THEOS

The City scrambled beneath Luke as he flew closer and closer to the monster. Most of them were panicking. Some of them watched on in sheer awe as one after another, bolts of lightning split the sky and struck the creature and its flesh sloughed off in molten waves.

They cheered every time the Argo or one of the countless warriors pestering the monster deflected an attack before it struck the golden barrier keeping them safe, and cheered even louder when someone managed to extract a pound of flesh from the thing.

Luke hardly paid attention to the battle. He was too busy reading the quest.

Status | Skills | Quests | Inventory

Giant Slayer:

Aid in the slaying of the Hero tier giant attacking the Capital, and harvest its mana with Maximus.

He read it once, and then once again, before dismissing it and let out a sigh of relief. The quest would still put him in conflict with his strongest opponent yet, but it was straight forward, and nowhere near as bad as he imagined it might be. Knowing the Seed, it could have just as easily asked him to kill it single handedly.

This… well this was just a cash grab, or more accurately, a Stat Point grab. Considering the last Quest the Seed had given him might be an impetus to start the Trojan War, it was a nice change of pace. He knew the target, and he knew what he got out of it– a metric ton of points and some serious pain, that he hoped wouldn't hit him quite so hard as it had the last time he had killed above his weight class.

He also needed to kill a hundred Hero tier beings, or a single Saint tier being to upgrade his sword to the Hero tier, so that may have been a benefit as well. All of which he was perfectly content with, even with the amount of hurt he knew he would feel when all this was over.

No pain, no gain, as they say but–

The actual act of harvesting its mana gave him pause yet, the more he thought about it, the more assured he became that he could do it.

It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be simple.

When his sword had advanced to the Warrior tier, some of the restrictions that came with absorbing mana had loosened. Not because the blade suddenly got better at sucking out mana from the dead, but because Luke could simply use it better.

The ability to maneuver the blade mid air and direct it with precision combined with the nature of the bond that connected Luke and his sword meant that making sure it was embedded in the monster at the moment of its death was a simple feat. Relatively speaking. Especially when the monster was a giant the size of a skyscraper.

If it worked, that is. This would be the first time Luke used his sword in such a manner, and never before had someone else killed a monster when his sword was lodged in it, and that’s what this would be. Luke held no illusions that he would be the one to actually fell the giant. The damage he could do with Maximus was proportionally less than a mosquito bite. Even so he was optimistic.

For the most part.

He still didn’t know how the blade judged when something was dead, but he did have a hypothesis that if correct, meant that his nascent plan would work. Simple biology and half remembered memories from his past life dictated that cells would remain alive and functioning minutes or even hours after a creature had passed. On top of that, Luke had seen more than one video of a dead skinned frog twitching after someone sprinkled salt on it.

The internet commentators had said it was because some of the nerve cells remained alive and reacted to the sodium or something. An explanation he was inclined to believe. In Luke’s experience, monsters and the like would still be a little alive even after he skewered them through and got the points. They twitched, blinked, and sometimes even made noises minutes after their supposed death.

Which led him to think about his own death.

My soul left my body instantly in the car crash. Meaning I died on impact or moments after it, but was all of me dead? Did my heart still beat a few times? Did my brain activity instantly go from alive to zero?

Probably not, or at the very least, it’s unlikely. It would take at least a few minutes for my cells to starve from the lack of blood flow and oxygen even if my neck did snap in half.

Even the Rebel. Was she all the way dead when I got the points from her… He shook his head. That was a bad example, there had been so much going on when that happened, that he barely even remembered any of it. From the moment he had stuck his sword in her, all he had known was pain. But, he rather distinctly remembered her falling off his blade seconds after he stabbed her heart, and she probably died-died minutes after she hit the ground. The mana though, he had gotten when she was still hooked on his blade. Of that he was pretty certain.

Every kill he had made with his sword, and the experiences of his own death, led him to the only conclusion he could think of.

The sword gave him a beings mana if it was impaling them the moment the soul left their body and relinquished its control over the energy. It was the only thing that really made sense to him, but it left him with even more questions.

When did the soul decide that it couldn’t stay in a body anymore?

Moreover, cultivators of a great enough tier could seemingly control their souls after their death and possess someone else, and Luke knew first hand that those people still had mana. Corrupted mana, but mana nonetheless. The practice was forbidden, and all Cyzicus’s library had on it was that any such person was eternally doomed to a state of half life and it was better for them to move on then haunt the world as it were.

Allegedly, those that stayed were in for a bad time.

Unable to cultivate and possessing a mere fraction of their true strength, they became shadows of themselves. Over the course of time their minds would begin to fray and they would mutate into something, but they wouldn’t remain themselves. Most, if left alone, were said to let themselves pass onto the Aether after realizing that there was nothing for them, and those that stubbornly held on would be killed the moment the world caught wind of them. From what Luke understood, it was a bigger problem in ages past. Nowadays most people who had the means to possess a body after death knew better than to try. Of those that did, they were so weak, that even a cultivator in the midstage of the Mortal tier could over power them.

According to the books at least.

Luke could tell there was more to it than just that, but knowledge of the subject was restricted beyond the basics. Even the cultivation level of the people able to stick around after death wasn’t mentioned. Likely to prevent people from actually doing it.

Maybe they’re demons? Luke thought halfheartedly, before shaking his head and perching on a tower just behind the barrier and blinked in surprise at the sight that awaited him.

He had expected to find scores of the Gegeness rising out of the earth and marching on the city, but that wasn’t the case at all.

There weren’t even any dead monsters. At all.

Now this doesn’t make sense.

If the Hero tier is the Prime, then there should be hundreds of the monsters by now considering it's been attacking for a few minutes. Even if they were all killed already, some body parts should be left. If the Hero tier isn’t the prime, then there should definitely be more. At least one if the big guy was the second to spawn.

I mean, I suppose Cyzicus could have just disintegrated them, Prime and all, but something should have been there. A stray limb at the very least.

Hmm. Something about all this felt off.

Whatever it is though, I’ll do my best, but at this scale?

Shaking his head, Luke turned his attention back to the sole giant and tried to think of any ways he could help, before deciding that there wasn’t really anything he could do.

Activating his Technique would just see him drained in seconds, and he already knew the way to kill the higher tier giants was by attrition. You just had to keep pummeling them until they fell apart.

That in mind, he withdrew the Limitless Thunder Bow from his storage ring and took aim at one of the smaller boulders hurtling towards the city.

The rock had no chance of actually breaking through the barrier, but every attack that hit it would drain a little energy until eventually, the bubble popped. If that happened, it would mean the end of the Capital.

Luckily, even though the boulders were attacks sent by a monster much stronger than Luke, at the end of the day they were just rocks. Big, dense, obsidian, and extremely hot to the point that a single attack from one would likely kill him, but just rocks.

Funneling mana into the bow, he drew the string back, and a thin line of electricity longer than Luke was tall, fizzled to life. Then just as the boulder was about to hit the city, Luke let it loose.

The moment it was clear of the bow, the lightning thickened and transformed, turning so bright that it was hard to look at, and traveling blisteringly fast collided with the giant chunk of obsidian.

“Tsk,” Luke frowned when it only gouged out a medium sized hole in the rock and shook his head.

Guess I underestimated it. A lot. This really isn’t a battle I have any right participating in, but you know what–

He pulled the drawstring back again and loosed another six bolts into the boulder before it finally shattered. Small chunks of jagged rock erupted over the City’s skyline and rained on the barrier.

Shaking his head, Luke returned the bow to his storage ring. Just destroying one of its attacks had depleted more than a third of his mana, and watching the Argo blast apart three much larger boulders at the same time, Luke decided that expending all his mana to stop two more of the smaller boulders wasn’t worth it. Not at all.

Not when just being close to a battle of such magnitude put him in some amount of danger. Not that he believed it would come to that, as he fully expected Cyzicus to win. The fact that the Emperor was evacuating the city as a precaution though, spoke volumes.

So Luke gripped Maximus and craned his head, struggling to even see the giant's head from his vantage point, he raked his eyes over its form. He was trying to determine the best place to put the blade in.

Its head seems like a good idea. The torso is probably a better target though since it's bigger. Still I should probably–

Thunder boomed in the sky and the thickest bolt of lightning Luke had ever seen crashed straight into the giant's head. Blinking the spots out of his eyes, Luke watched in awe as the Hero tier monster regenerated the entire left side of its head. Then with a flick of its fingers, sent hundreds of hill sized boulders barrelling into the sky

High up in the clouds, a golden barrier shimmed into existence around Cyzicus, and all of the rocks shattered on what Luke suspected was a Saint tier protective talisman, and turned to ashy dust that rained back down. The aftermath of that single attack rendered the air outside the city's barrier entirely unbreathable. There was too much obsidian dust and particulates polluting it. Enough to severely damage even a warrior's lungs.

Feeling grateful that he was protected, Luke turned his attention to the Argo. The city was safe, but maybe the ship with Saint tier protections would be safer?

Jason hadn’t steered it out of the city’s defenses yet, but Luke could imagine that if Heracles was by his side offering him advice, that would change soon. Maybe then he could actually get a better shot.

Before he could leave though, a prompt from the Seed sent chills down Luke’s spine. And it took every iota of will he had not to break into a nervous sweat.

Danger Detected.

Fuck.

“Hmph.” A woman beside him grunted. “That emperor of yours will kill it soon.” She said, disappointment clear in her voice.

Luke felt his mouth dry, as he looked at the person next to him. She was young with regal features, appearing no older than ten with long blonde hair that stretched for meters behind her. He didn’t recognize her but–

“Cybele?” He asked, his mouth suddenly feeling very dry.

“Who else would it be?” She said dismissively, as if she didn’t look like a completely different person compared to the last time Luke had seen her.

“What are you doing here?

“Mhm. Just seeing how my pet is doing.”

Pet? The giant? Me? What? How?

“Oh.” She lifted her finger up, and looked right at Luke. Something in her gaze made chills run down his spine. “It occurs to me that the trinket I gave you earlier isn’t quite enough to pay for the prize I took.”

“Wh–”

Her hair shimmered, and a circlet made of twine and roses appeared atop her head.

A pit formed in Luke’s stomach.

I can’t believe I thought this quest was simple.