Swish!
Cutting through the air, the sword also split down the humanoid monster, and twitching, the monster fell to the ground.
"Sam! That was dangerous!"
Rahul and Piyush ran toward Sam while the other students watched everything with their mouths wide open.
"Was that real? Sam, he alone took down the monster!"
"Or are we hallucinating?"
"Pinch me!"
"Ouch!"
...
"Sam, are you alright?"
Watching the care of his friends, his eyes softened.
"It's ok."
Wiping the non-existent sweat, Rahul shook his head.
"Sam, never do that. That can be dangerous."
"Ok. I wanted to check and now I'm sure that I can easily handle the monster single-handedly."
"Ok, try on another monster. We will stand behind you."
"Yeah, I will cover you."
...
"Still watching? Not going to actively participate in the fight?"
As the teacher reminded the remaining students, they came out of their daze and moved in groups toward the monsters.
...
Taking a glistening crystal in prism shape, Sam lightly weighed it.
'200 gm.'
It's a premeditated rule that every monster drops a rune crystal, which has various uses.
Rahul lightly watched Sam and instructed Piyush.
"Piyush, collect the corpse in your storage ring."
"But you both have storage rin—"
Before Piyush could complete the sentence, Rahul sneered.
"Stop whining! You'll have 20 percent more in carcass benefits."
A faint grin adorned Piyush's face, and he hurriedly stored it in his storage ring.
Flickering his sword, Sam moved to the next target while the crimson hue painted the ground.
'Time to focus on the main objective.'
As he entered the monster's territory, the monster already stood before him and slashed with its claw, ready to tear him apart.
Taking a deep breath, he focused on his ear, and an image of waves coming from the monster formed in his mind, and his eyes constricted.
'So my hunch was correct.'
The slash had already reached him, but he neatly dodged it since his stats alone were enough to defeat any monster.
'What should I do?'
Numerous calculations were going on in his mind, but this was the first time he was facing this, so he had no experience and didn't know which approach he should take.
'Killing the monster only erases the clue, so...'
Clank!
Clank!
The monster bore numerous bruises and gashes on its body, and blood dripped to the ground.
'What should be my approach?'
As his thoughts ran wild, he decided to give it a try and urged his inherent ability: Origin Fire, because he still remembered the contract he signed in his dream.
A fabric world of him and the monster formed in his mind, with a wave radiating from the monster, where he could sense numerous feelings: numbness, dread, hostility, urgency, and other emotions but failed to comprehend anything.
'What do these emotions signify?'
Exerting more focus in his mind, he saw a clue: the monster's dried and cracked lips shaking.
'No, it's saying something.'
He imitated the lip and tongue posture.
'Seal me? Mill me?..'
His eyes suddenly widened.
'Kill me? It's saying kill me.'
His heart almost leapt out of his chest, watching the monster begging for death, and his hair stood up while his body fidgeted excitedly.
Regaining posture, he replied to the monster in the fabric world in an attempt to get any answer, but the monster's lips were as if automated, giving the same movement.
Thump!
His heart suddenly struck in his chest, and his movements almost became sluggish.
"Sam, focus on the monster."
Smiling with an ugly face, Sam replied, "Yeah," while beads of sweat already rooted down his forehead, sliding to fall at any time, and his focus again went to the fabric world.
The monster's face twisted in a way that he couldn't describe, and his heart beat very rapidly as if it could come out of his chest at any time. But the main issue was that something deep inside the monster was trying to defy the automated body function but failing repeatedly, and the torture was becoming worse with time.
He also began to notice that his world of fabric started to be painted with a crimson hue, though no blood was seeping out of the monster.
His premonition of something very bad happening kept resurfacing in his mind, and his throbbing heart and raised hair unconsciously warned him, but something deep inside Sam also ignited, and a faint flicker of blue flame resurfaced in his pupils.
An invisible pressure burst from him and radiated in all directions, and as it came in contact with the monster, the twisted face of the monster relaxed a little, and its lips became readable.
Syncing his lips at the monster's rate, Sam tried to decipher, and little by little, he got the information, which made his pupils constrict, and his whole body went paralyzed for a moment before regaining control, and his breath almost got stuck in his throat.
'Everyone who dies here is stuck as a monster to repeat the process continuously for unknown eons, and already uncountable dungeons were created as if making a huge world of monsters where everything was categorized to continue repeating until you advance to the next level dungeon, and this process has been ongoing for an unknown period, and he lost track of time, only managing to save his sanity in this soul and…'
Suddenly, a crack appeared on the monster's face, and in no time, that crack almost covered the entire monster like a cobweb, and without any sound, that cobweb compacted the monster bit by bit, and before he could comprehend anything, Sam noticed a square cube-sized part of the monster's body separated and fell to the ground, but before it could even touch, it evaporated, and the same happened with the entire monster's body as if in no time, the monster disappeared into fragments, leaving nothing except the dread-filled news.
Sam came out of the fabric world and almost went into hypermode thinking.
'Even Origin Fire was unable to do anything...
So, what's the origin of everything and the information spewed by the monster...'
His body shuddered, and his gaze turned alert.
'Dying here means repeating the same never-ending process without any will to resist, except accepting the whole cycle to keep one's sanity in check. But no one knows how long the will can resist the corrosion of time.'