Goat Chomp

Rowan had to go through two more bonus rounds, one for horse and the other for snake, both rooms made the cracks on his body worse because despite knowing better he kept using [Call of the fairy King]. It was not that Rowan could not help himself, but he felt wrong leaving these souls that were already wronged here for the necromancer to once again manipulate. There was a man standing in the room.

He had long white hair with black spots and two short horns that protruded from the center of his forehead. They were currently swirling with a dark green light. His eyes were a dark black, but the rectangular pupils stood out as a vibrant green. He was definitely of fewer words than the last people, though. He clapped his hands together and then dragged them back to his sides.

He shook his hands towards his feet and the green wrapped around his feet and formed spectral hooves. [Movement Technique: Mountain Jumper.] He leapt skyward with a short hop and then hopped off the air again as he brought his hands high and slammed them down. [Overgrowth] [Terraforming] [Grass whip].

Goat had used three skills in rapid fashion while Rowan looked on. His first skill caused grass to form beneath Rowan's feet and then shoot up to a height that was over his head. The second skill caused a mini mountain to form that Goat was now standing on the final spell pulled a section of the grass away and braided it into a single braided whip. He slammed the whip down and it attached to the mountain and acted as a barbed tip on it as Rowan looked on with fascination. He thought he was going to be attacked by that, but instead he coated the whole thing in his green mana and it compressed the mountain until it became a glowing green triangular spike on the end of the whip.

He smiled down at Rowan and leaped, Rowan already had bolt form in his hands and at the ready when he switched direction in midair, it was a light tap the same way Goat had gone into the air but it was like the air was solid as he was now on Rowan's left. He flicked his wrist and the whip shot towards Rowan from his blind spot. He swiveled and caught the tip of the whip on a weathervane before it could connect with his body, which was good because it had the weight of an actual entire mountain, not that his stats were not so high at this point that it mattered. Rowan activated storm steps while Goat increased the speed of his whip strikes as he bounced around the room.

Rowan flung back storm points in secret, and they began to line the room. He was going to use them when Goat made a weird bleating sound and the grass closest to a storm point formed a goat mouth made of grass that chomped down on the storm point and shattered it before he could use it. Goat smiled in Rowan's direction and charged forward as the grass formed countless mouths that all tried to bite Rowan. The teeth weren't sharp at all, but still they shredded through his storm armament and cut into him in several places.

Rowan was quickly learning something, it was that despite how strong he had become with all the absorbed souls it truthfully didn't matter because no matter what these people were all at level fifty which despite the fights he had only reached 43 but that was a feat in itself but they were at the world's maximum mana level and even if they weren't rank five cultivators yet and just had the experience the fact they‌ were all tier zero, even if fake made it so that they each had one or two techniques that were oddly effective and in this case it was the chomps that had bypassed what should be an absolutely outrageous defense compared to his attackers.

A grass goat's mouth took a bite out of his chest and drew blood and before Rowan could react the whip that had been in one spot was able to switch location and plunge into the opening which knocked the wind from Rowan's lungs and sent him flying backwards. He could already feel his body mending while his storm armament did the same, but him getting sent flying backwards also gave several grass mouths the opportunity to take their piece of flesh from him. He skid across the ground and rolled as the whip slammed into his previous position.

He hopped up and left footprints in the sky as he ran upwards. He twirled the weathervane and storm points shot out of the weapon and covered the sky before they began to glow amethyst. Rowan tapped on the air and flew towards Goat at the same instant that carnage descended from the sky in the form of massive amethyst lightning bolts. The storm points were each the size of a basketball and sent forked lightning into the grass, setting the entire room on fire.

Rowan swung weathervane around him as it slid through his hands and was perfectly positioned for him to swing a chop down onto Goat. He looped the whip around his arms and wielded the tip like it was a dagger and, with perfect accuracy, stabbed the edge of the ax blade of the halberd. He threw the tip for Rowan's throat and Rowan side stepped it in the middle of the sky while also executing [sweep]. It cut through goats midsection but only as a glancing blow, leaving a barely wounded Goat huffing.

Dark green mana began to gather at a single point between his horns and fired out as a beam. It shot wide, but it approached Rowan and everywhere it passed it caused massive tufts of grass to explosively burst to life. Rowan dashed sideways and vanished into a column of smoke. He waved his hand and the storm points combined into a single massive storm point, a feat that he had rarely attempted.

Something Rowan had noticed was that while his own mana may not be able to harm him, the resulting explosive force certainly could if he was not careful. He appeared outside of the smoke and the ax blade shined with light as he executed [Slash] Goat tried to use the whip to block it once again but failed and in the process weathervane cleaved through it while also splitting him down the middle starting from his navel. Green mana burst to life and worked hard to sew the wound shut, but that left Goat unprepared for the back of the bolt form in the form of a spike shooting into his lower jaw and sending him flying upward with it lodged there.

Rowan was standing beneath all of this as it happened as he dragged his hand down and the storm point shot down a bolt of lightning thicker than his mid section that slammed down into Goat and turned more than half of his body into ash. He had used the whip to defend himself from the massive bolt, but unfortunately for him it had already destroyed most of his internal organs and almost the entire left side of his body. Rowan stood over his body and realized that, while not for long, he was still truly alive.

Rowan bent down next to him to put him out of his misery when Goat started to speak out. "I don't want to die like this." Rowan had not really inspected him before but as he did, he noticed that his green mana was still trying to repair his body even while he lay there dying. He looked up at Rowan with a look on his face that was a mix of hate, anger, and sadness. "I can make it quick, but I can imagine that you too know exactly how you got these boosts to your abilities? The innocence ended with Rat in the last room, didn't it?"

Goat nodded his head. "We were all adopted by Azure when we were children, all at different times but he has guided us for years even before the world went to shit."

The act of explaining this caused him to cough blood and ash. He was hanging on by the loosest of threads. "It was way before the apocalypse that he found all of us and founded the zodiac gang. He never told us more than that we were special and that one day we would see what he meant. It wasn't until the apocalypse that we did, but that's when he changed, too. He has always had weird habits, but he's always been kind to us and cared for us so it was only right that we showed him the same affection. He was there when we had no one."

Rowan could only shake his head. Thanks to how many souls he had absorbed he had gotten even closer to the truth, and that was that this Azure had picked them because for some reason each of these individuals, while not tier zero souls, had such powerful animal bloodlines that they indeed were special down to their very souls.

Rowan did not know enough as to how it was possible but he had not just helped them. He had chosen these people because of their unique souls. "He raised you all like cattle and then used your souls for his own work. He succeeded, but what if he had not? What about the times that he did not? What happened to all of those people? Goat had begun to cry silent tears as his life faded away, but Rowan was not done. "He took the most sacred part of you and made it his. You are all willing to die for a man who, given the opportunity, was planning on taking your souls and putting them in a different body to further his aims. Your souls would have been reborn as immortal warriors that had to listen to his every whim because that's what happens when you become someone else's pawn in this new world, especially someone as cold as the man you all call Azure.

Goat nodded "You think some of us don't know that, we've seen his lab, we've seen some of the horrors he would rather pretend don't exist… but he loved us when this world abandoned us, so for some of us we'd rather die his monster then live without his love." Rowan had no choice but to think of his parents at this moment as he shook his head and decapitated Goat in one swift motion before using [Call of the fairy king]. He absorbed the soul and the extra 200 hundred attached souls.

A matter that let Rowan know that not all of them used the same amount of souls. This time though as his body cracked and healed, he realized that he was feeling the sadness that pervaded Goat's entire soul before he died, and the anguish of those attached to them, almost like he could feel the pain of their deaths in a loop until his body healed. "If this is what the love of such an evil man feels like, then I think it would be better to not be loved at all.