Skill Hunter -Kill Monsters, Acquire Skills, Ascend to the Highest Rank!-Chapter 342. The Storm and I

The puppet didn’t plunge its blade into a human being; it plunged its blade into a storm. Lightning crackled up the blade, singing it black and tearing over the puppet’s wooden arm. Spidery black marks burned up its pale arm. The raw power of the lightning broke the porcelain apart, shattering it into a thousand pieces. The puppet jerked away, but Ike closed in. He tossed the blade away. Red blood, his raindrops, splattered over the puppet. Like acid, they burned through the puppet—no. Washed it away, as if the porcelain was mere mud, and its body no more than sand.

The puppet turned, outright fleeing. Ike was there. He flashed in the blink of an eye, as fast as lightning. Thunder rolled out from his passing and slammed into the puppet, throwing it back. It rolled head-over-tail, crashing into Wisp’s waiting foot.

“Fore!” she shouted, and kicked it back to Ike.

Ike drew the Hungry Sword. The sword hummed in his hand, and for the first time, he understood how poorly he’d been using it. The sword operated on this same power that he did, now—something beyond the System. Something where mere aether and mana weren’t near sufficient to power its true might—but now he had that something, and he poured it into the blade.

The blade grew. The thousands of teeth became thousands of palm-sized blades, and the blade itself inflated to the size of a man. A mouth opened on its end. The puppet dug its nails in, desperately jerking itself to a halt, and only lost its lower half to the sword.

Ike stepped forward. He lifted the sword to finish the job.

The puppet threw up a hand. “Wait! That secret, the thing you seek—”

“You’re a piece of me,” Ike said simply.

The puppet gaped.

He pointed up. “The storm told me. You, the King, you’re all pieces of me. Past lives… no. Previous existences. Pieces of me that Brightbriar carved up. That’s why I haven’t been able to let him go, all this time. That’s why I’ve pursued him, why he’s let me go time and time again. He did craft me. He crafted all of us. Cut us out from something greater, and made us these pitiful things.”

“You have another,” the puppet said. It pointed at Ike’s storage ring.

For a second, Ike blanked, before remembering. “Rosamund?”

“She is a piece of us. One so tattered it cannot even remember its gender or what it was, but a part of us nonetheless.” It gave him its hand. “Absorb me. Become what we were.”

“No,” Ike said simply.

“No? But you feel it too. We won’t be complete—”

“I won’t become what we were. I’ll be Ike, to the end. What we were was stupid enough to get carved up by Brightbriar. I’ll absorb you. I’ll absorb the King, and Rosamund—all of us. And I’ll become Ike, but more powerful.”

The puppet laughed. The beast faded from it. Its face returned, the one that oddly matched Ike’s, though its hair was blonde. “You must be the most headstrong, stubborn part of us. No wonder he only made you, where there was precious little else to cut free. Ha! Perhaps you have a point. We lost to Brightbriar before. Why combine into that same being? Let us become something greater!”

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“Well, I don’t know about that. You’ll become Ike, anyways,” Wisp muttered.

Ike shot her a look. “That is something greater.”

Wisp put her hands up.

“Yes. I think… maybe… I was waiting for this.” It offered Ike its hand. “I am the Prince. My failure was my indolence, my willingness to look the other way while my country fell to pieces and lose myself in my pleasure. I was routed, killed, and in the end, Brightbriar returned, slayed everyone who harmed me, and left me in this pathetic half-form, neither dead nor alive. I wandered the ruins, always wondering: what could I have done? What could I do?”

He looked to Ike, as if expecting an answer.

“Who cares? You failed, and you died. I won’t fail, and I won’t die.” Ike clasped its hand.

The Prince laughed. A pulse of light passed from it into Ike, and its body fell to dust, starting from the broken midriff upward. It locked eyes with him. “I believe you will.”

Ike closed his eyes. The light overcame him, and for a moment, he was someone else. A blonde boy, holding Brightbriar’s hand. The boy grew, always surrounded by lavish luxuries, the best of the world at his fingertips. The finest friends, the most delicious food, the softest robes. He never wanted; he need only call, and it came to him. His whole life was a waste, lived in this way, luxuriating in a golden spoon, until one day, Brightbriar vanished, leaving the kingdom to him. He’d taken classes, received the finest formal training, but what was fine training in the face of reality? He tried and failed, tried and failed, for the first time in his life—tried and failed.

Failure. Failure. Failure. His kingdom was nothing but failure after failure. The part of him that was still Ike rolled his eyes. Of course he failed sometimes. That was part of life. No one could live without failing a little bit.

But for the Prince, it was the first time he had ever failed, and he didn’t know how to handle it. Rather than facing his failures or trying to correct them, he retreated into himself, into the luxuries and extravagances that were all he’d known growing up. He turned his back on his kingdom, and the problems piled up. His people shouted for his help, for him to do anything—but he knew only failure awaited, so he dove deeper into his luxury.

Fire. Shouting. Mages assaulted his castle, while the mortals stormed it from before. Why? He hadn’t done anything. Was even that a failure? In the last moments of his life, the Prince asked these questions—and then he died.

After that, there were only fragments. Brightbriar, a deeply sad, yet disappointed expression on his face. He lifted the Prince and lowered him into this place, and Ike’s eyes widened. This was what the ants had shown him. This was that scene.

Within the stone rose, under Brightbriar’s ministrations, the Prince changed. His human body hardened, turning hollow. His soul, on the verge of leaving, was bound down, tied to the very porcelain he had become. The human parts of him were excised, tossed aside to become the Beast. And when he was done, Brightbriar turned him loose, setting a hollow man upon a hollowed land—because Brightbriar had been busy. The humans and mages who had opposed him were slaughtered. Their towns, burned to the ground. Only one town, one border town who had remained loyal, was left, and that was transformed, its citizens bound into puppetry and hidden away in the earth so the neighboring countries wouldn’t invade. And so it was left, an empty husk of a land, with the Prince an empty husk to match, bade to endlessly wander.

Ike’s brows furrowed. “Then… hold up. Does that mean Brightbriar doesn’t have a near-endless puppet army from all the lands he’s conquered?”

The Prince’s fading consciousness had no answer. He did not know what Brightbriar had done with the dying citizens. He could have bound the dead into puppets; during that time, the Prince himself was dead, and by the time he was revived, there was no one left to ask.

Ike nodded. He left the Prince to rest at last and opened his eyes. The storm had faded from him—no. Vanished into him. It remained within him, an indelible part of him, a part of his very soul and core. His core was wreathed in storm now, a permanent battleground.

“So… what happened?” Wisp asked, tilting her head.

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Ike laughed. “Where do I even begin?”