FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 344: Chapter 344: True Battle Of Survival

Warchief Veylara was fighting a war of absolute attrition.

She had bounded out of the gates, determined to cut the head off the apocalyptic snake. She was entirely surrounded by five of the surviving Layer 3 Behemoths.

These were not monsters that could be killed with a simple swing of a blade. They were omen blood, the absolute forces of nature, biological apex predators that had pushed their physical evolution to horrifying extremes.

To her north stood the Stonehide Ursid. It was a bear-like monstrosity two stories tall. It wielded no magic, but its fur was permanently matted with calcified earth and petrified sap, creating a natural armor denser than refined steel. Its sheer kinetic mass made the bedrock groan with every step it took.

Flanking her right was the Thousandfang Centipede. Nearly a hundred feet of segmented, chitinous nightmare. Its massive mandibles dripped a highly concentrated, biological necrotic venom that hissed and melted the mud beneath it. Its countless hooked legs tore trenches into the earth simply by shifting its weight.

Lurking in the peripheral gloom was the Silent Fang Mantis. Another towering insectoid assassin devoid of any flashy auras. Its evolutionary perfection lay in its exoskeleton, which naturally refracted the ambient light, rendering it a shifting, blurry gray shadow.

Its massive scythe-arms were honed to a microscopic, razor-thin edge capable of slicing through an obsidian boulder with zero resistance.

To her left paced the Nightfang Wolf

. A lupine horror the size of a Veynar longhouse. Its fur was pitch-black, naturally absorbing the dim light of the storm. Its muscles were coiled with terrifying, fast-twitch tension, and its jaws were lined with rows of serrated, iron-hard bone-saws meant to crush armor and shear through spines in a single bite.

And directly in front of her, pawing the earth, was the Rockhorn Beetle. A living, breathing siege engine. Its carapace was an impenetrable, domed fortress of compressed chitin. Protruding from its head was a massive, branching horn heavily scarred by the High Shaman’s lightning, acting as an unstoppable battering ram capable of toppling the Great Orrath’s oldest trees.

These five Sovereign beasts had survived Zephyra’s catastrophic lightning storm for one simple reason: they were not ordinary Layer 3 entities. They stood infinitely close to the threshold of Layer 4. Their bodies had reached the absolute, terrifying pinnacle of mortal beasts.

A hundred yards outward, forming a desperate, bloody ring around this standoff, were the remaining Veynar Elders.

Elder Harkan, and the surviving High-Layer Vanguard had established a tight, defensive perimeter. But strangely elder throne was missing, but right now, they didn’t had time to care for details like that, they were fighting like cornered demons, holding back the endless sea of elite Essence Born and Layer 2 beasts trying to swarm the Warchief.

Helping Veylara was completely out of the question. To step into that inner circle of near-Layer 4 Sovereigns would mean instant, unavoidable death for anyone below Layer 4.

They could only grind their teeth, bleed, and ensure her duel remained uninterrupted.

In the center of the ring, Veylara stood perfectly still.

Her chitin armor was scorched, and her breath a bit ragged, but her posture was unbroken. The massive White Tiger phantom hovered over her, its ethereal form projecting an incredibly dense, oppressive aura of sheer physical suppression. It was the king of beasts, and its presence weighed heavily on the instincts of the monsters surrounding her.

The five Behemoths were absolutely enraged. The slaughter of their kin and the agonizing burns from the lightning storm drove them toward a bloodthirsty frenzy. Yet, they did not blindly charge.

They possessed high intelligence, and their primal instincts screamed a warning. The woman standing before them had crossed the boundary. She was a Layer 4 entity. The qualitative gap in their essence was a physical wall they had to respect.

It was a terrifying, high-stakes testing phase.

The Nightfang Wolf initiated the clash. Unlike normal black wolves it didn’t howl, it simply vanished, its fast-twitch muscles launching it forward at a speed that defied its massive size. It was a blur of black aiming to cleanly sever Veylara’s torso.

Veylara’s storm-colored eyes tracked the blur perfectly. She didn’t retreat. She pivoted on her heel, her obsidian spear whipping around in a brutal, horizontal arc.

But she wasn’t aiming for the wolf.

Recognizing the wolf’s feint, she drove the butt of her spear directly forward, meeting the simultaneous, earth-shaking charge of the Rockhorn Beetle.

CLANG!

The impact of the petrified-wood spear against the massive siege-horn created a lshockwave of pure kinetic energy. The mud beneath them was instantly vaporized, blown outward in a perfectly circular crater. The multi-ton momentum of the Beetle was stopped completely dead in its tracks. Veylara’s boots sank four inches into the bedrock, but her arms didn’t buckle.

Using the recoil of the Beetle’s charge, Veylara spun, bringing the bladed tip of her spear up just in time to deflect the downward, guillotine-like strike of the Silent Fang Mantis.

Sparks screamed into the night air as the microscopic edge of the scythe ground against her dense weapon. The sheer physical strength of the Mantis forced Veylara to bend her knees, but her White Tiger phantom roared, matching the insect’s downward pressure.

Suddenly a shadow fell over her. The Stonehide Ursid had reared up to its full, terrifying two-story height. It brought both of its massive, rock-clad fists down in a hammer-blow meant to crush her and the Mantis together.

Veylara violently shoved the Mantis’s scythe aside and kicked off the ground.

She launched herself backward an instant before the Ursid’s fists struck the earth. The bedrock fractured violently. A shockwave of displaced earth and jagged stone erupted outward, throwing the Mantis off balance and showering Veylara in debris.

While she was mid-air, the Thousandfang Centipede struck. It surged from the right, its massive jaws snapping shut, the hissing, necrotic venom aiming to melt her out of the sky.

Veylara’s core flared. She twisted her body with impossible, feline grace. Channeling a massive surge of Layer 4 essence into her arms, she swung her spear in a wide, descending arc. The strike released a concentrated, crescent-shaped wave of pure physical force… a projection of the White Tiger’s claw.