Enigma of Sin

When Kayn's excitement reached its peak, he couldn't help himself and let out a mighty yell that sounded more like a roar. This served to do nothing but draw all of the crazed rune beasts to direct their gaze at him. For them, it was more like he was announcing his arrival and that he was the new apex predator there.

Seeing all of the beasts start to charge in his direction with the fliers quickly speeding up, Kayn charged in after fusing his fists with the earth element and coating his hands in fire. It may seem reckless to others, but Kayn wasn't going to start this fight with his strongest skills.

For one, he didn't know how long it would last, so he needed to be mana efficient. But second, Kayn just really, really wanted to bash in the skulls of some rune beasts with nothing but his body.

The first group of flying rune beasts arrived, and to his surprise he knew what they were. They were just D-rank Swift Falcons, Kayn didn't even think their talons could cut him very deeply after his bodily changes due to his Demonic Dragon Heart.

Kayn simply put his fist in front of his body as he flew forward, and when the beaks or talons of the falcons connected with his fist, the bird directly exploded due to the impact. After flying straight through them for a good 10 seconds, he arrived at the first line of ground beasts and shot directly downward.

His landing on the ground directly smashed a tiger type rune beast into mush before he kicked off the ground and punched his arm straight through the skull of larger wolf type.

Kayn continued plowing his way through rune beast after rune beast, and before long his entire body was dyed red. His clothing was in tatters already since it wasn't anything special, but his mask remained unfazed luckily.

He had accumulated minor wounds here and there after getting caught off guard by the skills the rune beasts could naturally fire off, but in the end, they healed quickly with light fusion. His healing speed through light fusion drastically improved ever since he created his new core and combined his mana pathways with his blood vessels.

Mana was just sitting in his tissues waiting to be commanded to do something, so his healing abilities were off the charts when one accounted for light fusion, not to mention the natural healing he had obtained as well.

Kayn's smile was slowly growing wider and wider, being covered in blood he truly looked like some evil battle crazed fiend. When Kayn noticed that some of the beasts had started ignoring his presence and continuing their charge forward, he immediately went into action with actual spells.

With his arm, he launched a massive lightning bolt into the sky that began chaining from one beast to the next, directly turning the weaker ones into ash. With his foot, he stomped down hard. The effect was noticed right away, but the beasts near the front of the tide that had passed by him all started getting stuck in the earth, slowly sinking into a wet boggy mess of mud.

As a lot of the smaller but faster beasts were at the front, they ended up being trampled by the larger beasts behind them before succumbing to the bog themselves. The beasts behind them then ran into them. It was truly a sight to behold as beasts were smashing others both into the bog and into other beasts.

Kayn's bog spell unfortunately cost at least a third of his mana or more. However, one of the discoveries Kayn made in the last few months was what gave him the confidence to try this in the first place.

He took a deep breath in and could instantly feel mana flooding into his body from his lungs to his heart. He could now fight while continuously absorbing the ambient mana in the atmosphere to replenish his core!

While it wasn't very much, each breath would slowly bring him closer to his peak as long as he minimized his expenditure. With this, Kayn returned back to punching and kicking his way through the beasts while shooting occasional lightning bolts into the sky to keep the flying beasts in check.

After the first hour or restraining and killing the beast tide, he was honestly starting to get bored as he had fought nothing but D and C-class rune beasts, which were no more challenging to him than crushing an ant now.

It was at this time that he started to change his tactic and utilized his new Mana Thread Arts. As he could weave one thread per finger, he began performing intricate hand and arm movements while weaving through the crowd of beasts.

In the beasts' eyes, as their prey was running through them, the beasts he passed by would suddenly lose their limbs or even their heads without him even touching them. From Kayn's perspective, he was weaving threads around necks, between limbs, and even on occasion he was just extending a short threat from his hands and waving them through the air like claws.

Even after another hour of slaughter like this, there were still hundreds if not thousands of beasts charging both at and away from him. He still hadn't seen a single B-class rune beast, let alone the rumored A-class.

From the start of the fight until now, he was keeping himself at the front of the tide, constantly culling them in order to not let the beasts make any progress forward.

The more experience he got while fighting with Mana Threads, the bolder he became. He next folded the five threads of each finger back into his hand and formed a 3m (10ft) whip in each hand before injecting lightning elemental mana into the whips.

The beasts now were witnessing him waving around these whips of lightning like he was an enthusiastic orchestral conductor. However, instead of being shocked or turned to ash in the previous cases, the rune beasts touched by these whips would directly explode, sending flesh and blood flying around.

The way Kayn had had structured his whips to work was by maintaining a low current through the threads to minimize the mana use, while every time they connected with a target a massive current was injected into the beast, vaporizing and causing an explosion from the inside due to heat and pressure build up.

However, after yet another hour and with no signs that he was getting close to the end, Kayn gave up holding his mana back. He flew directly into the air and began to pour massive amounts of fire from his hands like they were giant flamethrowers. He was essentially carpet bombing all of the beasts in the area as he flew over their heads now.

…

While Kayn was busy enraptured in his rampage through the rune beasts, a scout that was supposed to be checking on the progress of the tide was standing there with his eyes wide and jaw dropped.

He was standing on a small hill overlooking the battlefield. He had only just arrived, but he could see blood everywhere and there was a being with wings flying over the beast tide blanketing them in fire. The being was small and looked mostly like an indistinct blur from so far away. But with the shape of the wings and the fire his mind veered to one conclusion.

"A young dragon! It has to be a young dragon! I need to report this as soon as possible as a dragon hasn't been spotted in a few centuries now!"

While he was mesmerized by what he was witnessing, he had his duties to perform, so he quickly jumped onto the back of a Forest Lizard, the popular animal of travel for elves, and hurried to get back to report his findings.

The only thing that bothered him was why? Why was a young dragon destroying the beast tide? He knew almost nothing about dragons as he was less than 200 and had never interacted with one of their species before. And being only a 2nd stage core warrior focused on speed and tracking, he would in no way be able to help in this fight nor did he know if the dragon was hostile or not.

…

Meanwhile, Kayn was finally seeing some progress as the horde was thinning out significantly. He was also able to find and massacre his first B-class rune beast of the day. Regrettably, it was a lackluster occasion for him as he wasn't sure how strong it was.

Instead of using something that might not work, he directly weaved Mana Threads around its neck before pulling as hard as he could. It didn't take long before the beasts' head was severed from its body and Kayn couldn't help but feel a little disappointed at how easy it was to kill a B-class now.

That was until he tried it on the next B-class, a massive toxin spewing snake that he didn't know the name of. The snake's scales were more durable and much harder than he expected, and he was making no progress while using the Mana Threads other than for restraint.

A few minutes into fighting the snake, there was a hazy fog of poison just floating around in the air, so Kayn had to bring the fight back down to the ground where he had to focus even harder on the fight as other D and C-class beasts continued to be a nuisance by throwing themselves at him.

It took a while, but Kayn eventually killed the snake by launching a lightning bolt into its head through its eyeball. Even with his ridiculous regeneration, his skin and muscles were sloughing off as he got caught inside of a poison cloud. Though rather than poison, he felt like his body had been dropped into a vat of acid.

From then on Kayn was much more wary of the B-classes that he came across. He was starting to tire out from the continuous use of his mana for the last few hours, even with regaining small amounts with deep breaths.

After the snake, over two dozen other B-class monsters eventually fell to Kayn. His happy, battle-crazed mood was gone and was replaced with exhaustion and annoyance. He would be lying if he thought killing the horde of beasts would take this long, not to mention the numbers he had heard about were grossly off the mark.

Kayn once again flew a few meters into the air to see how many beasts were left, and fortunately there weren't many. He restarted his carpet bombing again as it was the most efficient and quickest way to get rid of what remained.

The Great Forest around the entire area was mostly destroyed already, so he wasn't worried about a forest fire occurring.

It took him another hour to finally clear up the area of the rune beasts. Flying or ground dwelling, there were no beasts left alive in the area from what he could tell. As much as he wanted to go around and collect core stones from the beasts that had them, it was too risky to remain in the area for too long, unless he wanted to get caught. Not to mention he was just too exhausted.

"Haaa," Kayn let out a big breath, "it's time to go back." After speaking to no one but himself, he started flying lowly over the canopy of the Great Forest on his way back towards the village.

Due to his exhaustion and releasing his built-up tension from the battle, he was barely able to notice a gargantuan hand reach out from under the trees towards him. Unfortunately, he couldn't react nearly fast enough.