Chapter 68: Cyclops

The tunnel after the Crawler chamber did not stay the way it was for long.

Stone closed in, then widened again as he walked deeper and deeper into the dungeon. The blue veins in the walls thickened and pulsed slower, like the wall itself was breathing. Grit under his boots turned sticky, then dry, then sticky again, and the Raven’s feedback overhead carried back nothing but stone and an empty path.

Not for long...

Soon, the air began thickening.

It was not humidity, nor was it heat. It was he was breathing in air that was stuffed into a plastic bag.

Not only that, the air carried the same wrongness he felt back when he had a run in with the Alpha. The memory itself caused an involuntary shiver to move down his spine as he remembered that incident.

If whatever he was going to face was remotely as strong as the alpha, then he would really be in a tight spot...

Bef’s steps began to slow, and the two Rank D Crawlers under the path jittered so hard, he could feel through the link. They were sensing vibration through ground better than he ever would with boots on. Ethan held, then gave them the order to fall back. The Beowolves that lined up in front of him had already failed him once today against speed he did not understand. He was not spending the new tools on the first unusual thing he noticed.

He moved forward until the tunnel opened into a chamber.

It was tall enough that the Raven could climb without scraping its wing on ceiling, and broad enough that a charge had just enough room to become something lethal.

The air intensified. He look to left, looked to his right.... He could feel something, but he couldn’t quite see it.

Not yet anyway...

The system the moment Ethan looked forward.

```

[WARNING]

[You have encountered: Cyclops]

[Classification: Devil]

[Rank: B]

```

Ethan found it in the same second the burning green text flickered off from his vision.

There, in the far side of the wall, the Cyclops stood as if it had been waiting to be noticed. It had a hulking humanoid frame of muscles layered upon muscle and pale thick skin. It’s torso was too deep and it had shoulders built like a siege gate.

One eye occupied most of the upper face, heavy lided and an iris that had a dirty gold color that reflected the chamber’s blue veins.

Its arms hung long and its hands looked wrong— slender, brittle looking and with way too many joints. It was the kind of hands that looked like they should belong to a different body and had been stolen for this one.

It breathed once, and the dense air seemed to move with it.

Ethan stared. Kill one Devil class monster for him to be able to leave this place. His exit condition was standing right there.

All he had to do was kill it and raise it without dying while he was at it. That sounded easy.

Only, it wasn’t... back in his fight with the Alpha, the iron golem had put up a good fight against the beast and they were still on the losing end.

This time, he only had a wolf, a raven, and two boneless centipedes...

What exactly could he hope to achieve with this?

He sighed. If the system gave it as an objective, then there had to be a way to kill it.

"Raven, go high. Bef, stay in front. Crawlers hold."

The Blood Raven sore upward, and Bef advanced forward with a low snarl.

Ethan kept the Crawlers buried next to him because he didn’t really know how to use them in battle yet.

Plus, against the Alpha, brute force contact had nearly cost them. Against this, he needed to know what the thing was before he even thought of a way to put the crawlers to use.

The Cyclops moved. Fast.

Not the kind of fast that was in a straight sprint. It was wors. It moved with the suddenness of a body that size deciding distance was optional.

One step cleared almost half the gap between them and a slender hand blurred out and hit Bef across the shoulder with a sound like wet wood breaking. Bef skidded sideways in a spray of sound, still "alive", still moving, but the muscles on its chest deformed in a way that told Ethan that this was going to get ugly.

"Fall back!" he immediately sent the Raven into a dive.

Its talons raked the Cyclops’s upper arm and did nothing but leave shallow lines that welled up dark. The Cyclop looked at its arm flatly and its single gold eye tracked the bird with a precision that shocked Ethan.

The other slender hand rose and blurred. A motion so fast, Ethan thought his eyesight was glitching. Air cracked, and the Raven folded mid flight and slammed into the far wall hard enough that the Ethan shuddered as he felt it through the link.

"Raven—!"

He forced the bird back into the air on will that cost Death Energy. Its feathers scattered, its flight was uneven. But he pulsed Death Link, using the Raven’s perspective to look for openings.

Bef tried to close in from the open angle, but the Cyclops stepped through and drove a knee into its ribs. Bef hit the ground, bounced, rolled, and came up on command.

Ethan flinched. It was responding slower.

The feeling emanating from the monster wasn’t only the beast’s aura. It was the gap between what Ethan’s orders could make his undead physically achieve and what the Cyclops was capable of doing.

He opened Death Link again through the Raven for a brief moment. He saw patterns, movement speed, and tracked it’s stance. He then cut it before the straun could stack due to panic. Through the link, he saw no obvious limp, no weak spot, and no blind side that he could exploit. That single eye covered too much, and the slender hands were not a design error. They were the weapons.

The Cyclops charged again. It came for him...

Ethan moved on pure instinct and panic, his boots rasing dust as a slender hand punched a crater into the stone where his chest had been.

Fragments struck his cheek, drawing blood and he sent Bef in from the flank and the Raven from above in the same breath. The dual stack strain made his head vibrate, but he needed something to give him time to create some space between him and that monstrosity.

Bef caught a forearm in its jaws, and the Raven hammered the eye ridge.

For a brief, silent moment, both contacts held.

Then the Cyclops closed the captured hand into a fist around Bef’s muzzle and squeezed.

"ARRGH!!"

The link screamed, and Ethan felt structural failure as a taste of metal. He dismissed Bef into Storage on reflex before the skull was crushed to pieces, and clutched his head as he attempted to steady himself.

His vision swam, and when he felt Bef fully settle into his shadow, and moved his eyes towards the beast.

The Raven got a deeper cut across the Cyclops’s brow and paid for it when the free hand swatted it out of the air again harder.

Ethan backed until his shoulder blades found stone. He could feel it with nauseating clarity.

Bef had taken too much damage, the Raven struggling. And he still didn’t know what to use the Crawlers for. So far, when if they were in a higher rank than the Beowolves, they would easily get killed upon direct contact.

Worse, his body was still Rank E. There was no way he would last a direct confrontation against that thing.

In other words, he was doomed...

The beast didn’t give off as much intimidating aura as the alpha but he would die earlier to this thing. Nora wasn’t to force blood the wrong way down a Devil’s veins, Lila wasn’t there to hold its attention with fire while he thought of something, and worse, there was no Iron Golem that had enough sturdy armor to buy him even one ugly collision.

Only him, a battered raven, a damaged wolf in Storage, two buried Rank D Crawlers, and a system that would not let him leave until this thing’s corpse belonged to him.

The Cyclops took another step, and swung it’s feet towards Ethan’s sides. He rolled at the last second, but its feet scraped his jacket. The force was so much that it actually tore the region open.

The Cyclops grunted and rushed him. Ethan ran to the other side, used one leg to vault from the wall— missing its fist by inches, and landed hard on the floor.

He forced his lungs to take one shaky breath and began running, weaving countless near misses until he slowly began to lose breath.

He was preparing himself to move out of the way of another swing when his vision blurred.

"Shit—"

**WHOOSH**

**BAM**

**CRACK**

"Ack!"

The blow hit him across the ribs hard enough that something broke. A spray of blood flew from his mouth and he hit the wall so hard a web of cracks formed behind him...

The chamber went silent and the Cyclops looked at the wall, then at the collapsed human in front of it.

He was not moving...