Chapter 479: Hive Of Shapeshifters [III]

"How about we share the glory?" Brida asked, nudging Tasmin’s shoulder with her armored elbow. "Half and half for the ledger? We tell the Lord we breached the nest together?"

Tasmin glanced at her, seeing the wide battle-hungry grin on the brawler’s face.

A soft genuine smirk touched her own lips.

"Fine," Tasmin conceded softly. "Half and half but I get the first strike on the—"

SZZZZZZZZZT... BUBBLE... SQUELCH!

The words died in Tasmin’s throat.

Across the cavern, the twelve surviving monsters didn’t charge as instead, they suddenly collapsed to their knees with their bodies convulsing in violent unnatural spasms.

CRACK-SNAP-POP!

The sound of snapping bone was sickeningly loud, echoing off the stone like dry branches breaking under an avalanche.

Their stolen skins began to violently boil, but this time, the transformation didn’t stop at their standard eight-foot wolf-aberration forms.

Dark oily mana erupted from their spines in thick, greasy plumes.

Their rib cages violently expanded outward, tearing through their chests to form external armor-plated bone carapaces.

Their limbs doubled in thickness, corded with dark, pulsating purple veins, and their four-foot sickle-claws fused together, thickening into jagged, three-pronged bone blades that crackled with unstable corrosive lightning.

’The fuck....?’

SKREEEEEEEEEECH!

The pressure in the cavern plummeted as four of the twelve had ballooned into hulking quad-pedal siege beasts, while the remaining eight rose as towering ten-foot armored dreadnoughts, their jaws dripping with glowing violet venom that ate clean through the bedrock where it fell.

"Oh, look at that," Brida whispered, her eyes widening with genuine glee. "They brought out the reserve rations... These ones actually have some meat on them..."

"They’re burning their life force from what I can see," Tasmin warned, her muscles tensing like coiled steel springs. "They’re much faster now so don’t let those bone blades graze you... the venom is pressurized."

BOOM!

The four quad-pedal siege beasts moved simultaneously.

They detonated off the rock face, moving with terrifying near-instantaneous speed that kicked up twin roostertails of pulverized stone.

The nearest dreadnought closed the forty-foot gap in seconds, its jagged three-pronged bone blade descending toward Brida’s skull in an executioner’s strike.

’I’m guessing that they’re at Tier 3... all of them.’ Tasmin thought, ’This’ll be my first time facing so many.’

CLANG-KRAAAACK!

Brida didn’t retreat.

She dropped her center of gravity, slamming the base of her tower shield into the dirt just as the bone blade connected.

The feedback was monstrous as the shockwave blasted the snow away from their boots, but Brida’s body remained rigid, anchored by the unyielding power of her physical constitution.

Her teeth gritted, her hair flaring as the shield’s crimson runes flared bright violet, drinking in the massive kinetic shock.

"Is that all?!" Brida roared into the beast’s face.

FWOOM!

She engaged her shield bash, detonating the absorbed energy right into the creature’s chest.

KRA-POW!

The concussive blast blew the dreadnought’s external bone carapace to splinters, sending it skidding backward across the floor.

Before it could recover its footing, a streak of pure black lightning cut through its blind spot.

Tasmin appeared directly above the reeling beast as she didn’t use her daggers this time... she channeled her mana into her weighted chains.

CLINK-CLINK-WHIP!

The two were holding back a lot... this was underground and Tasmin had already informed her that her own mine was not too far away and she didn’t want anything to happen to it.

’Tch...’

The dark links wrapped securely around the dreadnought’s throat and right arm.

Tasmin landed on its broad shoulders, planting her boots against its spine and leaning her entire body weight backward into the pull.

CRACK!

The beast’s neck strained with its jaws snapping wildly at the air.

"Brida! Clear the flank!" Tasmin shouted.

"On it!"

Brida spun on her heel, swinging her Titan’s Cleaver in a devastating low-to-high uppercut that caught a lunging quad-pedal beast right beneath the jaw.

SHKLK-CRUNCH!

The massive blade cleaved straight through the monster’s skull, splitting it from snout to crown.

Without pausing, Brida used the momentum of the swing to pivot, driving the iron rim of her shield directly into the side of the dreadnought Tasmin had pinned.

BOOM!

The combined force of the shield slam and the chain-strangle completely snapped the beast’s spine, sending it crashing to the dirt in a lifeless twitching heap.

For the next two minutes, the vault became an arena of relentless high-speed violence.

The empowered aberrations fought with savage suicidal coordination.

One lunged low to sweep Brida’s ankles with a sweeping sickle-claw, while another leaped from the high basalt pillars, aiming to crush her neck from above.

"Up, Brida!" Tasmin called out, melting into the shadows beneath the floor.

Brida didn’t even look up as she trusted Tasmin’s call implicitly... Why wouldn’t she?

She raised her shield directly overhead, locking her arms into a rigid impenetrable roof.

BANG!

The descending beast crashed against the top rim of the shield, its bone claws shattering against the dwarven alloy.

Before it could bounce off, Tasmin erupted from the darkness directly behind it in mid-air.

SHING-SHING!

Her void-daggers drove cleanly through the creature’s eye sockets, penetrating deep into its brainstem.

Tasmin kicked the limp carcass away, using it as a stepping stone to launch herself across the cavern toward the remaining dreadnoughts.

She moved like water... slipping beneath thrusts, sliding along the spatial seams, her blades finding the soft gaps beneath the external bone plates with lethal precision.

Every time a beast managed to corner her, Brida was there, smashing into its flank like an armored siege engine, breaking its momentum and shattering its guard.

CRUNCH! THUD! SPLAT!

One by one, the empowered abominations were butchered.

The last dreadnought let out a wet gurgling wheeze as Tasmin’s dagger punctured its throat from behind, while Brida’s heavy boot caved its chest in from the front.

The body hit the stone, dissolving into black acidic slime.

Silence descended over the clearing once more.

Save for the ragged breathing of the two women, the only sound was the howling wind drifting through the skylight, carrying fresh flakes of white snow that settled gently atop the mountains of butchered corpses.

And then, a deep earth-trembling vibration rolled through the bedrock.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

At the far end of the cavern, bathed in the column of daylight, the four-armed alpha stepped forward.

The creature stood twelve feet tall, its massive bipedal frame corded with dense dark muscle that looked like braided steel cables.

In its upper hands, it gripped two colossal petrified bone clubs carved from the ribs of ancient basin drakes.

In its lower hands, six-foot bone scythes clicked and scraped against each other, dripping with glowing corrosive venom.

Its crimson eyes swept across the field of dead children, its nostrils flaring as it took in the scent of their blood.

"RAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"

The roar was so concussive it blew the falling snow backward, tearing loose shale from the walls.

"Right," Brida muttered, wiping blood from her forehead with her knuckles whitening on the grip of her cleaver. "The head of the snake."

"No games this time, Brida," Tasmin breathed, her amber eyes locking onto the alpha’s joints. "We hit it together and we take its limbs first."

"Don’t have to tell me twice!"

BOOM!

They jumped the alpha simultaneously.

Brida led the charge, a direct frontal assault meant to draw its primary focus.

She charged across the thirty-yard gap, her tower shield glowing with violent red battle-mana.

The alpha snarled, swinging both of its massive drake-bone clubs downward in a crushing overhead smash meant to flatten her into the stone.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

’It’s Tier 4 too... or at the peak of Tier 3 rather.’

The clubs collided with the top rim of Brida’s shield with the force of an avalanche.

The bedrock beneath her boots violently shattered, sinking four inches into the dirt and blood trickled from the corner of Brida’s mouth as the monstrous weight of the strike shuddered through her bones, but her knees never buckled.

’Ah... I’m bleeding? How weird.’

Her unyielding constitution held the line, anchoring her against the impossible impact.

"TOO WEAK!" Brida screamed, her face flushed red as she pushed upward with all of her strength, throwing the massive bone clubs off balance.

In that exact microsecond of exposed recovery, Tasmin struck.

She didn’t run along the ground as she manifested directly out of the deep shadow cast by the alpha’s own raised arms.

SHSHSHK!

Tasmin blurred across its upper torso, her twin void-black daggers spinning in a blinding horizontal vortex.

SHING-SHING!

The blades bit deep into the thick, fibrous tendons of the alpha’s upper shoulders.

Black blood erupted like geysers, and with two sickening thwacks, both of the alpha’s upper arms... still clutching the petrified clubs were sheared completely off at the shoulder joints, tumbling heavily to the floor.

SKREEEEEEEEEE!

The beast shrieked in agony, but its lower arms immediately reacted, the six-foot bone scythes whipping inward to bisect Tasmin in mid-air.

"GET AWAY FROM HER!"

Brida stepped in, swinging her Titan’s Cleaver with the full rotation of her hips!

KRA-SHING!

The heavy alloy blade met the incoming bone scythes head-on.

The concentrated kinetic force sheared through the lower limbs, severing both scythes at the elbow with a deafening metallic snap as all four arms hit the dirt, dissolving into frothing gray slime.

The alpha stumbled backward, bleeding profusely from four massive cauterized stumps, its chest heaving as it backed toward the center of the daylight beam.

"We got it!" Brida laughed, raising her cleaver for the finishing blow. "It’s done!"

"Brida, wait!" Tasmin shouted with her senses screaming. "Back up! Back up right now!"

SZZZZZZT... GURGLE... SHRRRRK!

’It’s going to Tier 4!’

The alpha didn’t die.

Instead, its severed shoulder stumps violently ruptured as thick, black, rubbery masses of flesh erupted outward, not in the shape of arms, but in thick muscular tentacles lined with rows of barbed jagged bone suckers!

The creature’s entire silhouette violently melted and expanded as its wolf-like skull split down the center, folding backward into a bulbous grotesque cephalopod mantle.

Its legs dissolved into four more colossal twenty-foot-long tentacles that slammed into the cavern floor with earth-shaking thuds.

Within seconds, the bipedal wolf had completely transformed into a colossal, eight-tentacled, octopus-like underground monstrosity, its rubbery hide glistening with an impenetrable sheen of corrosive oily mucus.

WHIP-CRACK!

A massive twenty-foot tentacle lashed out faster than the eye could track.

BANG!

The strike caught Brida right in the chest, bypassing her guard and launching her armored frame sixty feet across the cavern.

She skipped twice across the jagged stone floor before slamming hard into the base of a basalt pillar, coughing out a spray of crimson blood.

"Brida!" Tasmin yelled with her heart lurching.

SWOOSH!

Two more barbed tentacles swept toward Tasmin, tearing through the air with the screech of high-velocity artillery.

Tasmin dropped into the shadows, sinking beneath the floorboards just as the tentacles smashed into the stone, pulverizing a five-foot trench where she had stood a fraction of a second before.

She emerged thirty feet away, sliding to a halt beside Brida.

Brida pushed herself up from the rubble, spitting a mouthful of dark blood into the snow.

"Haah... Haah..."

She wiped her jaw with her gauntlet, her breath coming in ragged shallow gasps, but the wild fire in her eyes hadn’t dimmed in the slightest.

"Gods damn it..." Brida coughed, leaning heavily on her cleaver. "That thing... hits like a siege catapult."

’...But bleeding feels so good.’

Was that why she let that hit her? Brida wanted to feel what it meant to bleed some more, it wasn’t her first time bu—

"Snap out of whatever you’re thinking... Its hide changed," Tasmin said, her voice dead serious as she watched the massive octopus-aberration drag its colossal bulk toward them as its tentacles whipping the air into a frenzy. "The mucus is absorbing impact so slicing it with normal edges won’t work as it’ll just deflect the blade."

Brida looked at Tasmin and Tasmin looked at Brida.

’I need to focus...’ Brida thought, she felt something weird with blood but she couldn’t act on it right now, she would ask her Lord.

Without a single word spoken, a silent mutual understanding passed between the two veterans as they nodded in unison.

’Together.’

"I’ll lock it down," Tasmin whispered, her mana flaring to its absolute limit. "You take the head."

"Make it count, Tas," Brida grinned, her muscles locking into position.

BOOM!

They leaped forward into the final clash.

The octopus-beast roared, a wet horrifying sound that bubbled from its central maw as all eight massive tentacles whipped forward simultaneously, creating a churning, impenetrable wall of bone-barbed muscle meant to crush anything in its path but Tasmin didn’t dodge.

She channeled her mana into her gear.

FZZZZZZT-KRA-FLASH!

Her long, dark chains ignited with roaring blinding crimson flames.

"Voltaic Chain Execution!" Tasmin roared!

She cast both chains forward, the burning links whistling through the air like twin fiery dragons.

The super-heated chains wrapped tightly around four of the primary tentacles, searing through the thick mucus and biting deep into the rubbery flesh.

Tasmin planted her boots into the stone, anchoring her weight as the violent flames spread, cooking the beast’s nervous system and completely paralyzing its forward momentum.

The monster shrieked, thrashing violently as its remaining tentacles whipped wildly to tear Tasmin apart.

"NOW, BRIDA!" Tasmin screamed, her muscles tearing under the immense crushing strain of holding the titan down. "KILL IT!"

Shooting straight through the gap created by the burning chains came Brida.

The women was not running... She was... flying?

Enveloped in an roaring pillar of deep crimson battle-mana, Brida launched herself thirty feet into the air, soaring directly above the thrashing pinned monstrosity.

She gripped the hilt of her Titan’s Cleaver with both hands, raising the colossal slab of steel high above her head.

Her face was twisted into a look of dominance.

"EARTH-SHATTERING CLEAVE!"

Brida brought the cleaver down with the wrath of an angry god.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The blade struck the central mantle of the octopus-beast dead center and the explosion was apocalyptic.

A blinding crimson shockwave detonated outward, tearing the burning tentacles to shreds and splitting the cavern floor in a thirty-meter-long, jagged chasm.

The colossal monster was cleaved in half, its rubbery bulk detonating into a massive raining shower of black blood, pulverized flesh, and dissolved slime.

THUD!

Brida landed on the far side of the chasm, dropping to one knee as the cleaver buried itself to the hilt in the cracked stone.

’Good... I still feel this itch.’

The itch for blood...

The raining ichor splattered against the cavern floor, slowly hissing into harmless steam beneath the soft, persistent drift of surface snow.

It was over.

...The entire hive was dead.