cudgel from her belt and attempted a chaotic and uncoordinated back swing for his head but he had already leapt out of range. A simple glance back at him was all the invitation the hydra needed to go in for the kill. It claimed her head in one fell swoop, the sound of her neck being separated from her shoulders muted, bony crunch. It chewed through her skull as Eik watched, his mind stuck somewhere between horror and morbid fascination.

  With those eyeless faces, the gigantic creature regarded him curiously. That was strange.

  There was barely any of that fear to see anywhere in its features. But he hadn’t—…

  A glance down at his own arm revealed what he had been missing. The purple streaks had faded, leaving nothing but dry, reddened skin in its place. He looked up just in time to see two heads blur as they struck from two different angles.

  It would have ended much worse if not for the shell of solid toxin he had already erected before. That one attack shattered it into several fragmented chunks and sent him flying back the way he’d come.

  Exhaustion from the lengthy Backflow of Visage of Death had left him weary but it was still barely worth mentioning compared to what he had gone through after even brief exposure to the standard version of the ability. No bone-grinding pain to be felt, except for wounds sustained in combat.

  What was there, however, was a mental weariness and remnants of rage and madness that seemed to refuse to leave their place in the back of his mind. That combined with a sense of impending doom made for a cerebral cocktail of frightening proportions. There was a price to pay after all, even if it wasn’t in the form of physical agony. He just hoped that these symptoms of the aftermath wouldn’t stick around permanently.

  Even as he stumbled backward, the fragments of crystalline toxin liquefying as they fell, the three more hydra heads pursued him relentlessly. Activating Toxic Liquefaction, he rushed for the hydra’s chomping maw but the beast snapped its mouth shut the moment he did, apparently too smart to fall for the same trick twice after all.

  Unfortunately for the hydra, he didn’t really need to go inside. He just need to get close enough to be able to trigger the present he had left inside. Abandoning the route of the mouth, he capitalized on the brief pause in the monster’s movement as it recoiled from his fluid form to stream up the side of its snout.

  With a thought, a quaking shock wave scattered him into the air like a kiwi fruit struck by a baseball bat as the copious amounts of liquid Profound Toxin he’d left inside the hydra was Accelerated. As a precautionary measure for exactly this type of situation, he’d poured as much poison into the bastard as he possibly could in the short time it had been dominated by fear.

  Although it was a bit of a mental strain to maintain for any significant length of time, he’d found himself capable of ordering Profound Toxin to lie low within a system without doing harm, just like he had with the Living Manifestation planted in the body of the unknown Gohkamorian.

  Waves of blue hue flashed across its skin, smoke rising from its form as it succumbed to a violent fit of convulsions. Having already suffered a considerably sized Accelerant earlier, the many-headed beast didn’t have the vitality to withstand this second attack as well, allowing Eik to climb onto its body.

  Drawing many deep and deliberate gashes through its flesh, he finally forced it to breathe its last, the serpentine being seeming to almost deflate as it died.

  He found two smooth stones laying on the hydra’s tongue, their surface showing no signs of having been covered in drool. They must have simply appeared there after its death like what had happened with the two he’d killed before. That made fifteen.

  Despite searching for a couple of minutes, he found no traces of a venom sac from which he could harvest alien toxin to use for experimentation. Going with the second best option, he filled a test tube with blood. For what purpose he wasn’t exactly sure. He had no equipment to look closely at it at home and, frankly, no idea how to do that kind of thing even if he did.

  But then again, he was feeling a bit insane still, so what the hell. It couldn’t hurt, right? He stuffed it into the rucksack of holding and stood up.

  The woman with the elemental attacks had wasn’t nearly as loaded as the lightning user and shield bearer. Considering that she had been here longer than they had when Eik met and killed them, it was a given that she would have used more but he still lifted two vials of a red potion that he identified as healing potion, bringing his total up to six.

  As for the rest of whatever she had been carrying, he ran into the same issue as before. Her bag of holding was inaccessible to anybody but her as its bound owner. He still strapped it to his belt and brought it with him, because why not? These people had years on him in the Unified Mass. It was only right that he got to pilfer their stuff when they died.

  Even from a distance it had been obvious that this mountain had just as many of those accursed worm tunnels as the one he had initially tried to climb. Careful to avoid each and every single one of them, he ascended the monolith with swift movements, the physical weariness from the Backflow ala Visage of Death long taken care of with a red potion of healing. Better safe than sorry, after all.

  For the first time since entering the forest, his fingers curled around the edge of the flat peak. With a final effort, he pulled himself up and stood up, taking in the place. Individual trees dotted the pinnacle, but the most eye-catching feature was the circular platform that was the source of the shimmering light visible from kilometers away.

  Someone had been sitting there on the twinkling surface. They now stood, towering above Eik like a giant. His fingers reached for the handle of the wakizashi on pure instinct.

  A wicked grin split the Gohkamorian warrior's lips.

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