Bonus Round

Rowan walked into the next room to it being completely dark, not magical darkness, but someone please turn on the light's darkness. It was not until later that he had that exact thought that the light began to turn on row by row. Rowan had noticed instantly that this room was slightly bigger than the last room he was in, but something he noticed very quickly was that the ceiling was much higher. The lights hit half of the room and suddenly he saw there was a massive cage in the other half of the room and sitting in it staring at Rowan was a massive hulking monstrosity of writhing flesh.

The screens began to slowly lower themselves from the ceiling once again and just like last time Tiger appeared on them, but this time visibly more tired than he was just the last time he had appeared, but still he did his best to sound chipper. "Well, thanks to everything that has happened between you and the zodiac gang, some of these rooms don't really have the personnel to stay manned, but if we are gonna try to tire you out, then the best we can do is to be consistent. Meet the boss's newest pet, found in the subway dungeon of our very own Evergreen city. I would have some speech, but I just don't feel like it this time around. So hope you trip falls and he catches you unaware. Welcome to the first bonus round. Break a leg."

Rowan smiled until the exact moment when he could finally see exactly what it was. There were zombies all smashed together to resemble a hulking monster. The skin was peeled from the flesh and the bones of all the zombies formed the teeth for the monster. Rowan saw the name above it read as [Hulking Colossus Lvl 40].

The monster's head was just a nose and eyes with no mouth, thanks to the one that took up most of its midsection. The entire being easily came to the ceiling as and Rowan stared at it there was his and suddenly the bars that held it back were sliding into the ground. The monster dropped to all fours and charged, its flesh still squirming and re-knitting itself as the very action threatened to tear it apart but each micro tear that opened would shoot a geyser of blood before the wound would heal the writhing flesh would see sturdier so that no part was spraying more than once.

This thing was getting stronger and stronger by the second, or at least its regeneration was. Rowan swapped the weather vane into wind form to test the theory while the monstrosity was almost upon him. He swung both of his arms and an X shaped slashed out in the form of amethyst wind blades. It cut into the colossus and stopped it in its tracks as the wind blades cut through the flesh like it was a hot knife through butter. The Colossus roared in pain and reared back onto two legs. The wind blade had cut so deeply that Rowan could see the zombie's heart, which was why he was confused when he saw it not made out of flesh and blood but of writhing parasites. Rowan did not know it was possible but his hyper vision showed the same thing , this monster had one weak point and it was not the head or brain stem but this mass of parasites. The skin started to re-knit itself in front of his eyes while the fat on the zombie started to steam and bubble. It roared in Rowan's direction.

"System, what in the fuck is going on here with this thing?" [Cost of info will be 1 lvl.] Rowan sighed and agreed and watched his level go back to 34. [The zombie king in front of you has managed to collect human corpses with giant bloodlines, the fear caused by the host has forced the zombie into evolving and therefore he has learned the racial trait of giants, known as compression. The zombie is going to compress its entire size into the size of a normal human, making him more lethal.]

Rowan felt his blood boil as he realized that finally someone here would be a worthy opponent, and this was just the second room. Rowan simply let the process continue as he activated [Berserker's Trance]. The smoke began to dissipate but not quick enough for Rowan and he lightly twisted his hands, which were in the wind form for weathervane and created a gust that swept it away. The zombie king known as the Hulking colossus has changed massively now. He was now only seven feet tall and instead of writhing flesh; he had what looked like normal skin but bright red. His nose had vanished and on its head were two crimson eyes that were staring at Rowan with hate in them.

The stomach of the beast was still a mouth, but the teeth of the monster now went around the hole in 360 degrees and each one seemed sharpened to a point and made of metal. The zombie took a shaky step and realized just how different it felt at its current size. It looked at Rowan and the mouth on its stomach smiled widely. He slowly shambled towards Rowan and then slowly picked up speed as it slowly and surely remembered how to run like it wasn't humongous. Rowan could feel the floor shaking with each stomp as he approached, which made him decide on something decidedly stupid, as he wanted to test his strength on something so perfectly made for it. It finally reached him and it threw its fist forward with so much momentum that the pressure caused Rowan's hair to blow backwards.

He threw his own punch to meet it and there was a collision and a boom that caused wind to burst through the room as the two fists met. The mouth on its stomach grinned and Rowan smiled back at it. A tornado slowly formed on the wrist of his hand, so his punch sped up and he delivered another punch. The zombie met the punch, and they began to trade blows. They met each other fist for fist with mana blazing in their eyes for quite a while, while the skin on the knuckles of the zombie burst and bled before healing, the splatters coating Rowan in blood and gore.

Rowan ducked a massive fist and threw a blow at his knee that buckled the entire thing. The follow up uppercut shattered his jaw and lifted him off his feet, but despite the fact that this zombie did not manage to stay standing and blood shot from where he was standing. The zombie let out a grunt from its stomach and its legs extended back so that it was back on the ground as it dragged its head forward and slammed it into the bridge of Rowan's nose. The stomach grinned at him. It was slowly becoming better, which was an issue. Rowan shook his head clear and threw a punch at the zombie's knee first and blew its kneecap into pieces. Three more punches delivered to its head caused its body to tilt back. Rowan moved faster than it could fathom as he was there and grasped it by the head and began to slam it into the ground over and over again with one hand.

It stretched to an uncomfortable point and grabbed at the storm armament, but the falcon's head on its shoulder bit the fingers off before it could grip. Rowan grabbed him up and spun the zombie like a top before locking his fingers together behind its head and slamming his knee into it over and over again. The zombie grabbed him by the leg and pulled it from under him before smashing him from side to side over and over again before throwing him clear across the room.

Rowan coughed blood as he threw the tornadoes from his wrist and used it to catch himself. The zombie jumped with a massive scream and slammed into the wall that Rowan had just slammed into. Rowan fell to the ground and rolled as he looked up. The zombie was slamming down. Rowan grabbed his ankle and swung him into the wall and cratered it.

The zombie pushed off of the wall and its mouth began to glow with silver light. All of a sudden, the zombie chomped forward, forcing Rowan to let go and back up. The mouth extended from the beast's stomach and took chunks out of the surrounding area while the mana around the beast surged. Rowan had thought that the zombie had finally used mana, but after a few moments he realized that the light was the aftereffect of a weapon technique. Rowan threw a blade of wind with his hand and the mouth chomped down onto it as it got there and shattered the blade, rendering it harmless.

So weapon light in itself could be used to counter mana. It made him classify it differently. The combination of mana and weapon light was so dangerous because of the fact that it was the mixture of two different types of mana. Weapon light seemed to be a mana created when someone was proficient enough with a technique, and of course normal mana was an energy that could be harnessed by living beings. The combination of the two could be rather dangerous and while Rowan had pulled it off as a fluke he had never really put this much thought into it until he just saw weapon light counter a blade of wind that should have been able to cut his enemy in half.

Weathervane seemed to cry out at that exact moment, while without Rowan even trying to change it, the weapon morphed into its bolt form. The falcon flew out of the spike on the back and seemed to hover in front of Rowan for a second before vanishing back into the weapon but he had gotten the message loud and clear, if he was going to play this game with these people then the least he could do is practice. At the same time, Rowan pushed his mana into the weapon and it hummed to life as amethyst cloud patterns appeared on the blade and the rain traveled down the shaft.

The zombie roared with its stomach, but now it was different. Rowan used the spike on the back and stabbed forward, blowing a hole in the zombie's shoulder and causing it to stagger backwards. The wound healed but as it did; it closed around a storm point that Rowan delivered into the wound. It exploded with all three elements included in its storm aspect and blew the shoulder clean off the body. Rowan then vanished and appeared in front of the zombie as he started with [Chop] Rowan, cleaved through the other arm and in turn he gave the zombie time to recover its original arm, which caused him to follow up with a [sweep]. The technique sheared the zombie's legs from its body but it never got to touch the ground. Rowan chained the technique into a series of [thrusts] that juggled the monster and kept it aloft despite its best efforts. Rowan smiled as launched himself into a sequence of [slashes] that left the zombie in pieces and him panting over it as his body absorbed the exp and the mountain of souls that was contained in it thanks to [call of the fairy king] each attack he had used this time around had carried an amethyst weapon light and while Rowan was sure he had leveled the skills, he was also certain that if he used those same techniques to make it through the rest of this place then he was certain he would evolve the skills to a point that he could fuse them completely with mana and create new skills further bolstering his own stats. He turned weathervane back into its cloud band form and walked towards the next room.