SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts - Chapter 555: Attack On The Third Base

He moved first.

That was always how it started.

Not because rushing was his preference—but because the window between arriving unseen and being discovered was never as wide as it looked, and every second spent waiting inside a perimeter he had already breached was a second that could close it.

Damien stepped out of the staging area and into the interior of the stronghold without announcement.

Fenrir moved with him on his right, its body low, presence still suppressed from the flight in. Cerbe fanned left, all three heads oriented forward, flames held close and dark—the hellhound’s version of quiet, which was never entirely quiet, but was controlled enough to serve.

Aquila lifted off from its landing position and climbed, finding the ceiling of the demonic canopy cover and moving along its inner surface—above the action, below visibility from outside.

Luton drifted just behind Damien.

Watching.

Waiting.

The first demons they encountered were foot soldiers.

There was no better word for what they were—not in classification, not in role, not in how they occupied the space around the stronghold’s interior. Wild. Instinct-driven.

Built for destruction in the simple, total way that left no room for anything more complex than forward motion and the desire to tear through whatever was in front of them.

They were also, despite all of that, numerous.

The first group registered Damien’s presence not through any sophisticated detection—just proximity. The simple, brute-force alarm system of creatures with enough essence density to feel when something that didn’t belong had entered their territory.

One turned.

Saw him.

Opened its mouth.

Fenrir crossed the distance before the sound could form.

The wolf’s shoulder hit the demon at full speed—not a leap, not a dramatic charge, just the sudden terrible acceleration of something that had been coiled and still and then was neither—and the demon went sideways into the structure wall behind it with a crack that was more felt than heard.

It didn’t get up.

The second demon in the group reacted—weapon raised, the instinctive counter of something trained to fight even if it couldn’t think—and Cerbe’s left head came through in the same moment.

Not flame.

Jaws.

The head snapped shut around the demon’s raised arm, and the follow-through tore it off the ground entirely, the hellhound’s neck swinging once before releasing. The demon traveled several meters through the air and landed badly.

Cerbe’s right head was already tracking the third.

Damien moved through them.

He didn’t stop for the ones his summons were handling. That had been the rhythm since the second base—not micromanagement, not hand-holding, but trust. He deployed them and trusted them and moved past toward whatever they weren’t already handling.

What they weren’t already handling was the cascade.

Because the first group had felt the intrusion, and the ones adjacent to the first group had felt the first group react, and the ones adjacent to those were already turning—the spreading ripple of awareness moving outward from Damien’s entry point like a stone dropped into water.

It was going to be loud in approximately thirty seconds regardless of what he did.

He made it loud sooner.

His fist drove into the chest of a demon twice his size—something armored, something that had gotten between him and the next section of the interior with what probably felt like enough mass to serve as an obstacle.

CRACK.

The demon folded.

The shockwave from the impact hit the surrounding demons before the body did, and for a fraction of a second every creature within range felt the pressure of it and understood what kind of thing had just hit their comrade.

The thirty second window closed instantly.

Every demon in the stronghold knew they were there.

The interior erupted.

Roars from multiple directions. Movement converging from the outer sections of the stronghold inward, the foot soldiers doing what foot soldiers did—responding to threat with mass, with numbers, with the overwhelming forward momentum of a hundred bodies all moving toward the same point simultaneously.

It would have worked against most things.

Cerbe stopped pretending to be quiet.

The flames came out.

Not the precise, targeted pillars it had used against the mana beast group. Not the controlled output it maintained when there were specific targets and limited space. This was wider—much wider—the kind of output it produced when the environment was hostile and the targets were everywhere and conservation was less important than coverage.

Dark red fire erupted from all three heads in overlapping arcs, the heat of it warping the air above the stronghold floor and forcing the advancing mass of foot soldiers to break formation or burn.

Most broke formation.

Some didn’t.

Those ones burned.

Aquila struck from above.

It had found its angle—the interior of the demonic canopy cover was high enough to give it real diving room, and the chaos below had fragmented the demons’ upward awareness to nothing. The griffin dropped through the mass with its talons extended, hit hard, drove something large and roaring into the ground, and was back up before the things nearest it could coordinate a response.

Then it dropped again.

A different target. A different angle.

Fenrir moved through the gaps.

Not in the way Cerbe moved—not heat and force and the terrifying energy of something that had been waiting to be let loose. Fenrir moved like precision made physical. Every demon it reached, it reached from the angle that ended the threat in the minimum number of movements. Jaws. Claws. The occasional violent redirect of a demon’s own momentum turned against it.

Nothing unnecessary.

Nothing wasted.

Damien was the center of it.

Not because he was directing everything—he wasn’t, not in any granular sense. His summons had long since internalized the logic of how he fought and what he needed from them. They created the chaos. They sustained the pressure. They prevented the mass of demons from ever fully consolidating into something organized enough to be genuinely dangerous.

What Damien did was move through the space that created.

And what he moved through it doing was breaking things.

A demon raised a weapon—a massive, dark-edged blade dense with absorbed demonic essence—and brought it down in a two-handed arc that would have cleaved through most high-grade targets.

Damien stepped inside it.

The blade passed behind him. His elbow drove into the demon’s jaw. The follow-through sent it rotating sideways, and before it had stabilized he had already moved on.

Another came from his left—two of them together, the instinct of foot soldiers that had learned, somewhere, that one at a time didn’t work.

Two at once didn’t either.

His hand caught the first by the face, momentum redirected, used, the demon becoming briefly a weapon against the second before both of them met the ground with enough force to stop being immediate problems.

He kept moving.

Luton worked behind him.

Not the bouncing patience it had shown with the scattered mana beasts.

Here, in the density of the stronghold interior, it operated differently—a rolling, expanding presence that covered the floor in sections, catching anything that fell or fled or tried to regroup in the spaces between the summons’ engagements. A cleanup mechanism. A net cast across the battlefield floor.

Demons that stumbled into it simply stopped being demons.

The foot soldiers were many, but they had one consistent weakness that no amount of number compensated for.

They didn’t adapt.

They came forward. If forward didn’t work, they came forward again. If that produced the same result, they came forward with more of them. It was effective against things that got tired. Against things that ran out of strength or essence or the will to keep going.