The wyvern lowered its upper body to the ground as if stalking prey. Its slitted eyes gleamed like a predator. The moonlight reflecting from its scales gave it an ominous crimson glow.

Its eyes showed no interest in the tarantula’s corpse lying on the ground, instead it was only focused on the living, breathing centipede before it. I raised my body up to flex my true size.

This way, the creature would think twice before attacking. But slowly it began to circle around me with no intentions of backing down while flashing its sharp, deadly teeth.

The corpse of the collasal tarantula painted a picture of the carnage that was about to unfold.

A centipede vs a wyvern. Usually both these creatures wouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath.

It was like comparing heaven and earth. And looking at the wyvern, I felt the difference between our power.

This was a monster I had no business facing and for the first time I understood how it felt to be hunted.

Escape...

That was the only thing I could do. Fighting wasn’t even an option.

At that moment, I channeled most of my mana into my wings and vibrated them to create a powerful explosion that launched me into the air like a rocket!

My wings and exoskeleton were shredded immediately, leaving my soft flesh exposed to the world. With no exoskeleton, it felt unbelievablely cold.

Without skipping a beat, I activated my molt skill and shed my injured wings and broken exoskeleton before forming a new one instantly.

At the same time as I rose up above the clouds, the wyvern’s fangs came down with tremendous force as it snapping at me.

All that, and the monster caught up with me in a matter of seconds. I twisted my body just in time to evade its vicious jaws, but the monster was still on my perverbial tail.

Every flap of its wings echoed in my ears. It sounded as if someone was flapping a piece of paper in the wind.

Every flap caused it to burst forward, coming too close for comfort and forcing me to change directions to evade its fangs.

Still, I continued to climb the sky until the ground was barely visible. Soon, my wings began to struggle. It felt as if an invisible force was pushing me back down but I fought through it. Channeling just a small amount of mana into my wings to boost my speed.

This far up felt strangely peaceful, and the planet which used to seem so far away felt strangely closer, even though there were light years between us.

The only sound was the vibrations of my own wings and the snarls of the beast as it chased me further and further up into the night sky.

RARW!

The beast snarled loudly before a loud pop! was heard as it exploded upwards towards me at even greater speeds than before.

I quickly pitched my entire body upwards at a 90-degree angle before twisting my wings in the opposite direction to push myself backwards. Allowing the wyvern to fly past me.

I then quickly reversed my body’s orientation again, switching into a nose-down angle before using my wings to aggressively drive myself downwards towards the ground.

The air whistled around me from the speed at which this occured.

And as expected, the wyvern followed after me, but with its wings, it couldn’t turn instantly like me. So the beast had to forcibly slow down its speed until it finally came to a stop before diving down after me.

This gave me a head start, which further agitated the wyvern, causing the monster to aggressively flap its wings to catch up to me.

The wyvern did so in a matter of seconds, but by then, the ground was already visible.

Still, neither the wyvern nor I showed any signs of slowing down as we plummeted from the sky like a missile.

Instead, I increased my speed, pushing my wings to the limit while the wyvern did the same.

I waited until the last second before I rotated my wings in the opposite direction once again to push myself sideways out of the wyvern’s path. The distance between the ground, the wyvern and I was just centimeters apart but I was gone from the monster’s vision in an instant.

BOOM!

The sound that followed afterwards was akin to a meteorite hitting the ground. A massive dust cloud, carrying small rubble and large pieces of rocks, rose as high as 50 feet into the sky, blocking out the moon and creating a void-like darkness over the entire area.

In the aftermath, a massive crater the size of a football field was left as proof of what had occured.

Through the explosion, I could hear the loud snarls of the wyvern. The creature was neither injured nor dead, and worse, that little stunt managed to piss it off even more.

Without hesitation, I dove deep underground, so far that I began encountering hard rocks that were harder to turn into magma.

I was so frantic that I didn’t even know how long I had been swimming downwards.

It wasn’t fear but precaution. The monster seemed frantic. Berserk even. It could very well go on a bloodbath.

In that state it could go on a warpath and attack the nearby towns and settlements.

Not even the other monsters would be safe.

I pity the person who encounters that monster next.

I wanted to retrieve the corpse of the tarantula boss monster, but it would be too dangerous.

It’s best to wait and let things calm down. For now, I decided to log out.

The world around me morphed and began to split apart into different pixels before it reconstructed itself, leaving me back home.

A familiar ceiling now hung above me. I turned to my left, and there was Amelia’s face sleeping peacefully.

She was so close to me that it surprised me, and it was then that I noticed the numbness in my arm as she used it as a pillow.

Still, I didn’t mind. Seeing her made me feel calm and a bit happier. I slowly closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep with a smile on my face.