Becoming a Monster

Chapter 419: Chapter 419: Grimoire’s "Soul Requiem"

Eve never planned to release her fangs.

It wasn’t that the troll’s blood had some exquisite taste; it didn’t. What mattered was the vitality threading through it, the raw mana pumping inside its veins. That essence was being funneled directly into her skill, fueling the spell that continuously drained her own reserves.

Just looking at her pale, frail figure, it would appear that nothing was happening. But as one watched Diablo’s plight, who now had to fight a troll all on his own, one would understand that something was being transferred.

His eyes were shining with the most alarming luster. His body radiated a dark aura, reminiscent of Eve’s own. The energy he supplied to his sword was growing at an alarming rate, and his speed and strength even more so.

Every drop Eve stole was feeding him.

When the new enemy blindsided Diablo, he was smashed into the ground by a fist nearly half the size of his body. Even when bracing his sword for the attack, it did nothing when compared to the troll’s strength.

Cracks formed on the side of his head, his armor broken in multiple places. But within those cracks and the seams of his armor, the dark energy reforged it faster than before. And when the troll approached him to finish its job, Diablo not only avoided the attack, but managed to slash into the troll’s arm at the same time.

The cut went deeper than his attacks from before. The miasma on his blade engulfed the wound without a speck of blood being able to splash.

The speed at which Diablo moved seemed to be as fast as when he and Eve were merged.

Seeing this, Noah wasn’t surprised at all.

When Eve merges with her guardians, her strength is actually weaker when she lets her guardians lead the evolution instead of herself. But it was her guardian’s instincts that made their forms more reliable in battle.

It was only when she took control of the merger that her skills fully manifested.

As she continued to absorb the life force and mana of the troll, her own life force and mana were being drained at a rapid pace, giving Diablo the strength to soon overpower the troll on his own.

But without exchanging the lifeforce of the troll for her own, the consequences of exchanging so much lifeforce would be dangerous.

With the troll weakened to such an extent, it finally felt the truth it had been denying this whole time.

It was dying.

And it was only then that it noticed the vampire on its shoulder. Its body was too weak to move, yet self-preservation gave it the strength to live.

Its vision dimmed, its limbs barely obeyed it, and only then, struggling, choking on its own fading breaths, it noticed the vampire latched onto its shoulder. At first, the troll didn’t understand how its strength slipped away so fast. But now, as the world darkened and its massive arms refused to move, it realized the "bug" was killing it.

Eve lifted her head just enough for the troll to see her face.

Her gaze met the troll’s almost-lifeless eyes without an ounce of care. The troll’s skin, once thick and earthen brown, was paling rapidly, turning into an unhealthy, corpse-gray tone that nearly matched Eve’s own.

Even if she stopped now, there was no telling if the troll’s body could recycle enough mana to regenerate its diminished life force in time, not to mention the severe blood loss.

The troll attempted to move its arm, even the slightest twitch to bat her off, but the moment the thought surfaced, the Avas returned. They manifested in its fading vision, like the physical embodiment of every nightmare it had ever imagined, each materializing at a different point on its body.

They clamped onto its flesh under its dimming gaze, and all three sank their teeth in simultaneously. The troll’s eyes widened from the foreign sensation that rippled through it. It wasn’t a physical pain anymore; it was the sensation of something deeper unraveling. It was the feeling of its existence being stripped away layer by layer.

As the Avas drained the last shreds of its soul and Eve continued siphoning its life force, the troll’s vision flipped, its eyes rolling into the back of its head as its pulse withered and died. Yet in the same breath that its life ended, something foreign surged into it. The whites of its eyes darkened until they became pitch black. Its skin no longer held the slightest hint of warmth. The body should have collapsed immediately; yet somehow, it didn’t. Something anchored it upright. Something refused to let it fall. Binding like an invisible hand refusing to release its puppet.

That was when something emerged from Eve’s chest. An indistinguishable object. Small at first, then expanding outward until the object was fully visible.

Her grimoire.

The tome drifted before her, pages rustling without wind, flipping rapidly through every illustration recorded previously of the Revenants they had created. The reason for its emergence remained unclear, at least until the pages suddenly stopped, slamming into an untouched, blank sheet.

A strand of black energy erupted from the grimoire, lashing outward and tethering itself directly to the troll’s corpse. Still, its body did not fall. It did not react. But something within it did. Something began to move inside it, something dark, the same color as the energy binding it. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the troll’s soul tore itself free from within. Wrapped entirely in that writhing black essence, it was pulled along the tether toward the book.

When it reached the waiting page, it was dragged inside. Ink formed immediately, sketching lines and shapes as if an unseen hand worked at unnatural speed. A perfect illustration of the troll took shape, but not as it once was.

Pale skin. Eyes red as fresh blood. Its mouth was lined with fangs far longer than its original canines, and an eerie, predatory stillness radiated from its expression. Unlike the other illustrations in the grimoire... this one moved.

The soul inside was still alive.

The troll’s body, now nothing more than a hollow vessel without a soul, lost the last invisible strings that kept it upright. Its spine sagged first, shoulders slumping forward as if every ounce of tension bled out of it. Then, with a slow tilt, the corpse leaned back until gravity seized it entirely. The body crashed into the ground with a heavy thud.

The sight of its soul being dragged screaming into the grimoire should have alarmed the remaining trolls, especially the chieftain, who had been originally analyzing everything to determine what they could benefit from this battle before retreating. They should have become more wary of the vampire than the others.

But none of them had the time to process what happened. Each of them had their attention forcibly anchored elsewhere.

Fenrir was no longer bound by the three enemies he had once faced.

Out of the three trolls that had cornered him earlier, only one remained alive. The one whose head Fenrir had nearly obliterated in his counterattack. The first troll had been dead since the moment its heart and core were devoured, its massive frame lying with half its body missing. But the third... the third was barely recognizable. It wasn’t simply ripped apart; it was charred black, burned down to a husk so brittle that even the slightest movement caused flakes of ashen flesh to crumble away.

Fenrir’s flames were no longer the same unstable embers they were before when they first entered this new world.

The dungeon’s evolution had changed more than he was aware.

The buffs provided to them weren’t simply boosts to magical output. It stabilized the mana in the air, making it so that it no longer resisted them. Normally, their mana and the ambient mana would clash, grinding against each other like two currents fighting for dominance. But here, within the domain of Noah’s dungeon, that resistance didn’t exist. Every drop of mana they summoned was now able to be unleashed within the limits of their fullest potential.

It was an unexpected gain, one that Noah had not accounted for.

If he had known his creatures would grow this powerful within his dungeon’s domain, if he had realized the dungeon’s subtle effects earlier, enabling his creatures to fight to such a degree... perhaps he might have left them to handle the battle alone.

No. Even knowing this, Noah understood himself enough to know he would have made the same decision. Those directly connected to his soul would probably have been fine.

But everyone else? Although he didn’t have the same sense of attachment to them as the others, he would never risk their lives thoughtlessly. Power or not, buffs or not, Noah knew better than to gamble the lives of those who placed their trust in him.

The fight appeared decided. Yet from where the chieftain stood, everything was falling apart in ways it had not foreseen. It was thought that the battle would end in ruin for both sides. It had accepted that outcome. It had even planned for it.

But the scene was nothing like it imagined. It stood facing a creature it had never encountered before. A creature that could barely reach its knee, and yet that creature filled it with extreme trepidation. A spider-like creature who had suddenly appeared and took out its strongest elites without issue.

All because they were too preoccupied with that abnormal beast.