Samael stood quietly in the grand hall, eyes fixed on the massive screen suspended at the front. He wasn't the only one. All around him, beings of power, gods, apostles, emissaries, high priestesses, and divine attendants were watching the exact same broadcast: The death of the Beast Lord.

Some clicked their tongues in disappointment, irritated by lost bets or underwhelmed by the serpent's performance. Others leaned in, intrigued. Samael noticed a few aides furiously scribbling down notes on the battle. A handful bolted from the chamber the moment the results were confirmed, activating communication relics to report back to their divine hierarchies.

They were interested in him now. Luke.

Killing the Beast Lord had drawn attention. Divine Orders hoping to establish influence on Earth saw an opportunity. Others, already established, had been watching him for some time, ever since he killed the Orc General, and later, a Midnight Warden. Always punching above his level. Always winning. And not through brute strength, but by evolving. Fast.

"A shame," someone muttered beside him.

Samael turned. It was Siegfried, a recently ascended apostle now walking the edge of divinity.

"If he'd taken out the Orc Lord before entering the capital, I would've had clearance. System rights. To speak to him directly," Siegfried said.

He meant Luke, of course.

"That special assassin contract he received... felt very pointed. Very personal. Whose initiative was that?" Samael asked, eyes still on the screen.

"Wasn't mine. Came from my Sovereign," Siegfried replied with a smirk. "I serve the God of Assassination, remember? Every assassin ends up in his crosshairs eventually. Especially the ones from this tutorial."

The God of Assassination is taking a personal interest?

Samael sipped his tea. The aroma was rich, the flavor sharp and grounding.

"I'm not sure he'd be easy to recruit," he said after a moment.

He has this strange habit of treating a god like... just some regular person.

"Doesn't strike me as someone who'd pledge himself to a divine order."

Siegfried chuckled. "Maybe not. But he doesn't need to. The more experience he gains, the more levels he climbs, the more valuable he becomes to Erza. Every one of them is just a walking bag of XP. She'll collect it all eventually. They're the livestock. She's the harvest."

Samael paused mid-sip, gazing down at the amber liquid. His reflection stared back at him.

"You know," he said slowly, "there's an old tale from Earth. Primitive culture, but fascinating nonetheless. It's about poisons, and the creatures that carry them."

"Insects?" Siegfried guessed.

Samael gestured toward the screen, where the Beast Lord's corpse lay still.

"There was once a wise man who wanted to discover the most poisonous creature alive. So he gathered them all, spiders, scorpions, snakes, centipedes, and locked them in a single space. He didn't interfere. He just... waited. Let nature run its course."

"They tore each other apart."

"They did. No hesitation. No strategy. Just pure instinct. They knew what they were, and they acted on it. The massacre was inevitable. In the end, only one survived. Not because it started as the strongest. That's the thing. Having the deadliest venom means nothing if one bite from something weaker still kills you."

Samael's voice lowered.

"The survivor didn't win because it was born powerful. It won because it was forged in that pit. Poisoned again and again, pushed past its limits, forced to adapt. Its venom became deadlier. Its instincts sharper. And it didn't just survive... it evolved."

He set the cup down, eyes never leaving the screen.

"In the end, it wasn't about who entered that place the strongest. It was about who came out."

"That's my master's assessment of the human named Luke. The more pressure he's under, the more cornered he is, the weaker he seems... the more dangerous he becomes. He adapts. He strategizes. He kills. If anyone plans to hunt him down, they'd better understand they might just be crafting the very poison that ends up destroying them."

He lifted the cup again, unfazed, and drank in silence.

"That came from the Primordial of Darkness himself?" Siegfried asked, clearly taken aback.

"Yes. From the Primordial himself," Samael replied.

Siegfried turned his attention back to the screen, now with a new level of interest. Samael followed his gaze. Luke was standing again, rising from the rubble.

So, you really did it. You kept your word and killed the Beast Lord solo.

Even Samael hadn't expected that.

"I would've given you the information anyway," he muttered under his breath.

But then, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he watched Luke staring down at the item newly granted by the system, his prize for slaying the Beast Lord.

Let's see what you'll do with that reward.

***

Luke pushed himself off the ground, coughing as a cloud of dust billowed around him. But his body was completely intact. Not a scratch. The chain of race level-ups had healed him fully. More than once, even. The explosion had launched him through the air, scorched his skin, slammed him into rubble. If he had used a regular arrow, it wouldn't have handled that much mana. It would've detonated in his hands. The only reason it worked was because of the material, the fang fragment from the Beast Lord. That thing had held.

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Maybe that's what rarity was really about. The arrows from his quiver were basic. Fine for most fights. But they weren't built to channel destruction. He looked down just in time to see his bow crumble into ash in his hand.

"No…" he muttered as the last of it disintegrated.

[Warning: Your item Angelica's Bow has been completely destroyed and is reconstructing inside your inventory. If this happens again, it will be permanently lost.]

Relief washed over him. For a second. That bow was more than just gear. It was a gift from Angelica, a memory. And he still needed it. He still needed it for Bartholomew.

He coughed again, walking forward through the haze. The air reeked of scorched flesh. The system had confirmed the Beast Lord's death, but he needed to see it with his own eyes.

Then the dust cleared.

"Holy shit…" he muttered.

The Beast Lord's body lay ahead of him, massive, monstrous, but its head was gone. Just a ragged neck with a gaping crater of blackened meat and exposed bone. The head had been obliterated. Bits of flesh and bone littered the ruins. Chunks of skull scattered like broken stone.

"That arrow was way too strong," he murmured, half-impressed, half-unnerved by his own firepower.

There was no way he could push that much mana into his kukris. They'd explode before he got close. And throwing one didn't have the speed needed to outrun the blast. But with the bow, with that arrow, he had basically launched a mana missile.

So many level-up notifications.

Luke stared in disbelief. He had finally reached level 50 in his class. Technically, if he killed an enemy with a bow, he wasn't supposed to earn class experience. The weapon wasn't compatible; his class was designed for daggers, knives, and short blades. The bow should've only given him race experience, nothing more. But with a faint smile, he focused on the true reason for all that XP: Mana Infusion.

What killed the Beast Lord wasn't the arrow itself. It was the fact that Luke had poured his entire mana reserve into it, overloading the shaft until it became a volatile mana bomb. The arrow was only the delivery system, carrying the explosive straight to its mark. Even so, Luke couldn't help but feel he'd lost out on potential gains. If he had found a way to use his kukris instead, he might have earned much more.

There was no way to game the system and use a bow for steady class experience in regular battles. To do so, he would need arrows sturdy enough to withstand such a massive mana infusion, something that would leave him completely drained, just to kill ordinary enemies worth only scraps of XP. And in this case, the arrow he used had been anything but ordinary: it was forged from the fang of the Beast Lord itself. A rarity that could never be easily replicated.

But in the end, whether it gave experience or not didn't matter. All that mattered was killing that bastard.

Still, that wasn't the only reason he'd won. The arm full of enchanted seeds had played its part. That plan had started back when he had ripped off his own finger just to test something absurd: whether he could store seeds inside his flesh, thanks to Freya's Blood and Botanical Bond, and command them to sprout on cue, feeding on his fertile blood.

It had worked.

He'd packed both arms with seeds. The strategy was brutal in its simplicity. Get the monster to swallow his arm. But there were complications. First, the Beast Lord wasn't stupid. It wouldn't just chomp down on a severed arm because he told it to. It was naturally cautious. Too cautious. Second, even if Luke found a way to get the arm inside, the snake's internal acid would break it down before it reached the stomach. Magical acid wasn't known for being patient.

So, his plan hinged on two things: make the Beast Lord want to eat his arm out of pure, mindless rage, and force it to run out of acid.

Just like dragons couldn't breathe fire nonstop, the serpent couldn't constantly produce acid. It needed to generate it, build it up. So Luke drew the fight out. He dodged, baited, provoked, forced the monster to burn through its supply. Then, when the rage peaked, when it stopped thinking and started reacting, it took the bait.

He'd done it. He made it swallow the trap. Out of spite. Out of fury. And that's what killed it.

Now I have to dig the seeds out of my other arm.

Before he could move, the serpent's massive body twitched. Luke stepped back on instinct, but quickly realized it was just post-mortem reflex, muscles firing as the last bits of life drained away.

Then came a wet, gurgling sound. A slow stream of liquid began seeping from the corpse, not blood this time, but acid. It poured out, sizzling as it ate through flesh and scale, starting to melt the Beast Lord from the inside out.

"That's insane"

Only then did it click. The creature had always been able to regulate its acid. It had some kind of internal control, a mechanism that kept it from digesting itself alive. But now that it was dead, that system had shut down. The acid was free to flow, and it was tearing the body apart from the inside.

Luke took a few cautious steps back. The sludge was starting to spread.

So much for collecting any more blood.

There went his shot at running further experiments. With a quiet sigh, he pulled up his system menu and looked over the latest updates.

Name: Luke Level: 35 Race: Half-Demon Rank: F Class: [Demonic Assassin (Lvl 50)] Profession: [Botanist of Mother Freya (Lvl 39)] Titles: [Dark Lord] Bloodline: [Bloodline of the Dark Demon] Health Points (HP): 2870/2870 Mana Points (MP): 2590/2590 (2640) Stamina: 1830/1830 (2030) Soul Fragments: 62/1000

Stats: Strength: 409 Agility: 305 (355) Endurance: 183 (203) Vitality: 287 Perception: 346 (356) Intelligence: 259 (264) Free Points: 32

Class Skills: [Basic Blade Handling (Common)], [Profane Knife Throwing (Uncommon)], [Twin Blade (Common)], [Basic Dark Dash (Rare)], [Basic Blood Regeneration (Rare)], [Assassin's Mark (Rare)], [Demonic Blade Dance (Rare)], [Wraith Form (Ultra-Rare)], [Force Infusion (Rare)], [Advanced Stealth (Rare)], [Assassin's Tracking (Rare)], [Mana Infusion (Rare)]

Profession Skills: [Herbology of Mother Freya (Ancient)], [Precise Extraction (Common)], [Basic Potion Crafting (Common)], [Corrupted Plant Growth (Rare)], [Plant Sensor (Uncommon)], [Botanical Bond of Mother Freya (Rare)], [Seed Conversion (Rare)], [Plant Manipulation of Mother Freya (Rare)], [Corrupted Blood of Mother Freya (Ultra-Rare)], [Thorn Mutation (Uncommon)]

Race Skills: [Identify (Common)], [Demonic Perception (Uncommon)], [Dark Blood (Uncommon)], [Meditation (Common)], [Demonic Endurance (Uncommon)]

Bloodline Skill: [Servant of the Dark Lord (Unique)] Servants: [Princess Charlie (Skeleton) - Lvl 20], [Servant Slot Available]

Luke scanned through the notifications, still reeling from the insane level-up streak. But it was the very last one that caught his eye:

[An item has been added to your inventory]

That was it. The item he had earned when the Beast Lord died. Heart picking up pace, he navigated the system interface. He didn't even bother opening the inventory to read the details. He just summoned the item straight into his hand.

A stone materialized. Jet black, etched with crude, almost primal markings. "What the hell is this?"

He turned it over in his palm, examining the strange carvings.

"Wait... no way. Is this?" His eyes widened. "A Skill Rune?"

Excited, he immediately used Identify, only to stop cold.

It wasn't a Skill Rune.

It was something else entirely.

[Familiar Rune]: Some magical beasts, when defeated, leave behind a core. If the core remains intact, and the creature's will to live is strong enough, its soul may remain trapped within, forming a Familiar Rune. This rune allows the bearer to forge a contract with the bound soul, turning it into a loyal familiar, ready to assist in battle, exploration, or other tasks. A magical bond sealed between master and beast, one that transcends death.

Luke just stared, dumbfounded.

The markings on the black stone suddenly glowed and took the shape of a serpent.

"HUMAN!" a voice bellowed from within the rune. "I REFUSE TO BE YOUR FAMILIAR!"

It was unmistakable.

The damn Beast Lord was still alive, inside the stone.

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