She met his glance with a scoff.
"What?" Her voice was dry. "Don’t tell me you need help dealing with a non-mutant beast."
’Non-mutant beast huh? That’s what they call normal beasts?’
Stan filed the term away with the small, distant part of his mind that was still gathering information. If there was a category of non-mutant beasts, there was, logically, a category of mutant ones. Beasts that had been altered by the recent emergence of Qi. Beasts that had passed some biological threshold into something more than ordinary predators.
The one in front of him was, apparently, still ordinary. Which meant he was expected to handle it.
He assessed rapidly.
Before the Bone-Tempering Pill, he had been strong enough to lift roughly a ton. After the pill, his strength had multiplied by roughly five to ten times. The heaviest polar bear ever recorded on Earth had weighed around eight hundred kilograms. This one was larger than average, perhaps a thousand kilos, but still nowhere near the upper end of what his current strength could handle.
He could take it barehanded.
But he had never actually killed a wild beast in single combat before. He had killed chickens for meals when he was younger. He had, in various street fights during his teenage years, injured people.
He had never gone hand-to-claw with a genuine apex predator whose entire existence had been built for killing things larger and more dangerous than himself. He weighed his options.
Barehanded combat with the bear was possible. It was also potentially messy. If he made mistakes, which was likely, given that this was his first fight of this specific kind, he might take injuries that Camilla would notice, and injuries would give her fresh material to mock him with, which would probably lower rather than raise her favorability.
The Bloodfangs were in his inventory.
Camilla had already seen his spatial treasure. She had already witnessed his healing pill. She had already registered that he possessed an unusual amount of unusual equipment. Revealing the daggers now would not fundamentally change her assessment of him. She had already accepted, with visible amusement, that he was walking around with a substantial collection of hidden resources.
If he used the daggers well, with elegance, with efficiency, with the kind of technique that a martial master would recognize and appreciate, it might, in fact, impress her further.
’Every point of favorability mattered.’ He made his decision with this thought and willed the Bloodfangs into his palms.
A pair of sleek red daggers materialized in his hands, one in each palm.
They were beautiful, slim, curved, engraved with fine intricate patterns that seemed to move slightly when Stan tried to focus on them. The blades caught the pale cave light and threw it back with the specific liquid quality of steel that had been treated with something exotic.
The grips settled into his hands with the unearned familiarity of weapons that had been forged specifically to fit his grip.
He had no time to admire them. The polar bear was already charging.
It came down the passage in a heavy, thundering rush, its massive paws pounding the ice, its head lowered, its shoulders bunched for the killing swipe. Fifteen hundred pounds of predatory mass compressed into a single moving line of intent.
Stan met it.
He moved forward at his full speed, dagger raised, and ducked under the swipe of the first paw at the last possible instant.
The paw passed over his head with the whistling rush of a fifty-kilogram limb moving at high speed one won’t expect from a beast of this size...
He came up on the inside of the bear’s guard. His left dagger flashed up.
He blocked the second incoming paw with the flat of the blade, the impact ringing through his arm, the bear’s strike would have shattered a normal weapon; the Bloodfangs held.
His right dagger drove forward. He aimed for the throat.
The polar bear’s neck was thick. His martial mastery told him a slice would not sever it in a single motion, and a slice would also expose his forearm to the bear’s snapping jaws.
Taking those into consideration, he chose the pierce instead, the fastest, safest technique that would put him inside the beast’s guard and out of the range of its teeth.
The dagger drove in and the blade sank through the bear’s throat with an ease that shocked Stan.
He had expected resistance. He had expected the tough hide and dense muscle of an apex predator to slow the strike. He got no resistance at all. The Bloodfang pierced the polar bear’s throat as though it were passing through cloth.
The bear’s charge faltered.
Stan pivoted. His right dagger stayed in the wound. His left dagger, freed from its blocking position, whipped forward in a horizontal slice across the same wound, meeting the pierce from the other angle, opening the throat wider.
The polar bear’s neck was too large for a single slice to sever completely.
But a slice meeting a pierce, opening from two angles at once, finished the job.
The bear’s head dropped.
The massive body sagged forward, momentum carrying it another two paces before its front legs buckled and it collapsed onto the cave floor with a heavy, final crash.
The head rolled slightly. The eyes went glassy and silence settled over the cave.
Stan straightened up. He examined his daggers. There was no blood on the blades.
He looked down at the polar bear’s neck. There was almost no blood dripping from the wound either. The Bloodfangs had, it appeared, absorbed the blood as they had cut, the blood had never left the beast’s body in any meaningful quantity because the daggers had sucked all of it that instant it sliced through it
’The description of the daggers,’ Stan remembered. ’They evolve by absorbing the blood of slain targets.’
The system’s mechanics were working exactly as advertised. But he hoped Camilla won’t notice...
Anyways, he watched, with a small, quiet fascination, as the daggers in his hands seemed to warm faintly against his palms, the intricate patterns along the blades pulsing with a barely-visible red light for a heartbeat before settling.
He waited for a favorability notification. None came.
’Of course what was I expecting.’ His mind processed the outcome pragmatically. ’Camilla is a Vampire Cultivator who has watched cultivators use every possible technique over years. A basic pierce-and-slice combination on a non-mutant bear is not going to impress her. This is basic work for someone at her level of experience, it’s nothing impressive for her.’
Before Stan could say anything, Camilla spoke the very thought that just crossed his mind.
"Did those daggers just absorb all the blood from that beast?" she asked, her crimson eyes fixed on the twin blades. "Human... you seem to possess an endless number of treasures."