The Apprentice of Ouroboros [Monster Evo LitRPG Adventure]

"The measure of a man is not in the children he fathers or the wife he loves. It is not a measure of the size of his home, or the gold in his chest. Nor is it the number of medals pinned upon his breast or the foes that fall beneath him.

"It is the totality of change he exerts upon the world. And you, Felix, will enact great change."

Felix gasped with a raspy, agonizing breath, claws trenching into the floor of the cavern grotto. He let out a hacking cough, echoing in the underground retreat. He glanced down and was greeted by a body covered with a slew of burns and injuries.

Those haunting words from the past had roused him from his unconsciousness, a period of rest that brought no feeling of relief.

Once his body stopped shaking, there was nothing but a muted flow of wind. Water dripped into a primordial pool in one corner and seeped deeper underground through a crack in the floor. Bushy moss and lichen draped part of the floor and wall, nourished by the source of water seeping nutrients and the dim glow of mana in the passage.

Every breath hurt from seared lungs slowly recovering from the inferno that had surrounded him in the climax of the battle at Bregin. Peeling skin and charred fur hung loose from his body as new fur and flesh grew in slowly. He was far from recovered. I haven't felt pain like this in…a while.

He grabbed a hanging strip of burnt flesh and snarled as he tugged it loose like an oversized scab. The fur beneath hadn't started to grow in yet, but he was healing.

He would survive.

Barely. He’d evaded the patrols of the Valos army. He knew them too well; their search patterns were too predictable, and he'd kept to trees and streams to throw off the hounds used to track him. His shadow step left little to no trace.

He’d limped twenty miles through dense forests and wild rivers before the sounds of bloodhounds and men on horseback had faded into nothing. He’d lost them, but just so. Out here, this was his territory, and he would be the hunter. The pursuers gave up, finally. No hounds or horses were audible.

His trek led him to this small refuge where his pack had gathered before. A pungent scent of offal, musk, and rotted meat still lingered. The exhaustion and pain had caught up with him over the night. As soon as he got into the refuge, he collapsed and made his peace with the fact that he might not survive, as his vision wavered and his consciousness slipped.

It should have been an easy mission in Bregin: cause chaos in the backlines, and turn his hometown into a killing ground.

My hometown… He shook his head, his own words feeling like a foreign language, alien and unfamiliar, trying to shed them from his mind. Focus. Don't let your memories distract you. Kill your past. He shuddered as every motion twisted his half-healed burns.

But pain was irrelevant. There was a new threat. The damn snake with uncanny powers. Something completely unlike any of the evolutions he was aware of.

And he’d lost his entire damn pack in the process because of her. Neska. An Awakened that proved that size didn't matter. She survived him and used his own ability against him. His shadow walk had become an autoclave that nearly killed him.

Now his pack was all dead. All because of one damned snake and an oversized mouse.

And Hadley.

What a surprise to find her still there. He’d savor that kill, once he found her again.

Remember your mission, Felix. Report back. There will be consequences. Not only was he injured, but the attack had cost him an entire pack of wolves that could have evolved into more dangerous Tier twos. Their attack at Bregin should have weakened the supply road and drawn men out of position on the western front by the rolling hills. Instead, they'd lost the whole pack and exposed the fact that monsters had broken through the holding line. They might even find the tunnels.

It was a disaster on every level.

But...why do I have to go back to them?

He couldn't shake the thought. Why would he not go back? He had to report back.

Something was missing…the compulsion to kill, to devour…where was it?

Why was his hunger for death missing? He rubbed a paw over his face, claws digging into fur and flesh.

He realized what he had been missing. An absence that had gone unnoted until he had a moment of respite.

The call of the Collective…the constant pressure to hunt, to kill, to destroy humanity, at the reward of power…it was muted.

Gone.

The fuck did you do to me, snake? He’d seen her powers. They almost looked like witch powers, something the Varadur had begun to research in libraries and manors stocked with books and scrolls. He had to admit, after joining the collective, most Varadur were mindless killing machines, following only simple commands; the ones with their minds intact who valued knowledge had begun collecting information on humanity, past and present. They'd even begun replicating their industries and understanding their classes.

But now he heard nothing, not even that background whisper to seek challenge, kill foes, consume them. This dead silence in his mind...it made his spine shiver

He needed that drive, that will. Why was it missing? Why did his blood not run hot like it always did?

The snake had robbed him of it. She must have, with one of her curses. Not only that, her mind had repelled his corrupting influence. The mental feedback had been painful. No Awakened had ever resisted being corrupted in that way, at least those weak of mind.

This one had pushed back in a way that hurt him.

Gritting his teeth, he rose to his feet and grabbed a stash of bandages and salves from a natural rocky shelf. The Varadur weren't completely lacking in medical or technical knowledge. Awakened like him had brought plenty of medical and other tactical insights with them to the collective, helping them understand humanity and its weaknesses.

Each wrap of gauze, every searing application of ointment was a pain he needed to focus his attention on—anything to help him forget that deafening silence that had shrouded the innards of his mind.

It's been a while since I did basic aid. I didn’t forget that. Meanwhile, a goblin will let its arm rot off because they don’t understand what an infection is—stupid shits. We lose more of our kind to our ingrained ferocity than to the spear of humanity.

He tied off another bandage, grimacing. He had to remember where the nearest Varadur congregation point was. Salvos, maybe? No, Arcesti Hills, maybe; it was north of here, past a poorly and almost uncontested region of the holding line.

But why did he need to go? Wasn't he just taking orders from another?

Stop it. It'll be fine. She got into your head just a little bit. Humanity turned its back on you first. You were justified in killing them. You're strong because you're a survivor, Felix.

He gazed south, ever further away. He couldn’t see it, but he could picture where the snake and her filthy allies had gone. A fortress set on top of a plateau, a fairy tale academy that humanity prized as one of its last hopes.

You're my next personal project, Neska. I know exactly where you're headed. There was only one logical place she could be going: Rivilat Academy. He had no chance of intercepting her now; he'd fled in the opposite direction. and getting in there, right now, wasn't an option.

Assaulting Rivilat alone, or even with a pack of monsters, was suicide. And he wasn't in the mood to die until he’d finished his goals.

Burnt flesh flaked away as he peeled at the damaged tissue. The fur had become a fused, charred mess, and he ripped it free so it would regenerate anew. He did the same elsewhere, some regions worse than others, and gritted his muzzle to avoid screaming.

This self-inflicted and necessary self-doctoring still didn't hurt as much as the end of his past life. He still remembered it as if it had happened yesterday.

Two hundred other hardened hunters and skirmishers like him had died holding a ridge to buy time for the army's retreat at Reilani pass, four years ago. The battle should have been a victory to smash the monsters' frontlines.

It had been a slaughter. The Varadur knew they were coming. His hunting party had volunteered to run interference, buying the army time to withdraw.

Two hundred men died. Thousands of Varadur were slain. An army survived.

Only he had been left standing, chewed up and wounded all over. The last wolf had taken a chomp from his leg. Others had to try to claw and bite him open elsewhere. His body was a tapestry of wounds, yet he survived.

He'd broken his knife, killing the last one. It didn't matter. He'd lost too much blood. His last adversary had been a wolf pup, growling menacingly at him.

But then, it pawed at the wolf corpse that had collapsed on Felix. The pup let out a soft whine, trying to move the dead weight of its presumptive kin. A pup, trying to rouse its mother.

And in that moment, he watched a monster realize their loss and lose the will to fight. The pup lay down, whining softly, as if crying, ignoring the hunter.

That sadness had moved him to stay his hand. At least he wouldn't die alone.

Then those goddamn mages on the last of the retreat team double-backed, shoved the poor pup in a sack, and dragged his half-dead body to a frontline triage center.

He was fucked. He knew it, and everyone else knew it. He was alive by sheer willpower, and even that would run out. Too much damage to safely heal. He'd begged them a last mercy.

Let the pup go. And let him go to the Umbral Shoal, to join his men.

Instead, they cut open his chest with him still alive, screaming for an end that wasn't coming. They'd parted skin, muscle, and ribs. He couldn't die fast enough to stop them from doing what he thought they might.

His last waking moment was seeing the gleam of his mana core in his own chest, and then a tearing sound of flesh parting.

Then blackness. One he hoped would be eternal.

No. His nightmare was only beginning. He woke with paws, a muzzle, and a changed body. When they showed him a mirror, he realized what they’d done. They fused him with the pup of the wolf that killed him.

He tried to bite his own legs off. Anything to escape this hell. Instead, they muzzled him. They brought him and his human remains home.

Lying shits. They delivered his own bones, and didn't have the balls to tell anyone what they did. Thus, his waking nightmare continued. He’d never had the strength to try to take his own life again, after all that.

But he still had the strength to train. To hunt. To inflict pain on those who wronged him.

Most important of all, he still had the will to kill.

But those would come later. He needed to go north and regroup with the front line. The closest ones were the Burning Head clan situated in a ruined town, named Arcesti Hills.

Goblins. He'd hunted these things as a human; he hated them then, and he despised them even more, now. This tribe got its name from their grotesque ritual of burning the hair off their heads once they reached maturity, laughing and giggling.

Half the time, they just ended up killing themselves, running around with their head on fire. Even with that, they were still dangerous in numbers. Why the hell did the glorious Interface want to bring enlightenment to them?

He glanced at the keepsakes of the grotto, a small table of laid out tools. Within the stone walls, mana veins were embedded, glowing with faint power throughout. The walls provided just enough light to see. In the center of the table was the cured hide of a thresher beast in the form of a pack, housing other items. He placed one clawed hand on it, then, after a moment of hesitation, opened it.

The enchantment of preservation still worked. Inside were more hunting tools, a carving knife, a whetstone, and more.

Next to the pack was another large hide wrapped around an object. He undid the buckle slowly and unwound the hide to reveal something he somehow couldn't let go of, even after his death. Inside the bundle lay a well-maintained wood and metal bow with runic inscriptions.

His warbow. Revenant. So named for the father who made it for him and was killed in the first battles against the Varadur. A weapon passed from father to son. It had slain food and foes alike, many times over. But why was his hand shaking as he gripped the bow? Was it the burns? Or the memory of seeing it after so long?

They killed him. They killed everyone of consequence. He’d been detached from the memory for so long, he barely remembered his father’s name.

Why did he want to remember it now? It was just a word. It meant nothing to him.

Then, he remembered: Bedivere. An old man who taught him everything, including the value of knowledge.

He ran his hand along the bow, the warm wood inviting, metal polished and gleaming as though it had been runesmithed yesterday. A string of sinew from a dead dragon completed the weapon, the string utterly unbreakable. With his new form, he could put massive power behind each shot. Superhuman power to make each arrow truly deadly.

Revenant. The last vestiges of Felix, the human. Felix, the savior of Reilani Ridge.

Felix, the murderer and traitor.

He snarled at the infectious thought. “Divines damn you, Neska,” he snarled to the gaping depths of the cavern, echoing into the tiny, deep places of the world.

Why was the collective muted? Why did his blood feel like ice in his veins?

He'd hunt. A good hunt should do it, and bring back that broiling, comforting heat in his veins. He stepped towards the entrance, sunlight just peeking past a bend in the rock. He now had a new quarry at the end of his hunt.

A hunt for the snake. One he would need more than just himself to complete. His quarry was dangerous, and not alone, with a deceptively dangerous mouse, the fiery swordsman, and the huntress he’d scarred.

Good. Danger meant power.

Then, he turned and grabbed the equipment, placed it in a leather pack he slung onto his back. Last came the bow; he strung the end up and slung it over his shoulder.

It would be a shame to leave such fine tools to sit unused, moldering in the dark.

---

It had been a long time since he remembered the feeling of stalking prey in this manner. Not up close, not with his fangs and claws, but with a bow and arrow.

Before he's Awakened, the bow had been slightly oversized. In his Tier two shadow wolfling form…it fit perfectly, and could transfer much of his body strength to the arrows.

Today's hunt was a Ceftari Elk with small crystalline antlers. It was already a skittish animal, and one charge could impale him and leave him dead. They could sprint over the gap with a burst of speed that left little time to react. He would have hunted it with his bare hands were he uninjured, but now uncertainty lingered.

He had a clear line of sight on the creature. He focused his vision and hearing on the beat of its heart within its chest. He adjusted his aim ever so slightly.

Better to aim a little higher, to avoid hitting a rib or the breastbone. He drew the bow back, metal and wood letting out only the faintest creak of protest. He wasn't worried about breaking it; it was enchanted to be durable.

If only the Varadur valued such items to their maximum potential. The mimicoids and doppelgangers picked up such effects by necessity to sell the illusion of humanity; goblins were more likely to piss in a helmet than wear it to protect their heads, and forget about giving them anything that set things on fire.

Seeing a crater in place of what had been the Sharpshin tribe after giving them fire orbs was not a mistake that would be repeated.

Back on target: his quarry, unaware of his presence, its scent of calm an aroma to his unparalleled sense of smell.

He let out a calm breath as he loosed the arrow, the air making a sharp cracking sound as the projectile flew through the air. The arrowhead pierced straight through the beast, and the creature staggered sideways, swaying its head as if to impale an invisible foe.

A primal grin spread on Felix’s face. Well, it's breakfast now. The beast collapsed on its side, slowly bleeding out from the hole through its heart. He leaped in when he was close enough, claws shearing through its throat.

When hunting, there was no need to let your prey suffer. Suffering was for those who hurt him.

But this feast brought no lasting pleasure as he clawed away the sweet meat, still hot from its last moment of living. If anything, there was a bitter taste in his mouth.

Why couldn't he enjoy this? Why were cuts from the flank and entrails so chewy, so unenjoyable?

Where was the feeling of power?

He still couldn’t hear the reassuring urge in his mind. The voice encouraged conquest, slaughter…or the difficult one, capturing humanoids alive.

Something was wrong. The hunt did nothing. The meat in his mouth tasted bitter. He looked at his kill, eyes widening as he took in the sight.

He didn’t see the elk. He saw the boy in academy robes lying on the floor of the chamber where the fuckers did their magic to bring people back to life unwillingly. Turned good people into monsters.

The boy whom he thought was a friend. He was a participant in putting monsters like him on a leash. His friend had participated in this, trying to keep Felix from ending this atrocious act and perversion of the last wishes of the dying. He'd attacked him.

Felix did the natural thing: he defended himself. You didn't let foes kill you.

One swipe, and the boy was disemboweled, guts spilling on the ground. He screamed in a way only a humanoid can scream seconds from death. Felix’s claws were drenched with blood, and viscera hung from his jaw as he ate him.

Chewy. An unpleasant taste in his mouth. Maybe another bite would have a different flavor, a better one.

The boy feebly pushed back at Felix, screaming, crying, watching as this monster ate him alive. The screams gave way to slow moans as his lifeblood gave out and his panic strength faded. Felix tore his head back, howling in delight.

Then the boy ceased his movement. It should have been raw power. But the taste was like rotten meat, left out too long and spoiled.

He stared at the lifeless body, then down at his own bloodstained and torn academy uniform. Why did I do it that way? All I had to do was push him aside. Why am I doubting myself now?

The boy moved. Felix stared in horror as something that he’d killed with his bare hands defied its fate. The boy’s head turned, locking eyes, even with a crater in his belly and chest.

Then, he spoke. There was a chunk of his cheek missing, and Felix could see the innards of his mouth and teeth, yet it still made out a raspy question like a last accusation of the doomed.

“How does freedom taste, Felix?”

Reality snapped back to focus as he recoiled backward, sprawling on the ground away from the remains of the elk. He gagged and retched on the forest floor, retching until nothing but bile came up. Claws trenched into soft moss and rich earth, and he let out a groan of pain, his body rebelling against him from the revulsion of the memory.

He wiped a bloodstained streak of mutilated elk and blood from his muzzle, gagging. He realized what the snake had done.

She hadn’t cursed him. She’d given him a blessing. A blessing with an irony more bitter than the taste of the bile on his tongue. A blessing of clarity.

He was free. She’d completely snapped the connection to the Collective. That’s why he couldn’t hear the urge or feel the reward for exerting power. It shouldn't have been possible.

Yet this was the evidence before him. “No, no, no!”

She'd given him clarity as to what he had become. What he had done. What drove you to them, Felix? Why did you turn your back on humanity? Those words from her haunted him.

He knew the answer, one he couldn't choke down. They brought him back to make a difference. To change the world.

He cradled his head with his claws, sobbing, praying for the connection to be restored. The silence in his head was deafening, and no assuring voice returned.

He was alone. He had freedom so terrifying, he wanted nothing more than to crawl back into his cage.

He let out a primal scream as he gripped the earth, a howl that echoed through the dense wood, startling birds to flee in the sound of flaps and distressed screeches. Four years of blood drunk rage had led to a hangover of existence–a moment of sobriety so painful that it would have been a mercy if the snake finished him off.

What have you done to me, Neska?

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The Apprentice of Ouroboros: End of Volume I

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