NOVGO.NET Chapter 192: The King of Treachery (Bonus - )
Chapter 192: Chapter 192: The King of Treachery (Bonus Chapter)
[A/N: Bonus Chapter for reaching 200 Power Stones! Weekly Goal achieved!]
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Chapter 192: The King of Treachery
The cavern shook as the King Level Beast unleashed a deafening, overlapping roar.
The colossal, million-eyed heart pulsed violently. The massive parasitic worms tethering the heart to the World Tree’s roots began to thrash.
At the head of each worm, the fused human faces stretched impossibly wide. Their jaws dislocated, tearing at the seams.
A torrential tidal wave of boiling, pitch-black acid erupted from the screaming mouths.
"Scatter!" Lucien yelled.
Draven did not run. He simply shifted his weight, taking two calm, precise steps to the right.
The highly corrosive acid splashed against the obsidian ridge mere inches from his boots, instantly melting the heavy stone into a bubbling puddle.
Lucien darted to the left, his silver boots a blur of motion.
Nyx did not dodge. She simply ceased to exist.
She melted flawlessly into the heavy shadows cast by the glowing acid. Her physical body slipped into the two-dimensional plane of the floor.
The millions of unblinking red eyes in the colossal heart darted frantically, trying to track the female assassin.
But Nyx was no longer relying on sight or sound. The deafening roars and blinding flashes of magic meant nothing to her. She closed her eyes entirely.
She triggered her [Awakened Mind’s Eye].
A flawless, three-dimensional spatial map bloomed in her mind.
She felt the exact location of the colossal heart, the swinging shadow-chains, and the thrashing parasitic worms without needing to look at them.
She pinpointed the exact structural weak point connecting the massive central worm, the one wearing Lord Lionel’s screaming face, to the Beast’s core.
Nyx rose from the shadows directly beneath the central worm. She opened her eyes. They glowed with a terrifying, pure white light.
[Phantom Queen]
The black obsidian floor beneath the Beast instantly transformed. It became a rippling, pitch-black lake of ink.
The King Level Beast suddenly shrieked. It tried to lift its massive tentacles, but its own colossal shadow turned against it.
Nearly a thousand faceless, jagged-mawed shadow-wraiths erupted from the inky lake.
The wraiths swarmed the beast, wrapping their shadowy limbs around the parasitic worms, physically restraining the thrashing monsters and rapidly draining their dark mana.
A heavy shadow-chain whipped blindly toward Nyx to crush her.
Lucien stepped elegantly into the chain’s path. He raised his [Storm-Caller Rapier].
He did not try to block the multi-ton chain with brute strength. He parried it at a flawless forty-five-degree angle.
CLANG!
The blade absorbed the massive kinetic friction of the glancing blow. The silver rapier instantly overloaded with crackling blue energy. Lucien spun gracefully and thrust the blade directly toward the colossal heart.
A blinding pillar of blue lightning ripped across the cavern, striking the million-eyed heart directly in the center.
The Beast roared in agony, momentarily blinded and paralyzed by the electrical shock.
Nyx used the fraction of a second perfectly.
She vaulted off the back of a restraining shadow-wraith, launching herself directly at the thickest part of the central parasitic worm.
She applied her academy knowledge of pressure points and joint locks on a massive scale, identifying the exact nerve cluster controlling the worm’s movement.
She crossed her arms and slashed her [Shadow-Rend Daggers] outward in a brutal, horizontal scissor-strike.
SHNK.
The void-steel blades bypassed the physical dark matter entirely. They sliced cleanly through the spatial fabric anchoring the worm to the heart.
Lord Lionel’s screaming face went completely silent. The massive, house-sized parasitic worm was perfectly severed. It collapsed heavily into the lake of shadows, where Nyx’s wraiths instantly tore it to shreds.
The King Level Beast went absolutely berserk.
Having its primary tether amputated pushed the cosmic abomination into pure, unadulterated rage.
The headless, jagged torso rising above the heart suddenly split open down the center, revealing a massive, glowing purple ribcage.
It unleashed a cavern-wide wave of hyper-condensed Miasma.
It was a suffocating cloud of dark magic and hallucinogenic fear-gas designed to instantly rot the lungs and shatter the minds of anything in the room.
The cloud expanded so fast that Nyx and Lucien had absolutely nowhere to run.
Draven stepped to the edge of the obsidian ridge. He stared down at the expanding wave of certain death.
[Vector Manipulation]
He reached out with both hands and grabbed the natural, heavy subterranean drafts flowing through the massive cavern. He forcefully yanked the kinetic vectors into a tight, violent spiral.
FWOOSH!
Draven generated a localized, Category-5 hurricane directly in the center of the room. The extreme cyclonic winds caught the expanding wave of toxic gas, rapidly pulling it away from Nyx and Lucien and trapping it within the swirling vortex.
The King Level Beast screeched, trying to pump more gas into the room.
Draven closed his fists. He flawlessly reversed the kinetic momentum of the entire hurricane.
The massive, swirling storm of toxic death stopped in mid-air. It shot violently backward, accelerating straight down the glowing, open ribcage of the headless shadow-torso.
The Beast choked, gagging on its own highly pressurized poison.
But Draven was not finished.
With the entire massive cloud of Miasma trapped inside the beast’s chest cavity, Draven clapped his hands together.
He applied a terrifying level of internal gravitational compression. He grabbed every single vector of the expanding gas cloud and crushed it inward.
The massive volume of gas violently condensed.
It shrank from the size of a cathedral down to the size of a carriage, then a boulder, and finally into a tiny, hyper-dense marble of pure, volatile dark matter resting directly next to the Beast’s million-eyed heart.
Draven released his absolute hold on the vectors.
The laws of physics snapped back into place. The highly compressed gas instantly attempted to expand back to its original volume.
KRA-KOOM!
A catastrophic internal implosion ripped through the King Level Beast.
The headless torso was violently blown to pieces from the inside out. Black blood and chunks of shattered dark matter rained down across the cavern.
Draven fell heavily to one knee, coughing a horrific splatter of black blood onto the obsidian floor.
The sheer processing power required to compress a hurricane into a marble had pushed his human host body to the absolute brink of total organ failure.
"Captain!" Lucien shouted, rushing to his side.
"Hold your position," Draven rasped, wiping his mouth with a shaking iron gauntlet. His cold, gray eyes remained locked on the ruined Beast.
"It is not dead."
The King Level Beast was shattered, but it was panicking.
Sensing its imminent destruction, the colossal, bleeding heart clamped its remaining parasitic worms directly into the deepest, purest roots of the World Tree.
It began to rapidly, violently drain the raw life force of the mountain.
The Beast was initiating a terrifying, forced mutation to enter its second phase. The ambient mana density in the cavern skyrocketed.
The sheer atmospheric pressure of the energy became physically suffocating. The air cracked and popped with raw, unfiltered power.
For the King Level Beast, it was a desperate power grab.
But for Strike Team Zero, it was a catalyst.
Nyx felt a searing heat bloom directly inside her chest. Lucien fell to one knee beside Draven, gripping his chest as a blinding surge of electrical mana flooded his veins.
The intense, suffocating pressure of the Beast’s mutation was acting as a massive evolutionary forge.
It was pushing the Eclipse Hunters’ internal mana cores past their absolute physical limitations.
Glowing blue system text violently flooded Draven’s vision.
[WARNING: Ally ’Nyx Vespera’ is breaching the Level 100 Threshold.]
[WARNING: Ally ’Lucien’ is breaching the Level 100 Threshold.]
The air around Nyx and Lucien began to violently warp. They were hitting their Awakenings directly in the middle of a boss fight.
If they did not instantly figure out how to seal their massive new domains, the sheer outpouring of unfiltered power would rip their physical bodies completely apart.