Chapter 66- Warg’s Dusk Striders
Leo raised his hand and summoned the Warg’s soul.
A black, translucent sphere of smoke formed above his palm. It drifted slowly, denser at the center and thinning toward the edges. Faint shapes moved inside it—brief flashes of teeth, running legs, and yellow eyes.
Hugh took an involuntary step back. His face had gone pale. Sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip. He had never seen a soul extracted and held like this. The sight felt wrong in a way ordinary metalwork never did.
Leo glanced at him and couldn’t help but smile at the terrified expression on Hugh’s face.
He focused back on the soul.
"Hehe. Watch carefully, old man."
"Shall we begin?"
He called the Soul Flame into the same hand that held the smoky sphere. A pale silver fire bloomed around it.
Leo kept the flame low at first and began burning away the outer layers.
The first things to burn were the memories.
Images rose and dissolved in the smoke. Narrow dirt tunnels packed with bodies. The smell of wet earth. Night hunts through thick undergrowth. The sudden freeze of prey when it realized it had been found.
Leo let the Soul Flame consume them one by one. He did not rush. Each memory flared briefly, then collapsed into ash that the flame ate away.
Next came the emotions.
Anger rose first among the leftovers. Then terror—sharp and short—from the final fight. Then the heavy weight of dying. Leo burned these away as well. The soul shuddered each time a strong emotion was stripped off. The smoke grew thinner and more concentrated with every pass of the flame.
Because this was a Vivid-rank soul, the process took longer than Leo had expected. It was also his first time refining a Vivid-rank soul. The remaining core resisted more strongly.
Leo increased the intensity of the Soul Flame by a small degree. The fire brightened. The soul contracted and pushed back against the flame.
Vivid souls did not surrender cleanly.
A fragment of the Warg’s final moments slammed into Leo’s mind without warning.
He saw everything from the Warg’s perspective. He felt what the Warg had felt in its last moments. He also learned that the Warg had two cubs. It had been trying to protect them and hunt food for them. A flicker of sadness passed through him at the knowledge that he had killed it.
But it had been a do-or-die moment. He decided he would go back later, find the cubs, and take care of them in its stead.
The memories were vivid. Fangs meeting steel. The weight of the last charge. The shape of the thing that had killed it—Leo saw his own shadow.
For a moment his focus tightened too hard. He leaned into the flame, trying to force the resistance down by pure will.
"You’re leaning in," Hugh said. His voice sounded distant, as if it came from the far side of the room. "Breathe. The flame does the burning. You just point it."
Leo exhaled slowly and eased the pressure. He firmed his will and cleared his conscience, no longer feeling guilty. He returned to the careful work of peeling away only what was unnecessary.
After several more minutes the last of the outer shell, along with all the unnecessary remnants, burned away clean.
Then the core unfolded.
A pattern appeared in the air above Leo’s palm.
The pattern took the clear shape of the Warg itself—four legs, lowered head, the curve of a spine ready to spring. The soul pattern was made of interwoven threads of deep black and pale wind-colored light.
Two types of soul threads...
Leo stared at it for a second. He had expected a geometric formation or a simple rune lattice.
A complete animal shape was different.
Leo was surprised.
Previously, the Faint-rank soul had only taken the shape of a claw.
Now he was even more certain that each soul would likely possess a different soul pattern.
He nodded to himself in affirmation and reached for the boots.
He set the finished pair of metal boots on the workbench.
The Eternal Flame in the forge burned at a low, steady level. He directed a thin stream of heat across the boots—not enough to soften the steel, only enough to widen the microscopic gaps between the metal grains.
Then he manifested the Soul Fire Hammer. The tool formed in his right hand, its head made of the same pale silver flame he had used to refine the soul.
He began the binding procedure.
The first blows pressed the dark threads of the pattern against the surface of the boots.
The threads resisted. The Vivid soul pushed back.
At the same time, the metal itself seemed to pull at the energy, hungry and uneven.
The two forces tangled.
The seams he had welded earlier gave a low metallic complaint under the pressure.
Hugh shifted his weight but stayed where he was, eyes locked on the work.
Thankfully, the metal only showed its hunger now, not while he had been forging it. The way the alloy pulled the soul threads toward itself actually made Leo’s work a little easier.
He adjusted his grip and continued. Each strike of the Soul Fire Hammer forced a short length of thread into the surface. The threads sank only a little way and then stopped moving.
Leo set the Soul Fire Hammer aside and picked up the Starfall Hammer.
The weapon responded to his intent and shrank to the size of a small rounding hammer, dense and perfectly balanced.
He used it to hammer softly next.
The solid steel head of the round hammer sent sharp vibrations through the boots with every blow.
The vibrations traveled along the grain boundaries and helped drive the half-sunk threads deeper into the metal. Leo worked in a steady rhythm—Soul Fire Hammer to place and guide the threads, Starfall Hammer to seat them with vibration and force. Between sequences he fed a little more heat from the Eternal Flame to keep the grain gaps open.
The dark threads went first. They sank into the steel and spread through the structure of both boots.
Once the shadow component was seated, the lighter wind-threads followed.
They moved faster, weaving between the dark strands. Leo followed their path with the hammers, making sure each segment locked into place before moving to the next.
He lost count of the blows.
One. Ten. Fifty. A hundred.
The dark-violet glow that had hung around the pattern gradually faded as more of the soul’s structure disappeared into the metal. The surface of the boots smoothed. The welded seams sealed until no line remained.
The pre-drawn runes for the channel now came into action as they connected with each other, and all the seams seemed to cease existing.
The last thread vanished into the alloy. The air above the workbench went still.
A system window opened in front of Leo.
[Ding~]
[Forging Complete!]
[Item: Warg’s Dusk Striders]
[Rank: Epic]
[Type: Boots]
[Materials: Starfall Shard (Rare) + Umbra’s Shards (Unique Alloy)]
[Soul: Direfang Warg (Vivid)]
[Attributes]
DEX +120, STR +50
Def +30
Movement Speed +15%
[Item Description]
Dark, scale-like hide that drinks light—faint star-flecks run through the leather, and the dark around them settles a shade deeper, as if the boots carry their own pocket of night.
[Active Skill: Shadow Lunge Teleportation]
40 MP, CD 12s
Range 12m (+6m in darkness)
Sink into the shadow pooling at your feet, cross the void, and re-emerge from any shadow within range—including an enemy’s own shadow. You can also place a Dusk Mark on the target: your next attack on them within 4s is a guaranteed critical hit.
[Passive Skill: Shadow Veil]
Your connection to shadow deepens in the dark: in dark areas Shadow Lunge’s cooldown drops depending on the level of darkness, and at nighttime the skill has no cooldown at all, allowing you to teleport freely as long as there is shadow to cross.
Leo set the hammer down and looked at the finished boots. The metal had taken on a deeper, matte darkness. When he tilted one of them, faint currents of shadow seemed to shift just beneath the surface.
Hugh still stood several steps away, face damp, eyes fixed on the boots as if they might move on their own.
The soul forging was complete.
"So... is it done?" Hugh asked.
"Yes. Are you that scared of souls?" Leo asked back with a laugh.
"Who’s scared? I just don’t like the ghostly energy it emitted." Hugh said as he looked away arrogantly. But his legs were shaking as he said it. Even his voice trembled.
Then another notification panel appeared.
[Ding!]
[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED]
Congratulations! You are the first player to forge a Epic-grade item in Myth Online from your world.
[A server-wide announcement will be made.]
[Do you wish to hide your identity?]
[Yes] [No]
Leo stared at the panel for a second, surprised. He had already forged an Epic-rank hammer back in Asgard, yet nothing like this had happened then.
Maybe someone else had forged one there first, so no announcement was triggered?
He selected Yes without hesitation.
The server-wide announcement rang out across the entire server. Golden text blazed through the sky, visible to every player—just like the announcement that had appeared when he forged the first Rare-rank item.
[MONOMYTH SERVER ANNOUNCEMENT]
Congratulations to Player [****] for being the first player on this server to forge a Epic-grade item in Myth Online!
...