Becoming a Monster

Chapter 369: Chapter 369: Veins of Blight

Dummy was quick to get up, but the trolls didn’t rush to follow through. Instead, their steps slowed.

They could hear the sound of something constantly breaking. It was loud, loud enough that despite the sound of the others fighting, they could clearly hear it.

The troll’s eyes widened as they saw Dummy pulling himself upright. His hulking frame warped back together. Its bark-like skin melding back together as his ribs were reconnecting.

His mouth opened, not the one of his face, but the maw carved across his torso. The looming mouth was salivating heavily, its teeth chattered in anticipation.

The green troll looked at its hand. Its exposed bone was already healed but its bark-layered skin had still yet to form back.

They had never come across another creature with regeneration as tenacious as theirs. But they could also tell that its regeneration was still slower than their own. They had to take advantage of that factor.

So they charged.

A long intense exchange went down. Blood continued to splatter, and heavy thuds impacted against Dummy’s body.

Dummy endured each blow, his body caving, snapping, and bursting open again and again. Yet every time he fell apart, he got back up.

And every time, he bit back. They were small, but ugly bites. Teeth tearing out patches of flesh from both of the golems. Each wound closed so fast that if Dummy were smarter, he would believe that he hadn’t hurt them at all.

But it wasn’t enough for Dummy. The healing enraged him. Not because he was losing, but because he couldn’t heal just as fast. If he could, just how much could he have eaten by now? The trolls were an endless buffet that continued to give him food. And yet, his body was recovering too slow to receive their offering.

If not for his pack leader’s master’s words, he would have stripped Pandora’s genes from his body long ago. Instead, he clung to them, reluctantly holding on to the hybrid’s genes, the only memory of its most delicious meal, and its strongest gene.

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Dummy’s fight was the first of many, and the drake was there to witness it all. It had already known that Noah’s group of misfits were strong. Maybe not strong on their own, but their strengths didn’t reside in their bodily physique nor their magical properties.

It was because of their unique traits.

The drake keenly observed Dummy, a creature whose entire identity seemed to be that of a beast who only knew to feed. It embodied that hunger to the extent that even its autonomy bent toward it. Everything it did, every choice it made, if one could even call them choices, was guided by that instinct to consume.

It wasn’t reckless hunger.

No, the drake noted. Hunger itself was its weapon.

The drake had come across many specimens in its long life; it had even come across creatures who grew from what they consumed. But as it witnessed Dummy’s body going through a metamorphosis just from consuming another’s flesh, it realized that the creature’s uniqueness surpassed mere evolution.

When the drake’s mind was still circling that revelation, it witnessed another spectacle. The slime creature, whose aura was dark and twisted as their leaders had suddenly been bestowed with holy divinity, the same divinity of the gods the humans worshipped.

The shock in its eyes was apparent. It has seen demons inherit bloodlines, and monsters mutate into horrors. But never once had it seen corruption perfectly assimilate with sacred energy before. It could sense that the two energies within the creature were circulating in harmony.

As it watched Ailetta summon a legion of slimes, their mouths dripping with a contaminated holy essence, the drake began to doubt its own knowledge.

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The blue troll had already made its decision. Despite whatever surprises its enemy had in store, it would tear through it all the same. The dozens of slimes spread out across the battlefield, many of them converging to its position as it charged towards their creator.

No one could predict what would actually happen if those damnations bit into someone. The troll’s instincts told it that if it didn’t take out that slime, they would lose.

However, it still needed to get through the cluster of slimes before it could reach her. And that meant also having to experience what they could do before all the others.

The first wave came, they flew at him without hesitation, almost mindlessly. They had no self-preservation in their bodies.

The troll raised its club, and before it struck, ice began to envelop it.

Out of most of the trolls in its tribe, it was one, if not the only troll who was attuned with water attribute mana. All trolls were attuned with an element of some sort, most circulating between earth and wind. Even the stronger flame-born trolls were rare. But this one was different. Its attunement of water had always been its edge, its reason for survival in battles against foes that raw strength alone couldn’t crush.

It wasn’t just because it could empower its weapons in ice. Its source of pride lay in its special physique that embodied its element’s natural advantage.

Healing.

Compared to even the strongest of trolls, its regeneration was by far the strongest of its kind. Heavy injuries took seconds to heal. As long as its limbs were still attached to it, it could heal through any injury. Poison, disease, those were meaningless to it.

It was why it was the leader of their scout teams. Against its rivals, goblins coated all of their weapons in poisons that could eventually incapacitate the strongest of trolls if infected with enough. But against it, those same venoms were useless.

Even the goblins successors, the orcs, loathed crossing it.

And because of its regeneration, the troll recklessly charged into the swarm. Its club slammed into three slimes at a time, intending to smash them into piles of sludge. But as it plowed through them, it felt a resistance on its weapon that hadn’t been there before.

The slimes warped themselves around its weapon, their eerie eyes staring back at it as though it was a twisted game. And the rest of the slime converged onto the troll.

The troll pressed forward regardless. It swung the club again and again, but each strike only changed the weapon’s shape further. The wood and ice vanished beneath layers of slime, its club slowly becoming unrecognizable, as though it was a morphed club created entirely of slime. And then as the slimes continued to latch on. They began climbing its wrist, attempting to wrap around its hand.

With a roar, the troll hurled the weapon aside, abandoning it without a thought. Both fists clenched tight, its arms and shoulders erupted with frost, coating them in a dense frosty layer. It lowered its body as it continued its charge, plowing into the swarm with its arms protecting its face.

That’s when it finally felt them. The teeth.

The first bites were shallow. The slimes gnawed, their jaws grinding against its hide, fighting to pierce through its flesh that was just tough. It was extremely thick, as if there were layers of fat before it could even reach muscle, and even its fat was tenacious.

They clung on,biting without care that their attempts bore no results. At first, the troll compared their bites to tiny ants.

But then, it felt its skin finally being ripped.

It didn’t notice that the slimes began to merge together. Forty became twenty, and those twenty, down to ten, and only then did their efforts begin to show results. Their teeth tugged and ripped away at the troll’s skin. And just as quickly, new flesh knitted itself back together.

The troll’s regeneration displayed its worth as its skin would even heal with teeth still buried inside it, locking the slimes against it as they fought to carve deeper.

The troll found their bites less of a threat than it imagined. It didn’t stop as it continued its charge with even greater fervor. But during its rampage, it suddenly began to frown.

It had noticed it before, something was being injected into its body. The liquid slipped under its skin, a liquid that was as thick as tree sap. At first, it thought it was only an irritation, but the more it spread, the more it realized that the substance clung to more than flesh. The liquid mixed with its blood and latched onto the flow of mana coursing through it, turning every heartbeat into a channel that bled power away.

For moments off and on, it felt its blood boiling. Not from heat, but from its body struggling to mend itself while its own essence was being pulled out of it. Its regeneration tried to seal its wounds while its blood sought to break down the holy substance, yet each second it felt more of its mana leak into the slimes’ teeth. Around the punctured areas, veins faintly glowed, light shining through even its thick layers of fat.

The drainage wasn’t severe if it was only a few slimes draining its mana. But as it constantly wielded its mana to heal its wounds, while being drained by multiple abominations, it could feel its wounds regenerating slower than before.

Its eyes were enraged, pure red enveloped the white around its pupils as it edged closer to Ailetta. It could sense that, while Ailetta’s slimes were strong, her presence was growing weaker by the second.