Worthy Opponents

"Are you ready, Robus?"

"rrr…"

"Are you sure?"

"Rrr!"

"Alright then…"

The two creatures, one humanoid demon, and one demonic gorilla then looked at each other as they stared at each other's eyes, neither of the two was backing down from each other.

Then after 5 seconds of eerie silence, the humanoid demon then shouted,

"ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, SHOOT!"

The two creatures then extended their right hand, which looked very different from one another, with one of them as huge as a tree trunk while the other was just a normal, ordinary, human-sized, jet-black limb.

Robus's huge hand proudly showed his huge fist, while Blake's little hand showed his palm.

"Paper beats stone! I win!"

"RRrr…"( I still can't understand how my fist would lose…) Robus said as he compared his hand which was several times bigger than Blake's hand.

"It's a game, Robus. And that's the rules. So, as per our agreement, I will take this one while you take that other one!"

"rrr.." (I really don't like that one…)

"Don't worry, I know you can do it!"

"rr." (Sure)

"Rrr?"( Are you sure you don't need help? I could feel its strength is even higher than the monkey that I defeated some time ago.)

"Yes, you don't have to worry, I have grown considerably stronger than back then!" Blake puffed up his chest and showed off his moderately developed bicep that he got from increasing his physique stat.

Robus only nodded his head before saying once again,

"Rrrr?"

"Yes, if you've defeated yours first, you will come to me, but if I finish mine first, I will come to you. Let's go!"

The two then separated from each other as Blake went towards the right side of the forest while Robus went to the left side of the forest, going into the complete opposite side of each other.

With the connection that they had with each other, they could find the approximate direction of one another, and even if they got lost in the forest and didn't know the way home, they would still know where to find one another. Not that it could happen since Blake literally memorized every step that he took and he could just retrace them back to where he came from.

It has been about a week since the two of them met with each other and made the darkness monarch's covenant. And since then, every time Blake went out of Vera's house, he spent the time adventuring the forest together with Robus.

And now after a week of circling around the unknown parts of the forest together, they finally stumbled upon a new part where the creatures living inside it were something that Blake had never seen before. The two of them took their time and hunted the demonic beasts and ate their souls, with Robus giving most of the souls of the weaker demons to Blake since Robus seemed to not like to eat the souls of the creatures who were too weak. And with that, Blake had gotten several levels and more stat points to strengthen himself even more.

With their strength being way above the average demonic beasts and they were only getting stronger each day, the duo was able to wipe the floor with every opponent that they met along their journey.

However, after the seventh day of their journey, the two of them finally meet creatures that could make them spend their effort to defeat, in other words, a worthy opponent.

And the rock paper scissors that they did earlier were to determine which one of them would fight each enemy. And Blake was necessarily happy that he won because he was able to choose an enemy that was less annoying to deal with.

He already knew where to find his target since he had seen the creature and he had stepped inside the creature's territory back then with Robus, and the huge gorilla was so excited that he had almost jumped right in front of the creature while still carrying Blake on his back. But since they didn't know anything about the creature, Blake told Robus to stand down first and to look around the area just in case there were a lot more other strong creatures like it around the area and if they would be antagonizing a lot of them at the same time.

This would be a problem since Blake didn't want to overestimate themselves and die as a result.

Fortunately, after the two of them ran around the forest about 2 miles away from the location they found the creature, they only found one other creature with similar strength as that creature. Which was perfect for Blake and Robus since there were two of them and two strong creatures that they could fight for themselves.

They could just go and group up against one of the creatures and defeat it before going to the other creature that they found and also fought it together. However, neither of them wanted to do such a thing since they wanted to fight strong opponents to improve themselves.

Blake prepared himself as he neared the territory of the creature as his opponent wouldn't be a simple one and it would take much more than just tagging his opponent with his marking spell and casting the myriad darkness tendrils to defeat it.

"There it is…" Blake muttered as he climbed onto one of the tall trees and spotted his target.

Blake kept his eyes locked onto his target, which was constantly moving around, and only stopped every once in a while on one of the trees.

'I think it's currently searching for prey to eat…' Blake thought as he saw his target flying around in circles.

"It's really not comfortable looking up all the time to follow its movements… Maybe I should target its wings to bring it down first..."

The target that Blake had been observing for the past minutes was none other than a demonic bird that would not lose in size even if compared to Robus' huge body.

If Blake were to simplify the bird's description, he would just call it an oversized crow that had green feathers covering its body instead of black feathers.

Blake wanted to observe the crow some more time to get a better understanding of it, and it would have been more perfect if he could see how the crow went after its prey since it could reveal at least one of the crow's abilities, but after seeing the crow completely stopped moving and perched itself on the top of one of the thick trees, Blake knew that it was a chance that he shouldn't miss.

"Well, let's see how tough it is…" Blake thought as he quickly refined the strategy that he already had in mind.