No Rank 1 is expected to fight a Rank 1 Calamity Beast no matter what their talent and its potential. Death is the only certainty.
The Calamity Beast's eyes locked with Elias's, and something primal within him shattered. This wasn't fear—it was the absolute certainty of his own insignificance. His lungs constricted, mouth dry as sand. Here stood the apex predator that haunted ancestral humans, a being crafted for the singular purpose of extermination.
As it lunged, time stretched into a grotesque parody of itself. Elias saw his death approach in agonizing clarity—the gleaming teeth, the frost forming in the air around the beast's maw.
He wanted to move. His legs refused to obey; his mind fragmented into useless shards of panic. The gap between them collapsed with horrifying inevitability.
Lightning cracked across the space between them—a desperate intervention—but Elias had no time for relief. The beast's displaced air slammed into him with the force of a collapsing mountain.
"Bubble!"
His instinct triggered his barrier, but deep down he knew—knew with devastating certainty—it wouldn't be enough. Not an active skill but Instinctual Defense—unreliable, insufficient, a cruel joke in the face of such power.
His body crashed against stone, barrier shattering like his hopes.
The Calamity Beast weathered the lightning attack, its massive form barely inconvenienced. It merely redirected its own force into one hand, deflecting what should have been a killing blow.
Through vision blurred by terror, Elias watched the beast recover in seconds, watched death regain its footing.
Then it moved.
Elias hadn't even caught his breath when the beast speed came before him. Glacial cold enveloped his flesh. Panic wasn't an emotion anymore—it was his entire existence, consuming every thought. His lungs labored against the freezing air. His fingers numbed. His mind screamed silently.
"Bubble!"
Another barrier formed, thin as hope itself. The momentary relief was cruel, a false promise immediately broken as the beast's claws descended.
"Shatter!"
Another barrier rose, desperate and futile. Then another. They were nothing—tissue paper against a hurricane. With each failure, despair dug deeper roots into Elias heart.
"Cackle!"
Lightning illuminated the nightmarish beasg, giving Elias a perfect view of the calamity he couldn't escape. The rock behind him exploded, sending toward uncertain destiny.
A man descended from above, crackling with thunder—a Hunter, perhaps. The beast roared, turning to face this old threat.
The reprieve wasn't relief; it merely postponed the inevitable.
In that moment of suspended animation, numbness blossomed in Elias's chest. He looked down, and the sight crushed what remained of his hope. Three gaping wounds tore across his torso to his left shoulder. Exposed bone, cracked and fractured, gleamed with crystalline frost. No blood flowed—just ice, spreading through his veins like despair through his mind.
His neck froze, immobilizing him. His heart slowed, each beat more labored than the last. The cold was unlike anything he'd experienced—not just physical but existential, as if the universe itself was withdrawing its warmth from him. He was becoming a monument to his own failure.
Movement approached—footsteps, not bestial but human.
"We are sorry. We didn't know there was someone...!"
Something pierced his neck, forcing its way through ice-hardened flesh. Warmth flooded him, but it wasn't comfort—it was uncertainty. His body untensed, heart hammering against his ribs like it might break free. His mind, dormant in shock, thrown in hyperactive panic.
He gasped, lungs burning as they filled. The wounds began thawing, releasing their frozen poison, followed by blood. Pain returned, and he welcomed it only because it replaced the horrifying void of numbness.
Elias collapsed to his knees, the weight of his own tired body suddenly unbearable. Using his stumped arm—the one injury he'd almost forgotten—he braced himself, preventing complete collapse.
"We need to move!" A female voice penetrated the fog of his consciousness. He looked up, but she was merely a blur through eyes clouded by trauma and tears.
His gaze drifted to his chest, then his left arm. It hung limp, unresponsive—a dead thing still attached to him. No sensation, no movement. Just like his right wrist, but worse. So much worse. His body was abandoning him piece by piece.
The world darkened around him, colors bleeding away. Battle sounds faded into muffled echoes, replaced by the roaring inside his skull—a primal scream built of rage, terror, grief, and despair, so tangled he couldn't distinguish between them.
"Ahhh. It can't be. My hand. My arm. It can't be!"
Something within Elias fractured completely. His face contorted into a mask of pure horror, eyes wide and unseeing, mouth stretched in a silent scream. Reason abandoned him. He bolted, running blindly into the forest, pursued only by the specter of his own mutilation.
The girl tried to stop him, but his madness was beyond reason. She grabbed, tackled, pleaded, but he thrashed against her restraints, deaf to her call. He was beyond words, beyond thought—a creature of pure instinct and fear.
"Please!" she shouted, her brown hair turning white thrashing in the wind. Tears streamed down her face as she clung to him, her own legs bleeding as they dragged across the forest floor. Her desperation couldn't match his delirium.
"We need to stay behind him!"
"You are running toward them. The beast will come for you!"
Her warning dissolved into a pained yelp as his elbow connected with her nose, freeing him from her grasp.
"Never. I will not be... never. I will!" His shouts were fragments, the broken language of a broken mind.
She watched him run toward certain doom, gathering her remaining strength to follow. She wouldn't let him die alone.
In his madness, Elias wasn't fleeing the danger but running perpendicular to it—tracing the perimeter of destruction like a moth circling flame.
The girl froze as the Calamity Beast, momentarily driven back, turned its attention toward them. The Hunter descended from above, too slow, too distant.
'It saw us!'
Time compressed. The Calamity Beast speed came before Elias, and the cold returned instantly. His body began freezing, starting from the wounds and spreading outward. His heart stuttered and stilled.
Yet in that moment of zero hope, something shifted in Elias's expression. A twisted smile carved itself across his face—not joy, not courage, but the terrible grin of one who has nothing left to lose.
His stumped arm swung forward, carrying a dark spot no larger than a grain of sand. His half-frozen body somehow accelerated, meeting the beast's gaping maw as it lunged for his head.
The beast recognized the danger too late. It recoiled, The black speck rushed forward, drawn to the monster's essence.
The Calamity Beast thrust its force-coated hand forward in desperate defense, but the power behind Elias's stump was primal, elemental. It shredded the beast's forelimbs like paper in a storm.
The beast suddenly launched upward, trailing shattered bone and blood. Driven by a rage beyond reason, Elias leapt after it, gravity bend to his will.
The beast released a shockwave roar that should have pulverized him. Instead, Elias swung his ruined arm, shattering the wave like glass. The remnant force reversed course, striking the beast with devastating power, driving it earthward.
Elias descended like vengeance incarnate, a grimhammer falling upon his tormentor.
BOOM!
The impact resonated through the forest, a thunder that belonged to neither storm nor beast, but to a boy who had transcended despair to find something darker, something more primal waiting on the other side.
Wrath!