NOVPUB
Chapter 145: Timber!
Tobias’s runes had dimmed, his domain seemingly dissipated, but the aftereffects lingered.
His momentum was monstrous.
He was reading the flow of the water, predicting movement, reacting before Eclipse could even fully transform.
A knot of panic coiled inside Eclipse’s gut.
For the first time in centuries, it felt hunted.
As the Hero passed its position, Eclipse expanded once more, forming into its preferred draconic serpent shape.
Its scales shimmered like obsidian oil under the dim light, and it burst through the water in a spiraling motion, breaking the surface with a violent roar.
The ocean exploded behind it.
Tobias broke through immediately after, soaked and relentless, his expression unreadable beneath the glint of his crooked glasses.
The moment his feet found a foothold on air — whether through magic or will — he cast a barrage of fireballs upward.
Boom — Boom — CRACK!
Explosions bloomed in the sky like crimson flowers.
Eclipse zigzagged, twisting its body through the air with a serpentine grace.
It swerved through the storm of flames, its heart thundering with a growing realization: It couldn’t win this.
Even if it matched Tobias in power —and it didn’t — the Hero’s adaptability was something far worse.
The way he calculated, the way he processed every twitch, every ripple, every pattern in movement — It was inhuman.
Bolts of lightning rained down next, streaks of blue-gold magic splitting the clouds and singeing Eclipse’s wings.
’No — No!’ Eclipse cried internally, its inner voice trembling with dread. ’This was supposed to be my hunt!’
But what had it truly seen in Tobias?
A weakling. A mage who relied on books. Whose miniature power hung in the shadows of other heroes.
And yet...
Tobias had become a demon of momentum.
Even as Eclipse gained altitude, Tobias soared behind, leaping on air platforms created mid-flight, never losing distance, always firing.
His fingers weaved complex signs, and the sky responded with magic that bent to his command.
’How... How did he evolve so much? Was he really hiding that much power?’
Eclipse barely avoided another lightning bolt and felt the heat of an explosive fireball skim across its back, burning a few glimmering scales.
Desperation clawed at it.
"Enough! This realm... it’s wrong for me!" Eclipse hissed, spiraling upward, higher and higher, into the thinning clouds. "I’ll return! I’ll return stronger! You haven’t seen the last of me!"
It opened its maw and let out a screeching cry that echoed through the hills like a warning.
Tobias stood atop a floating rune in the air, his eyes following the fading trail of Eclipse as it finally disappeared into the horizon, a shrinking dot in the sky.
He didn’t pursue.
He simply adjusted his glasses, letting out a soft, exhausted breath.
Below, the battlefield quieted.
The others had regrouped, the monsters all but defeated. Zayn had just finished crushing the last one beneath his heel.
"Where’s Tobias?" Elisse asked, brushing her bloodied hair from her face.
Zayn looked up and smiled faintly. "Up there... making sure the sky remembers who the real predator is."
He was shocked... but not that much, he already knew Tobias was holding back a lot.
Tobias slowly descended as his floating platform vanished beneath his boots.
His robe, soaked and torn, clung to him. But his expression was composed.
Not victorious.
But focused.
The others approached him as he landed on solid ground.
"You alright?" Zayn asked.
Tobias nodded. "That thing... won’t be back soon."
"You let it go," Kara said with a slight frown.
"It was afraid." Tobias looked up again. "That’s enough."
...
The battlefield smelled of iron and smoke.
The sun had begun its slow descent, casting an orange hue across the torn-up grass and monster corpses.
Everyone had a bruise or bloodstain somewhere, but for the most part — they were alive.
Zayn let out a low whistle, running a hand through his damp hair as he surveyed the fallen enemies. "Well. That was something."
"I liked the part where I almost drowned," he muttered to himself, kicking a severed claw out of the way.
Bran and Elisse were crouched beside one of the fallen creatures — something that looked vaguely like a bear, if bears had scorpion tails and teeth running down their spines.
Seren, away from the group, was carving open another monster with a sword she’d found somewhere.
Her eyes narrowed as she sliced through the chest cavity, revealing steaming flesh, shattered bones, and...
Nothing.
"Hey!" she called out, voice sharp.
Tobias, who was off cleaning his now straightened glasses with a cloth conjured from thin air, turned slowly. "What is it now?"
Seren tossed her sword into the ground with a dull thunk, standing and folding her arms. "This thing doesn’t have a core."
"...What?"
"No core," she repeated. "Not even fragments."
Tobias frowned, walking over to her.
He muttered a quick incantation and extended his hand. A dim blue light scanned the open corpse, gliding through flesh and tissue like ghostly mist.
He froze.
"That’s... impossible," he said, voice flat.
"I thought so too," Seren muttered. Even though she was young, she at least knew the basic anatomy of monsters.
Kara stood a few feet away, one foot planted on a snake-like monster’s corpse.
She summoned a long spear of stone with a flick of her wrist and drove it into the creature’s belly, carving deep.
She flung the flesh apart.
Nothing.
No glow. No magical resonance. No trace of the crystallized soul cores that monsters were known to carry. Not even a dead one.
"...There’s nothing in this one either," Kara said, brows creasing.
Bran moved next. "I’ll check the hound-thing I killed."
Minutes passed.
Monster after monster.
Nothing.
Each one as hollow as the last, like puppets built only to fight and die.
"They’re all empty," Elisse said at last, voice quiet.
Tobias knelt near the nearest corpse, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed in thought.
"This doesn’t make sense. Monsters need cores. They’re not just power sources — they’re organs. It’s how they regulate soul energy, how they evolve, reproduce, even maintain form."
"So what are we looking at?" Zayn asked. "Illusions?"
"No," Tobias said. "These things bled. They broke bones, snapped blades. They were real."
"Then what the hell are they?" Zayn asked again, more firmly though he knew wht they were.
These were Demon Puppets, Eclipse could summon them, they were mindless monsters that had been stripped of their cores, they were powered by Invisible threads binding them to Eclipse.
