Sss Awakening I Can Class Change At Will Chapter 696

[ … words ]

As his injuries piled up, Moon’s mind ran through every remaining option, and the fastest answer was the simplest one.

Run.

If he couldn’t beat it and couldn’t outlast it, then he could try to open distance, break line of sight, and buy time for the racial skill’s timer to run down somewhere the archer’s arrows couldn’t reach him.

Without hesitation, he bolted.

He turned and sprinted across the snow in the opposite direction, pouring everything into his legs, his agility carrying him fast across the frozen ground.

The archer read the plan instantly.

It gave chase, and it fired as it ran, arrows screaming after him in a relentless stream. Moon juked and cut and dodged, throwing himself sideways to slip the shots, Air Step letting him change direction faster than the arrows could correct. He avoided the first few, then a few more, weaving a desperate path across the wasteland.

But it wasn’t working.

Even at a dead sprint, he couldn’t pull ahead. The archer matched his pace and then some, its new speed keeping it right on him, and every dodge he made cost him forward momentum while the elf gained ground. Running just meant dying tired, with an arrow in his back instead of his chest.

He couldn’t outrun a Surpasser, and trying only turned his exposed spine toward its bow.

Moon abandoned the escape.

He killed his sprint, spun on his heel, and squared off with the elf once more, both blades snapping back up, ice and lightning. If he couldn’t run and couldn’t hide, then he’d face it head-on and keep bleeding the clock the only way left to him.

The archer slowed as he turned, its grin returning at his refusal to keep fleeing, and it raised its bow again, savoring the moment.

Moon set his feet, injured shoulder and all, and stared it down.

Fine. Head-on it is. Just break already. Any second now.

Moon fought the archer once more, using everything he had in his arsenal in order to deal damage, buy time, and survive just a little longer against the Surpaser Lesser Elf.

Unfortunately, his injuries continued to mount, and his healing could no longer keep up with the rate of injuries.

And then, in a single exchange he was a moment too slow for, the archer’s arrow found him before he could pull clear.

It punched through his chest, destroying his heart.

Moon looked down at the gap in his chest, a weak smile on his face.

‘Shit…’

Moon died.

[You have lost 10,000 Lives]

His body dispersed, and he reformed once more. He forced himself to stay standing, despite his body’s urge to bend a knee in the snow.

His breath came in ragged pulls. The resurrection debuff taking no time to settle in his body.

Despite the weakness in his limbs, Moon immediately tried put distance between himself and the elf, staggering back out of range.

The death he had been avoiding had arrived, so did the weakness.

He couldn’t cruise through this fight anymore. Things he had been doing to stay alive would no longer work.

Although the wounds on his body had disappeared, the debuff that took their place was arguably worse for his current situation.

The strategy of survive-until-the-timer-breaks was failing, because he was going to run out of lives before the archer ran out of power.

The only way to survive this is to eat the heart of the true elf…

The thought was very difficult to settle with. He had the heart in his storage ring right now. Swallowing it would certainly give him a power up.

But I wanted that for the Supreme turtle egg. It would have helped it hatch, helped it grow into something extraordinary.

He considered his original plan for exactly one second before discarding it. His life was worth more than a beast’s growth, a dead man couldn’t raise a Supreme creature anyway.

But the hesitation didn’t fully clear, another doubt creeping in.

I don’t actually know how it’ll affect me. I’m human, not an elf. The archer got a Surpasser ascension and a racial skill out of it, but that’s because it shares the bloodline. What if it does far less for me? What if I swallow the single most valuable thing I own from this place, in the middle of a fight, and it’s barely enough?

His eyes landed on the archer across the snow, on the crimson power still blazing off its transformed body.

Elves benefit most from this. It’s their bloodline. It’s meant for them.

A gasp escaped Moon’s mouth as a thought appeared in his mind like a light bulb in a dark room.

What if I feed it to the southern commander? To the Beast Soul? It’s an elf. Same race as the one that ate it. If the Northern Commander took all these benefits from its heart, then my elf, the one I already command, would get the exact same thing.

Nothing stopped him. The Beast Soul was a living creature, in its own strange way, a summoned spirit with its own body, capable of injury and death and, if the logic held, growth.

Although he had only evolved his beast souls through Lives…perhaps, just perhaps… they could evolve through this too.

Moon decided to take the more probably gamble.

Moon reached into his mind and summoned the southern commander to his side.

The Lesser Elf blade master materialized in a burst of pale light, both blades drawn, the dead rival standing once more against the one that had killed it.

The northern commander saw it, and scoffed, its lip curling as it looked at the spirit of the blade master it had killed just minutes earlier.

The Northern Commander’s thoughts needed no translation.

You summon back the one I killed? You bring me the corpse I already stepped over, and call it help?

Moon ignored the taunt.

He drew the true elf’s heart from his storage ring, the crimson organ pulsing in his palm, and held it out toward the Beast Soul.

Let’s see if you can grow the same way it did.