Chapter 12

I started making runes to protect myself. It's a modification of the fortification rune, just a few hundred changes to make the barrier flexible enough to not be a nuisance in the middle of battle. It still retains the ability to protect from the explosion of cores, just that it breaks with only five explosions.

I could be using qi to protect myself forming an armor, but if I use it I would not have energy enough to use the battle armament (I named the ability to produce weapons from qi like that). And a good offense is the best defense. And I can't create weapons with runes, so the most obvious option would be to protect myself with them.

Let's wait for the beast that is coming with a little explosion. Normally when a beast is desperate enough like the one is coming, because of a prey that could be snatched, they would just storm through the forest in a straight line. So, it's pretty easy to set up traps for beings like that.

The bomb I am creating is just a cluster of runes that would overload itself and explode the moment it senses movement. It's as easy as accumulating motion sensor runes and qi accumulation runes in a messy way.

The waiting was not large. In just five minutes the beast was in the perimeter of the house. The bad and good thing is that it was wounded. It seems that the blast from before was effective. Apart from that the beast was weak, just on the verge of an evolution towards forming a core, but still pretty weak.

It died in just seconds after infiltrating the perimeter of the house. It was a disappointing sight. It didn't even have the time to get near me, and I didn't get the time to test it.

Now there are more alarms going off in all the perimeter of the territory. There are at least dozens of them being activated simultaneously.

This was not what I wanted!!?

I'm pretty powerful myself, but if I were to battle dozens of beasts at the same time, I would undoubtedly end up wounded gravely. And I can't allow myself to do that. At least not until the little fox exits her evolving phase.

I put my all into creating explosive traps, as much as I could.

I did create something twenty-ish traps, but it is still not enough. The beast approaching this location are increasing with each second.

I didn't think the evolution of the little fox could arouse the interest of so many beasts!??

And for the looks of it, some are even in the stage of forming runes around the core.

Ahead of me awaits a bleak future!?? But I would gladly take upon it!!

And so, with a joyous smile, I began to battle each and every one of the beasts that didn't land on an explosive trap.

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I have been battling for almost half an hour. At least that is the sensation I got from the fight. The beast attacked from every angle, and I tried to counter every one of them. Of course, some of the attacks slipped through me and ended up hitting the house. The good thing is that the runes there could resist it and there are still quite a good number of them.

There were some beasts that instead of aiming for the house, tried to get me first. And although rare, they could shatter some runes protecting my body.

For that reason, I ended up picturing a sorry sight. And the battle was nowhere near the end. There is now a little mountain of corpses, but the beast still throws themselves into battle every time they can. Some even tried to fight between themselves. At least that reduced my burden.

Now I don't have any more the runes protecting my body. Preciously I would just get into the fight regardless of injuries because there were the runes protecting my body, kind of like a berserker or a suicide bomber. But I can't do that anymore. I would have to take the next fight seriously.

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Everyone would think that I would be in a disadvantage in this fight. And they are right because I would be fighting a damn bear. And it's not a normal bear, this one appears to be made of stone. With a height of more than three meters while standing in its four paws, it's jaw full of rock formations and its back with some sprouts here and there showing its state after hibernating for a long time.

It growled menacingly in my direction, some rocks started protruding from its sides.

It instantly went for my weak spots. As I'm already worn out from the all-out battle earlier, I already have some problems with the speed of my reactions.

That said, it's not that big of a problem. Maybe I would end up without a limb or two, but if I can protect the little fox, then it would be alright.

The bear threw its paw at a ridiculous speed.

And so began a full speed fight to death.

The bear was powerful enough to tore down entire boulders, but its speed was the same as mine.

While he did have the upper hand in the beginning, its stamina was running out.

At that time, I decide to take advantage of its sluggish movements and attacked some of the cracks in its body.

Those cracks seemed like they were full of qi, so what I did was to pour all the qi I could in those cracks.

Then the bear started to become even larger than before.

Maybe it's not a good idea to try innovating battle techniques in the middle of a fight.