William had to admit that the fight with the Oni was going uncommonly well. He wanted to put the credit for it squarely on his squad’s shoulders but knew that they had only been able to get this far because of the efforts of his fellow Captain and their ninja ally. It mattered little to the Monster Hunter that an innocent man had to die to get them to this point. He was far more pragmatic than to mourn the loss of one life when weighed against the potential destruction that leaving him alive could bring. Besides, how many other innocent people had died because the man had become the enemy’s pawn? In the Revenant’s unforgiving mind, the man’s life had been forfeit the moment he succumbed to the summoner’s power.
Rearing up, the Oni roared ahead of William, wildly thrashing about as the magical forces within it ran amok. It attacked almost blindly, swiping at the Nighstalker, the monster hunters, and William himself with broad, sluggish strokes. Talen had done them all a great service by killing the chained man, and as hesitant as William had been to allow the ninja to join with them, he had to admit that the Nightstalker had proven his usefulness by distracting the summoner and keeping the man from bolstering his flailing creature. Ducking under a slashing swipe from Oni no Kosaku’s hind leg, William thrust the summoner completely out of his mind, trusting Talen and the Nightstalker to deal with the errant mage. Now that the others had done their business, it was time for William and his team to do theirs.
All of his squad had turned their fire to focus on the floundering Oni, sensing the creature’s momentary weakness and pressing on it. Another round of fire concentrated fire from the hunter’s heavy crossbows slammed into the beast, and this time each bolt found purchase in the creature’s armored carapace and drove home with force. William snarled, rolled out of the path of another of the Oni’s strikes, and then charged back into the fray.
While the others saw the Oni’s sluggishness and brittle carapace as the extent of the creature’s weakness, William saw all of the intricate details that went with the severing of the creature’s magical tether. After completing the test of the Icehenge in the frozen wasteland of Berevar, William’s sight had been blessed by the Thayne Goddess Jomil. Everything that he looked at decayed in front of him, but in doing so it showed William the inherently weak points that could be exploited for greater destruction. His gift was usually limited against living things as their shifting natures made their weaknesses fluctuate too much to be of any real use to the Revenant. But despite his normal deficiencies regarding living creatures, the sudden shift in power away from the Oni manifested very visibly in William’s sight as a series of cracks woven throughout the Oni’s carapace. All he would need to do would be to strike at one of those cracks to open it wide and do massive damage to the creature.
It was a simple matter for William to time his blow to strike one of the cracks in the Oni’s leg carapace as the creature recovered from its wild swing. Steel hard bone bit deeply into the creature’s armor, driven by all of the weight of the Revenant’s supernatural strength. A wet, snapping sound echoed through the street, followed by a hideous, bellowing wail from Oni no Kosaku. The creature stumbled backwards as its leg gave way beneath it and crashed into one of the nearby wooden dwellings that were so favored by the Akashiman people. William was instantly on the move again, dodging kicked up waves of grit and flying splinters as he moved in for the kill. Oni no Kosaku glared at the approaching Revenant with hate-filled eyes and William barely had time to react as the wounded creature opened its jaws and loosed a gigantic spray of bubbling webbed strands that reached over the entire square.