Rooster

Rowan walked into the next group to be greeted by a woman with a smile on her face. Rowan was about to speak when she held her hand up. Her voice was light and enchanting, which made Rowan take a closer look at the rest of her. She looked fit based on what he could see. She was wearing a tank top that clung to her body. She had the sides of her head shaved and the hair that grew from the top of her head cascaded down her back. It was a mix of three colors. It was red, blonde and orange and all of them were braided together into a single long braid that went all the way down to her butt.

It made it look like she had a whip of braided sun bursts that was braided down her back. "You don't need to give me some long and drawn out conversation about how you detest us for the means that we have followed, or telling me about how you think we are wrong, I really don't care. I chose this path willingly and will follow it to the end. It's that simple. Father Azure asked me if I wanted strength and my answer was yes and will always be yes. You talk like you are better than us, but we did not have the luxuries of being born with money. You put in the work to turn it into more, but you still started at a much different position than us zodiac. I was born into a lowly gang in this area actually, and I say born into rather loosely."

"They had kidnapped my mother and her family was too poor to ever afford it but they too knew that when they did it. My mother was beautiful when it first happened. They had pictures that I was able to see. She was rented out on a daily basis like plenty of other women, I would be born from a man I would never meet and she was too high to remember, and by the time I was old enough to ask those questions, she had been deemed used and cut apart to be sold as parts like a car in a scrap yard. So save your words for someone you can relate to because I'm not it, you are never going to be anything more than a spoiled rich kid who was handed everything you needed to excel, I had to fight for it tooth and nail even before the apocalypse and then here we are."

"The middle of the apocalypse and the silver spoon decided it wanted to be made from gold. Once again, you start with the obvious advantage. Father Azure calls you gifted, or a monster or one of the chosen, but either way the outcome is the same and once again I had to claw my way up and fight tooth and goddamn nail. So when father Azure made the proposition, I said yes because for people like me that's how we get ahead and how we have always gotten ahead, by taking what we want and need from those around us."

Rowan was stunned initially, but as the tirade went on, he was able to understand exactly where she was coming from. She was born from nothing with nothing, from her viewpoint she was only ever doing exactly what she had to in order to survive. Rowan shook his head at her as Weathervane morphed into bolt form.

"You are right, I can't speak on how you were raised, but I will say this , whether it was during the apocalypse or before , I worked for what I have now. My family left me pennies compared to what I was worth before the apocalypse. I can't help that we have different starting points. I can only control my own actions, and regardless of that, I have built nothing on the backs of the surrounding innocents".

Rowan felt a tug in his gut that he had never felt before, but he focused on it and the moment that he did his killing intent, the manifestation of the four winged vermillion falcon formed behind him and let out a raptor call. The souls inside of Rooster all rolled and in unison they all cried in anguish causing her to double over in pain.

Rowan had an innate connection with souls something that he was was acutely aware of recently and he currently had so many of them attached to him that he could feel the connection so deeply that the pain that each of the souls attached to her body was going through was able to audibly heard as they cried in unison. Their anguish was laid bare for all of them to hear in the form of a chorus of crying and wails. The falcon disappeared but not before Rowan got an accurate estimate of the amount of souls it had taken to raise Rooster to her current level of power. His hyper vision had evolved once again and not only could he see the paths of mana as they whirled around the room.

He could now see an illusionary image of her soul behind her. It was a rooster just like her namesake but in its waddle was 5000 screaming souls. She had more souls attached to her own then even Rat. It finally made Rowan question what exactly this boss Azure had done to the souls of these strangers as well as the souls of the zodiac members. It was when he was thinking about that when Rooster finally stopped shaking from the pain of Rowan calling out to the souls attached to hers involuntarily. She looked at Rowan with anger on her face before she shook her wrists and a long spear appeared in her hands. It was more ornate then any of the basic weapons the rest of the zodiac had used. It had a black shaft that was inscribed with tri-colored runes that matched her hair.

The blade itself looked like a flickering flame that seemed to sway like the wind. She was one of the first targets he had fought with an actual Astra other than Feng, the difference being the fact that this was not a spar and his fact would be on the line. She tapped her foot off the ground and there was an explosion of bright mana that was comparable to a flashbang and abruptly Rowan was blinded by the flash.

He relied on his hearing the moment it happened, which is why he was able to hear the swoosh of her spear as it stabbed towards his throat while wrapped in a fiery light. He leaned back so that his back was parallel to the ground as his natural healing allowed him to see again. He looked up at the blade while Rooster abruptly dragged the weapon downwards towards his midsection. Rowan created a storm point beneath himself before sending a strong blast of wind that hit his right shoulder and shifted his body, sending him spiraling out of the way. He lightly danced backwards and she pursued with her spear in hand. Rowan brought the weathervane up and smacked it out of the way before they started to clash over and over again.

They were both using [thrust] at the exact same moment so that the points of their weapons were clashing over and over again in a massive burst of mana. Rowan executed a sweep that she parried with the shaft of her weapon before twisting her spear around the weathervane and stabbing it directly into his shoulder. The spear cauterized the wound as it slid into his flesh as she smiled back at him. She blew outwards at the same time as a jet of flames shot towards Rowan, blocking his retreat as it enveloped him. His storm armament opened the shoulders up in that exact moment and spewed out golf ball sized storm points that wrapped him in a cocoon of water. He supplied the mana to defend himself as the flame stopped and he shot out ward.

He executed a[chop] that she caught on the shaft of her weapon but not before cracks spread through it and her knees buckled beneath her from the weight of the blow. Rowan smiled and hammered down with a series of chops, the first connected and she could no longer stay on her feet even loosely as her legs thudded into the ground and then shattered when she tried to block another chop from the same position.

She spit more flames, but Rowan ignored it completely. He was tired of this game. This situation had grown to a point that he could have never expected, but also there was something going on with him. Some of his active skills had been active too long but thanks to the mana he kept gaining it was possible but more so was the fact that he was slowly losing his sanity as the mindless berserker desperately wanted out of the cage that Rowan thought it had been firmly locked in.

[The host was warned about mixing several of these skills before they were ready, host will have to bear all consequences on his own at this time. Host has let his mana cultivation lag so far behind his current strength that the body is instinctually taking over to survive the amount of strength that you were not prepared for.]

Rowan finally got a moment of clarity when the system answered him, but it wasn't until he looked down that he realized why exactly the system decided to answer him in the middle of what should have been a fight with his life on the line. The chop sequence he started had never ended. There were several wounds on his body where there was no doubt that she had tried to fight back, but Rowan had used chop over and over again until all that was left of her was a pile of chopped mush.

He let out a bestial roar and without him using call of the fairy king, the souls and all the souls attached to hers were swallowed by the four winged falcon Image. There was a series of popping sounds in his body as his body enlarged slightly, his muscles bulging with the strain of explosive growth. He huffed and walked towards the single open door as he made his way towards the last of his two targets that he knew stood between him and the necromancer that had caused this madness.