Velik’s nose was filled with the stink of burnt hair and meat, and every single joint in his body ached. He’d been ten feet away from whatever it was Torwin had used at the end there—One of those specialty arrows he took from that bounty hunter?—but it still felt like he’d been stomped on by a whole herd of horses.

The one consolation was that if he hurt this bad from being caught in the outer edge of that attack, Tesir had to be feeling it a lot worse. Velik’s vision returned quickly, his single eye blinking rapidly to try to clear out the white spots. He still had a few seconds left on his haste potion, which was the only reason he saw anything happen before it hit him.

One moment, Tesir was crouched there, still a great white and gold cat with smoke rolling off him and raw, red flesh covered in odd, root-like patterns. The next, he was gone. [Apex Hunter] caught the sound of cracking wood fifty feet away and a flicker of white as Tesir rebounded off a tree with a ten-foot-diameter trunk. The tree buckled under the impact and leaned drunkenly, its roots tearing up out of the ground on one side.

Something black slashed a sharp line through the air. It bisected Velik’s front leg, spilling golden blood and only not taking the whole limb because he flinched back a few inches just in time. There was no opportunity to retaliate; Tesir had already bounded past him and broken another tree.

Velik got hit a dozen times in the next second, and he quickly realized that Tesir hadn’t missed the first time either. He’d simply cut exactly as deep as he’d wanted to. He was bleeding Velik out, not trying to kill him. He pushed his regeneration as hard as he could, trying to funnel extra mana into the skill to hold himself together, but more cuts kept appearing faster than he could heal them.

[True Form has advanced to rank 6.]

It was only when the potion failed that Velik realized what had happened. Tesir had run out the rest of his time with a blitz of high-speed attacks. With his ability to react returned to normal speed, he could only hope that Tesir didn’t have the ability to keep the attack going for more than a few seconds. Already, the entire area was a mess of felled trees and deep gouges in the earth. It looked like some sort of natural disaster had torn through the area, and Velik could well imagine a battlefield featuring hundreds of corpses left in the wake of the same attack.

Steam rose from Velik’s body as his regeneration pushed the wounds closed and forced fatigue from his muscles. His reserves started to gutter, but they weren’t empty yet. He had another minute or two left in [True Form] before he simply couldn’t sustain the skill, but he was only dimly aware of that fact. Something else had captured his attention.

Torwin had been perched in a tree, sniping at Tesir the whole fight. He wasn’t in that tree anymore. The tree wasn’t even standing. All that was left was a stump about four feet tall made of broken, jagged spikes of blood-stained wood. Torwin himself wasn’t in sight, but Velik found him under the tree.

Shit. Fuck. No, he’s fine. That’s not enough to kill him. A tree isn’t that heavy.

Then he noticed the blood on Tesir’s claws—red blood.

Human blood.

All Velik could hear was the sound of his own breathing. The only thing he could feel was his heart slamming in his chest. His vision narrowed down to that red stain on black nail.

[True Form has advanced to rank 7.]

The notification came and went, almost unnoticed. A growl filled the air, so deep that the leaves still attached to branches started shaking. His jaw parted, and his muscles bunched up. Tesir had just enough time to whip his head around from the blood-stained tree trunk to Velik before the massive wolf slammed into him.

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When Velik had first gained [True Form], he’d been wary of it, afraid that it would turn him into a monster. He’d shied away from falling too deeply into it. The wolf’s instincts were buried in there, repressed by his own intellect. He’d learned to move his new body through practice and the guidance of his other skills. He’d never let the beast take control.

[True Form has advanced to rank 8.]

Velik tore Tesir apart. Mana surged through him and his blood sang with it. Fangs slashed and ripped, carving mouthfuls of meat off his prey. Tesir fought back, of course, because that was what prey that thought it was a predator did. His claws raked Velik’s back and sides, and his jaw fastened onto Velik’s throat. He got hold, sank his fangs deep, and tried to rip Velik’s throat out.

Velik simply flexed his neck muscles and forced the fangs to a standstill. At the same time, his own hard, sharp nails raked at Tesir’s body. The two rolled over top of each other, their fighting wild and uncontained. Blood flowed freely, staining the whole clearing gold.

He should have been out of mana. [True Form] should have faded. Somehow, more and more just kept flooding into him, flushing him with strength. He no longer felt his injuries. He didn’t even realize when his eye grew back. All he knew was a desperate, unyielding need to slaughter the monster in front of him.

And when what he had wasn’t enough, when [Dread Lance] after [Dread Lance] delivered with harsh bites failed to deliver that kill notification, Velik pulled harder on the mana. He realized its source then. It was obvious, in hindsight. His blood sang with magic. The golden blood of a divine beast was pure liquid mana, self-replenishing and limitless.

[Apex Hunter has been folded into True Form.]

[True Form has become Awakened Blood.]

[Awakened Blood set to rank 1.]

Blue lightning coalesced around them, arcing between their limbs and across their fur. Velik ignored the pain and held on. The mana came to him, a river rushing over a cliff to spill into his reserves, and he used it as fast as it appeared.

And then, somehow, suddenly, he was lying on his side, all four of his legs gone. Tesir stood over him in human form, his chest heaving, and his body covered in burns and cuts. “I fucked this right up, didn’t I?”

He glanced over at where Torwin had been perched and growled, then reached up and grabbed hold of a six-inch lock of his hair. With one nail, he severed the hair, then looped it into a knot. He tossed it to the ground in front of Velik and said, “Come find me in the real world when you figure out how to get out of this playpen. This was fun. Not bad, for an amateur.”

Then Tesir was gone, leaving nothing but a cloud of billowing dust behind as he disappeared. Even with his enhanced senses, Velik couldn’t tell where he was, which meant Tesir was either doing something to shield his presence from detection, or he had just traveled so far away so fast that he was already out of Velik’s range.

Probably both.

Scarcely believing that he’d survived, Velik bent all his regeneration to regrowing his lost limbs. That needed to be done before he reverted to human form. He wasn’t sure he’d even have Life Giver’s Ring if he transformed back now. The ring went on a finger he no longer possessed, and his best guess was that it would just plop into the dirt next to him.

With a start, he realized he could feel the ring working with his natural regeneration. Tentatively, he reached out into his mind and touched the nodes that represented his gear. All of it was active and available to him now, all at once. If his situation weren’t so dire, he’d have laughed.

Could have used that twenty minutes ago.

It took another minute to regrow his legs, a feat he would have considered miraculous yesterday. Just repairing his own hand after that mishap with [Dread Lance] had taken hours. But now, his body veritably glowed with power to his [Mana Sight]. That could be a problem, him being a beacon to anything that could sense mana, but he’d worry about that later. At the moment, he greedily drank it in and fueled his healing with it.

With his body more or less restored to working order, Velik shifted back to his human form. He staggered to his feet, then paused and blinked down at his hands. The sensation of his strength draining away when he let [True Form] go was something he’d long since gotten used to, so the fact that it hadn’t happened this time came as a surprise.

It had to be part of his new skill, but he didn’t have time to look at it now. He took two stumbling steps as he reoriented himself to his human body, then threw himself across the devastated landscape to land next to Torwin’s tree. His eyes scoured the blood, mentally calculating how much Torwin would have lost to leave a stain that size behind. It wasn’t enough on its own to kill a hunter of his level.

“Where are you?” Velik demanded of the empty air as he leaned down to shift the fallen trunk so that he could look under it. “Tell me you’re still alive.”