The Walker Of Voids

[Golden Ticket Leaderboards This Month:

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Huge thank you to all of you. I'll try to find some kind of prize to give the top three next month.]

Lloyd found himself walking for several hours, and at a certain point, he had lost track of the monster's direction after slaughtering the team.

They had clearly taken one of the team members for the reason that Lloyd still did not understand, but his priority right now was not to understand what was happening, but rather to kill as many monsters as he could.

Since the trace of blood had halted, Lloyd closed his eyes and expanded his mana senses, yet he still could not see anything within a few miles of him.

So he began walking using the traces left behind to track them. He was an assassin, after all. One of his main skills were supposed to be the ability to track people, and even though he wasn't very true to his assassin role when it really came to it, he did know enough from his rouge combat class to track people down no matter what environment they were in.

Lloyd scanned the area before him using his soul and mana vision to see if any remaining traces were left.

Since the person they took had stopped bleeding at a certain point, tracking them came down to sensing their mana signature or any form of life force used in the area.

"Found you..." Lloyd chuckled when he saw a trail of something's mana signature smeared onto the trees nearby and embedded into the ground in the form of a large foot.

Through his soul vision, Lloyd could see a very faint silhouette of the creature that was there. There were two of them, one big and the other shorter than even him. A girl could be seen thrown over the big monster's shoulder, but since it had been too long since the monsters had been there, it was hard for Lloyd to even understand what the silhouettes were without thoroughly checking them up and down and using the context to fill in the rest of the details.

'Maybe its a boy long hair...' Lloyd thought to himself as he shot through the forest as fast as possible so the silhouettes wouldn't disappear before he got to the monsters in time.

Lloyd had no idea how strong they were, but if they could kill a third year on their own, Lloyd felt there was a chance they would be a problem.

At the same time, his greed for the void energy had taken over his body, since, after tasting the two human's void energies, he began to crave for something similar.

'Man... Why did it have to be so pure and... Tasty? Is that really the word I want to use? It sounds like cannibalism so how about... Wait, I'm not human, so does it still count as cannibalism?' Lloyd asked himself, yet before he could answer, a series of sounds entered his ears despite the fact that a blizzard was blowing over him, making it nearly impossible to hear anything that wasn't loud enough to attract monsters.

This usually meant two things. Either the people on the other side of this blizzard were strong enough to not care about the animals and monsters that their voices might attract, or they were humans, too stupid and young to understand the basics of surviving in the wild.

Lloyd walked through the blizzard before jumping onto a tree and reaching one of the highest branches.

Even though the wind was much more powerful now that he was at the top, his shadow wings, now in the form of a cloak, protected him from all the wind while the shadow below his feet stuck to him, making it impossible for him to be thrown off the tree without being attacked.

Lloyd looked down, yet what he saw only made him frown.

'Looks like this might be harder than I thought.' Lloyd scratched his chin.

Grey-skinned children ran around and laughed with their neighbors. They were skinny and small, and so were their parents, or that's at least who Lloyd thought were looking after them.

He still didn't know how their society worked, but from the huts and even farms below him, he understood that they worked similarly to humanity during the bronze age.

Looking down, Lloyd stretched his hand out and tapped onto a distorted layer of energy.

Seeing that there was some kind of barrier in the way, Lloyd closed his eyes and deactivated his mana eyes to see what the barrier would be like normal, but when he did, he could only widen his eyes in shock.

'To think they can cloak an entire village in plain sight. And with their technology at that. Maybe they are a mana-based society. I heard that having mana early on in a world can dramatically affect its development.' Lloyd thought while remembering a really old story about a world called Gilea that could not take itself out of the middle ages for millennia due to the fact that magic had always been a key factor on their planet, making inventors lazy and the people spiritless.

'I would have loved to study this under any other scenario... Too bad I have to destroy every trace of it.' Lloyd sighed while cocking his arm back, covering it in his shadow, and releasing a devastating punch.

*BOOOM*

The punch ripped right through the barrier, and the air pressure from it shot toward one of the huts, turning it into ashes at the moment of contact and turning anyone inside it into a bloody paste.

The barrier started to repair itself, yet Lloyd quickly jumped through it before it could and spread his wings wide.

[Shadow Arrows + Flame Control]

A rain of flaming black arrows shot out of Lloyd's six enormous shadow wings, falling onto the people, the houses, and the farms, burning them one by one.

The monsters screamed...

They were screaming? How weird. Monsters didn't usually scream, but this had nothing to do with him. They attacked humans of the military academy, after all. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. All wounds equal to equal.

*"My baby"* A woman cried in a language Lloyd could not understand, yet her body language and grief in her voice told him the whole story better than any set of words could have ever done.

The woman had four arms and the same signature grey skin as the monsters he had seen outside. However, her aura gave off the power of a peak first commandment, unlike the monsters on the outside that were barely in the first commandment alone.

Lloyd remembered the goblin he killed during his second dungeon raid. It seemed semi-intelligent but far too weak to reach a point where it could have been a sentient intelligent creature at the same level as humans.

For a moment, Lloyd stopped his attacks and looked at the woman who was kneeling on the ground with shivering shoulders.

She held a grotesque-looking small monster, the same size as most of the common goblins in the weaker dungeons. The small monster had a large nose, a triangle-shaped head as well as enormous pointed ears.