Strongest Among the Heavens
Chapter 374: Dasha’s Great Hunt

Chapter 374: Dasha’s Great Hunt

Bodies were everywhere.

The way of the Dark Tower remained absolute. It remained stagnant for the past hundred years. Bodies were left. Bodies were thrown. Bodies experienced death as they lay in the waiting area.

Within the waiting room of the Dark Tower, on a floor in the mid-fifties, a fighter named Taz curled in agony. An unwellness had settled since yesterday, an inexplicable heaviness in his belly. He fought through it anyway. It was but a distraction, after all.

Every move of his seemed a little bit faster, however. Sick and faster? Did he take one too many potions? Did he take an unstable potion? Yes, that had to be it.

"Fuck..."

Sweat poured from every inch of him, soaking through his clothes, and a dull, throbbing pain radiated from his bones.

Taz groaned, rolling onto his back, staring up at the stone ceiling of this...this waiting chamber. The fighters ignored his groans and complaints, attributing them to fatigue from a previous battle. Some idiots in the waiting room pushed themselves for no good reason. This was not that. Taz had won four battles with mild comfort and called it quits thereafter.

His stomach. He was faster and yet he knew something was horribly wrong. His belly felt swollen, as if filled with lead, and every breath he took was a laborious effort.

This was the waiting area. Nerves were normal. Nerves were expected. Nerves could feel like this. Vomiting, dying, feeling weak and sad and pathetic...

Were these nerves or—

A sudden, sharp pain sliced through his body, and Taz cried out, clutching his stomach. He felt his bones shift. Slowly at first, then faster until it became an unhearing burn and turn. A sickening crunching sound accompanied each turn. His skin rippled, muscles bulging unnaturally beneath it. Taz tried to scream, but his voice was lost in a gurgle of blood and saliva.

His vision blurred, and he saw his own hands—fingers elongating, nails turning into sharp claws. "H-huh? Wha—ssshh—!"

His belly split open. His insides twisted, reshaping into something monstrous. Fur sprouted from his skin, a dark, blood-soaked pelt enveloping his soul.

Those around him were...red. He could see them. They were all...in range. They were all here. The shades of grey in this waiting room, in this entry to hell...

Taz could see it all. The flesh, the beating of the heart...

All of it looked so deliciouuuuuus!

A primal hunger, a need to tear, to rend, to consuuuume. Taz let out a guttural howl. No fighter could ignore him now. All were looking, all were uncertain.

"What the hell....?"

"A wolf demon? The fuck...!?"

All were confronted by a nightmare.

Taz, or what had once been Taz, lunged at them with feral speed. He tore into the first fighter, his claws ripping through flesh and bone. Blood sprayed across the walls, and the scent drove him into a frenzy. He moved from one victim to the next, claws hacking the face and then tearing the flesh off.

A trail of carnage was beginning.

Sheating one’s weapon was quite irregular. Everyone here was on stand by to fight. Everyone reacted and fought with their swords, katanas, gauntlets, and spears. The monster was too strong, too fast. The claws, the canines, all were forged from bone made from the darkness of the soul. From hell itself.

Taz was no longer a man but a creature of pure savagery and instinct. His jaws snapped around a familiar woman’s neck, crushing her windpipe.

He feasted on the remains.

For a moment, he stared down at the woman’s face. Was this...a friends?

Oh, yes.

The blood of his comrades fueled his transformation further.

Then he saw another one of his kind, pouncing and tearing. They made eye-contact. They growled and they immediately understood. Blood dripping, like a pack, they hunted.

***

Dasha Pang stood atop the building of the weak, his white Venetian mask glinting in the faint light. From this vantage point, the Dark Tower lay in the distance. A plume of smoke rose from the Sukhothai, dark and thick, twisting into the air like a sinister serpent. His hands clasped behind his back, Dasha observed the smoke. The plan was unfolding perfectly.

Behind him were wisps of black smoke. A chain reaction had been set-off and a fire was slowly beginning to consume this box of weaklings.

Dürr once lived here.

To lose his home on top of everything else would make him strong indeed.

The fire remained behind him, rising higher and higher, twisting thicker and thicker. Dasha stood and watched anyway. The fire did not matter right now. The smoke did.

He had not been collecting the hearts of players and men for the fun of it. He experimented. He dabbled in the darkest of arts. Dasha Pang did not need a secret grimoire; he merely needed his intellect, a base understanding of what he was experimenting with, and the differences in humans and in animals. The gap between demi-gods and full-blooded humans. The shift from monkey to human. Vikings and modern humans.

He read. He thought. He experimented.

Geri and Freki were the twin wolves said to accompany the High-Father Odin. A small tuf of their fur was sold at the Moon Club. Whether it was authentic or the tuff of a unnamed powerful werewolf did not matter. To Dasha, mythos was merely a method of inscribing detail and understanding. Nameless, named, it did not matter. The power did.

He sold hundreds of them. Hundreds of potions that settled in the bottom of the drinker’s belly and manipulated the Qi inside them to push forward a transformation that heightened their abilities. Dasha was certain that some were vastly more powerful than himself.

And yet all did not possess the intellect he did. All had succumbed to the instincts of their new forms.

An explosion of Qi. Dasha closed his eyes.

As a boy, he had discovered a method to prevent aging.

And yet...

Dasha Pang died. The impossible occurred.

Not just him, many had died in pursuit of completing his formula to its ultimate form. Through his years as a professor, he gathered the necessary resources and experimented on hundreds. He recalled the amnesia that arose when the brain was destroyed. The brain would recover on a physical level yet not on a neurological level. Dasha deepened his understanding. He experimented. He perfected it as deeply as he could.

He died anyway.

The more he learned and discovered about science, the less the world made sense to him. The calculations simply didn’t fit.

Until a year before his death—he was able to confirm it.

The soul.

The soul existed.

The soul was tethered to one’s existence.

Azrael’s comments were merely a confirmation to his theories. It was why he was able to conclude that the System was chained to his soul without panic, without thinking of the scientific repercussions.

He knew. He knew everything.

But despite knowing, he could not touch it. On Earth, manipulating the soul was impossible. It was as if it had been stripped from the laws of reality. That was not the case here.

Here, he was able to understand what the soul was. How it functioned. Why it functioned.

Here, he could. Able to temper and push the soul. Break it. Change it.

An explosion rang out. Three beams of light shined up.

"Such power."

They were not solely werewolves; they were of wolf-dragonkind and wolf-phoenixes. An almighty amalgamation of creatures that twisted their souls and magical energy. Obscene threats who threatened to shred the marketplace to cinders.

More beams of light shone out. More destruction. More death.

Dasha stood above it all.