Overwhelming Firepower

Despite it being a prosthetic, Zehn felt his left hand aching. He could not believe that his entire operation, which he had been building for a year now, was being destroyed in a single night.

He could not help but remember those ruby red eyes looking down on him. The confident smile as if saying there was no possible way he would lose.

”True to his monikers, the Ruby-Eyed Monster, and the Ever-Victorious. Such a vicious man, he might become the biggest variable to our plans.”

Even in this situation, Zehn continued to be eerily relaxed. He had found the weird stone-like object a few hours ago. He was not sure what it was, but after studying it for a while, he figured out that it was emitting a certain mana frequency.

’This might be the reason why they found my safehouses so fast.’ After figuring that out, he quickly discarded the object and left the safehouse and headed to his final safehouse.

The room he was in was not one of the cheap safehouses in the lower district anymore. After the destruction of his workshops and pill bases, he had abandoned every place tied to his earlier routes and moved into one of the deeper fallback sites prepared for emergencies.

This one was located in a better district in Caelhart. This made it harder to locate than the others.

Zehn sat in silence for a while, his remaining eye moving across the markings on the map. So many points had already been crossed out.

Workshops, safehouses, supply routes. Places that had taken months to secure had vanished in a single night. Yet despite all that, Zehn continued to smile.

The ache in his prosthetic hand pulsed again. He flexed the black metal fingers slowly, as though reminding himself that pain meant he was still here.

”How fun,” he murmured to himself.

’I no longer have time to start from scratch. I was thinking of just burning down the lower district, but that doesn’t help our cause; it might also make the people of Norvaegard get their guards up. So what kind of chaos can I cause that won’t affect our plans?’

Zehn started thinking about what he could do, and then he remembered something. ”Oh, right, I have that.”

The smile on his face deepened ever so slightly. He reached toward the bottom drawer of the desk beside him and pulled it open with his remaining hand.

Hidden beneath several folded documents and an old ledger was a small iron box, blackened at the edges as though it had once been exposed to intense heat.

Zehn placed it on the table and opened it. Inside was a single dark red pill. This pill was emanating mana, so foul it would make you think it had demonic energy.

It looked similar to the enhancement pills that had already spread through the lower districts, but only at a glance.

This one was rougher in shape, its surfaces slightly uneven, and faint black veins ran through like cracks in dried blood.

This pill was the culmination of Zehn’s research; it was created using the flesh and souls of other humans and monsters. It was taboo research, but it was one that gave a huge amount of increase in abilities.

’Seeing as this is Norvaegard, known for monster attacks. I guess a monster attack within the walls of Caelhart wouldn’t be that suspicious.’

Zehn’s smile deepened as he looked at the dark red pill resting in the iron box.

Using it on a human inside Caelhart would be too risky. The side effects would be too obvious, and if the one who consumed it died too quickly, then the chaos he wanted would not last long enough to be useful.

A monster, however, was different.

Monsters were already creatures of violence. If one suddenly became stronger, more savage, and harder to kill, then people would simply assume it was an especially dangerous variant or some rare mutation.

The city would focus on the beast rampaging through its streets, not on someone quietly slipping out of the shadows while everyone else’s attention was elsewhere.

”Yes,” Zehn murmured to himself. ”That should do nicely.”

He closed the box, rose from his chair, and walked toward the back of the room. Despite the current situation, the calm in his expression never changed.

At the rear wall of the room was a narrow wooden cabinet that looked ordinary enough. Zehn pushed it aside with his good hand, revealing a metal hatch set into the floor. He pulled it open.

A foul smell immediately rose from below. Blood, damp stone, and the rank stench of something caged for too long.

Zehn descended the narrow steps into the cellar beneath the safehouse. The space below was larger than the room above, though much of it was empty. Iron chains had been bolted into the walls. Crates filled with feed, tools, and cloth sat in one corner.

There were also weapons like clubs, swords, and maces, but their size was much larger than normal; they looked like they were created to be wielded by a giant.

At the center of the room was a large iron cage. Inside that iron cage was a monster that seemed to have been stitched together with varying monster parts.

It stood upright like a man, though there was nothing truly human about it. Its frame was broad and heavy, nearly as tall as four men, with a thick torso wrapped in patchwork flesh and coarse black stitches.

One arm was far too large, swollen with the dense muscle of an ogre-like beast, while the other was leaner but ended in a hand with long, clawed fingers that could still curl well enough around a weapon’s grip.

Its legs were shaped to bear weight like a human’s, though the joints bent a little strangely, giving it the look of something that had never been meant to walk this way. Plates of crude armor had been fastened onto its chest, shoulders, and thighs, not for protection alone, but to help hold parts of its body together.

The head was of a lion in the front, a ram with huge horns on the right side, and a snake with a very long neck on its left side.

Its lion eyes were filled with dull hostility, while the ram’s head kept twitching slightly as though it wanted to smash its horns into anything nearby. The snake head was the most active of the three, swaying slowly from side to side, its slit pupils locked onto Zehn the moment he stepped into view.

Heavy chains bound the creature’s wrists and ankles, though even those chains were slightly stretched, proof that the monster had already tested its restraints more than once.

Zehn stopped in front of the cage and looked at it with quiet satisfaction.

It had taken a great deal of effort to create this one. Flesh from multiple monsters. Failed subjects. Repeated refinement. A body forced into a shape that could move like a man and still retain the savage strength of a beast.

Also, unlike most monsters with beast-like features, this one can use weapons; he made sure that was the case.

”My masterpiece, which I named Dyr, the beast. You were meant to be used for a grander stage, but it seems that you get to play earlier than expected.”

The lion’s head let out a low growl. The ram’s head scraped one horn against the iron bars. The snake’s head hissed. Zehn opened the iron box once more and took out the dark red pill.

The moment the box was opened, the monster reacted violently. All three heads focused on the pill at once. Its massive body slammed against the cage door, making the entire iron frame shudder.

Zehn’s smile deepened. ”So you can sense it as well.”

He took a step closer to the cage. His remaining hand formed a small magic circle, and several runes carved into the floor around the cage lit up at once. The monster immediately convulsed as the restraining spell activated.

”Yes, this thing will give you unimaginable power. Use it and wreak as much havoc as you want.”

The beast that had its body stiffened due to the spell Zehn used glared at the other party.

Zehn looked at the monster in silence for a few moments, then slowly raised the dark red pill between two fingers.

Even restrained, Dyr’s entire body trembled with hunger. The lion’s head bared its fangs and let out a low rumbling growl. The ram head snorted hot breath and stamped one heavy foot against the floor.

The snake’s head stretched forward as far as it could, its jaws opening and closing with a wet hiss. All three heads wanted the same thing.

”Good, hunger more, rage more,” Zehn said with excitement.

He stepped to the side and used telekinesis to pick up one of the weapons leaning against the wall. It was a massive iron cleaver, thick and brutal, more like a slab of sharpened metal than a proper sword. He set it down just outside the cage where Dyr could clearly see it. Then he placed a huge spiked mace beside it as well.

Zehn placed the pill on the floor as well and walked out of the room. After Zehn disappeared, a few moments later, several keys floated into the room and opened the lock to the cage and chains.

Dyr was free; it did not hesitate to gulp down the dark red pill. Then the monster’s body locked in place.

Its lion’s head threw itself back and roared so violently that dust rained from the ceiling. The ram head slammed sideways into the bars hard enough to bend iron. The snake’s head writhed like something being burned alive from the inside.

Dark red veins spread beneath its patchwork flesh. They did not stop at the surface. They burrowed deeper, pulsing like molten lines through muscle, bone, and sinew.

The crude stitches binding the mismatched parts of its body began to glow faintly, then split one by one as the flesh beneath them swelled.

Its ogre-like arm swelled grotesquely, doubling in size, while the clawed hand on the other side stretched longer, its fingers sharpening into hooked blades.

The lion’s mane darkened into something closer to black flame, while the ram’s horns grew longer and more twisted. Even the snake’s scales deepened into a metallic red sheen.

The stitches that kept its body together disappeared, making it look like a natural monster. Dyr felt more powerful than ever before as the lion’s head roared even louder, making the entire building shake.

Dyr then picked up the weapons on the ground, the intensity it was emitting grew as it was now ready to start a massacre.