The Transcendent Godslayer

Kallen leaned against the wall of a building, his head lowered, and his breathing slightly labored.

Each exhale came out with a thick fog of white that drifted into the wind.

He found it quite lucky that it was raining—if it wasn't, with how fast and how long he had been running, his body should have been overheating.

In fact, right now, he felt incredibly hot and was sure he was probably exuding vapor because of his bodily heat—if someone could see him. But with how dark the sky was, that might not be happening.

As his pulse steadily slowed, he felt a sudden change in the atmosphere, and his eyes sharpened.

'Another one?'

Whoosh

The sound of something slicing through the air, cutting through the rain, drifted into his ears, and he leaned to the side.

Something struck the wall beside him and exploded immediately upon contact.

Kallen was violently thrown away from the wall, his cloak blowing open.

'This is not a beast!' he immediately concluded, twirling himself in the air and landing on his feet.

Asides the shadow cat, he had met three other beasts on his way, which also contributed to why he had almost burnout.

He killed one as it was quite relentless, just like the shadow cat. He injured the other, and it immediately backed off, while he spared the last one, not even coming in contact with it, since it was quite slow, and he simply outran it.

There was no way to track him from them, as the one he injured, just had a broken limb. With what had happened with the Saints, any beast could have a broken limb.

Unless he was dealing with a beast tamer, but he doubted that. Why would they have their beasts wandering in the rain? Also all three beasts had distinct auras that didn't point to one person.

He dashed to the side the moment his feet touched the ground, as another projectile hit the spot he had just been, exploding just the same.

Kallen's eyes turned cold, and Aeneas' sword found its way to his hand.

He moved again, streaking through the rain as explosive projectiles chased after his heels.

He suddenly stomped his foot forcefully on the ground, the puddle beneath his feet shooting upward. His calf bulged to the extreme, his skin splitting, and his pants nearly doing the same.

With a powerful push, he changed direction completely, dashing to the side as another projectile struck the ground just in front of his face and exploded again.

Kallen ran forward, the storm of projectiles suddenly halting. Instantly, he knew he had found his target.

He accelerated, now tapping into his full speed for the first time since the battle began.

The next second, he felt three humanoid figures at the edge of the range of influence his Will covered, two rushing toward him, and the last rushing away.

'An archer, then,' he concluded, focusing on the one rushing away, as they slid out from his range.

Kallen suddenly splitting into three as he charged the two rushing towards him, momentarily leaving them confused.

Under the dark sky, there was no other light distortion needed to create an illusion. It was even better that it was raining... the atmosphere was as hazy as it could be.

Only specific skills or traits would be able to sniff him out of his illusions.

He reached one of them in an instant, his hand moving, his sword cleaving through the orc's neck and separating head from body.

Kicking off the ground, he sped toward the other, one of his illusions doing the same, while Kallen himself became invisible to the orc's sight.

The orc attacked, pulling two sharp scimitars from the sheaths at his waist. Moving like a phantom, he cleaved Kallen into three!

Ironically, he felt the world spinning in his gaze, everything reflecting like it was daylight under his night vision skill.

Under his confused stare, he saw his headless body plop to the ground, and his landed just a feet away. His eyes sharply narrowed, panic rushing to his mind.

'How?!!!' He screamed internally, as he watched the cloaked person he just killed, vanish like he was never there.

If not for his recently acquired Third Ascension Active Skill, he would have already died. And even then, he only had a few seconds... at most a minute, to reach his body and reattach his head, or he would be dead for sure.

That was the last thought he had before his head splattered under a heel that crushed it into the unmoving earth.

Kallen pulled his foot from the crushed skull beneath his heel, eyes scanning the area, and his Will pushing as far as it could to find the archer.

The storm of explosive arrows had stopped, and the whole place was silent against the heavy pattering of rain, yet Kallen did not lower his guard in the slightest. If anything, it only heightened.

He created an illusion of himself running off after waiting a while and finding nothing, as though he had concluded that the archer had fled.

After more than ten seconds, with no attack on either himself or the illusion, he finally moved.

His guard, however, rose even higher. Although it was possible the archer had run away after seeing his companions swiftly defeated, infact, that was the smart choice. But Kallen wasn't buying it completely.

Instead, he leaned into two possibilities. One: the archer was following him from outside the range of his Will...They needed to be within his range, for his illusions to work on them.

That would only make sense if they had a skill that allowed for a far range of vision, along with night vision, all of which was already apparent, considering they had attacked him before he even knew he had company, and he hadn't been able to find them within his influence.

The second possibility was more troublesome: the archer was just like the shadow cat and could blend into the darkness just as well, while also possessing a skill that bypassed his illusions.

He was however, leaning more into the first possibility. Because if they could do that, they wouldn't have needed to attack him from far before.

But at the same time, that could have been a ruse to make him lower his guard.

His eyes suddenly narrowed, as up ahead, he felt the auras of more than ten persons converging on him, not bothering to hide their intentions at all.