The forest was a dark green labyrinth, remote and uncharted. Sunlight was a rare visitor, fractured by the ceiling of leaves. Green moss was painted across the bark of enormous, ancient trees. A small, clear river made quiet, relentless sounds. The air was heavy, smelling sharply of dirt and wood. High up, birds sang. Nature's peace was absolute until it was ripped apart.
A series of whooshing sounds snapped through the quiet as a figure moved at a blinding speed. It was a young man with short purple hair. One eye, a sharp, vigilant red, was visible; the other was hidden by an eyepatch. He wore two glowing red crystal-shaped earrings. This was Azrael, now in his teens, his body a blur of purpose.
He held a specialized compass projected onto his gloved hand, displaying the target's distance and direction. "Sixty meters, forty meters, twenty meters," he muttered, covering meters in fractions of a second. "And finally," he said, halting abruptly under the immense canopy of a single, giant tree. He glanced up with his one red eye. "Target found."
Crouched on a thick branch was a behemoth: a massive gorilla, standing four meters tall and two meters wide, encased in thick, yellow fur. Its red eyes were pure, focused blood lust. Azrael observed it dispassionately. "Uhm, yes, as the information stated: a D-rank Beast," he noted, identifying its threat level.
He reached up to the crystal earrings and, with a controlled squeeze, activated them. They didn't shatter; instead, they instantly morphed into wicked-looking, multi-taloned clawed gauntlets that covered his hands and forearms. A visible tide of blood-red Aether surged to his hands. "Come on, beast," he taunted.
The gorilla exploded into motion. It let out a deafening roar and lunged with terrifying force. The thick branch it had been standing on snapped under the brutal momentum.
Azrael mentally commanded: "Phantom Step!"
In a blink, he was two meters away. The beast landed where he had been, creating a small-sized crater as dirt and pebbles scattered.
"Rawrrrrr!" The beast roared its frustration and charged again.
Azrael activated the next spell: "Lightning Cell Activation!"
Blue-white lightning sparked across his body. With an overwhelming burst of speed, he met the beast halfway. He was too fast, appearing directly at the gorilla's head while it was mid-charge. He grabbed the beast's skull and slammed it down with brutal force onto his right knee. The gorilla staggered, taking an involuntary step back before collapsing onto one knee.
Azrael utilized the lag, appearing mid-air above it, driving his left foot into its jaw. The impact was loud, the jaw visibly shifting. But the creature was a Mythos-infused gorilla; its pain threshold was very high.
The beast reacted instantly, a flash of something beyond simple rage in its eyes. Its grip snapped out and seized Azrael by the left foot.
Azrael felt the immense pressure and prepared for the impact, chanting: "Aether Armament!"
His body glowed with a protective layer of solid red Aether a second before he was slammed straight onto the ground. The resulting impact threw up a colossal amount of dust.
The gorilla was too powerful to allow a moment's rest. It lifted its face, its broken jaw snapping violently back into place—a horrifying display of Mythos-level regeneration. It drew a deep, rattling breath, and then from its massive mouth, it focused and fired.
A brilliant, corrosive red energy blast erupted, tearing through the dust cloud directly at the spot where it had slammed Azrael. The blast hit the earth, not the boy, vaporizing a large patch of ground with a high-pitched sizzle and leaving a smoking, glass-like patch of fused rock.
The beast stood perplexed. Its target was gone, and its powerful energy attack had failed.
Azrael, having used a combination of Phantom Step and his Aether Armament to phase-shift slightly and absorb the initial shock, was already on the move. He reappeared twenty meters away, clinging vertically to a massive tree trunk. The sudden burst of speed and the power-consuming nature of the protective Aether layer forced him to breathe hard, a controlled gasp.
"Good. The blast confirms high D- rank, almost D. Means the core is worth more," Azrael muttered, his voice sharp and steady despite the adrenaline. He focused his energy. He wouldn't risk another close-quarters exchange, not with that energy blast ability.
He let go of the trunk and dropped, simultaneously activating the next sequence. A layer of extremely cold frost began to spread from the beast's feet, creeping rapidly up its yellow fur. The air temperature around the gorilla plummeted as Azrael channeled aether into the ground beneath the beast. The creature, realizing the sudden, paralyzing cold, glanced wildly around.
The frost covered its legs, then its massive arms, restricting movement. A low, insistent buzzing sound began to grow from above it. The gorilla looked up.
It saw Azrael descending from the air, his gauntlet held high, concentrating a terrifying amount of blue-white power. He was generating an enormous, glowing, spherical blue lightning ball—the size of a man's torso—in his right palm. The intense, electric buzzing was unbearable, vibrating through the beast's very bones.
"Extreme Lightning Bomb!"
The gorilla strained, its immense physical strength and Mythos fighting the ice. With a desperate surge of its own Aether, the massive brute shattered the frost encasing it, freeing its limbs for a crucial second. It let out a defiant, throaty snort—a final, useless gesture of resistance.
But that single second of freedom was not enough.
The lightning bomb hit the beast square in the face. It was an overwhelming fusion of elemental power and kinetic force. The creature's head exploded with a catastrophic CRACKLE and a sickening wet sound, turning instantly into a shower of bloody mist.
Azrael landed lightly in front of the collapsing, headless beast. The enormous, muscular body fell backward, hitting the forest floor with a final, heavy thud that sent up a huge curtain of dust. Azrael's blood-red Aether faded, and the gauntlets silently reverted back into the small, red crystal earrings. He stood perfectly still. The air was thick with ozone and the scent of blood, a testament to the brief, violent clash.
Azrael reached down, his gloved hand casually retrieving a small, faintly glowing orb from the remains of the beast's neck. The D-rank Mythos Core, before storing the corpse in a storage ring.
"Core secured," he stated, his voice exasperated "four down one more to go". He re-checked his compass, a small flicker of red indicating the direction of his extraction point. He began to run again, the whooshing sounds returning as he disappeared back into the forest at blinding speed. The forest's quiet resumed, the birds singing again, indifferent to the violence that had just transpired.