I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 195

“It was rather simple. I originally had fleshhowler attractant anyway. How else could we temper the young men and help them learn combat if they didn’t experience any fighting?” Felix shook his head. “Getting you to stay back was tricky. I didn’t expect Lucky to suddenly volunteer, but he’s a good lad. He’ll believe what I tell him to believe once he comes to.” Felix pulled up the rope and stood on the branch, making it clear he had no intention of helping me escape.

“So, the Lou family is only this much. I have to say, I look down on you all.” I spoke as I leaped out of the way of a fleshhowler, narrowly avoiding it.

“It’s nothing personal.” Felix frowned. “I’m following orders.”

“I have to admit that I’m a bit surprised. Fortune doesn’t take me for the type to plot against his allies.” I blocked another fleshhowler with my sword. “What a pathetic man.”

Felix’s expression turned sour for a moment. “Fortune is too righteous to do what needs to be done. This task was handed down to me by our family head. It’s my job to dirty my hands so the main family doesn’t have to.”

“Oh? So, it’s one of those situations where the right hand pretends it doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, huh?” A fleshhowler managed to swipe my ankle, knocking me to the ground. “Does that mean Lot and Fate-”

The fleshhowler leaped on top of me, preventing me from speaking any further. I barely managed to get my blade between its teeth and my face. As I held it back in my final struggle, Felix seemed to grow a bit more relaxed.

“You should have used your last moments praying, but since you asked, let me unburden you. They have no clue about this.” He looked down on me pitifully. “You can leave this life knowing your death was just a forgone conclusion to your sudden rise. All people have their selected place, and when you fail to learn yours, this is a natural result.”

I took a breath, feeling a bit of relief. I hadn’t realized it, but I had started to grow a bit fond of the Lou family. Destiny wasn’t that bad, and although Fate was thorny, she seemed to care about Abigail.

“It would have been regretful if I had to kill them all,” I admitted out loud.

“You?” Felix blinked and then broke into laughter. “Kill them all? Is this insanity in the face of death?”

I let go of my sword, instead reaching up and grabbing the fleshhowler’s neck. With a quick twist and a sharp whine, the fleshhowler collapsed on top of me. I effortlessly tossed it to the side and stood up, brushing off my pants. Six more fleshhowlers had already formed a circle around me, or more specifically, the tree that Felix was hiding. However, upon seeing one of their own dead, they turned their focus to me as the most easy to reach.

“I don’t particularly believe in a class system.” I continued to speak with Felix. “Who decides people’s proper place? The strong? Well, if the strong rule, then class is merely an illusion that weak people attached to the strong use to prop themselves up. Why would someone truly strong care about someone’s class or station?”

After speaking, I made a high-pitched whistle with my lips, a sound a normal person couldn’t hear. All six fleshhowlers began to whine, shaking their heads as if they had an unpleasant sound in their ears. I had theorized that high frequencies would be an irritate, but I wanted to try it and see.

“Some kind of trick?” Although the sound was outside of Felix’s hearing, he could see the effect it suddenly had. “You are a tricky bastard. I don’t disagree that this world is ruled by the strong, but strength comes in many forms. There is a strength in numbers. A strength in legacy. When you are only alone, dependent on your strength, you are vulnerable.”

Felix pulled out his bow and knocked an arrow. It turned out that in the event I survived the fleshhowlers, he intended to finish me off with arrows anyway. To him, it was probably best if I died by fleshhowler. It would be harder to prove his betrayal and it would weigh easier on his conscience. Yet, that didn’t mean he planned to let me walk out of here. Well, it wasn’t like I planned to let him off the hook either. I could ignore when people bent the rules to try to do me harm in the dark, but when they outright challenged me in the open like this, if I kept holding back, I’d just be a fool.

I stopped whistling and backed away from Felix and toward the fleshhowlers. “That’s only if I’m not strong enough!”

As soon as my whistling ended, so did their disorientation. The fleshhowlers grew enraged and let out ear-piercing howls. Felix released an arrow, and I jumped to the side just as a fleshhowler leaped at my back. The arrow ended up hitting the fleshhowler in the eye, killing it instantly. I did a wide sweep, grabbing Eternal Harmony tightly and then swiping out another Fleshhowler. Felix was quick and already shot another arrow, but I managed to block it with my blade just before it reached me.

“What kind of devilish luck do you have?” Felix cursed.

“Luck is the Lou family’s quirk, not mine. All I need is my strength,” I chuckled, grabbing his arrow and planning to send it flying at the next fleshhowler, but then I noticed all four of the remaining fleshhowlers were backing up, their ears and tails down in a submissive pose. “Is that all it takes?”

There was a bestial roar that came from the forest. There was potential energy in that roar, and it was enough to cause Felix who was in the process of nocking his next arrow to stop and look up warily. The forest became oddly quiet, but my eyes were locked on a certain spot in the forest. I wasn’t even paying attention to Felix. That’s because my danger sense was telling me that there was something far stronger approaching. It finally appeared, stepping out of the shadows. It was twice the size of the fleshhowlers, and instead of being pale, it was completely red, giving it the appearance of blood meat. Its claws and teeth were longer, and its eyes rose red.

“A… h-howl demon?” Felix’s voice sounded nervous for the first time.

“I take it this is the next evolution of a fleshhowlers?” I asked.

Felix nodded dumbly. “I had heard rumor of a fleshhowler king, but he must have evolved. This beast is at the level of a champion! It has the power to wipe out the entire expedition!”

I was starting to understand a bit about how sage beast’s work. They naturally had a source animal, but when they absorbed enough mana, they became a sage beast and could self-propagate their species. Their level depended on the amount of mana they needed to absorb to induce their first evolution. This meant that they could theoretically have the mana and strength of any paragon level starting.

This level was arbitrarily decided by humans based on their combat effectiveness and mana level.  However, as they acquired more mana, they would first become an alpha, and then evolve into a king. While alphas were just the strongest of the pack, kings were considered the evolved form of a sage beast. If they evolved a second time, they’d become a tertiary sage beast and were granted a new name based on their evolutionary pathway. In this case, fleshhowlers evolved into flesh demons. That meant that the current flesh demon had a power of a prestiged, at least when it came to fighting paragons. Even Fortune would only be able to fight it if he was in a group of other champions and they had the advantage.

As for me, I was staring at the sage beast with trepidation. I felt a tinge of fear and disgust. The sage demon was a horrific-looking monster, and I didn’t have all that much experience fighting monsters, especially strong ones. Although my stats overwhelmed him completely, as I regained my sense of humanity, I found myself naturally rejecting such abominations as this. As a former gang member, I was much more comfortable fighting people. It wasn’t like I had spent my life as a gladiator battling lions and bears. This is one of the reasons I stayed back and let everyone else fight while all I did was shoot pebbles. I had no training in fighting animals, and there was no way I could do it without depending completely on my superior stats. Now that I had no intention of holding back, I was comfortable fighting the fleshhowlers, but the flesh demon was substantially stronger.

“Then, I guess I’ll have to kill it,” I responded.

“We’ll fight it together.” Felix declared, jumping down from the tree. “Truce?”

“Truce…” I responded.

“I hope you’re as strong as you claim to be.”

“Well, let’s see then.”