The wyvern's breath was hot and heavy. It pressed onto Ashton's skin like sheets of lead.

  He didn't dare to move, though it wouldn't matter anyway. The beast, the 'ruler' of Drakewood, had already seen him. It had been watching him for a while, that's why it dropped that bat down toward him instead of just outright eating it. It was trying to mock Ashton.

  There were different types of boss monsters.

  'Hidden' bosses or ones without a name modifier were the lowest type. They were special entities that were created by the system to protect a specific thing or spot. Usually, these were things like mana wells or other places that were important for the transition into a system-world. Soon, 'Bosses' would also just be the leaders of different monster camps, once camps became a proper system function.

  Once dungeons would become a thing, the leaders of those places would specifically become 'Dungeon Bosses'. Beside the fact that they had a higher level of control over the other dungeon monsters and lost their power should they leave said dungeon, they were mostly like regular bosses. It was just that their upper range of strength tended to be higher depending on the dungeon's difficulty.

  Then there were field bosses, like the hobgoblin Ashton killed during the tutorial. They were a bit more complicated. Rather than having directly assigned locations where they were born, field bosses were usually roaming monsters with extremely powerful abilities. It just so happened that the hobgoblin's ability was to control monsters and create something like a camp.

  Usually, when a camp was functionally destroyed, the connected boss monster would lose a large portion of its power, but if Ashton had let that hobgoblin live, it could have just moved to another place and done the whole thing all over again without losing its strength in the process.

  And then there was the type that was standing in front of Ashton. A 'regional' boss. There were other types, such as 'World', 'Event', or 'Quest' bosses, but they they shouldn't be important for the time being. There was a quest boss connected to phase one's final quest, but what was standing in front of Ashton was arguably even more dangerous.

  If a regular boss was the most overall powerful monster of its respective camp or location, whether through command abilities like the hobgoblin or sheer power like the orc boss that Ashton first encountered, then a regional boss was the overall most powerful monster of its region.

  Through the 'Community', it had already been confirmed that the regions were most likely towns as well as a bit of land beyond that. The Drakewood region included a handful of adjacent villages and hamlets, for example. It was likely that larger places like London were split up into multiple regions as well.

  There weren't regional bosses everywhere. Just those unlucky few places. Usually, they were out in remote regions as well, like mountains or deserts. But a regional boss in a town? The council was going all out to ensure that this place would be ground to dust.

  Regional bosses weren't made to be taken on alone. Just the sheer amount of reward that this guy gave showed that it was made for at least a dozen people to take on together. But during a time where most people were still working on getting their classes? That was ridiculous.

  [[Executor of the End] suggests that you accept this time]

  [[Executor of the End] has offered to become your Sponsoring Constellation]

  Ashton ground his teeth. Already? The Executor really must be a lot more powerful than he thought. They were obviously a constellation ruling over death, but there were many of those.

  But that wasn't important. Without even reading the agreement, Ashton declined it. He never had any intention of becoming another being's tool, and that wouldn't change no matter how sweet they made the deal.

  Instead, he slowly pushed his hand down to his leg. He had a particular potion in a small plastic bottle there to use for emergencies.

  The moment he moved even slightly, the wyvern opened its maw wide and screamed. It made Ashton's ears ring, but the thing that stunned him the most was the putrid, almost rotting scent that came out of the monster's throat. It was clear what it was trying to do.

  Wyverns were hunters, through and through. They loved the chase, and when they weren't hungry, they simply hunted for fun. Clearly, this one saw Ashton and found what he was doing interesting, and was now trying to scare him off so he would run away.

  And obviously, he was about to run away, but if he just ran without anything to help him, Ashton would be killed instantly.

  As the wyvern roared, Ashton snatched the bottle out of his pocket and tore off the cap as fast as he could, using the undine to help him splash the potion into the wyvern's throat. The reaction came almost immediately. Not only did the potion taste absolutely foul, but the monster's airways quickly swelled up.

  It was the wood skin potion. Ashton kept this with him in the case of an emergency. Not only was it a good way to quickly make make many sorts of wounds stop bleeding, since the swelled-up, hardened skin acted like a temporary bandage pressing the wound shut, but if he was losing the upper hand in a fight, he could use this potion and allow himself to stop concentrating on defence quite as much.

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  But what was happening to the wyvern right now was one of the reasons why you had to be careful about labelling your potions. If you drank the wrong one, it could be fatal.

  The wyvern's roar stopped almost immediately, and it took a few steps back, startled. Wyverns could easily hold their breath long enough to outlast the potion's effect, but it wasn't like this monster knew that. The only thing that it could tell was that it suddenly couldn't breathe anymore because of something that Ashton did. And a moment later, he turned around and ran away as fast as he possibly could. He changed his focus immediately and had the undine stop keeping up the umbrella.

  Ashton summoned Poppy within his palms and had her use her spell on him to let him run even a little bit faster. He also threw off his jacket and tossed it offer to the backpacker, who threw back a small bag of something, before he told the spirit and fairy to both return to his vessel.

  The reason why he took off his jacket was simple. Usually, the colour of his clothes didn't matter too much. During the day, being in a city where every colour was strewn around, it was irrelevant what colour his clothes were as long as they weren't the most glaringly bright thing in the world. Plus, in the dark, the colour red was the first that people and many monsters lost track of, so he blended in well.

  However, avian and reptilian monsters were a different case. A lot of the time, they had a wider range of colour than mammalian species, so there, Ashton would still stick out a bit even in the dark, though there, he had the benefit of the colour of the natural city. Plus, he was confident that he could take care of most monsters easily, so being inconspicuous wasn't his biggest priority.

  But now? Wyverns had incredibly potent eyes. Hell, their eyes were ingredients in some of the most potent eyesight-boosting potions that Ashton knew of. They even had some pretty great night vision, and could see colours better at night than almost any other species. So while it was almost pitch black out, Ashton had to reduce the possibility of being spotted as much as he could. He grabbed himself a bit of mud and covered up his shoes and belt to take care of the last splotches of colour, too.

  Like that, he basically had two of the three major senses taken care of. Sight and hearing. The silent step shoelaces took care of most, and as long as he tactically held his breath, Ashton would be fine in that regard.

  But there was one more thing. He was sure that he spotted it here earlier. In the past hour, Ashton had moved decently away from the camp, and in that time, he had spotted a few... interesting places, to say the least.

  Particularly, there was a pile of relatively fresh corpses just nearby. They must have died yesterday, and had just started to smell. There were a few bugs crawling over them, but Ashton preferred them over the fucking wyvern that would soon realize that it wasn't in fact in lethal danger, and would just get extremely pissed off.

  While he was running, Ashton opened the bag that the Backpacker had thrown to him earlier. It was the bag filled with the stinkhorn myconid, the necromancer. Truly, these things smelled like death and rot, and that was exactly what he was looking for. Basically squeezing out as much liquid as he could from the dead monster, Ashton rubbed it onto himself and pushed himself into the pile of corpses.

  It felt a bit disrespectful to use the remains of these folk just trying their best to survive for something like this, but Ashton was desperate.

  The moment he laid down on the ground, he could feel insects gnawing at his skin. But that was fine. They might get a bit annoying, but Ashton knew a few potion recipes that could get any sort of parasites or insects out of his body, and he had the ingredients for it. He would just do it later. It was fine.

  He closed his eyes. It was still raining, and the undine hid away in a puddle of water just a few steps away. Ashton didn't unsummon the undine so that he could keep up the magical sense, and figure out how close that beast was without having to move.

  And then, he heard it. Another loud roar, but this one, it wasn't meant to intimidate. It was just a genuine scream of anger. Heavy footsteps sounded out as the wyvern ran through the streets. Ashton was laying in an alley that should be a bit too small for the monster.

  Hopefully, it would just believe that it lost him. If he hid inside somewhere, the wyvern would stay there until he tried to leave, and then kill him right then and there. But if Ashton made it think that he somehow left, then he could have a chance to properly run away.

  He spotted it running across the street sometime over the course of the next twenty minutes. Twenty extremely painful minutes. He could feel maggots crawling underneath his skin. Even the constellations had grown silent. Not out of fear, obviously.

  Ashton figured it was just like that sort of stunned silence that you felt when watching a particularly tense scene in a movie.

  He just kept laying there.

  And it was humiliating.

  This sort of moment wasn't foreign to Ashton. Hiding in a pile of corpses, having things gnaw or feed off his flesh, being infected with god-knows-what... he had done those things so often that he couldn't even remember how often it was-

  No. That was a lie. Ashton knew exactly. Fifteen times. Thirty-seven times. Eight times. That's how often he was forced to do each one of those things. But it was never in this sort of situation. Frankly, after the first decade or so, Ashton had stopped fearing for his life.

  By then, he had died so often that his survival instincts were gone almost completely. It wasn't like he wanted to die or let himself pass on at the slightest inconvenience. Death still hurt, and he would be punished for dying, suffering far worse than death.

  And then, a couple more decades later, the only reason Ashton died would have been because the Summoner was pissed off that day. There were barely any enemies that could hold a candle to him.

  When the system came, Ashton thought it would be easy. That there was nothing to worry about. And for the most part, that was the truth. The quests were simple and easily taken care of, but things just got so, so much harder over time.

  But even then, he didn't have to struggle. Because Ashton was strong. He was fucking *strong*.

  And then, he came back to Earth. He lost his strength, and regained his survival instincts, as if his body remembered what it was like to fear death even if his mind didn't.

  But that was exactly why this was so terribly humiliating.

  Ashton had killed a dragon before. Not these fake 'descendants' of dragons. True dragons that could have torn apart the world if they wanted to. He had stood against armies on his own, coming out victorious after days of constant battle.

  But now, he had to resort to something like this. Out of fear, because he didn't want to die to a mere wyvern. He was in pain because of scavenger bugs that thought he was a corpse because he had to disguise his scent with a rotting Myconid.

  Ashton hated to admit it because he despised the Summoner with his very being, but at some point, he had taken pride in how strong he had become.

  And now he had to crawl in the dirt all over again.

  In the end, as the wyverns screech echoed throughout Drakewood, and probably even into adjacent regions, a single thought crossed through his mind, born from these mixed feelings of hatred, lost pride, and humiliating frustration.

  'I will kill that fucking wyvern.'