A Dual Crest Summoner In Infinite Summoning World

Auren's farm was growing at a nice pace. For the time, everything seemed to work perfectly. The schedule was set, and it had become a habit of his after a couple of months.

But one evening, when Auren was playing with Kenzo in their backyard—Dante came back. It was later than usual for him. And the reason, everyone could see from afar, was a big turkey-like light green bird that had a large beak and a very annoying clucking sound. Three of them, actually—two of which were awfully dead, and the third one was going haywire seeing its dead comrades in Dante's hand.

Dante never brought home anything alive. This was something new.

"A bird! A bird! Aonen! Bird!" The most excited among them was the one who loved loud sounds the most—Kenzo.

"I am not a bird. You are bird!" Auren pushed him away and walked near Sable and the other ladies in the front yard.

Seeing their curious gazes, Dante explained just as he opened the fence gate,

"To see if Auren can grow his summon."

How was that going to be possible? For an animal or spirit beast summon to grow, it needed to kill the prey and eat it. Neither just defeating nor eating had any confirmed effect; one had to do both—which was why it was so hard for small, non-violent animal summoners to rank up.

There was, however, something in which every summon excelled—whether it was looking far, tracking scents, or simply flying, walking, or swimming; if the summoner killed the prey with its summon assisting in with these distinct skills, then the summon would indeed grow. Leading that to an eventual rank-up.

Auren's dark stoney remote had no mouth, though, and there wasn't anything it did other than being controlled by him. How in the hell could that even be an animal summon? Still, it was worth trying.

There were no numerical or physical signs of a summon's growth other than the natural getting-bigger-in-size growth—summons do not age naturally. They only grow when they win the fight and kill the opponent. But growth in power or abilities and growth in skill were two different things.

So will his already big remote become even bigger? Did he even want it to grow?

Ranking up—for him—Auren had no idea how to even approach that. If all objects and living summons had a purpose, fulfilling which constantly ranked them up—there had to be something for him too. But what was the purpose of something formless and shapeless? To kill? His summons were just as odd an addition to this world as his soul.

Still, Auren was also curious, and Dante wanted to do it, so he didn't say no. Behind their house, Dante and Sable took Auren and the noisy bird. Kenzo's mother and Granny decided it was too much for little Kenzo, so they held him back in the front yard with a bribe of treats.

"When you are ready, I will release it. You have to close in and kill it on your own. Neither of us can help you for it to be your kill," Dante instructed. Auren nodded.

His wooden toy sword once again coated in lethal dark particles. The edges were so sharp, when Auren did a simple overhead slash, one could hear the slight sound of it cutting the very air itself. Much sharper than any average iron or steel sword. No force that Auren and Dante had managed to apply on it till now had succeeded in breaking the dark hardened material—nothing even made a small dent in the sharp edge.

Just as much happiness and giddiness Dante and Auren had felt discovering that, the fear of becoming the summoner and shaper of the rarest and toughest material in existence was equally as big. Thankfully, no one in the village knew for real what his summons were—some who had heard only mentioned it as rock and dirt, and with the help of Kenzo's family and his own, they had decided to keep the rumors going strong. Neither Dante nor Granny had much faith in their own lord, needless to mention other nobles.

The highest authority in the region, however, the keeper family's head called 'The Grove Keeper'—the ruler of all Greenvale—was someone all three people in his family believed in with all the faith in the world. It was almost reverence and religious-like trust. Auren never voiced it, but he was not so sure. Well, he had never even seen the guy. And all the wonderful stories he had heard about the guy were all depicting him as the kindest, bravest, and strongest guy in the world.

The admiration for the Emperor himself and his family was not as much as it was for the Grove Keeper. It wasn't just his family but the whole village was like that.

Auren focused his mind, discarding all thoughts from his mind and keeping his eyes fixed on the green bird. Time started moving slow, like he was watching some movie—even the annoying sound of the ugly bird had disappeared. It was a trick Dante had taught him, using just a small amount of Chi in the very front of his brain, just behind the forehead, and this effect triggered. Coincidentally, the place Auren knew as the Prefrontal Cortex—responsible for focus, planning, decision-making, and thought suppression.

Dante let the bird go—it turned its head left and right, then left again, but then its body started running in the right. Clever chap—or maybe just stupid. It had barely taken three steps when Auren enhanced his tendons slightly and had reached near it with his sword in full swing.

Auren stopped—it was the perfect amount of Chi. This thing, he had to practice a lot. His body did not move a step forward from what he had calculated he would stop at. A few seconds later, the enhanced focus was gone, and the tennis-ball-sized head of the bird fell down with the sharpest and most deadly cut to its neck. The bone and everything had been sliced perfectly.

Both Auren and Dante moved away from the bird after the second ended—only Sable had been too confused and in shock to dodge the gushing blood drops.