The Sharper Blade
It was a Sura of the Broken Horn, born upon the plains — a creature that had shattered the confines of a mere low-grade monster.
An internal shockwave warping the ecosystem. Another Anomaly unto itself.
A Sura never permitted anything to stand before its eyes.
How much humiliation had it endured simply to survive?
Its companions had been torn apart and devoured. Its parents had collapsed, bleeding out into the dirt. It had failed to protect its young.
The Sura had clawed its way through their sacrifices, surviving by the skin of its teeth. It had used those same sacrifices as openings — punching holes through monster flesh, carving wounds, killing. And at the end of that long, brutal path, the plains had given birth to a monster that would protect its own herd.
Everything the Sura did was a thrashing struggle to pour out the rage it had swallowed for so long.
So it fought. And fought again.
To protect the herd. To protect its territory. And to push its own horns to their absolute limit.
KrAAaaaa!!
For that purpose, Kespiratos would never stop its four legs.
"Hmph."
Alice snorted as she watched Kespiratos charge toward her. In the thin, steady rain, her peach-pink eyes gleamed with open challenge.
She understood the creature's heart. It wanted to know its own end — its own limit. Just like her.
Then from this moment on, it was a contest of who was the more finely honed blade.
Alice moved her staff. With the Essence gauge still empty, the staff was nothing more than a stick. For now, this would be a battle of technique.
Kespiratos charged. Its four massive legs pounded the ground as it drove its horns forward. Those three savagely broken horns were more than enough to skewer any enemy standing in its path.
That was its defining trait — matching the terror of those horns, a clean impalement meant instant death. Once you were run through, recovery was impossible.
Conversely, if you simply watched the horns, it wasn't that difficult an opponent.
Alice watched the charging Kespiratos. Anyone who would fall for an attack this straightforward would have died ages ago without ever casting a single spark of light.
She swung her staff and spun her body sideways in a fluid whirl.
A Whirl — evading a monster's pattern while striking at the same time.
She grazed past Kespiratos's horns and slammed the staff into its flank.
As if refusing to let any hunter who dared touch it go unpunished, the beast kicked off the ground, spraying water and mud, and whipped around. A sharp turn, then another charge.
But it was well within her predicted range.
Alice's eyes flashed. She planted her staff against the ground, poured strength through her entire body, and launched herself upward. Springing into the air, she locked the staff between her back and both arms and spun.
Spine Ride.
She rode the charging beast's back and dropped back to the ground. Using the residual spin, she planted a hand, let her legs skid across the earth, and bled off the impact.
Kespiratos, its back now turned, swung its head left and right and exhaled in ragged bursts. It drove its horns into the ground and heaved upward. The earth caught on those horns flipped over like an overturned table.
Alice backstepped clear of the flying dirt. Dust billowed for a moment before the rain smothered it flat.
She stepped onto the overturned earth and rushed forward. Keep letting it charge, and she would miss every opening to attack.
The broken horns whipped left and right as the beast shook its head. The horns lashed after her, but they only carved empty air.
A Whirl, followed immediately by a strike. She flourished the staff in a dazzling arc and brought it down hard. The damage, however, barely accumulated. Kespiratos snorted at the ticklish blow and lifted one massive leg high.
It meant to crush the fly that kept clinging to it.
Alice slipped past the descending leg by a hair's breadth with another Whirl, then swung the staff in a great arc toward its head.
Wheel.
A clean, satisfying crack rang out.
She didn't stop. She kicked off the ground, spun through the air, and came down with everything she had.
Great Wheel.
Crack!
The horn rang like struck metal.
It was a solid hit — yet it still felt underwhelming. Proof enough: Kespiratos didn't so much as flinch. Instead, as if finding her laughable, it drew its whole body back and drove its head forward in a sudden ram.
Alice spun away and retreated before the impact could land. Then she shifted her grip, holding the staff in one hand instead of two.
The Essence's power had filled to the brim and was surging. She had been waiting for this.
Liberation.
Alice drew out every last drop of the ominous energy welling up from the Essence.
Aaaawooo!!
A Luga-lac's howl rolled across the plain. Not the living beast itself — the roar of a lingering will.
The staff shuddered as if rejecting her. Alice tightened her grip. The vibration died under her crushing strength, and only then could she fully command the Essence's power.
A staff in Essence Liberation changed the nature and form of its attacks according to the Essence within. This one held a Luga-lac's Essence — so Kespiratos was about to learn what it felt like to be raked open by claws.
She swept the staff sideways.
The energy that burst from within took shape, resolving into razor-sharp claws. The Essence's dark crimson power tore through the air.
Kill it. Now.
Something rang suddenly in Alice's ear — half a voice, half a monster's howling. She paid it no mind. This was not the moment for questions about voices. She had a fight in front of her.
Struck by an attack that borrowed a monster's power, Kespiratos recoiled in confusion. It had never faced anything like this. Its reaction was only natural.
This time she raised the staff and swept it upward. A distance the staff could never have reached before Liberation — and yet, with the Luga-lac's attack layered onto the swinging weapon, the blow landed hard on Kespiratos.
The Luga-lac was itself one of the powerful mid-grade monsters of the Flooded Sea. Its strikes were nothing to dismiss.
Kespiratos shuddered as the attack shredded its hide, then leapt high into the air. It tucked its body and dropped, horns aimed straight at Alice.
Her evasion flowed naturally into a pre-Liberation Whirl.
The beast's massive bulk slammed down, spraying water and shaking the earth. Alice blocked the mud and water with her rain cloak, then shook it once clean.
And she did not miss the brief delay as the creature tried to wrench its horns free of the ground.
Alice gripped the center of the staff and spun it. The Essence's trail traced a perfect circle in the air.
Full Liberation.
She stabbed the staff into the circle's center like a period mark, and a dark crimson monster's hand burst forth, raking violently across the space in front of her.
Shrrrak!
The sharp blade-bone jutting from the monster's elbow left a long, deep gash across Kespiratos's body.
As the price of borrowing such power, the Essence's strength drained away in an instant and vanished.
So this is what it feels like.
Alice let out a breath.
"Haa…"
The Essence's power was stronger than she had expected. Whether reality itself had applied some kind of correction, she had never imagined it could produce this kind of destructive force. She could truly feel what it meant to borrow a monster's strength.
The greatsword. The longblade. The twin shields. Techniques that used Essence were even more effective here than they had been in the game.
A greatsword that borrowed a monster's raw physical power itself. A longblade that concentrated every ounce of force into a single cutting line. Twin shields that gathered Essence into one point and detonated it. And a staff that gave that power actual form.
Alice felt a vast, surging exhilaration.
This was nothing like the fight against the One-Eyed Luga-lac. Back then she had no armor, and her weapon had been garbage — the fight had dragged on forever.
But now, everything was perfect.
The armor crafted from Luga-lac hide had been refined under Matillo's hands into something elegant that protected her body. The weapon forged from Ekriki bone and scale-fur was harder and stronger than steel, even if the rain kept her from using its full effects. And the Essence itself could pour out its power freely, completely.
The truly tempered blade is me.
Alice took the staff in both hands again.
This is fun.
This power she was discovering all over again — it was far too much fun.
For Alice, killing monsters had always been something new and thrilling. The corners of her mouth curled upward in a grin that looked nothing like her usual cool composure. She seemed completely consumed by the joy of combat.
But her mind remained calm.
No matter how manageable Kespiratos felt right now, being gored by those horns still meant instant death. Dying in some absurd way was absolutely forbidden.
She kept constant watch on the horns' every movement. Her top priority was destroying those prized weapons of its.
When she couldn't use Essence, she prioritized evasion — but never forgot to attack and fill the gauge. Forgetting that would reverse the entire point of the fight.
Alice moved the staff. Once more she deployed the Essence's power and released it at maximum.
Crack!
The Luga-lac blade-bone summoned through the staff snapped one of the three horns clean in half.
KrRRAAA!!!
The violent shock sent Kespiratos sprawling, consciousness flickering out.
The groggy state that followed a destroyed horn. This opportunity would come three times in total — once for each horn.
She packed in as much damage as she could in that window, then pulled far back.
Kespiratos, for its part, was not about to go down quietly.
Just as the One-Eyed Luga-lac had a state where it vented blood-steam from its entire body, the Broken-Horn Kespiratos had a state of its own.
A few seconds later the monster rose, shaking its head, exhaling hard. It lifted its face toward the sky.
KRRR!!
It began gathering every scrap of power into its horns and releasing it. The horns flushed red and sprayed blood-qi in every direction.
From this moment on, the horn patterns grew more varied. Attack range expanded, and long-range homing patterns joined the mix.
At Kespiratos's transformation, the air grew thick and even more oppressive. An ominous energy blanketed everything. The blood-qi turned the surrounding raindrops into something that looked like drops of blood.
!!
Without warning, Kespiratos dropped its head and blasted the blood-qi stored in its horns straight forward.
It was an attack no staff could block. So Alice simply threw the staff aside.
Just as she had planned, she stomped hard on the shield lying at her feet. The shield sprang upward into her waiting hand.
Before the blood-qi could devour her, Alice thrust the shield forward.
Just Guard.
A dense impact slammed into her arm. She braced and deflected it sideways. The condensed blood-qi skidded along the shield face and ricocheted away.
If what came flying wasn't the horns themselves but blood-qi, a shield was more than enough to bounce it.
It must have thought, for a moment, that it had seized the upper hand.
That was a mistake.
Alice pulled the sword buried in the mud free. She flicked the blade once to clear the dirt, then walked forward at an unhurried pace.
The rest of those horns — she would break every last one of them with her own hands.