SSS Evolution: Upgrading My Trash Grade Skeleton to Godhood-Chapter 56: Secret! ...Fixed

As someone who had already made peace with the idea of being out here during a star beast tide, the appearance of a Bloodthirsty Boar group led by a First Sequence legendary creature didn’t particularly unsettle him. Dangerous, yes. Unexpected, not especially.

What caught him slightly off guard was the presence of the awakeners.

During a tide of this magnitude, wandering this deep into the forest was not a calculated risk — it was closer to a death wish. Even the most experienced awakeners who spent the majority of their time operating in the inner regions of the forest had retreated toward the settlement’s walls. The tide changed the equation entirely. Distance from the settlement meant distance from protection, and distance from protection, in most cases, meant a quiet and unremarkable end.

Nobody in their right mind stayed out here. Nobody who had other options.

And yet here they were.

He paused on that thought for a moment.

Except, of course, there was him. Lukas himself was out here despite knowing exactly how dangerous it was — despite understanding better than most what the odds were of running into something that couldn’t be talked past or escaped from. But for him, the calculation was different. Staying close to the settlement and waiting passively meant falling behind, and falling behind meant weakness, and weakness was a currency he couldn’t afford to keep spending. He had the resources to grow stronger out here. The risk was worth it.

So these cultivators also...

The thought trailed at the edge of a conclusion he hadn’t fully reached yet.

What could possibly be out here — something significant enough to make awakeners set aside their own survival instincts and venture this far from safety?

The way Lukas looked at the distant boar group shifted quietly but completely. The battle-readiness that had been running through him since he entered the forest — that sharp, almost eager edge — receded. In its place came something cooler and more precise. His eyes moved through the scene differently now, not hunting for the next threat but searching for the thing underneath the threat. The detail that didn’t fit. The anomaly hiding behind the obvious.

He looked hard.

He found nothing. Not yet.

Just as his mind was beginning to work through the possibilities—

Snap.

The sound was small. Barely audible — the dry, clean crack of a branch splitting under pressure. Tommy’s foot. One thoughtless step against the wrong piece of dead wood.

It was enough.

The legendary grade Bloodthirsty Boar’s head swung around with the terrible speed of something that had been waiting for exactly this kind of signal. Its eyes found them immediately — two deep, dark points burning with a bloodthirst that had nothing calculated behind it, only the pure and ancient impulse toward violence. Its silence was somehow worse than a roar would have been. It struck its hooves against the ground once, twice, and the earth answered each blow with a tremor that ran up through the soles of Lukas’s feet and into his knees.

Then the boar launched.

It left the ground like a cannonball fired from something that had been holding back for too long — enormous, terrifyingly fast, its massive frame cutting through the air toward them with a velocity that the mind struggled to properly comprehend.

Whoosh!

Lukas had barely managed a single blink before the boar’s ugly, enormous face filled his entire field of vision. His heart lurched hard against his ribs, a single, involuntary spike of pure, unmediated alarm shooting through his chest.

Too fast. Way too fast.

There was no space to think. No gap in time large enough to fit a proper decision inside. The distance had collapsed to almost nothing in the time it had taken him to register the threat, and his body moved before his mind had fully caught up with what was happening — pure instinct pulling the trigger, Phase Steps activating in a single, seamless transition.

He phased.

The world blurred. Space folded around him and released him elsewhere.

He materialized a hundred meters deep inside the Bloodthirsty Boar horde, surrounded on all sides by the milling, restless bodies of creatures that had not yet processed his arrival.

Rumble.

The sound arrived a fraction of a second behind him — a deep, resonant impact that shook the ground hard enough to send a ripple through the soles of his feet even from this distance. Where Lukas had been standing a moment ago, the earth had simply ceased to exist in the same shape. The legendary grade boar’s body had struck the ground with the force of falling architecture — stones and dirt erupting outward in every direction, a crater more than ten meters wide torn into what had been flat, unremarkable ground a breath before. The kind of damage that belonged to siege weapons, not animals.

Lukas stared at it and slowly drew in a long, controlled breath of cold air.

That was too close.

The cost of Phase Steps was not trivial — the drain it placed on him was disproportionate to most other skills, the kind of expenditure that made using it feel like paying for something with money you hadn’t quite earned yet. But looking at that crater, at the depth of it, at the sheer, casual violence of impact it represented, he revised his opinion without hesitation.

Worth it. Entirely, unambiguously worth it.

If the boar’s full mass had connected with him — if he had been even a fraction of a second slower — there would have been no recovery from that. No Parasitic Regrowth, no passive, no amount of talent would have been sufficient to reassemble what would have been left of him. The boar was a legendary grade creature, and legendary grade creatures operated at a physical tier that sat comfortably above even the peak of human body refining — and that was before accounting for the fact that star monsters, regardless of rank, always leaned harder into raw physical force than their human equivalents.

Lukas felt the cold truth of that settle into him without drama.

Why even get hit in the first place?

The thought was simple and sensible and he intended to keep it close. Parasitic Regrowth was a fallback, not a strategy. Getting injured was a tax on his time and his resources, and out here — far from any supply, far from any support — he could afford neither.

Every engagement from this point forward had to be chosen carefully.

His eyes moved through the boar horde surrounding him, already calculating.

The boar had missed.

That fact did not sit well with it.

It raised its enormous head skyward and released a roar that was less a sound and more a physical event — a wall of raw, furious noise that crashed into Lukas’s eardrums like a hammer striking an anvil. His vision blurred at the edges for a fraction of a second from the sheer force of it. The air itself seemed to flinch.

Lukas was already moving before the roar had finished.

He ran toward Tommy without a single wasted motion, and the decision was already made before his mouth opened to give it a name.

"Fusion of Life and Death!"

There was no hesitation in it. The legendary grade boar had demonstrated in a single strike what it was capable of — that crater in the ground was all the evidence he needed. Going in measured, going in cautious, holding anything back — all of that was a fast path to becoming a red smear on the forest floor. Against something like this, the only sane decision was to go all out from the very beginning and not look back.

He might have reacted in time once. He might not react in time twice.

Tommy’s round, solid frame responded instantly.

The bones came apart with a sound like a puzzle disassembling itself — a quick, precise series of separations — and then they were moving, each piece tracing its own path through the air before converging on Lukas’s body. They wrapped around him with an almost intelligent precision, slotting into place against his frame, layering and interlocking until the arrangement had become something more than the sum of its parts. Not simply armor, but an exoskeleton — an intricate, tightly knitted structure that pressed against every surface of his body, reinforcing him against incoming force while amplifying everything he sent outward in return.

From the outside, it might have appeared to be nothing more than a rank two body refiner wearing the bones of an undead creature. The reality was considerably more complicated. Fusion of Life and Death didn’t simply combine — it synthesized. The result was a state that sat below Second Sequence creatures in the broader hierarchy, yes — but cleanly above that of ordinary legendary grade beings. The gap between Lukas and the boar had just narrowed in a way the boar had not been designed to account for.

Lukas felt the power settling into his limbs and his expression did not soften even slightly.

"Damn..." The words came out under his breath, grim and unhurried. "Less than twenty-five percent of star energy left."

The Phase Steps had been expensive. Two successive uses had carved deep into his reserves, and the activation of Fusion of Life and Death had taken what remained and pushed it toward the bottom of the well. The cushion he had entered this encounter with was almost entirely gone.

End this. Now. Fast.

The thought settled into the center of his focus and stayed there, clean and singular.

His eyes moved to the boar as it charged again, the ground shaking under each thunderous stride, the rest of the horde churning in agitation around him — rare grade Bloodthirsty Boars pressing in from every side, squealing and stamping. He registered them the way one registers furniture in a familiar room. Present. Noted. Not the current problem.

Boom.

Lukas’s fist — bone-reinforced, driven by the full combined weight of his strength and Tommy’s amplification — collided with the legendary boar’s tusk head-on. The impact sent the creature skidding backward, its massive frame pushed off its line by a force it hadn’t calculated for.

Lukas followed immediately. He didn’t throw another punch — instead, he raised his hand upward and reached inward with everything he had left.

For a single, blazing instant, it looked as though he had pulled a piece of the sun down into his palm. The light that gathered there was white-hot and compressed to a point — every last reserve of star energy stored within Tommy’s bones, drawn out and concentrated into a single shard of force so dense it had become its own kind of weapon.

It shot out like a laser beam, narrow and burning, piercing directly into the legendary boar’s widened, bellowing mouth.

The sound it made going in was brief. The aftermath was not.

Blood painted the air in every direction. The boar lurched — its enormous body fighting the momentum of what had just happened, legs working on instinct to keep it upright, muscles flexing against an injury that had already decided the outcome. It took one step. Then another.

Then it fell.

The impact of that much mass hitting the ground sent a low tremor through the earth.

Dead.

Lukas had already looked away.

His attention had moved on before the boar finished falling, swinging outward to sweep across the remaining rare grade Bloodthirsty Boars now surrounding him in a loose, terrified ring. They had watched. They had seen their legendary leader slaughtered with a speed and finality that left no room for reinterpretation. Their aggressive squealing had taken on a higher, more desperate pitch — the sound of creatures that had transitioned from predators to prey without fully understanding how.

It didn’t matter.

Lukas exhaled once — slow, controlled — and then his figure blurred.

He moved through them like wind moving through tall grass, appearing and disappearing between bodies so quickly that the individual transitions were impossible to follow. Wherever he emerged, a fist came down — precise, efficient, targeting the skull each time with the same clean application of force.

The sound of it was almost mundane.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

Like someone working their way through a pile of walnuts.

In the span of a single drawn breath, the ground around him was covered in still, cooling bodies. The Bloodthirsty Boar horde — the same mass of creatures that had been roaring and churning with violent energy only moments ago — lay scattered across the forest floor in a silence that felt sudden and absolute.

Lukas stood in the middle of it, chest rising and falling steadily, the bone exoskeleton still fitted around him, and looked out across the aftermath.

Empty. Finished.

He allowed himself exactly one moment of stillness before his mind moved forward to the next thing.

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