The sudden glare assaulted his vision.
Torvin Pierce instinctively raised a hand, a futile gesture against the blinding intensity. His eyelids fluttered, fighting to adjust, before slowly peeling open.
'Where… is this?' The thought surfaced through a haze of disorientation. Logically, the last thing he remembered preceded oblivion and yet…
Agony lanced through every fiber of his being. A full-body inventory of pain that contradicted the finality of death. With a grunt, straining muscles that felt both alien and familiar, he forced himself into a sitting position as his gaze swept the surroundings.
Barren plains stretched to the horizon, devoid of any natural cover. A desolate, bleak landscape. But as his eyes focused, adjusting to the harsh light and the throbbing in his skull, the true nature of the scene slammed into his consciousness. His pupils contracted sharply.
Corpses. An ocean of them, carpeting the cracked earth.
His gaze snapped downwards. His left hand, braced against the ground, was pressed beside the face of a fallen young man. The man's eyes were half-lidded, fixed in a final, unwilling stare. These bodies shared a commonality – crude leather armor. Soldiers, Torvin's mind supplied, the assessment automatic. An army, slaughtered.
But how? The answer became terrifyingly apparent even before the thought fully formed.
Kilometers away, a cloud of dust billowed, churning towards him like an angry storm front. The ground beneath him began to tremble, a low, violent vibration that resonated deep in his bones. Torvin strained his eyes, pushing his vision to its limits. What he saw momentarily stunned his mind, despite the imminent danger.
"Is that… a boar?" But the scale was wrong. Utterly, terrifyingly wrong. Tusks thicker and longer than elephant with a snout the size of a small vehicle. Its sheer bulk defied any terrestrial comparison.
And it wasn't alone. Creatures resembling chickens, ducks, geese, dogs, cats – all grotesquely oversized, monstrous parodies of familiar forms – charged alongside the behemoth boar, a tide of unnatural predators.
"Did I stumble into some kind of giant's butcher yard? Or did I shrink myself down?" A detached, almost absurd thought, a relic of countless hours spent consuming fiction, flickered through his mind even as adrenaline surged. A testament, perhaps, to a mind still grappling with the impossible shift from mundane reality to lethal fantasy.
Carefree? Hardly. His Viltrumite blood, awakened only a week prior in a surge of power that had shattered his old life, now hummed with a low thrum of warning. Survival instincts honed by generations of Viltrumite conquest warred with the sheer absurdity of the situation.
[Innate System Interface Initialized!]
[First Activation Detected.]
"System?" The familiar chime, ripped straight from the isekai tropes he'd devoured, echoed in his mind. So death wasn't the end, just a transfer. A bitter, almost ironic realization. And dumped right into the jaws of… well, death again.
He glanced at the rapidly closing tide of monstrous beasts. Yes, this was undeniably facing death. Again.
"HELP! DAMN IT ALL, HELP!" The scream tore from his throat, raw and desperate, echoing across the corpse-strewn plains. A moment of weakness, perhaps, but the sheer overwhelming threat bypassed his nascent Viltrumite stoicism.
High above, concealed within the ethereal clouds blanketing the azure sky, a figure paused. Wu Qingcheng, her flight momentarily arrested, tilted her head. Her phoenix eyes, shimmering with a faint golden light beneath the concealing mist, scanned the ground below.
The desolate battlefield, the legion of corpses, and the single, blood-streaked figure registered instantly. She saw Torvin Pierce, disheveled, seemingly insignificant amidst the carnage. His desperate cry reached her clearly. Observing the approaching beast tide, she swiftly deduced the situation.
"Hmph, a mere mortal." A flicker of disdain crossed her peerless features. Such unsightly noise. She raised a jade-like hand, slender fingers poised. A casual gesture imbued with chilling finality. Ending his suffering quickly would be a mercy. Annihilating the source of the irritating sound was simply efficient.
'Consider it a small kindness, mortal. You are welcome.'
Her index finger, flawless as carved white jade, tapped the air. A minute flicker of starlight coalesced, then shot downwards – a needle-thin stream of potent True Energy, aimed to extinguish his fleeting existence.
[Host Authorization Required! Commence Overdrive Protocol? Time Critical!]
"Ah! YES! COMMENCE! DO IT! DO IT NOW!" Torvin roared, the words tumbling out in panicked urgency.
[Analyzing Host Genetic Markers… Viltrumite Origin Confirmed.]
[Overdrive Protocol (Temporary - Duration: 5 Minutes)]
"COMMENCE!!" He bellowed, caring little for dignity. Survival was paramount. This was no game; this was the brutal reality being in unfamiliar lands.
[Overdrive Protocol Activated!]
A wave, not of comfort, but of raw, overwhelming power surged through Torvin. It felt less like healing and more like every cell in his body igniting, reforging itself. The superficial injuries vanished, consumed by the internal furnace. His Viltrumite heritage alongside the indomitable spirit of man (adrenaline), flared into roaring life.
[Overdrive Protocol Active! Countdown: 300 Seconds!]
An unstoppable tide of raw force erupted from him.
"GRAAAAAH!" This wasn't a scream of fear, but an involuntary roar of sheer, untamed power. Primal Viltrumite aggression, perhaps, or just the shock of the sudden influx.
His body lifted from the ground, effortlessly hovering a dozen centimeters above the blood-soaked earth. The air around him didn't shimmer with golden light like some anime power-up; it warped, buckling under the sheer physical pressure radiating from him. No visible cyclones, no crackling lightning – just the silent, terrifying promise of overwhelming force. His dark hair remained dark, but his eyes, sharp and focused, now held an intensity that could bore through steel. The transformation was internal, terrifyingly potent.
All this, the System prompts, the infusion, the surge – it transpired in the space of a single heartbeat.
Tz!
Wu Qingcheng's meticulously aimed stream of True Energy impacted the invisible field of force radiating from Torvin. It didn't explode; it simply… ceased to exist. Obliterated by a power operating on entirely different principles.
Torvin snapped his head upwards. His eyes, now burning with cold, calculating intensity, met Wu Qingcheng's across the distance. Gone was the panicked mortal. In his place stood something… else.
Wu Qingcheng's delicate eyebrows knitted together. Her casual strike, carrying enough force to atomize a dozen mortals, nullified so easily? By someone who, moments ago, possessed no discernible cultivation? 'Impossible. This… mortal… had changed.' His aura was immense, a raw physical presence that dwarfed any cultivator she'd encountered below the nascent soul realm, yet it lacked the structured energy flow of cultivation. She couldn't gauge his depth.
'Interesting.' On this continent, such an anomaly was rare, unheard of. Curiosity, sharp and calculating, replaced her initial disdain.
Torvin slowly raised an arm, palm facing the cultivator in the sky. He didn't channel energy; he simply willed it. Raw kinetic force, the inherent power of his Viltrumite blood amplified by the influx of adrenaline, began to condense— not into a neat energy ball, but into a localized distortion in space, a shimmering sphere of pure, contained force the size of a cannonball. It felt clumsy, instinctual, nothing like the refined techniques from the comics he read, but undeniably potent.
Wu Qingcheng watched, intrigued. She made no move to interrupt. This display was unlike any cultivation art she knew. It lacked finesse, lacked the harmony of spiritual energy, yet pulsed with undeniable destructive potential. She couldn't sense its nature through conventional means. How strong is this crude application? She resolved to test it.
With a final clench of his fist, Torvin pushed. The sphere of distorted force shot upwards, not with the elegance of a cultivator's technique, but with the brutal velocity of a railgun slug. It crossed the distance instantaneously.
Wu Qingcheng, still maintaining a detached curiosity, extended a single finger again. This time, however, her expression was serious. She channeled not 1%, but a full 10% of her True Energy, coating her fingertip in a dense, shimmering light.
Bang!
A muffled concussion echoed in the air. The sphere of raw force detonated against her empowered fingertip. It vanished, but Wu Qingcheng felt a distinct, jarring numbness travel up her arm. She frowned, glancing at her finger, then back at the ground.
Torvin Pierce was gone.
He hadn't teleported. He had moved. A dark blur, already halfway to the charging beast tide, body angled low in a posture vaguely reminiscent of comic book flight poses – pure, unrestrained Viltrumite speed.
The five-minute surge was ticking down. Nearly a minute wasted. Engaging the sky-borne cultivator was foolish. 'Threat assessment: Eliminate the immediate ground danger first. Survive.'
No finesse. No energy blasts learned from anime. Just raw Viltrumite potential unleashed. He became a living projectile, a force of nature tearing through the monstrous horde.
Impact. Gore. Rend.
He didn't dodge; he plowed through. Bones shattered, flesh ripped, a grotesque ballet of destruction unfolded. Oversized boar heads exploded like ripe melons. Giant chicken wings were torn off with contemptuous ease. Duck necks snapped with sickening crunches. The ground became slick with blood and viscera, a charnel house banquet.
'Pork head meat, grilled pig's trotters, braised chicken wings, marinated duck heads, deep-fried roasted goose...' The fleeting, absurd thought surfaced again, a human ghost in the Viltrumite machine. 'If I wasn't about to potentially die again, some of this might actually be salvageable.' Hunger gnawed faintly, a distant sensation beneath the power surge.
But time flowed like escaping sand. The horde, though decimated with every pass, was vast. The sheer number of "delicacies" seemed endless.
Panic. Cold and sharp, it pierced through the adrenaline. 'The surge is fading. Too many. This isn't working.' He was strong, incredibly so, but not invincible, not yet. And definitely not fast enough to kill them all before the timer ran out.
'Reassess. Objective: Survival. Current strategy: Inefficient against numbers and time limit. New strategy: Tactical withdrawal.' His JoJo's Bizarre Adventure-addled brain might have called it running away, but the Viltrumite pragmatism inherited from Kregg framed it as survival optimization.
But no sooner decided than acted upon, Torvin abruptly changed vector. Leaving a trail of pulverized beast flesh behind him, he became a streak of raw speed, heading directly southwest, away from the carnage.
High above, Wu Qingcheng observed the abrupt retreat. A perfect, knowing arc formed on her lips. "Oh? Giving up so soon?" The predator's interest was piqued. This anomaly was proving quite entertaining.
The next instant, she too vanished, leaving only undisturbed clouds behind.
Distance blurred behind him. Torvin risked a glance back. The beast horde was shrinking rapidly, the immediate threat seemingly averted. A sliver of relief penetrated his focus.
"Hah… too fast," He muttered, momentum still carrying him at incredible speed. "Should've… should've grabbed a wing." The absurdity of the thought, the ingrained human desire even now, almost made him laugh. Saliva pooled slightly in his mouth.
A voice, cool and carrying effortlessly over the wind shear of his passage, sounded directly beside him.
"Longing for sustenance, worm? Such mundane desires are easily fulfilled. Allow this Palace to treat you."