Blood Online: Evolving Endlessly-Chapter 187: Instant Kill

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On his platform, Nibo faced four opponents his own size and adjusted his grip on his axe with the particular satisfaction of someone who’d been hoping for a real challenge.

Not because he didn’t care about what had happened to Akhil—the kid had been smart, had been useful, had been the kind of tactical thinker that made Nibo’s straightforward approach to violence actually work in complicated situations.

But because Nibo had learned a long time ago that you couldn’t think your way through everything.

Sometimes you just had to hit things until the problem resolved itself.

And right now, he had four very large problems that needed hitting.

The first opponent came in with a overhead chop that would have split a normal fighter in half. Nibo met it with his axe, the impact sending a shockwave across the platform that cracked stone, both fighters locked in a test of pure strength.

The other three moved while he was engaged. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Nibo grinned—the wide, dangerous grin that people who’d fought beside him knew meant he was about to do something reckless—and channeled every ounce of divine-gift-enhanced strength into a single explosive movement.

He didn’t try to overpower the opponent he was locked with.

He used them.

He twisted, redirecting the force of their matched strength, and threw the opponent into the path of the other three. All four collided in a tangle of armor and limbs, and Nibo’s axe was already descending by the time they tried to separate.

The platform shook with the impact.

One opponent didn’t get up.

Three remained, and they were moving with more caution now, having learned that straightforward approaches didn’t work against someone who could weaponize their own momentum.

Nibo’s grin widened.

’Good,’ he thought. ’Let’s see what you’ve got when I stop being nice.’

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Across the arena, on every platform, variations of the same desperate combat played out.

Fighters who’d been watching safely from screens now thrown into situations calibrated to kill. Experienced combatants facing opponents specifically designed to counter their abilities. The difficulty had jumped not gradually but in a single brutal leap, and the arena filled with the sounds of steel on steel, abilities activating, barriers being tested by attacks that would have ended fighters in the earlier rounds.

And through it all, Jeren stood on his elevated platform and watched with the expression of someone conducting an experiment.

Not entertainment.

Not sport.

An experiment.

Testing how they’d perform under pressure while distracted by what had happened to Akhil. Measuring their ability to compartmentalize crisis while fighting for survival. Cataloguing data that would be useful later, when the real purpose of this tournament—the purpose the gods understood but hadn’t shared with their participants—came to fruition.

His fan remained closed in his hand.

Above, the divine realm maintained its eerie silence.

And somewhere in the darkness where Akhil had been transported, something that was not Akhil and not entirely the Monarch breathed in the shadows.

The tournament continued.

But everyone present understood, whether they acknowledged it consciously or not, that the tournament was no longer the real game.

It was preparation for what came after, would they be able to face Akhil and kill him?

Meanwhile.

Akhil was still in the underground basement and his eyes fixed ahead as though trying to see past the walls.

He didn’t need to stare for much longer as something moved.

Shadows within shadows, distinguishing themselves from the static darkness by virtue of intent. They emerged from the walls, from the floor, from spaces that shouldn’t have been able to conceal human-sized forms but did anyway.

Ten of them, spreading out across the chamber in a formation designed to surround, to attack from multiple angles, to overwhelm through coordinated assault.

Akhil watched them position themselves and felt something shift in his chest—not fear, not even concern exactly, but a kind of cold assessment that ran calculations his normal mind wouldn’t have bothered with. Threat levels. Attack vectors. The precise amount of force required to end each one based on stance and equipment and the microscopic tells his enhanced perception could now detect.

And beneath that assessment, warming like coals being breathed back to life, the Monarch’s hunger stirred.

The first ninja moved.

A blur of shadow-enhanced speed, closing the distance between them faster than human reflexes should be able to track. The blade in its hand caught nonexistent light, angled for Akhil’s throat in a strike designed to end the fight before it properly began.

Akhil raised one hand almost casually.

The motion looked lazy, unhurried, like he was brushing away an insect rather than responding to a killing blow from a trained assassin moving at supernatural speed.

His fingers didn’t close into a fist.

They simply flexed.

Instant kill

{Blood Essence: -20,000}

The ninja exploded.

Not metaphorically. Not the hyperbolic language of impressive violence. The figure genuinely detonated from the inside out, their body suddenly unable to contain the pressure of blood that had been given a command it couldn’t refuse. Skin split. Armor segments flew apart. The ninja burst like an overfilled water balloon, spraying blood and viscera across stone walls in patterns that would have been almost artistic if they weren’t so horrifying.

The sound was wet and final and echoed through the chamber with the kind of resonance that made clear something fundamental had just happened.

The remaining nine ninjas froze.

Akhil stared at his hand, at the casual motion that had just ended a life with the effort of swatting a fly. His enhanced mind was already cataloguing the discrepancy—the technique had cost him twenty thousand blood essence, not the fifty thousand it would have required before his transformation.

A 60% reduction in cost.

His evolution had made his abilities significantly more efficient.

’Interesting,’ he thought, and the word felt cold even in the privacy of his own mind.

The blood from the destroyed ninja was everywhere—splattered across walls, pooling on the floor, droplets still falling from the ceiling where the explosion had thrown them. So much blood. So much life force suddenly made available, still warm, still carrying the echoes of the power that had animated the assassin.

It was moving.

Not flowing. Moving with intent, with direction, streams of crimson pulling themselves across stone toward Akhil like iron filings toward a magnet. Responding to something in him, to the Monarch’s nature, to the hunger that whispered this was food and fuel and everything he needed to grow stronger.

He could feel the pull of it—not physical, but something deeper. The instinct to absorb, to consume, to take what had been someone else’s and make it his. The same instinct that had saved his life against Najim, that had transformed him, that was responsible for everything he’d become.

And beneath that instinct, the knowledge of what would happen if he gave in to it.

{Awakening Progress: 23%}

The notification pulsed faintly in his vision, a reminder of what he was becoming, what accelerating that process would mean.

Akhil closed his hand into a fist and pushed.

Not physically. With will. With the same force of intent that let him manipulate blood. He pushed against the streams that were trying to reach him, stopped them mid-motion, forced them to pool and spread across the floor instead of flowing into his body.

The effort felt wrong.

Like holding his breath underwater when his lungs were screaming for air. Like refusing food when starving. His body wanted the blood. The Monarch’s hunger wanted it. Every instinct that had been rewritten by his transformation was telling him to stop fighting and just absorb and grow stronger and—

’No.’

The word was iron in his mind, cold and absolute.

He held the blood at bay through pure force of will, his white skin prickling with the effort, his enhanced senses screaming at him that he was refusing something he needed.

But while he could control the urge to absorb—could lock it down through determination and the last fragments of who he’d been before the transformation—he couldn’t control what came with it.

The bloodlust.

It hit him like a physical wave, crashing over whatever remained of his normal restraint and filling the spaces it left with something older and hungrier and far less concerned with concepts like mercy or restraint. Not hunger for blood exactly—he was refusing that—but hunger for violence. For destruction. For the act of ending things and watching them break and feeling the satisfaction of prey reduced to component parts.

He looked at the remaining nine ninjas, and his transformed eyes must have shown something terrible because three of them took involuntary steps backward.

His lips pulled back from his teeth in an expression that wasn’t quite a smile.

The ninjas moved as one, their formation collapsing into coordinated assault. They’d seen what happened to their companion, understood that straightforward approaches meant instant death, and adapted with the speed of professionals who’d trained for exactly this kind of impossible opponent.

Was it their bravery or his sudden overconfidence Akhil didn’t know which, but with the way he felt now he was really looking forward to the fight... Despite being outnumbered.

They came from all angles simultaneously—floor, walls, ceiling, using shadow-manipulation to appear from surfaces that shouldn’t have supported their weight. Blades angled for vital points. Attacks timed to arrive in overlapping waves that would force any defender to choose which fatal blow to block and which to accept.

In no time, they met him at the center.