Chapter 287: Predator’s Moment
The three remaining Wargs didn’t wait for an order that would never come. Their primal rage, stoked by the scent of their fallen kin’s blood, took over. They charged forward, driven by a fury that erased fear and strategy alike. Their claws tore through the damp soil, throwing up clumps of earth and black dust, their howls merging into a wild cacophony that froze the blood.
Dylan no longer had breath, nor strength left for complex thought. His mind had been stripped down to a raw state — running purely on reflex and the grim economy of despair. Each heartbeat no longer pumped blood, but the last remnants of raw essence — that same essence now devouring his own life force just to keep a body upright that should have collapsed long ago.
The first Warg, the most reckless, leapt — too close, too fast for any feint.
Dylan, grounded in his final square of willpower, raised his sword — not to block, but to take the hit and strike back at the same time. The creature half-impaled itself on the blade, which sank into its chest with a splintering crack, lodged between two monstrous ribs. The weight of the beast, its sheer inertia, crushed him down. Dylan buckled under the impact, knees giving way. The beast’s putrid breath, its fangs snapping inches from his throat — that was all there was.
He had no choice. He let go of the weapon.
From somewhere deep in his primal survival instinct, he gathered what little anima remained — not into his whole body, but into his left arm, that freshly regrown limb, still tender, still thrumming with the energy of its own rebirth.
And he struck.
It wasn’t a sword strike. It wasn’t a martial technique. It was a single punch — loaded to the brim with raw, unstable spiritual energy.
His fist connected with the Warg’s skull.
The sound was hideous — wet and blunt. Not metal on bone, but bone and brain giving way under explosive force. The creature’s head burst like an overripe fruit, spraying shards of bone and grey matter. The impact threw Dylan backward, twisting his wrist to its limit. He hit the ground hard, ears ringing, vision flickering red and black. But the beast — its skull crushed from within — fell, lifeless. Two.
He stayed there for a moment, on his knees, gasping, body shaking with uncontrollable tremors. The anima that had surged through his arm now receded, leaving behind a deep ache and a hollow vastness. It had burned erratically, dangerously, too compressed, too unstable — as if every cell in his body had consumed its own reserves just to feed that last spark of violence.
The third Warg, smaller and scarred, stopped circling. It had seen. It had understood the human’s desperate madness. A strange prudence, almost intelligence, tempered the rage in its violet eyes. It no longer attacked blindly, sensing the coming collapse, waiting for Dylan’s body to betray his soul.
The fourth, the largest — a true colossus streaked with white scales — held back. It growled, low and menacing, the sound vibrating like an almost human patience. Beyond them, the duel between Julius and the Awakened beast raged on like its own cataclysm. Flashes of pure amber light tore through violet darkness; shockwaves split ancient trees in silence. The whole clearing pulsed with their titanic struggle.
Dylan didn’t have the luxury to look away.
The third Warg, judging the time right, leapt again.
This time, Dylan didn’t move.
Something inside him had given way. Not his will — his resistance. The dam that held back his inner storm had burst.
He let it go. All of it.
And the storm answered.
The world around him warped, slowed. Details sharpened to a painful clarity: motes of dust dancing in a stray shaft of light, the predictable curve of a falling leaf, the precise contraction of each muscle beneath the Warg’s hide mid-leap. Everything was cold, clear, inevitable.
The beast was in the air, jaws open, aiming for his throat.
Dylan raised his empty hand.
He focused not on raw power, but on that thin thread — that breath he’d always felt within him yet never grasped. And in a flash of perfect lucidity, devoid of thought, he released it. Not as flame, not as lightning — but as a focused vibration, a pure wave born from his arm that split the air.
Snap.
A dry, almost trivial sound — like the snap of a finger.
The Warg froze mid-flight, as if it had slammed into an invisible wall. Then it crumpled sideways. No visible wound, save for a faint line across its chest. But inside — devastation. The spiritual shockwave had passed through its hide, through its natural armor, and pulverized its organs, crushing heart and lungs before blood could even flow.
Dylan stood still, hand outstretched, eyes wide. His breath came in ragged gasps. A new light — both terrified and exultant — burned in his gaze.
This wasn’t reflex. It wasn’t chance.
He had just used — instinctively, violently — the Materialized Breath.
The last beast, the white-scaled colossus, hesitated. It stepped back once. Twice. Its jaws clacked at the empty air — a less certain sound. Its breath reeked of sudden fear. It saw. It understood, in its beastly way.
The thing before it was no longer prey.
It was a predator of another kind.
But Dylan was far past exploiting that advantage.
The rush of adrenaline drained away — and with it came the collapse. He fell to his knees, choking, as though his lungs had been torn out. Pain flooded back in one unstoppable wave — his regrown arm burned, his torn thigh bled freely, his chest was a battlefield of bruises and shattered muscle. His spiritual essence had caved in like a sandcastle, leaving behind only a vast, aching emptiness.
The colossal Warg saw the fall. The doubt in its violet eyes vanished, replaced by primal hunger. It growled, louder this time, regaining courage, and stepped forward, slow and deliberate.
Dylan raised his head weakly, his face streaked with sweat, blood, and involuntary tears of agony. He saw death coming — and he had nothing left to stop it.
Then, a shadow fell over him — swift and silent as the night.
Julius.
A movement too fast for the eye to follow. The last Warg’s body was lifted clean off the ground — cleaved into two equal halves that fell on either side of Dylan with a dull, wet thud. A golden shockwave rippled through the clearing, pure and sharp, sweeping away the lingering haze of negative energy and silencing the forest’s growls.
Julius stood between the two halves of the beast, breathing heavily, covered in blood and dust. In his right hand, he held an anima gem — a violet so deep, so dense, it seemed to swallow light itself — the crystallized heart of the Awakened creature. His eyes, usually mocking or cold, now burned with something else: satisfaction — but not just the satisfaction of victory.
He turned his gaze toward Dylan, still kneeling, barely conscious. He didn’t look directly at him, but at the ground around him — the Warg corpses, the marks of raw energy, the air still charged with the residue of the wild, materialized Breath.
Then, calmly, his voice deeper than ever, cutting through the fog of Dylan’s pain:
"You didn’t survive."
He took a step forward, his immense shadow falling protectively over the kneeling youth.
"You evolved."