The Oracle Paths

" Perhaps you're not lying, but all the more reason to kill you." The Alpha Eagle proclaimed resolutely, before turning his head up to give a complicated and apologetic gaze to the White Avian Qewie who was anxiously watching their fight a couple of hundred meters above them.

All of a sudden, the Golden Were-Eagle's aura underwent a radical shift in atmosphere. A demonic presence of boundless savagery and cruelty began to radiate wildly from the half-man, half-beast warrior. The spirit energy fluctuations were so disordered that one would suspect that his whole soul was about to explode.

Then Jake noticed the first change. The Were-Eagle, nearly his size in his non-miniaturized form, experienced a sudden growth spurt, its vast size and wingspan soon covering the Mutant with their gargantuan shadow.

At the same time, its humanoid appearance, which still had vaguely human features, lost all commonality with humanity apart from its bipedalism. Its claws became even longer and sharper, its plumage turned a dark gold, each feather becoming as sleek and cutting as a magic steel blade. His muscles morphed into something grotesque, and dark energy started to seep out of his pores with every exhale.

With each breath cycle, his demonic aura went up a notch, and his composure darkened drastically, as if his consciousness was gradually falling into a berserk state. By the time the demonification was over, the Alpha Were-Eagle had become as massive as a building and its wingspan had become so wide that each random flapping of its wings triggered hurricanes and tornadoes nearing the speed of sound.

Jake obviously tried to stop its transformation with Soul Attacks, wind blades and bullets and even more demanding spells like a laser beam containing 30% of the Aether and energy stored within his cells, but nothing worked. One should know that such a beam could easily cut him in two if he was not prepared.

And so his shock was not faked at all when the laser melted only a few feathers before new ones replaced them, quickly consuming the photonic energy contained in those rays.

Jake responded to the beast's ridiculous display of vitality by further condensing the light particles. If he was only going to make a small hole, he wanted to at least leave a wound on his enemy's body after all his efforts.

He succeeded. At the end of his transformation, the winged monster did have a tiny, coin-width hole in the middle of his forehead, but even with a draft in his brain, the demonic Were-Eagle stoically stood his ground as if he didn't care about his wound. A second later, the hole in his skull closed as if it had never existed.

Jake had expended 30% of his energy for nothing.

Assuming the worst, he took advantage of the monster's stillness to spread his Spirit Body and quickly suck up as much of the surrounding Aether as possible, but how could his enemy let him recover so easily.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw the Shadow Guide hastily reactivate the Oracle Shield and his pupils narrowing with alertness, he followed suit unthinkingly before being hit by a wing flap that struck him with as much weight and inertia as a large asteroid. Even with the Oracle Shield neutralizing the impact, his body felt it.

Before his brain even grasped what he had just been hit with, his body crashed down just like the meteorite he had pictured right in the middle of the refugee convoy and the Undead army. The shockwave resulted in a blast of such magnitude that the Undeads and innocent survivors were scattered like pollen in the spring, their entire skeletons shattering like twigs.

Indirectly, Jake had killed 90% of the remaining humans with his landing, including the vast majority of the children he and his companions had been trying to keep alive.

Gazing around in a daze, tinnitus from the crash whistling through his skull, Jake recognized Trash's unrecognizable corpse amidst those of other children and a thousand Undeads reduced to rubble. That was the only good thing to come out of this devastating fall.

Farther on, he saw Carmin, as if possessed by rage and grief, fighting like a fiend against a dozen Avians, cooperating with thousands of Undeads, several humans and specters to sap her strength. In one arm she clutched her Blood Energy powered whip, in the other her passed out sister, dried tear streaks running down her makeup.

Her limbless sister Lily had long since slipped into unconsciousness, her baby face completely bloodless and a Death Mark glistening eerily on her forehead. The sea of enemies threatened to overwhelm her at any moment.

Further away, Bhammod and Elduin were fighting back to back against a flood of Undeads, valiantly protecting a bunch of terrified humans with the help of the few Wengol soldiers still alive. They were littered with wounds and their legs and arms were so wobbly they looked like parkinsonians.

The unbearable feeling of helplessness that had been eating away at him since the beginning of the battle completely relapsed and Jake found himself overwhelmed by a suffocating dizziness.

BANG!

With no chance to wallow in his self-centered helplessness, the titanic Were-Eagle trampled him with all its weight with such force and brutality that Jake didn't even have time to conjure up a second Oracle Shield to unleash his compressor trap. The beast had swooped down from the sky, crossing the thousands of meters separating them in an almost instantaneous way.

A new and even more terrible shockwave blew again on the battlefield, but the previous one having already swept and destroyed everything, this one did comparatively less damage.

Pinned to the ground under the monster's enormous claw, Jake pushed on his arms to stand up, and attempted a surprise double Oracle Shields to slice off one of the creature's legs, but no sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the Were-Eagle was already 500 meters away, near the dwarf and the elf.

Without them being able to figure out what was happening to them, the two Rank-A Adventurers were hit by a terrific blast of wind so sharp and powerful that they were hurled into the sky, their fate unknown.

The Were-Eagle stepped forth and its gigantic silhouette flashed away like a mirage, leaving an afterimage before reappearing just behind Carmin, its foot raised. The creature stomped hard and the young woman only owed her life to her vampiric reflexes. In the blink of an eye, she dissolved into a crimson streak of light that magically carried her across 10 kilometers in the blink of an eye.

Feeling no flesh crushed under its talon, the demonic Eagle screeched in anger, then finding no other of Jake's companions nearby began slaughtering the remaining innocents.

"STOP IT!" Jake howled madly, his deafening scream silencing the entire battlefield. Something had just snapped inside him.

He had never been so enraged in his life. He'd felt hatred or the urge to kill before, but on this scale? Never!

Such seething fury, if Jake didn't release it somewhere, he might go nuts forever. The giant Were-Eagle interrupted his slaughter, turning his beak in his direction with eyes filled with malice and contempt.

"If you want to end this madness, stop hiding under your shield and face your death." The monster's thunderous voice pierced the silence, reverberating throughout the plain.

Even Carmin and Ruby, who were far from the convoy, heard his provocation. Inwardly they prayed that he would not respond to the enemy's obvious taunt, but it was too late for Jake. His pride, his ego, his anger had long since reached their breaking point.

"You asked for it." Jake declared coldly, his gaze becoming as icy and unyielding as a predator before its prey.

So what if he died? It was just an Ordeal in the end. Without fear, he turned off his Oracle Shield.

But sometimes, the difference between courage and recklessness was a thin line. As soon as the monster felt the removal of that mysterious energy barrier, he delivered his judgment.

BOOOOOM!

In less than a second, Jake was trampled hundreds of times by a creature weighing dozens of times his own weight and with physical strength immeasurably greater than his own.

Even with Digitization, Jake took heavy damage and splattered the deep crater he was embedded in with his blood and guts. His HP instantly dropped to 0, but oddly enough, the last 0.01 point refused to yield as the Were-Eagle went on a rampage against him.

In a Spirit Body state, Jake beheld the obliteration of his body with chilling detachment. By foolishly responding to the challenge, he had pointlessly hastened his death. Yet oddly, deprived of all the hormones, the cocktail of neurotransmitters affecting his emotions and personality, Jake's Soul in its purest form was filled with a sense of purifying clarity.

His mental turmoil, his doubts, were completely gone. All that remained was a chilling rationality devoted solely to his murderous intent. Examining his opponent intently and thinking fast, he suddenly saw the light.

Even as the Were-Eagle vented its anger on him, Jake suddenly noticed that he had begun to shrink. It was subtle, hard to perceive, but nothing could escape his Perception. Meanwhile, that remaining 0.01HP was still holding on, his HP regen of 82.3 HPs/sec struggling hard to keep it from slipping away completely.

There was also something else in his body that was completely intact: his Oracle Device. Without skipping a beat, Jake summoned his Aether Sun Core ten meters above the bloody mess that was his body, right where his enemy's knee stood.

A high-pitched screech of pain and wrath rippled across the plain as the Were-Eagle hurriedly retreated, leaving a talon behind him.

From the moment Jake was showered with the scorching rays of his artificial sun, his HP regen of 82.3/sec skyrocketed, almost 100-fold.

Within seconds, the biomass splattered and squashed by the enemy coalesced and the outline of a new body took shape as his Spirit once again became one with it.

When less than 30 seconds later, his body finished regenerating, an identical but slightly different Jake reappeared in the center of the crater. As his Myrtharian Eyes rested unblinkingly on the demonified Were-being, a shiver of unbridled terror ran down his spine.