Zel charged at the wolf, now that Strong Legs was active, he could finally display his true colors. A savage and fearless beast!
As Lira slashed at the Mutated Wolf's hindlegs from behind, Zel moved at full speed as if the enemy wasn't even there.
The creature tried crushing him the same way he crashed Anna half an hour ago, but his target was too fast, and dodged the heavy paws. Zel then ran through the wolf's forelegs and tightly grabbed his fur from the side. Pulling it to the point of ripping, he managed to get on top of the creature, except the latter was now enraged.
Zel used his legs to get a grip on the beast's back to stay on it, but it was very hard, of course. That was until he managed to grab his Bone Dagger. After he reobtained his weapon, he quickly jumped off before the creature rolled on its back once more. He landed easily, his experience paying off.
Zel gave a quick look at Lira, and she did the same. With a simple nod, the two of them got next to each other before Zel accelerated and took the lead. The giant wolf also took the initiative to attack and raised his right paw for a powerful crush attack. Both of his enemies were smaller than him, they were close to each other and were charging in a straight line, it was the best possible moment! But just as he attacked, Zel used his dagger to gently send the paw off course, making it barely miss himself. Now that the path was clear, he quickly kneeled and allowed Lira to step on his shoulders.
Thanks to their mutual understanding, they both timed their roles right and did what looked like an acrobat. Zel quickly raised up, boosting Lira upwards, giving her the chance to strike the wolf. "Empowered Slash!" She willed, her blade emanating a faint silver glow. Having used one of her active skills, her strike was enhanced, and she managed to make a clean cut off the wolf's leg from one end to the other. She had amputated him!
But it wasn't over yet. She landed on top of his back and stabbed her blade into the right side of the wolf, the same spot where Zel had hit. She moved her sword in all directions, worsening the wound and angering the wolf, but she managed to find one of the things she was looking for. With all her strength, she pushed down, so far down that her arm entered the body itself, but she finally managed to deal a very heavy blow to the beast.
Before the monster could do anything unexpected, she quickly jumped back and returned to Zel who was only a few meters away.
"Did you spot the heart?" He asked."
"No, it was moving too much. But I managed to cut both his lungs. Thanks to a wolf's anatomy, they are rather easy to spot."
"Both? Good enough, it should stop moving in a minute or so."
The Mutated Wolf, with its missing foreleg and impossibility to breathe, had little to do except try to kill them out of revenge.
The beast charged forward, slowly, and tried biting Lira, but she easily dodged by moving to the right, a blind spot. His hindlegs exerted force and he leaped forward, his only foreleg left ready to pin down Lira and his jaws open to devour her. Lira took a long step back, and allowed Zel to rush forward, passing between the wolf's legs and, using his Bone Dagger, taking advantage of the wolf's momentum and air time, stabbed the Mutated Wolf's chest gripping the handle with both hands and using his own body weight and strength to keep the blade in place as the monster's body moved above him. The wolf landed, but he didn't attack. Instead, he collapsed. He had been killed after falling for a basic trick, his own speed was used against him!
Behind the corpse, Zel was drenched in blood. His black and red robe was completely soaked and every part of his body was dripping blood. He had cut open the wolf's entire torso, and all the organs had fallen on him. But instead of feeling disgusted or vomiting like a normal person would, he simply looked at the corpse without giving any attention to his horrible looks. "Is it dead?" He asked, knowing to always make sure.
Lira walked up to the beast's head and stabbed through the eye and brain with her silver blade, "Yes," She replied.
"Let's steal everything and inspect the goods once we are inside the city, the amount of blood here will attract more monsters than we can take," Zel suggested, taking a leather sack out of his Internal Temple, which was used as a sort of inventory by most people, and moving away, leaving the largest corpse in Lira's hands.
Knowing monsters could come any time, he moved to the three human corpses lying flat on the ground. He grabbed a nearby rock the size of a fist and smashed their head one by one.
"Oh? This one dropped an Ability Orb, how lucky. It seems to be… Enhanced Aim. Sigh, useless to both of us." Zel put the three human Cores and the Enhanced Aim Ability Orb inside his sack. By the time he was done, Lira had just finished collecting the three wolves' Cores as well.
"Let's return, I see movements a few kilometers from here," Lira said, using her Eagle's Eyes Ability to scout for enemies.
Without waiting even a second, the two left the scene and returned back to Rimrock. Just as they had expected, in only ten minutes the battlefield was filled with beasts.
They walked through the tunnel, blood still dripping from Zel's body, dyeing the tunnel with a few drops of red. Once they reached the door, they knocked twice and waited for a few seconds. Finally, the door opened and they entered back into the safe village. When the guard saw them, he was extremely worried, the woman was fine, but the man was soaked in blood with little bits of flesh in his hair!
"A- Are you okay? There's a medic fifty meters in that direction…" The man said worriedly, pointing towards the center of the crater.
"This is not our blood. We saw three girls get devoured by a pack of wolves and decided to help them. The fight was harder than expected, there were two wolves and one Mutated Wolf."
"A Mutated Wolf?" The guard echoed, his eyes widening, "What kind of mutation did it have? If that's the case, I am obliged to make a report to the elders. Also, where are the three girls?"
"Those three didn't make it, sadly. As for the mutation, its teeth were like iron, meaning he had an Iron mutation." Lira described, "Killing it was hard, but we somehow managed."
"Got it, thanks." He thanked them, writing everything that was told to him on a small piece of paper, "Thank you for your collaboration."
Finally, Zel and Lira were safe and could take an accurate look at their gains. They walked for ten minutes, before entering a small house in one of the uphill parts of the crater. It only had two rooms, one was the living room the other was the bedroom. Both were cramped, but they did not mind. This was, after all, their own house.
Living with their parents all the time was a significant bottleneck to what they could do, both because of being under the constant risk of being caught doing something illegal and also because if their true personalities were to be exposed, it would be problematic. Thanks to this small yet useful building, they did not have to worry about those problems.
Once inside, Zel took out one of the many spare changes in his Internal Temple and changed in front of Lira while she laid the Cores and the Enhanced Aim Ability Orb on the short table in the middle of the room. This was something they had done many times, even if one of the two had to change clothes, none of them were interested in the other's body nor did they feel embarrassed or have strange thoughts. To them, this was standard procedure.
"One Ability Orb and six Cores, eleven if we count the goblins and the wolf Core you consumed," She grinned, "This night we earned quite a lot, I remember last month it took us three nights to reach this amount of gains," As for why they immediately absorbed the goblins Core, it was because the number was even, so they didn't have to argue, while the wolf Core was absorbed by Zel due to their usual agreement. "So, how do we split this?"
On top of the wooden table, there were six Cores, two were grey and belonged to the two normal wolves, one was brown and was the Mutated Wolf's, one was green, another one was yellow, and the last one was red. Next to all of that, there was a transparent orb with an eyebulb inside of it, which was the Enhanced Aim Ability Orb.
"Before you do anything, there's something I want to try," Zel said, his tone imposing.
"Speak."
"Wait for a minute or two." Saying that he grabbed the Mutant Wolf's brown Core along with Anna's yellow Core and absorbed them. Lira was slightly surprised since they didn't even agree on what they would take, but instead of getting angry like a normal person, she didn't speak and waited patiently. She knew what kind of man Zel was, and that he would never do something if he did not have a valid reason.
Zel closed his eyes and entered his Core. When he saw the Mutant Wolf's and Anna's Cores inside his own, he eerily smiled. He looked upwards a little and spotted his soul inside his Internal Temple. To his surprise, it was extremely deformed! The tail got bigger, the ears longer, and fur was all over it. Even the nose had changed and turned into that of a wolf! As I thought, a Mutated Wolf will deal much more damage to my soul than a normal one! Such changes... it's the equivalent of three wolves if not even four! Any more monster Cores, and I might die. Luckily, there's a solution for such a thing, and that is to absorb a human's Core."
Before doing anything though, he grabbed Anna's Core and focused, trying to figure out how to find her Internal Temple. He tried several things, such as calling it forth, thinking about the concept itself, and even trying to say it out loud, but in the end, the solution was to shake it. Thanks to his Core explaining to him how it worked, he managed to figure it out and successfully made Anna's Internal Temple appear inside his Core.