Oblivion's Throne-Chapter 100: Tyrradic Hearing

Orion's breathing steadied, but his heartbeat didn't slow. The sensation crawling down his spine was more than just adrenaline—it was an instinctual warning.

His awareness stretched outward, threading through the cavern like an invisible web. He could feel it—just outside his line of sight. A presence.

He could faintly sense its form, its size was larger than the Varkren, bulkier. The creature seemed perfectly at ease in its environment. Unlike the Varkren's territorial tendencies that forced it into defending it's territory against intruders, this one exuded patience. It wasn't the territorial type either. It was the stalker type.

Orion could feel it was assessing him just as he was assessing it.

His muscles twitched as an unbidden thought flickered through his mind—this is how its prey must feel.

But he wasn't prey.

Orion moved towards the entrance to meet the creature.

The creature surged forward nearing the cavern entrance.

Orion barely had time to register its form before it was upon him.

A blur of slate-gray muscle and bone, its bipedal frame a mass of condensed power. Thick, fibrous sinew rippled beneath its armored hide, its form a living war-machine built for unrelenting endurance.

But it was the skull that struck Orion first.

Its head shaped more like a battering ram, reinforced with ridges of keratin that extended into jagged protrusions. The beast didn't only kill with teeth and claws.

It was a Tyrradon.

Orion only had a heartbeat to react.

The creature's head lashed out, and the entire cavern trembled.

He dodged. Barely.

The shockwave from the impact sent cracks racing through the stone, the wall where he stood moments ago now a pulverized ruin. A direct hit would have been fatal.

Orion twisted mid-air, landing with a grace that shouldn't have been possible two days ago.

For a brief second, he felt invincible.

His balance was perfect. His limbs felt weightless, effortless, as if gravity itself had been lessened. His own speed shocked him—the moment his foot touched the ground, his body had already calculated the optimal next movement.

He felt three times stronger than before.

No, more than that.

If he had fought a trained Confederacy knight from his family before, he would have lasted seconds. If he faced a knight now he was sure he could stand his ground or at least be able to flee.

Now he could kill them.

He was five years old. He had never trained for more than six months.

Yet here he was, body thrumming with raw power, able to move in ways that should have been impossible.

A part of him—some small, rational corner of his mind—felt terror at the sheer absurdity of it.

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The other part felt euphoric.

The Tyrradon didn't give him time to think.

It lunged again.

But this time, Orion saw everything.

Not just the attack—the intention behind it.

The tension in its back legs before the push. The subtle angle shift in its plated skull. The way its weight distribution told him exactly where the next blow would land.

A perfect sidestep. A counter-strike.

He responded instantly, his speed blurring as he lunged towards the creature in front of him.

His Wraith's blade, still slick with Varkren blood, moved in a flash aiming for the creature neck.

The Tyrradon roared.

His slash had connected. A deep, gaping wound tore through its neck, thick, dark ichor spilling onto the cavern floor.

It stumbled back, stunned.

Orion was somehow more stunned than the creature, since he hadn't expected him to be this fast.

The Tyrradon's body lay still, its slate-gray hide marred by old wound marks. Thick ichor seeped into the cavern floor, pooling beneath its lifeless frame. The stench of blood clung to the air.

Orion stood over the carcass, his breath even, his pulse steady. His body thrummed with energy, but he was not tired.

No, what he felt was something else.

His fingers curled into the Tyrradon's thick hide. Even with his enhanced strength, the sheer weight of the beast was considerable. A living war machine built for endurance—even in death, it resisted.

Orion pulled.

The floor trembled slightly under the strain, but he moved.

The Tyrradon's corpse shifted, then he dragged its body forward with a slow, grinding scrape.

He tightened his grip, forced his will into his limbs, and pulled again.

The slow, heavy journey back to the cavern began.

The Tyrradon lay motionless in front of Orion near the Varkren.

Orion stood over the carcass, heart hammering, breath coming in sharp bursts.

A chime echoed in his skull, the Pythia System once again responding to his unspoken intent.

「Begin Extraction?」

Orion exhaled slowly, his fingers twitching as he placed his palm on the beast's corpse.

The moment he made contact, the world shifted.

A tidal wave of foreign sensation crashed into him.

It wasn't like the Varkren. The Tyrradon didn't see the world through aggression and frenzied hunger.

It was patient. Precise. Methodical.

Even if it was blinded, Orion felt the Tyrradon could still fight—still kill. It could hear the heartbeat of prey through walls, feel the subtlest tremors in the ground, detect the faintest disturbance in airflow.

It was a creature of total awareness.

Orion's mind split apart and reformed.

Every sound in the cavern magnified a tenfold.

The drip of water against stone became a thunderous chime. The scuttle of distant insects sounded like clattering bones.

He clenched his jaw, fighting against the sensory overload.

Then, another chime.

「Trait Extraction Complete.」

「Tyrradic Hearing – Enhanced auditory range with subsonic and ultrasonic detection. Capable of pinpointing heartbeats, airflow shifts, and micro-vibrations.」

Orion inhaled.

The moment the extraction completed, the world around him detonated with sounds.

His eardrums felt like it was about to rapture adapting to a new spectrum of existence. Every breath, every whisper of movement, every imperceptible shift in the cavern assaulted his mind.

The faintest drip of water struck his ears like a hammer on glass.

The flutter of an insect's wings became unbearably noisy.

The faintest tremor in the stone beneath him roared like a seismic upheaval.

His body seized, knees nearly buckling as Tyrradic Hearing overrode his human faculties. His lungs hitched, his heartbeat accelerating as he tried to come to terms with this sensory overload.

His mind wasn't just hearing sound.

It was instinctively translating it.

Parsing the shifts in air pressure. Pinpointing the exact location of every disturbance within the cavern. His subconscious was being reprogrammed to function on a higher sensory level.

And it was too much.

A splitting pain lanced through his skull.

His body tried to to process too much data at once. The world blurred at the edges, the sheer input triggering a deep, guttural nausea from within.

He collapsed to one knee, fingers digging into the stone. Breathe. Breathe.

But ironically his own breath felt too loud.

The way his lungs expanded, the faint turbulence in his airways, the shift in his vocal cords with every subtle exhale.

He tried to calm down. But his own heartbeat was too loud.

It thudded in his ears like war drums, the vibrations of his own blood racing through his veins turning into a deafening cacophony.

Orion tried to zone out the noise and try to focus on something.