Chapter 27: The Chimera’s Fury

The Abyssal Armored Chimera, which had been lazily stepping forward to grind the remaining shadows beneath its feet, abruptly froze.

Its massive, draconic skull snapped toward Lucian.

Those cruel, slit-pupiled amber eyes locked directly onto the armored figure.

In the primitive hierarchy of Otherworldly Beasts, such a sudden and dense manifestation of foreign spiritual energy was not merely prey, it was a direct, insolent challenge to its territorial dominion.

ROOOAAAR!

The beast opened its maw, unleashing a blood-curdling roar that rattled the very foundation of the mountain.

The sound wave alone shattered the stone beneath Lucian’s boots, reducing it to gravel.

The beast’s massive hind legs flexed, the ground cratering beneath its enormous weight.

Then...

It lunged.

Its colossal body shot directly toward Lucian’s head, while its ivory claws glowed with sickly, corrupted purple flames.

’Take that head-on? Only an idiot would try!’

Lucian didn’t even attempt to parry.

The gap between a Martial Warrior and a Martial General was not something that could be bridged simply by stacking numbers.

A single direct hit would tear through the integrated form, shattering the commander and potentially causing catastrophic spiritual recoil to his main body back at the manor.

There was only one choice.

Escape!

The moment the beast launched itself into the air, Lucian immediately activated the Shadow Kill Secret Canon.

His heavy boots kicked off the disintegrating rock face.

His form blurred, slipping through the air with feather-light, phantom-like agility that belied his massive two-and-a-half-meter armored frame.

CRASH!

The Chimera’s claws struck the empty boulder Lucian had occupied a millisecond earlier.

The five-meter slab of solid stone exploded into countless fragments, gouging a six-foot crater into the ridge.

Lucian landed fifty meters away on a narrow, descending ridge path and immediately took off in a dead sprint.

Every step was calculated.

He didn’t run along the open dirt paths. Instead, he weaved violently through the thickest groves of ancient ironwood trees, using their massive, five-person-wide trunks as both visual and physical obstructions.

Behind him, the Chimera gave chase with terrifying momentum.

It didn’t bother maneuvering around the ancient forest.

It simply barreled straight through it like a runaway freight train.

Massive trunks splintered with deafening cracks, sending clouds of wood chips and pulverized foliage raining down like a storm.

The beast was closing the distance.

One hundred meters.

Eighty meters.

Fifty meters.

Lucian’s expression grew increasingly grim.

The gap was shrinking far too quickly.

’It’s too fast on open ground.’

Lucian analyzed the situation coldly, feeling the shockwaves of the monster’s footfalls vibrating through Shadow One’s armored greaves.

’I need to break its line of sight and ruin its momentum.’

Ahead lay the Devil’s Tooth Chasm, a narrow, fractured ravine where two sheer cliff faces leaned inward, leaving only a treacherous three-meter-wide passage at the base.

Lucian’s eyes flashed.

"Let’s see how thick your skull really is."

As he sprinted between the two towering rock faces, Lucian suddenly swung his greatsword behind him; not at the beast, but horizontally across the narrow canyon walls.

Blood Battle Saber Technique—Mountain Cleaver!

The blade unleashed a crescent of dark, concentrated energy that bit deep into the fractured structural faults of the leaning cliffs.

At that exact moment, Lucian detached five percent of his integrated shadow essence, projecting a decoy phantom of himself running straight ahead through the center of the canyon.

Meanwhile, his actual body dropped low, sliding silently through the shadows along the base of the left cliff wall.

The Chimera charged into the narrow pass, its eyes locked onto the fleeing phantom.

RUMBLE!

The compromised cliffs could no longer support their own weight.

Thousands of tons of jagged boulders, fractured rock slabs, and ancient soil collapsed inward like an avalanche, burying the narrow throat of the chasm beneath a massive wall of debris.

CRASH!

The landslide slammed directly into the beast’s path, burying its front half beneath the crushing weight of stone.

The monster shrieked in fury, thrashing violently as its powerful limbs shattered the falling boulders into dust.

But the sudden collapse had thoroughly broken its charging momentum.

The resulting dust cloud billowed hundreds of feet into the air, completely obscuring the beast’s scent trail and blocking its thermal visibility.

Taking advantage of the diversion, Lucian didn’t look back.

He immediately redirected his path, abandoning the familiar ridges and plunging recklessly into the uncharted depths of the mountain range.

One mile.

Three miles.

Ten miles.

He sprinted at maximum output, his joints burning under the immense burden of the hundred-soldier fusion.

The terrain grew increasingly alien and hostile.

The lush green foliage gradually gave way to blackened, petrified trees clinging to jagged, blood-colored rock formations.

The air grew thin and freezing, thick with ancient, stagnant miasma.

After traveling nearly seventeen thousand meters into the forbidden core perimeter, the terrain finally leveled out into an ancient, windswept ridge of sheer volcanic basalt.

Lucian’s energy was beginning to flag.

Maintaining the full integration across such an extreme distance was rapidly draining the commander’s reserves.

’I need to hide. Anywhere that can block its perception.’

Lucian’s gaze swept across the face of a jagged, black-stone cliff.

There, nestled beneath a thick curtain of petrified stone vines and twisted brambles, his eyes caught an anomaly.

It was an ancient fissure in the rock face.

The opening was extraordinarily narrow, barely a single meter in length and less than two feet wide. To an ordinary beast or human scout, it would have looked like nothing more than a superficial crack caused by ancient mountain tremors.

Yet Lucian’s heightened spiritual senses immediately detected something unnatural about the space surrounding the crack.

The ambient Spiritual Energy around the fissure was eerily still.

There was no wind passing through the opening, and even the pervasive miasma of the deep forest seemed to glide around it, deflected by an invisible, ancient barrier.

A natural energy-dampening field!

Without hesitating for even a heartbeat, Lucian commanded the armored frame to move.

He didn’t bother cutting the vines with his blade, fearing that fresh cuts would leave behind a distinct scent. Instead, he turned his broad, armored shoulders sideways and forced himself through the narrow fissure, squeezing through the tight opening with sheer physical force.

The stone walls scraped against his black armor with a dull, muffled friction.

Once his entire body crossed the threshold, the ground suddenly disappeared beneath his feet.

He dropped nearly three meters before landing heavily on a cold, hard floor of smooth, cut stone.

Thud!

The moment he landed, Lucian immediately sat down against the cold stone floor, pulling his knees toward his chest.

"Sever all output. Full concealment!"

He recalled the ninety-seven integrated soldiers into the dormant core of the commander’s form. Then, circulating the ultimate stealth mnemonic of the Shadow Kill Secret Canon, he manually shut down every energy node within the armor.

The violet flames in the visor extinguished completely.

The ambient dark aura receded into the pores of the metal plating.

The towering two-and-a-half-meter commander transformed into nothing more than a lifeless, cold statue of black iron, blending seamlessly into the subterranean gloom.

Under the overlapping suppression of the cave’s natural energy-dampening field, his aura vanished from the world as though he had never existed.

Less than three breaths later—

BOOM!

The sky above the cliff face seemed to tear open.

The Abyssal Armored Chimera had caught up.

The colossal beast landed heavily on the rocky ridge directly above the fissure, its massive weight causing small pebbles to trickle down from the cavern ceiling.

The air outside once again grew suffocatingly dense.

The monster paced back and forth across the stone plateau, its ivory claws scraping against the bedrock with a screech that set Lucian’s teeth on edge.

It tilted its draconic skull toward the wind and sniffed furiously.

Nothing.

Not even the slightest trace of his aura.

The foreign energy signature that had dared to leak its power into the beast’s territory had vanished into thin air.

There was no scent of blood.

No footprint on the volcanic basalt.

Not even the faintest whisper of spiritual fluctuation.

ROOOAAAR!

Frustrated and enraged, the Chimera unleashed an earth-shattering roar that shook the very foundation of the cliff.

It began tearing through the surrounding terrain with blind fury.

Its ivory claws tore through the canyon in a frenzy, slicing ancient petrified trees in half and smashing massive boulders into piles of broken stone.

The beast prowled in wide, furious circles, its heavy tail repeatedly crashing against the canyon walls with enough force to shake the ground.

It searched everywhere.

Every hollow.

Every ditch.

Every narrow crevice within a mile.

Nothing escaped its notice.

And yet, the prey that had slipped away remained nowhere to be found.

Deep inside a pitch-black crack, buried beneath three meters of solid stone, Lucian sat perfectly still.

He didn’t think about anything.

He didn’t let even the slightest trace of spiritual energy escape his body.

Surrounded by cold, suffocating darkness, he remained completely silent and motionless, patiently waiting for the chaos raging above to finally pass.