Awakening of the Weakest Slayer

Vesta stood there staring at the ground, her chest heaving with every breath, as panic flared. Sezel stepped closer, his own heart hammering against his ribs, and pitched his voice to a whisper audible only to her.

"Run the moment the beast appears."

That was all he said. Vesta looked at him, her ruby eyes wide with a frantic confusion. The faint smile playing on his lips seemed so utterly, absurdly out of place that for a moment, she thought he had finally gone mad.

"I think you have gone crazy now." She said. But everything became terrifyingly clear the moment the earth trembled with a final, cataclysmic tremor.

Sezel and Vesta nearly lost their footing, stumbling as the very ground beneath them buckled. The tremors stopped as abruptly as they had begun, and in their wake, an unseen force descended, a pressure that felt as if they were suddenly in the presence of something ancient and utterly vicious.

The man, Captain Ruin, still suspended gracefully in mid-air, looked at them with a faintly confused expression. He was immune to the shaking of the earth.

Vesta, however, was staring past him, her body frozen stiff, her face a mask of pure, abject terror. It would be wrong to say that Sezel wasn't afraid. His own heart was beating like a war drum inside his chest.

Suddenly, a strange, thick mist began to envelop the area, rolling in from all sides like a silent, grey tide. The air became thick with a familiar, cloying metallic tang. Through the swirling fog, two large, crimson balls of light appeared, hovering high above the man's tiny, insignificant human body. They were not lights. They were eyes.

The man too felt a strange chill press down his spine. He turned slowly, and the bored, confident smirk on his face vanished, replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated shock. He bit his lip, his hollow eyes wide with a crippling horror as he beheld the enormous thing that now stood behind him.

The clouds rumbled again, and with a deafening roar of lightening, heavy gusts of wind tore through the ruins. The thunderstorm was no longer approaching. It was here. And the one who controlled it was here as well.

As the mist submitted to the wind, torn apart and dispersed, the form became clearer, with too little light to see, its features could barely be made out, a shifting, impossible mass of shadow and scale.

The assessment devices of all three Slayers chimed at the same time, an inadequate attempt to quantify the cosmic horror before them.

[Elite beast - Cecaelia Detected]

[Rank-2]

Sezel swallowed a thick glob of saliva, his throat as dry as dust., the beast was of the elite category no less, but just a Rank-2 that was at least a little less harmful. But it wouldn't make a difference. An Elite beast, no matter its rank, was considered to be almost as intelligent as a young human, around the age of 13 to 15.

The beast's lower body, was soft and smooth, reflecting the faint purple light of the Spirit essence. which were the only source of light around. The terrifying and humongous, coiling mass of eight colossal tentacles flew around its body.

The upper body was a grotesque, monstrous parody of a humanoid form, with four large, muscular arms, two on each side of its massive chest. Its skin was covered in hard, green-colored scales, each one as large as a man's shield, that pointed out from its body like a thousand jagged blades. If anything else only one word came to Sezel's mind as he looked at the beast, 'Ugly.'

Soon, the creature, easily two hundred meters tall, became completely visible under the eerie purple luminescence, a living mountain of scales and tentacles

A strange kind of feeling twisted Sezel's stomach as he looked at the beast, dazed. He had done this. He was the one who had called this thing here.

He pushed the thoughts out of his mind and turned to Vesta. She, too, was thinking the same thing, and she turned towards him at the same moment, their eyes locking in a silent, shared understanding.

"Let's go," Sezel said and he erupted into a sprint, diving into a narrow, alley on the side. Vesta nodded once and followed without hesitation.

Sezel's puppet caught up to them in no time. It held something in its scythe like hands—the long, cloth-wrapped sniper rifle the woman had carried. It handed the weapon to Sezel, who quickly slung it over his shoulder, and then, its task complete, the puppet dissolved into a swirl of black and purple mist and converged back inside his body.

CRASH!

A blast echoed behind them, a sound so powerful it made the very earth tremble again. The beast and the Slayer had, most likely, engaged in battle. By now, Sezel estimated, the other two members of the man's team would have caught up to him, adding their strength to the futile fight.

The biggest problem now would be the person on his team who could control Spirit Beasts. But that didn't matter for the time being. There was a ninety-percent chance it would fail. The thought of an Elite beast, a creature of such immense power and cunning, being controlled by a human was one of the worst things Sezel could possibly imagine.

"How did you do that?" Vesta asked, her voice a breathless, incredulous whisper as they ran.

"What? I did nothing," Sezel replied, his face a mask of feigned innocence.

"Don't play with me," Vesta said, a hysterical, half-laugh escaping her lips. "How did you make that thing come here?"

"Long story short," Sezel explained, his words punctuated by ragged, desperate breaths, "I made my puppet destroy one of its statues. And just as I envisioned, the beast followed to check what had happened to its territory."

Vesta didn't ask further, they needed to focus and run, the gusts had became almost as strong as a typhoon. They had taken an unknown path through the maze-like ruins, but they were sure, with a desperate, gut-wrenching certainty, that they would reach their destination if they just kept moving in the same direction.

Behind them, the continuous, earth-shaking blasts and tremors echoed through the night, a symphony of destruction that marked the struggle between the monster and the men.

Soon, the venomous rain would begin to fall, lashing down from the thunderclouds that seemed to resonate with the beast's rage. And as they ran, as they fled from the hell they had unleashed, Sezel and Vesta could only hope, with a desperation that was a prayer in itself, that Mari and Shiki were safe.