Chapter 77

Subjugation

The Fire Spirit had been dealt with, but one spirit colony still remained.

This group consisted of wild beasts resembling wolves. Every single one of them possessed combat ability worthy of the title of spirit.

And right now, two women were tearing through the entire colony.

“!”

A wolf-shaped spirit exploded under Noel’s bare fist.

Aiden had already watched her do the exact same thing dozens of times today. Even ordinary steel blades usually could not pierce a spirit’s hide properly, much less inflict fatal damage. Yet Noel was crushing them with her bare hands as if she were popping simple balloons.

Even Katya was watching the spectacle with a hollow, dazed expression. In only a few minutes, more than twenty spirits had already been sent to the afterlife that way.

Of course, Katya’s own performance was hardly less absurd.

“Hmm.”

She exhaled briefly, and intense flames flared into existence around her body. Heat so extreme that it became nearly invisible flooded the surrounding area in an instant. The fire swept across the air and engulfed every spirit nearby.

The motion itself was casual, but every creature in its path was instantly reduced to ash.

Noel fought with overwhelming, violent force, obliterating anything that entered her reach. Katya’s combat technique, by contrast, was so precise and efficient that it evoked a machine. At this point, calling it a subjugation barely felt accurate. It looked more like routine labor—as though the two of them were simply pulling weeds and clearing away anything that caught their eye.

‘…Those are two of the main heroines in the scenario.’

The sight reminded Aiden all over again what kind of monsters he normally spent his time around. It also reminded him of the scale of the Main Scenario itself—an event vast enough to treat women like these as mere components in its grand narrative.

“…”

Aiden let out a quiet sigh. He had chosen to walk this path himself, so he would see it through to the end. Still, thinking about how an ordinary person like him had somehow become entangled in all this left him with little else to do but sigh.

Especially because there was no longer any way to run away.

That did not mean he could simply stand there sighing while those terrifying women swept the battlefield, though.

So what was Aiden doing while people frightening enough to send chills down his spine dominated the fight?

“Oh, this one’s still alive.”

He was collecting the spirits that had been thrown nearby. More precisely, he was harvesting the ones that were barely alive and hanging on the verge of death.

It looked pathetic, but he had a practical reason. A spirit nearing death expelled its core, just as the Fire Spirit had done. Even if these creatures were not leader-class spirits dominating an entire region, their cores would definitely prove useful if gathered in large quantities.

Aiden hummed to himself as he gathered the spirit cores into a bag.

Suddenly, the noise around him stopped completely.

An opponent had appeared that made even Noel and Katya—who had been mowing down everything in sight—stop in their tracks and narrow their eyes.

“…That thing looks troublesome,” Katya muttered, staring at an enormous wolf covered in grotesque, glowing protrusions.

Judging from its size, it was a high-tier medium spirit. Most likely, this was the absolute ruler of the surrounding colony.

Even Noel and Katya, who had destroyed the lesser spirits in a single strike each, did not rush forward to attack it carelessly. Anyone could tell at a glance that the leader of the colony was loaded with special abilities.

‘Judging by that color, it’s completely stacked.’

A bitter smile appeared on Aiden’s face.

Among spirits, the danger posed by individuals with special mutations could usually be estimated by the color of their bodies. This one was a deep crimson, marking it as one of the most dangerous specimens within its class. It probably possessed the maximum limit of three special traits.

“…Adaptive Skin, Refraction, and Hyper-Regeneration. How annoying.” Noel sighed in agreement, quickly evaluating the monster’s traits.

Adaptive Skin was a mutation that granted immense resistance against any weapon that had made contact with the target even once.

Refraction reflected a portion of incoming damage back toward the attacker.

Hyper-Regeneration did exactly what the name implied, continuously sealing wounds in real time.

In other words, they needed to hit a creature that refused to die with enough raw force to kill it in one blow, while whoever delivered that strike would suffer the exact same lethal damage in return.

Each of those mutations would have been troublesome on its own. All three had appeared together on the exact same target.

There was a reason the wolf stood there so confidently, even after every other spirit around it had been wiped out.

“There is a simple solution,” Katya grinned, as though the answer were obvious.

“…There is?”

“Just keep hitting it until it dies.”

“…And what about the reflected damage?”

“Endure it through sheer willpower.”

“…”

“Then it becomes a contest over which side dies first. I’ve never lost one of those.”

That was only a viable strategy because she was the one using it. Noel glared at Katya as that absurd thought crossed her mind.

Before either of them could continue, Aiden stepped forward. “…I’ll handle this one. You two have already done more than enough.”

The entire subjugation party looked at him with widened eyes as he sighed and walked past them.

“You will? How?”

“I’ll manage somehow. I’ve been getting carried this whole time, so I should at least earn my keep.”

As Aiden loosened his shoulders, Katya gave a disbelieving laugh. “…I won’t stop you if you want to take the hard job, but are you sure? Don’t show off. Just ask us for help.”

Beside her, Noel was staring at him with a severe, worried expression. Her eyes clearly said: ‘You’re planning to get hurt again, aren’t you?’

“…”

Aiden sent her what he hoped was a reassuring look. No, really—this time he wasn’t going to get hurt. He waved one hand dismissively to tell her not to worry.

“…Even so, this is too difficult to handle alone. We should help you.”

“Lady Noel.” Aiden smiled at Noel with absolute confidence. “Please stand back.”

Then, he launched himself straight toward the giant wolf.

The creature noticed him at the exact same moment. With a bestial roar, one enormous forepaw shot forward. The strike came with absurd, blinding speed.

‘Yeah, it really is strong!’

Even setting aside its special mutations, a medium-class spirit possessed physical strength dangerous enough to threaten most superhumans. A specimen covered in multiple traits like this one was normally even more powerful than average.

Still, Aiden could now inflate his basic physical attributes through the supernatural powers he had collected.

System Message

▶ Activating ‘Skill: Beastification.’

▶ Activating ‘Skill: Primordial Power.’

He could at least react to its movements through abilities like these.

Aiden layered Liza Aslan’s Beastification over the Primordial Power he had copied from River. Ferocious, primal energy flooded the body of an otherwise ordinary human. In the past, meeting an attack like this head-on would have crushed him instantly.

Now, things were different. Using his enormously strengthened muscles, Aiden raised his sword to defect the incoming limb.

Clang!

The blade knocked the massive paw aside. Blue energy rising from the beast spread across his weapon in fine, web-like cracks. Aiden had cut the paw slightly while deflecting it, but a wound that shallow vanished almost immediately under Hyper-Regeneration.

Aiden could not truly read the expression of a beast, yet the wolf somehow looked smug.

System Message

▶ You have made contact with the spirit’s ‘Adaptive Skin’!

▶ The power of this weapon against the target spirit has been reduced by 90%!

‘So that’s how it works.’

It was an absurdly unfair ability. Blocking a single attack was enough to completely seal off one of his primary weapons. Even for a rare mutation, that felt excessive.

“You idiot! Why would you use your weapon like that?!” Katya shouted from behind him in sheer frustration. “That sword is useless against it now! Get out of there! Fighting any longer is just wasting time…!”

She stopped mid-sentence. Aiden had already charged the spirit again.

From his perspective, there was no problem with handling this alone. He had never intended to kill it with the sword in the first place. The first exchange had merely been bait to make the beast lower its guard.

“…?”

The spirit seemed genuinely confused by the sight of a human who had lost his weapon’s effectiveness charging straight at it barehanded. That confusion quickly turned to mockery as the wolf raised its forepaw again, intending to finish Aiden with a single, pulverizing strike.

This time, it abandoned its own defense entirely and swung with full power. As far as the creature knew, Aiden no longer possessed any meaningful means of attack.

However, there was one ability that was almost always devastating against opponents relying on strange, unnatural traits.

The base was Law Force, and mixed directly into it was pure divine power.

System Message

▶ Activating ‘Skill: Purifier.’

The deep red coloration covering the wolf’s body was instantly washed away.

“!”

Its eyes widened as pure instinct told the creature that something fundamental had changed—that mortal danger had arrived. Every special mutation protecting it had vanished all at once.

Before it could react, it was already too late. Blade of Dawn flashed through the air.

The wolf’s thick hide split wide open, leaving a wound so deep that its internal organs were nearly exposed.

Aiden immediately used Pure White Qi to construct a solid barrier, forcing it directly into the open wound. The gap in the hide was pried violently wider by the expanding barrier.

The barrier had no offensive power of its own, but it was exceptionally durable, meaning it could be used as an unstoppable wedge.

Before the spirit could even scream from the agony, Aiden drove the finishing blow straight into the heart exposed through the widened wound. A blade formed from Guardian’s Flame plunged deep into its core, utilizing the same shaping technique as Blade of Dawn: Spiral, Aperture.

“!”

The result was instantaneous. The glowing light vanished from the creature’s eyes. It staggered for a fraction of a second, then collapsed heavily onto the ground.

“…”

“…”

Everyone stared at the fallen spirit with their mouths wide open. No one managed to utter a word until its enormous body crashed against the dirt.

“…Did that even take five seconds?”

“4.7 seconds.”

Noel and Katya exchanged those remarks in dazed, disbelieving voices. Noel in particular stared at Aiden as though she could not comprehend what she had just witnessed.

‘…This man.’

Aiden always seemed determined to underestimate his own combat abilities. Yet in truth, he had already become a far greater collection of variables than Noel herself.

He possessed not one or two, but more than a dozen unique strengths impossible to find in any ordinary supernatural user. Noel had crossed countless battlefields, yet she had never once encountered anyone quite like him.

Even more terrifying was that the growth rate of this walking collection of miracles showed no sign of slowing down.

‘When I first met him, I wondered where someone like this had come from.’

She had wondered how such a bizarre concentration of unusual traits could simply appear from nowhere. That curiosity had never disappeared, and now another question had joined it: How far will this man grow?

‘It might not take long.’

Perhaps he would soon surpass both Noel and Katya. Noel watched Aiden silently with that thought weighing on her mind.

✦ ✦ ✦

‘…Jackpot. Jackpot. Seriously, jackpot!’

Aiden, meanwhile, was paying no attention whatsoever to her solemn thoughts. There was something here he needed to harvest, and judging by the massive corpse, there was an enormous quantity of it.

‘This thing is basically a mountain of high-grade materials!’

A spirit’s body was already top-class equipment material on its own. A rare, mutated specimen like this was infinitely more valuable. Aiden happily approached the fallen spirit with a bright smile.

As he did, he caught the faint sound of Noel and Katya whispering behind him.

“…Why does he seem completely unbothered by the idea of butchering a corpse?”

“I keep telling you. His way of thinking is just inherently dangerous.”

“…”

Aiden decided they were being unnecessarily noisy about honest hard work.