Surely, at this point, Northern didn't need to be told what his fault was.
He had realized it in that instant when the monster appeared in front of him before he could react.
No doubt, because of his winning state, he got over himself. Not only was he distracted, but in that momentary lapse, he had underestimated his opponent.
And so when the Corpse Eater suddenly lunged with an increased speed, he was caught off guard.
These were his consequences of getting complacent... again.
'Over and over again, I keep repeating the same crappy mistake!'
Northern ground his teeth painfully, one hand was still holding his side, where blood seeped from.
The Corpse Eater menacingly towered before him, glaring down, obviously with a ghoulish glee, even though its facial features betrayed no emotion of any sort.
Northern was now at the mercy of the monster. Of course, it wasn't like he was going to die.
He still had options in his arsenal to use... but it pained him to resort to such antics.
Since he wanted to win this with raw power.
The Corpse Eater growled, low but a palpable viciousness seeped from the growl.
Even Northern could tell.
"I guess you're carrying a lot of grudge, huh?"
All those moments where it was completely powerless before him, damn, he even made it clean the entire mansion!
The monster probably was boiling, about to burst with so much hatred for this wickedness in human clothing kneeling before it.
With a thunderous roar of hatred and hunger, it reared back, preparing to bring the full brunt of its remaining bulk down upon Northern's prone form.
There would be no surviving such an onslaught - only a rent, mangled aftermath amidst the fresh crimson smears of his gory obliteration.
Even staring at such annihilation in the face, a manic grin split Northern's features.
'Ah... crap, I don't know what is wrong with me... this is just so awesome.'
The morbid grin on Northern's face caused the Eater to shudder visibly. Even Ellis, whose legs had moved on their own in that moment, stopped in his tracks, blinking.
Northern's sudden change in composure shrouded the entire place with an unfamiliar sense of dread.
Both the Eater and Ellis couldn't tell, but both of them had leaped a couple of steps back before they could realize that they had.
Pearls of sweat streamed down Ellis's face.
The monster was probably sweating too, in its own way.
Northern, however, was just staring, a wide grin parting his lips, his eyes glowing ghastly, altogether forming a concupiscent look on his face.
The moment passed in silence, and Northern slowly began to rise. However, before he could completely rise, the monster lunged at him with a loud guttural cry.
One could almost tell it was breaking the chains of fear that bound it just now.
Faced with the same blinding speed again, Northern this time did not make the same mistake.
There was no time to look, so the moment the monster moved, he rolled, allowing the Eater to crash into the floor where he'd been sprawled, delving dents into it.
As it struggled to regain its bearings, he flowed to his feet in one sinuous, boneless movement.
There was no wasted motion, no extraneous effort.
One moment he was prone, the next he was upright with his fingers hooked into jagged furrows torn in the Eater's flank by his earlier barrage.
Fetid ropes of intestine slithered free as he drove his grip deeper, nearly burying his forearms inside the creature's body cavity.
'Eh?' Ellis blinked a couple of times. He didn't even see what just happened. 'When did he move?!'
It was amazing that Northern could move like that.
Teleportation was far-fetched; even he knew it was only available to some kind of drifters, the kind that were often called Mages and Scholars.
And Northern wasn't that kind.
Northern was clearly a warrior.
But what other phenomenon would explain such blinding... unseen movement?
'Ah, I don't even know what to think anymore...'
At the very least, he was beginning to get one message.
Northern is fucking strong!
'I don't understand, if he had so much strength, then why did he let us get caught? Why is he so reserved and calm...'
Although crazy too. But Ellis just didn't expect that someone with so much combat prowess would be unknown.
If anything, Northern was strong enough to be a party leader too. He was sure about it!
'Damn, he's strong, he's so strong!!' Ellis didn't seem to be able to get over how strong Northern is or could be.
The Corpse Eater let out a deep wild cry of agony, shaking the very air within the mansion, if not mistaken, the entire mansion itself!
It tried to whirl away, but Northern held fast, using its own inertia to rip his arms laterally in opposite directions.
With a sickening reverberation of sundered sinew and cracking bone, he laid the beast's body core open from pelvis to sternum.
A tidal deluge of black gore and offal came exploding outwards, drenching them both in a warm, noxious rain.
Northern kept his face angled into the blast, draping his tongue to catch the spurting essence of the Eater's life force.
The coppery tang of it basting his palate made him shiver in rapturous ecstasy.
'Ahh... awesome indeed.'
Still impaled on his gory lances, the Eater could only gargle weakly around the eruption of its own viscera.
It had nothing left, no defiance or final reserves of strength with which to punish Northern's audacity.
Slowly, with equal measures of inevitability and mercy, he lowered it to the ground.
Lank strands of flesh and gristle unspooled from Northern's forearms as the weight settled.
What little remained of its eyes found him, glazed in the timeless resignation of the utterly defeated.
"Look at me," Northern growled in that same eerie rasp as before.
His voice was velvet-wrapped gravel, harsh yet mesmerizing. "Let your fear and despair fill me... shoot them all at ME..."
He punctuated those last words with a sharp inhalation and watched as the dimmed glow in the Eater's maw slowly faded.
Just then, two blackish orbs rolled out of its severed abdomen, and simultaneously, Northern heard the system.
[You have slain an Abysmal Savage - Corpse Eater]
[You have gained +6 talent fragments]
'Six? I expected it to be more, though...'
He received twice from killing Dark Terror, who had just become a devil at the time.
Which means monsters were still, in the end, greatly limited by their soul rank.
Northern raised his head and let out an audible breath.
Meanwhile, Ellis watched all this in a state of frozen horror, muscles locked, breath stilled in his lungs.
Even from where he observed, there was no mistaking the...unholy intimacy of Northern's actions.
It transcended simple violence or bloodlust.
This was something deeply perverted and soulless.
An elemental violation of all that was natural and wholesome.
Finally, Northern came back to his senses and turned his head to Ellis, who shuddered weakly.
"This..." he said hoarsely, grinning at the shivering black-haired boy standing six meters away from him, "This is what a battle should be."
He suddenly frowned as he heard the clapping sound. It definitely wasn't Ellis since his eyes were currently on Ellis, and he wasn't clapping.
He was barely even moving.
'Who... who could it be?'
It was all in a microsecond, but Northern's mind had already borne thousands of thoughts and ways to kill whoever had just witnessed a portion of what he is capable of.
"Show yourself," he demanded.
And slowly, a silhouette came out of the darkness.