Kairos thought to himself for a few moments. Even if the ears on his head really were tiger ears, that didn’t really help much. It still made him look… strange.
“Hey, do you still want to get one of those cores to harden your skin? I guess we only need to get three considering our current situation.”
Nyoka spoke out to Kairos, who snapped out of it. He wasn’t sure why he was even so hung up about it in the first place. After clearing his throat, he responded.
“Oh yeah, sure.”
Without waiting any longer, Nyoka continued to lead the way further. After just a couple of minutes of walking, they found the original target they were coming here for.
Kairos’ eyebrow twitched when he saw what was in front of him.
It looked like a giant hedgehog, with massive spikes jutting out from every part of its body. As for the body itself, that part wasn’t even visible because the spikes simply obscured the entirety of it.
“So how is this thing normally killed?”
Nyoka shrugged his shoulders.
“The traditional way is to just continue threatening it by attacking the spikes. It will continually harden those spikes to try and defend itself, but it can only do that for so long since it doesn’t have infinite black blood.”
Kairos gave him a sidelong glance.
“And how long exactly does that take?”
Nyoka laughed.
“I’d say maybe five hours.”
Kairos didn’t respond for a second.
“So what’s the other way?”
Nyoka cracked his neck.
“Baiting the thing to harden its spikes on one side and quickly launching an attack at the other right after. The window is very small, I must say. Though, of course you could always brute force it if you’re just far stronger than it.”
Kairos gave a small nod.
“Let me try something then. I have an idea…”
If he just needed to do a feint on one side, then actually attack the other, he wouldn’t be able to run around simply because he didn’t have any real method of increasing his speed substantially.
As such, the only thing he could really think of was to directly jump over it, throwing his spear as a feint before using a spell as the real attack afterwards. He didn’t really want to use more of his mana, but he still felt comfortable doing so as he still had quite a bit left.
With that in mind, he began preparing the gale spell with his left hand, while his right hand held the spear. He walked up to the giant hedgehog, which in turn walked up to him. It seemed as though the thing wasn’t afraid of him.
In fact, it might’ve even seen him as a meal.
Kairos narrowed his eyes and suddenly broke out into a sprint. He had already channeled the gale spell for a few seconds, which he figured would be enough. And if it wasn’t, he could always get the others to finish them off.
For starters, he slammed his foot into the ground the moment he got close to the hedgehog before throwing his spear after he got some air. In response to that, the giant hedgehog’s spikes suddenly turned black. The spear was still able to slip past, but there was a clear clang after it traveled somewhat.
Though, that was all just part of the plan. By the time Kairos was directly over the hedgehog, he pointed his left hand downwards, holding out those four fingers. He narrowed his eyes slightly, as the hedgehog ended up hardened more of its spikes than he initially thought.
A little over half of the entire hedgehog had hardened. However, there was a clear line for where it stopped.
Confident in his own aiming and with the help of his future vision, he arbitrarily decided to aim for that line. Then, he released the gale spell, which hardly even made the smallest whisper.
All of a sudden, the giant hedgehog let out a shriek, while all of the spikes began vibrating wildly. It was hard to tell because the spikes obscured most of it, but that gale spell appeared to injure it fairly badly.
Kairos watched on for a little longer until he landed on the opposite end. He quickly turned around to look at the hedgehog and noticed that all of the spikes had hardened. Now that he didn’t have his weapon and no spell pre-channeled, he didn’t feel too good about confronting it now.
From his future vision, he saw the hedgehog running towards him without abandon, just like a bull rushing forth.
Naturally, Kairos began running away, not wanting to get skewered by the countless spikes. Though, as he was running, he felt this strange instinct to start doing so on all fours. He ignored it, as doing something like that probably wouldn’t work well considering the human body wasn’t designed for that.
Yet, the hedgehog was rapidly closing in on him. He extended his future vision to two seconds to be safe, yet right as he did so he felt the spike easily piercing through his body. He didn’t expect to suddenly be thrust into such a helpless situation. It wasn’t as though he could dodge to the left and right which he had done many times before in similar situations.
His mind instantly went through several solutions. The first one he thought of was the red prism, using it to create a wall, however, that was quickly dropped due to how slow it was in doing just that.
He then thought of using the nature cores to brute force his own survival, but it would be hard to regenerate wounds while spikes were still in his own body. He also thought about using some sort of spell to escape this situation, frankly even the one second it would take to cast was probably more than what he could spare.
From there, he could only think of getting the help of the others, which really didn’t feel good. But even if he did call out for help at this point, he doubted that they would be able to do anything. And that was assuming that they would even want to try in the first place.
While all those thoughts clouded his mind, he suddenly found himself on all fours. He hadn’t even realized until a few seconds later, because he still wasn’t skewered from the spikes. He was no longer outmatched by the spikes while running like this.
In fact, he was even faster and not by a small margin.
Eventually, the hedgehog from behind him stopped chasing and collapsed to the ground, the spikes all drooping downwards. Kairos turned around, still on all fours. He felt a little strange, not because the position he was in felt awkward, but because it simply felt too natural. It was almost as though he had lived his life running like this when in reality this was his first time doing it.
His fingers were curled up so that the highest joint was used to support most of the weight along with the palm.
With a bit of awkwardness, he stood back up normally, now feeling that standing was weird.
Nyoka walked over and with a few congratulatory claps.
“I’m a little surprised. I didn’t think that you could do it all by yourself. Though, how did you attack the hedgehog the second time?”
Kairos waved his hand dismissively.
“I used a spell. That’s pretty much it.”
Jeff walked over with the spear in his hand and tossed it over.
“You really shouldn’t be throwing your weapons around like that. Someone could easily take it.”
Kairos caught the spear and smiled.
“It’s not particularly precious to me or anything. If anything, it feels like it’s not all that suited for combat down here.”
He was especially not worried because he could always make another one, though the retrieval process might be a little complicated considering that anything he made appeared to be embedded into the ground.
Kairos looked at the dead hedgehog lying next to him.
“So how exactly am I supposed to get this thing’s core?”
Nyoka shrugged his shoulders.
“Get through all the spikes.”
Kairos blinked a few times.
“…Fair enough.”
With that, he worked on pushing away the spikes, which were surprisingly heavy for how thin they were. Eventually, once he pushed through them, he could feel countless spikes resting on his body and weighing him down. But at the very least, he made it to the body, which was probably only as large as an average hippo. There was a giant bloody wound on it, though the spikes remained firmly in place even as black blood spilled out of the wounds.
Kairos used his spear to peel away at the thing’s skin until he eventually reached the black heart. After fishing that thing out, he peeled away the skin of the heart to reveal the inside.
And there was one small dark gray glowing core within.
It was a little unclear, but he could also make out several other shards of cores within, but their glow was rapidly dimming, until they just became black chunks.
Kairos couldn’t help but feel how easily they were able to break was a bit unreasonable. But regardless, he decided to consider himself lucky that one was still preserved.
He gulped it down, and let the core gradually get assimilated into his body.
[You Have Unlocked a Special Ability – Toughen (???)]
Like last time, the rank was hidden. And since he was here, he decided to begin eating away at the hedgehog’s body. On top of that, he used his conversion spell in regular intervals so that his body wouldn’t get overwhelmed.
It took a little while, but he eventually ate the entire thing. Though, the black blood he got from it was nothing compared to what he had converted.
He felt quite hungry afterwards, but he converted roughly two liters of his own blood into black blood. His body had morphed considerably, with changes he didn’t understand along with ones he did. He still didn’t understand why the black flesh appeared to be compounding on each other, as it didn’t seem to be toughening his defense. However, he could distinctly tell his already improved hearing and sense of smell had gotten stronger.
Kairos felt like he was close to upgrading his Abyss form at this stage. That if he just got a little bit more black blood, then he would become far stronger.
All things considered, he definitely felt that the others would catch on to something fishy if he had gotten stronger too fast. But at the same time, the additional ears shouldn’t have appeared this early without the conversion skill.
After a bit of thought, he decided it was better to just increase his own strength. And so, he used his conversion skill to convert more of his blood into black blood.
As for whether or not that was a bad idea, he would leave future him to deal with it.