Chapter 377 -377 – Taming Trails – 6 Lin covered her mouth with one hand, clearly struggling to contain her amusement at watching the agent writhe as he tried to reach his back with his enormous scorpion arms. The transformed limbs, designed for crushing and tearing, proved utterly inadequate for the simple task of reaching behind himself. “What’s so funny?” he snarled, spinning to include Ren in his threatening glare. His voice carried the distortion of his dual transformation, but beneath the mechanical rasp lay something new: uncertainty. The confident predator was beginning to crack. Ren was also smiling, an expression that seemed disturbingly innocent on his young face. He raised both hands slowly, deliberately, showing his palms to the agent. His hands were completely covered in a golden, viscous substance that clung to his skin like liquid metal. The material pulsed with its own bioluminescence. The sight alone made the agent’s stomach twist with instinctive revulsion. But it was the smell that truly disturbed him. Sweet. Cloying. Wrong. Like flowers blooming over an abyssal’s corpse. “This is a creature that, according to my new knowledge…” Ren paused, tilting his head as if listening to an internal voice, “seems to hate the abyssal energy you use.” His tone was conversational, almost educational. “Took it from the consumed bodies of your comrades who chased us into the tunnel. Very useful for… making you feel.” The agent took an involuntary step backward. Every cell in his body screamed warnings. The substance coating Ren’s hands emitted an energy signature that was fundamentally repulsive to everything abyssal within him. The air around the child had become toxic, charged with an energy that made his transformed flesh crawl. “We only had to get through your common beast’s layer,” Ren continued, casually smearing more of the golden mold onto his dagger’s blade. “I deposited a bit in the crack before you threw me.” The agent’s eyes widened with horrified understanding. The wound in his back wasn’t just hurting, it was burning. A slow, creeping fire that ate at his connection to abyssal energy. He could feel his armor weakening, the chitinous plates softening as whatever Ren had introduced fought against his very essence. Ren kept talking while the agent remained frozen in indecision, as his armor dissolved across a good portion of his torso and back. The small mushrooms in the boy’s hair pulsed with greater intensity. “You’re lucky it can’t become a parasite in your body and consume it completely, since the energies seem to cancel each other out.” Ren’s neutral tone made it somehow worse. “But you’ll have to pay with a good portion of your corrupt energy.” The agent manipulated his transformation slightly, contorting his elongated arms to be slender again and reach the wounds on his back and neck. His fingers found them, feeling the pain that radiated from each contact point through his system. The sensation was unlike anything he’d experienced. Physical pain he understood. But this was different. This ate at the very foundation of his power, corroding not just flesh but the new connections that made him whole. “Filthy brats!” he roared, but even his voice sounded weaker. The words emerged as more of a rasp than the commanding bellow he’d intended. “Using that repulsive trash is cowardice!” “It’s not trash,” Lin corrected, finally lowering her hand from her mouth. Her smile was sharp as a blade, the expression of someone who had found exactly the weakness she’d been searching for. “It’s more like… soap for cleaning YOUR repulsive trash.” Ren nodded solemnly, as if they were discussing the properties of different ash-based household cleaners or the ones from skills of some plants rather than an organism that was systematically dismantling their enemy’s power from within “Very effective. Especially against filthy… abyssals.” Here was a child, barely past his true eleventh birthday, treating the agent’s power, his connection to forces that had required years of sacrifice and pain to obtain… as nothing more than dirt to be scrubbed away. The agent felt the first real wave of panic. He could feel his connection to his scorpion fluctuating, the normally reliable bond stuttering like a candle in a hurricane. Follow new episodes on the "N0vel1st.c0m". The creature wasn’t dying… but it was completely occupied with the reaction, too distracted to obey any coherent commands. “Enough talk!” he bellowed, planting both feet firmly. The ground trembled under his weight. Cracks spider-webbed outward from where he stood, small stones dancing with the vibration of his power. If he was losing his abyssal strength, he still had his rock spirit. He still had options. “I’ll show you the true advantages of having more than one beast in our Yino!” The earth beneath his feet responded immediately. But not gently. The ground undulated like water, sending waves of power that expanded in all directions with huge force. Trees swayed like grass in a storm. Leaves fell like rain, torn free by the supernatural vibration that shook the very foundations of the forest. The air itself seemed to vibrate with elemental force. Lin moved immediately, her crane manifesting to give her the height needed to be above the first wave of power. But the agent had learned from his earlier mistakes. This time, he would attack even high in the air. While Lin hung suspended above the chaos, the agent raised both massive arms and struck the ground with devastating force. The impact created an explosion of rocks and earth that rose like a directed fountain toward her. Lin barely managed to dodge with a burst of her limited wind control, the small technique Ren had taught her during their training sessions that she didn’t know she had. It wasn’t much, but ended up giving her just enough momentum to twist away from the stone barrage. Barely was still enough. Ren took advantage of the fact that the agent wasn’t attacking him, moving to approach the exposed back ready to drive his dagger home. His balance was poor in the earth control madness, yet he managed to push forward. But Ren stopped abruptly, he had caught sight of the enemy’s mana control pattern just in time to save himself from the trap. The entire ground in front of Ren’s feet collapsed, creating a five-meter crater that would have sent him falling toward a pit filled with rock spikes that sprouted from below. He threw himself backward, his hugely enhanced reflexes the only thing between him and impalement. The agent, with movements of his transformed arms like a conductor directing an orchestra, guided the stone projectiles in a second wave of attacks at Lin in the air. “Dance all you want!” he shouted, his voice loaded with malicious satisfaction. “In the end, you can’t escape the ground, my ground!” The boast carried weight. He was right, in a sense. No matter how agile they were, gravity would eventually bring them down. And when it did, he would be waiting with a terrain that obeyed his every command. But Lin had been observing, analyzing, waiting for exactly this type of brute power demonstration. It was impressive, yes, but also somewhat predictable. Most elemental control users always made the same mistake: they assumed that launching powers over larger areas equaled better strategy. They confused spectacle with effectiveness. While she dodged the second wave of rocks with movements that seemed more like dancing than combat, she smiled. Lin let herself fall toward the ground deliberately. But the agent no longer limited himself to throwing rocks like some desperate novice. Instead, two walls of earth rose like waves, creating a sphere that closed around her from all directions. There was no horizontal or vertical escape, it was a three-dimensional trap. The agent was learning. The stone moved fast, rising from the earth like a living creature. The agent’s control was remarkable, each wall perfectly positioned to cut off her retreat, deadly spikes inside and all while maintaining structural integrity. Lin activated her crane to the maximum instantly, feathers manifesting not just as light ornaments on her body but wrapping around her arms and giving her almost true wings. A single wingbeat could pull her out of the bad trajectory. But the agent had already anticipated the movement. His extended dome, accelerated with the enormous amount of mana he’d spent, would make it impossible for her to retreat at this distance. Not to mention that stopping now would cost her much more effort due to her rapid descent. The physics were against her. Lin didn’t try to retreat… ‘Suicidal?’ he growled in his mind. She flapped and propelled herself forward with her slight wind control too in a fast maneuver. The movement was so unexpected, so contrary to all logic of survival, that it seemed like madness. The agent hesitated for a fraction of a second. That fraction was all Lin needed. She changed beasts again as she avoided the trap. Her right hand, now bearing powerful black claws, extended not in a fist but with fingers spread like a spear. The strike connected directly with the agent’s exposed torso, the exact point where the armor plates had been corroded by the golden mold. The agent doubled forward involuntarily, but fury and adrenaline made him endure it to try to give Lin a deadly embrace. His massive arms swung inward, pincers spread wide to crush her against his chest.