Chapter 19

He flew into the air, his sword glistering in the sun as he zoomed around the area already feeling better after he left that village and was now alone. He always disliked crowded places and he didn’t have his trusty headphones to block out the noise around him anymore. So he was finally out in the open and decided to go in a different direction than he came from, wondering if the same problem was happening in other parts of the forest. He could see where he was on the map, he marked a waypoint on his spirit maps and flew off at a high speed. He didn’t worry about losing his way as the map was pretty accurate, he did find this settlement and all.

Didn’t take him long to spot a couple of angry looking beasties, they were attacking some other creature that was running away. It had an elongated frame split into segments, with one pair of legs per that body segment. It looked like it was made from a hard shell and the head had large antennae sticking out, a pair of elongated mandibles along with more claw like appendages that made it look quite ferocious. Size wise it was about 4 to 5 meters long. It was more or less a giant version of a centipede, Matt grimaced as he saw those monsters moving about and just wanted to ignore them as they were quite gruesome looking.

But he had to toughen up, plus he had a way to take them out without moving in too close. He gathered up his spirit energy into his hand to form a long spear and took aim at the creepy crawlies that were chasing something that looked like a big boar? He focused on his target and chucked the javelin at it, hitting one of the monsters closer to its hind area than in the head. This didn’t kill the big centipede, but it did slow it down. It stopped in its tracks to see what attacked gnashing its mandibles at the surroundings in a menacing way. But this only gave Matt the chance to charge up one more bolt of lightning and as he got closer he chucked it right at its head that promptly exploded into gory bits.

The second monster didn’t stop in its chase after the large boar and continued on without helping its kin. He decided to forget about the body of this horror as he chased after the other one, missing with his aim here and there before finally landing a killing hit, the trees were getting in the way and he wasn’t really used to throwing lightning bolts at things that moved, but this whole thing sure made him feel like Zeus.

The other beast got away but he didn’t chase after it, he flew down to check if the monster was dead. The guts and bodily fluids were all over the place, Matt covered his nose as the big bug had quite the smell to it.

*Uh… will those villagers even want to eat this thing…*

He shrugged for now and placed the dead body in his storage ring and then backtracked to the spot that he killed the other one, only to find more giant bugs of the same kind eating the corpse that he had slain. This was a good thing and a bad thing in a way, good that he had more monsters that he could practice his skills on, bad that the other beasts body was wasted now. Well, he rained down lightning laced javelins on the monsters, getting better and better at aiming them as practice did indeed make perfect and soon a pile of remains was filling the ground. He was glad that he had his ring on him, it would really be annoying if he had to fly with those stinky corpses around, he waved his hand and they vanished into thin air.

*Well this is going well… should I see where these monsters come from and clear out the nest, or just check out the area some more.*

These monsters weren’t enraged or anything so they were just regular insect beasties, but they gave similar amount of points that he could farm. He left one corps outside to examine it, he could tell that the armor was kind of sturdy as knocking made robust sounds, maybe the people in the village could make things from this?

He got the smart idea of leaving one of the creature bodies out in the open, in the hopes of attracting it’s kind. He thought that there should be a pace where they were coming from as the other ones appeared quite fast after he slew the first one. He hovered above them while checking his points, he had some now but still far from having enough to buy better skills or gear. He heard the sounds of insectoid feet on rummaging on the ground as another group of giant centipede monsters emerged. He smirked and cleared them out as well, soon being able to precisely aim his lightning spear at the heads which brought the beasts down with one hit.

“I’m sure am a bit overpowered, aren’t I? Or at least haven’t found anything that could hurt me yet… better not get cocky. Think those monsters came from that way.”

He flew in the direction the large insects came from and after spotting more of them, clearing them out, gathering all the remains he wooshed further and further and finally came up to a hill. The hill had many holes in the side of it and he could see the insect monsters crawling out of them. Sometimes they moved some food inside, sometimes they bit each other but mostly they were just being creepy.

“Hm… wished I had some grand skills so I could take this hill out … It looks like there are hundreds of them there…”

Matt checked his map and the amount of red dots on it was huge, he couldn’t tell how many of those creatures were stuck in that hill but it was a lot. He could more or less distinguish the power level of these monsters by now, there weren’t any strong ones around them as all of them were at the Qi Condensation stage, there was one a bit stronger than the other ones but it wouldn’t be a problem.

“Question is… do I have enough spirit qi to fling so many javelins at them… guess this will be a good training exercise.”

He wasn’t tired from using his throwing skill that much at the moment, but he didn’t use it that much and he had downtimes to gather up more spirit qi from the surroundings, which his lightning core was kind of doing on its own passively.

“I’m cheating a bit as they have no way of getting up here to where I am… oh well… “

Matt started throwing javelin after javelin at the creepy crawling giant centipede monsters, doing it faster and faster as they emerged from the hillside to see what was going on. They knew that they were in danger but they couldn’t see with their limited senses, not really having good eyes and mostly using their huge antennas and changes in the surroundings to get a read on their opponents. They weren’t really ready for a shameless cultivator that just bombarded them from a safe distance with bolts of lightning. Matt started getting really good at this, managing to fire off multiple javelins at once, he learned that he could produce multiple spears of lightning in his hand and throw them with an added devastating effect, or he could charge up longer and fling a huge one that could take out multiple centipedes if they piled up in one spot.

After using this skill to take out most of the insect beasts, he started feeling tired, he felt weird as his body as getting deprived of spiritual energy after prolonged usage.

“I guess that I do have a cap to this power, but luckily there aren’t many left and I think the leader is coming out.”

The hill burst open and a centipede that was about twice the size of the other ones emerged, but it also wasn’t much for him to handle as it also just took one supercharged javelin to the face before crumbling down, dead on the ground.

“Oh, guess it was close to advancing, maybe I’d have gotten more points if I had waited a bit?”

He cleared out the entire nest within a couple of hours, his throwing abilities were at a higher level now plus he finally had some SP to spend.

“Let’s see…think I killed close to 200 of those bugs.”