Blood Online: Evolving Endlessly-Chapter 184 - 100% Monarch?

It was hard to accept, but he could tell it was the truth.

Mutant level was meant to be capped at level 5 but somehow he had gone even beyond that.... He could no longer feel the monarch within him, but he could tell why.

He was the monarch.

The tournament. The divine gifts. The carefully calibrated matches that pushed them to their limits and rewarded growth. None of it was for entertainment. None of it was random selection or arbitrary cruelty.

It was preparation.

They’d been training. All of them. Every fighter in this arena, every player in the settlement, everyone who’d been grinding levels and gaining abilities and growing stronger—they’d been preparing for this moment.

For him.

The tournament wasn’t meant to entertain the gods. It was meant to create warriors strong enough to kill what the gods themselves couldn’t kill. To forge weapons capable of destroying the Monarch before he fully awakened.

And Akhil was the Monarch’s vessel.

He stood slowly, his transformed body responding more smoothly now as his nervous system finished integrating the changes. His white skin caught the arena’s light strangely, almost seeming to glow. His lengthened hair moved in air currents he could feel with uncomfortable precision.

And inside him, beneath the enhanced senses and the overwhelming input and the 120,000 blood essence burning in his veins, he felt something else.

Hunger.

Not for food. Not even for survival. Something deeper and more terrible—a hunger for blood. For consumption. For the act of taking what others had and making it his, growing stronger with every drop absorbed, evolving without limit toward something that could consume worlds.

The Monarch’s hunger.

It wasn’t overwhelming yet. Wasn’t controlling him. But it was there, a constant presence in the back of his mind like a second heartbeat, whispering that power was good and more power was better and the fastest path to more power was right in front of him—

All these fighters. All this blood. All this potential strength just waiting to be absorbed.

’No,’ Akhil thought, but the denial felt thin against the weight of instinct that wasn’t entirely his own.

He looked at Nyla.

His sister, who’d survived with him through everything, who’d fought beside him and trusted him and just watched him transform into something she’d been told needed to die.

Her expression was complicated—fear and love and uncertainty all mixed together in a way that his enhanced vision could read with painful clarity. She hadn’t moved toward him, but she hadn’t moved away either. She was frozen between what she felt and what she’d been told, between the brother she knew and the monster the system said he’d become.

"Nyla," Akhil said, and his voice sounded wrong in his own enhanced ears. Too deep. Too resonant. Carrying harmonics that human vocal cords shouldn’t produce.

She flinched at the sound.

That small reaction—that tiny, involuntary flinch from the person he cared about most—hit harder than Najim’s shadow-lance ever had.

Around them, fighters were beginning to move. Not attacking yet, but preparing. Weapons being drawn. Abilities being activated. The air thickening with the buildup of power from dozens of sources.

They were going to try to kill him.

All of them.

His teammates. His allies. Everyone he’d worked with, everyone he’d fought beside, everyone who’d trusted him—they were all going to try to kill him because the system had told them to, because the gods had declared him too dangerous to live, because he was the vessel of something that could consume worlds.

And the worst part, the part that made Akhil’s transformed heart clench in his chest?

They might be right.

He could feel the Monarch’s presence growing stronger with every second, feel the hunger intensifying, feel parts of himself that had been entirely his own starting to blur at the edges.

23% awakened.

What would happen at 50%? At 100%?

Would there be anything left of Akhil, or would the Monarch consume him from the inside just as thoroughly as he consumed blood from the outside?

He didn’t know.

But he knew one thing with absolute certainty:

The game had just changed.

And he was no longer playing to win.

He was playing to survive.

Against everyone.

But he quickly noticed.

The hesitation was visible from across the arena.

Akhil could see it with his enhanced vision—read it in the micro-expressions of faces that had never been easy to read before his transformation. The slight tremor in Nyla’s jaw. The way Nibo’s massive hands tightened and loosened on his axe in rhythmic indecision.

He could even imagine Aria’s expression, her eyes probably moving between the system notification still glowing in her vision and the person she’d fought beside through every scenario, every impossible situation, every moment where survival had seemed like a bad bet.

They didn’t want to kill him.

That was the truth written in every face turned toward him.

These weren’t strangers. These were people who’d bled beside him, who’d trusted his judgment when their own instincts failed, who’d survived because of decisions he’d made and plans he’d constructed and moments where he’d put himself between them and whatever was trying to kill them.

And now they’d been told he was the thing trying to kill them.

Akhil understood their hesitation completely. He felt it himself—a strange recursive loop of understanding why they should kill him and understanding why they couldn’t bring themselves to do it simultaneously. Both truths existed without canceling each other out.

But he also understood something they didn’t yet.

He could feel the Monarch’s hunger more clearly now that the transformation had settled, now that his enhanced perception had quieted from overwhelming to merely extraordinary. It sat in his chest like a coal, warm and patient and growing steadily. Not controlling him. Not yet. But present in a way that was impossible to ignore, like a sound you couldn’t unhear once you’d noticed it.

He thought about what 23% felt like.

Then tried to imagine 100%. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The fighters on the platforms surrounding him were still frozen in that painful in-between of knowing what they were supposed to do and being unable to make themselves do it. Their weapons were drawn, their abilities half-activated, but no one was moving. The system notification continued pulsing in their shared vision, its red letters insistent and unambiguous.

Kill the Monarch. Save your world.

’If they wait too long,’ Akhil thought, his enhanced mind running the calculus with uncomfortable precision, ’the option disappears. I can feel myself getting stronger just standing here. The blood essence from Najim is still integrating. If I absorb much more, if I evolve much further, the handful of people who might be able to hold me down right now won’t be able to anymore.’

He wasn’t being self-deprecating or abstractly philosophical.

He was being accurate.

Currently, with fresh wounds and incomplete integration of Najim’s absorbed essence, there were perhaps five fighters in this arena who could genuinely challenge him. Nyla with her Winter of Death. Nibo at full strength. Two or three others whose abilities had impressed him during the earlier rounds.

At 50% awakening?

He doubted any of them could touch him.

At 100%?

The thought went somewhere he didn’t want to follow it.

He was still working through the implications, still trying to construct some plan that didn’t end with either his death or the consumption of everything around him.

But he was sure of one thing, if they fought now.... The others weren’t winning.