Chapter 99: Intense Competition
Back at Nero’s location, he glanced at the leaderboard and noticed their score had surged by twenty points.
"Ah... so you baited me to kill four of them," he murmured, a dry smile tugging at the corner of his lips. He wasn’t surprised—Khione had outplayed him. He had underestimated the ice-cold tactician, and she had exploited that with precision. A bitter lesson carved into pride.
"Tch... never again," Nero muttered.
He dropped to a seated position and closed his eyes, drawing in a slow, steady breath. His muscles relaxed, and the aura of fire around him faded as he entered a meditative state. For the next few minutes, silence enveloped him. Within, he centered his prana, gathering it from every thread of his body and pulling it toward his core. His breathing synchronized with the subtle rhythm of the world around him. Heat pulsed in his veins like molten steel waiting to be forged.
Then, without warning, flames surged out from his back.
Crimson wings of fire unfurled, radiant and fierce, illuminating the forest canopy around him with a warm, menacing glow. His eyes snapped open—burning, focused.
"Time to hunt."
Nero’s Divine Sense expanded like a second heartbeat, flooding the surrounding forest in an invisible web of awareness. Every living creature, every faint movement, every heartbeat within two hundred meters flared in his perception. But he wasn’t looking for rabbits or birds.
He was looking for monsters.
For over half an hour, he swept through the dense underbrush and fog-draped paths, silent as a shadow. Then—three presences flared on the edge of his awareness, heavy and brutish. Orcs.
He landed silently atop a boulder overlooking a ravine, and there they were—hulking beasts, nearly eight feet tall, their muscles thick like corded rope beneath mottled green skin. Two of them wielded massive rusted cleavers, the third carried a crude war hammer the size of a tree stump.
Nero didn’t hesitate.