The moment Alex threw his sword away, the remaining beasts all swarming in at once, as if they knew that he was at his most vulnerable point at this moment.
But in reality, Alex was actually about to unleash the strongest attack he could conjure up with his current strength and abilities.
Right as the monkey beasts started to swarm him, Alex's skin started to turn orange and flames started to envelope him.
He had activated his Phoenix fury technique.
But quite unlike every other time he had used it, his skin didn't stop glowing when it reached a certain point.
Instead, the light his body gave off became brighter and brighter until even the beasts attacking him couldn't bear to look at it directly.
It was like the sun had risen in the forest even though it was the middle of the night.
He lit up the surrounding tens of kilometres with his intense light, so much that even the mercenaries sleeping in their encampments were woken up by their internal clock, thinking that it was morning already.
'Man, this sucks.'
Alex on the other hand wasn't enjoying this moment one bit.
He had long built up a strong resistance to the fire element, but that was only up to a certain point.
If he were to be hit with a strong fire elemental attack, then he would still be injured, just not as much as anybody without his resistance would be.
However, in this case, Alex knew what he was attempting would leave him seriously injured even with his resistance.
Soon enough the heat and light became so intense that the beasts had stopped attacking him entirely, as every time they came close to his body, the heat straight up seared their skin off of their muscles.
Alex himself was in an even worse state, as he had no skin left to burn, and the flames were starting to eat away at his muscle fibres bit by bit.
But it wasn't over yet.
This was only the build-up to the true attack that Alex was preparing, and…
BOOOOM!
It finally reached its tipping point.
All of the accumulated energy in Alex's body — literally every last bit of it, was unleashed at once, not in a mighty explosion like he would normally release, but in a roaring, flaming shockwave that spread out in all directions and burned every tree in a 1 kilometre radius to a crisp.
As for what was left of the monkeys, well… there wasn't anything left.
Except for a few shining beast cores that had luckily been scattered around the area when the beast's bodies had been vaporised.
It seemed these little rocks of energy were quite resilient, as Alex's attack didn't even leave a scratch on them.
As for Alex himself, he toppled over into the mounds of charcoal the moment his energy zeroed out, with all of his skin burned off and half of his muscles cooked to well done.
If someone came over to look at him right now, they'd think a demon had just risen from the depths of hell.
But he was still alive, and he was healing, but very, very slowly considering any energy he regenerated was immediately siphoned off to his most damaged areas.
***
"What the fuck just happened??" Carter shouted as he ripped open the flaps of his tent and stormed outside.
He was the leader of the mercenaries hired by the Count to look for the beast that had been causing trouble for Evermoor city over the last few weeks.
One second he was sleeping peacefully in his tent, then the next moment he was thrown around like a ragdoll and a loud bang had nearly burst his eardrums.
As he exited his tent, every other mercenary in the corps had the exact same look of shock and bewilderment as him.
Nobody knew what was going on, and it was his job as their leader to find out.
"Mike, you and jones were the only ones on watch duty tonight. Care to explain what the fuck exactly happened?" Carter immediately went over to one of the two people who had actually been awake.
He and Jones were the most likely person to have witnessed what happened personally, as every other mercenary was cooped up in their tents fast asleep.
"Was there an attack?? An explosion?? Did you two cause all this mess???" Carter burst out at Mike, berating him even more as his questions continued.
But this whole time, Mike just sat there with a distant look on his face, like he had no idea Carter was even speaking to him and he had been daydreaming this whole time.
Whack!
It was only after Carter delivered a loud slap to Mike's cheek that he was forcibly brought out of his reverie.
"Focus god dammit!" Carter barked.
"Uh-Uhhh… T-The…" Mike struggled to get his words out.
But the terrifying look on Carter's face made him recompose himself.
"T-there was this bright light all of a sudden, like the sun had just risen, and then a few seconds later the light completely disappeared like it was never there! And then after that, the trees started shaking, then boom! The whole camp was suddenly messed up like some explosion was set off in the distance and we were feeling the aftershocks of it!" Mike recounted all that he could remember to Carter.
The whole ordeal had only taken place in less than 10 seconds, so he couldn't compute much of what was happening at the time as the weird phenomena just kept on coming until that final shockwave.
"Which direction did you see the light rise from?" After Carter had learned the general account from Mike, next on his agenda was to investigate the source of this shockwave directly.
'This is our closest lead to finding the beast!' He thought.
"Over there."
But the direction Mike pointed in just happened to be the same direction where Alex was currently lying in a pile of ash, unconscious…