SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts - Chapter 556: Attack On The Third Base II

Against Damien, who had none of those limitations in any way the foot soldiers could meaningfully exploit, it was a pattern that had only one direction.

The numbers dropped.

Not quickly—there were too many of them for quickly. But steadily. Continuously. The way a tide drops when the pull is constant and the resistance is not.

Damien moved through the interior in a rough expanding pattern, pushing outward from his entry point, clearing sections as he went. Not systematically, not with the rigid structure of a tactical advance—but organically, following the flow of where the pressure was highest, where the clustering was densest, where his presence would do the most to break what was forming before it could form.

Cerbe swept wide arcs of flame through the eastern section of the stronghold, where the foot soldiers had packed tightest around the storage structures and were using them as cover.

The cover helped less than they hoped.

Dark red fire found angles. It found gaps. It found the spaces between cover rather than requiring clear line of sight, the way Cerbe’s flame always had—like it was looking for fuel rather than targets, opportunistic, and deeply satisfied when it found both at once.

Aquila controlled vertical space.

Anything that tried to climb—the few demons that had thought gaining height would give them a position advantage—found the griffin there before they reached it. Aquila was faster and more comfortable at altitude than anything in the stronghold, and it used that with the efficiency of something that understood the value of domain control rather than individual kills.

While it was up, nothing with wings stayed up long.

Fenrir operated in the spaces Cerbe’s fire made dangerous.

Not because Fenrir was afraid of the fire—but because the demons fleeing Cerbe’s arcs were moving fast and disoriented, which made them predictable, and predictable demons running directly into the wolf’s path had exactly the outcome the pattern suggested.

Fenrir simply had to be in the right place.

It always was.

Damien broke through a wall.

Not deliberately—the demon he had just hit had been standing in front of it, and the force of the impact had carried through the demon and into the structure behind it, and the structure had decided that this was more than it was built to handle and had responded accordingly.

The wall came apart.

What was behind it was another section of the interior—a space that had previously been separated from the main engagement, where a group of the smarter demons had apparently taken position to observe and wait.

Intelligent ones.

He could tell immediately.

Not from appearance—they didn’t look markedly different from the foot soldiers at first glance. But from the way they moved when the wall came down. Not the reflex-driven forward surge of the wild ones. A step back. A spread. A repositioning that suggested someone had thought about what to do if the wall stopped being a wall.

A planned response.

These were from the top twenty.

Not captains. Not vice captains. But the tier below—the ones intelligent enough to take orders and give them to the wild ones, intelligent enough to recognize a situation and adapt rather than simply react.

They adapted quickly.

One of them issued a short, sharp command in demonic—a sound Damien didn’t need to translate because the result of it was self-evident. The group split into two clusters, one moving to flank left, one maintaining center position, the spacing between individuals deliberate enough to prevent Luton from taking multiple at once.

They had assessed Luton.

Interesting.

Damien moved toward them.

The center cluster held ground, weapons raised, auras layering over each other in the interlocking pattern of a practiced formation.

The flanking cluster angled for the edge of his vision.

He let them get halfway there.

Then Fenrir came through the gap in the wall behind him, having tracked the split through the structure, and the flanking cluster found that the space they had been moving toward was already occupied by something that had been there before they were.

The formation fractured.

Damien was inside it before it could reform.

This fight was different from the foot soldiers—not harder, exactly, but more deliberate. The intelligent ones defended properly. They covered each other’s openings. When one of them took a strike, the one beside it counterattacked in the same motion rather than waiting for its companion to recover.

Good instincts.

Not good enough.

But good.

He worked through them with more attention than the foot soldiers had required, reading the coverage patterns and finding the specific gaps—the half-second windows where one of them was transitioning from defense to offense and the coverage of its neighbor hadn’t yet adjusted to compensate.

Those windows were short.

He moved through them anyway.

Outside the broken wall, Cerbe and Aquila continued their work on the remaining foot soldiers. The sounds of it—flame and impact and the particular frequency of demon roars dropping from many to fewer—served as background to the more precise, quieter engagement Damien was running in the interior room.

Fewer demons remained upright in the main area.

The intelligent ones in the room were also thinning. Not as fast—they lasted longer, hurt more on the occasions their strikes connected, required more thought to handle. But they lasted longer, not indefinitely, and indefinitely was what it would have taken.

The room was almost clear when Damien felt it.

A change in the air.

Pressure—the kind that came before presence, the leading edge of a significant aura that hadn’t yet been revealed but was close enough that its approach was already reshaping the ambient essence field around it.

Not one presence.

Three.

He straightened slowly.

Around the stronghold, the remaining foot soldiers—the ones that hadn’t been burned through or devoured or torn apart—were doing something he hadn’t seen from them before.

Moving back.

Not fleeing. Not the panicked scatter of things that had decided survival mattered more than engagement. Deliberately making space. Opening a corridor through the mass of them toward where Damien stood.

Like they were clearing the field.

Like something was coming through and needed room.

Damien turned.

At the far end of the corridor the demons had opened, the entrance to the stronghold’s primary structure was no longer empty.

Three figures.

The two in front moved in tandem—not side by side, but with the precise, practiced offset of a pair that had fought as a unit long enough that their positioning had become unconscious. The one on the left was slightly ahead, its weapon already in hand. The one on the right was slightly back, its stance defensive rather than aggressive, weight distributed for response rather than initiation.

Vice captains.

Behind them, in the entrance itself, was the third figure.

Larger than the other two.

Not dramatically—not the exaggerated mass of something that had sacrificed everything for size. But larger in a way that registered immediately and completely, the way certain presences registered before you had consciously processed them. Dense. Heavy. The kind of physical presence that made the air around it feel different.

It stepped forward once.

Just once.

And even that single step was enough to understand that this was something different from what Damien had faced before.

The Captain looked at him.

Not at the damage around them. Not at Cerbe, whose flames had dimmed at Damien’s subtle signal. Not at Fenrir, who had gone still the moment the three figures appeared. Not at the bodies or the wreckage or any of the evidence of what had just occurred inside its stronghold.

At Damien.

The look lasted several seconds.

Then the Captain’s aura expanded.

Not explosively. Not with the dramatic surge of something trying to intimidate.

Quietly.

Steadily.

Like a tide coming in—not announcing itself, just arriving, growing until it occupied every available space without asking permission.

Even Cerbe’s flames went slightly smaller in response.

Even Fenrir lowered itself a fraction, the wolf’s body responding to the weight of the presence before its mind had directed it to.

The Captain said nothing.

Neither did its vice captains.

They simply stood there, filling the entrance to the primary structure, their combined presence reshaping the weight of the battlefield entirely.

Damien looked at them.

All three.

Then his eyes settled on the Captain.

The stronghold had gone quiet—the foot soldiers that remained motionless, the summons still, the crackling of residual flame from Cerbe’s earlier work the only sound that continued without asking anyone’s permission.

Quiet.

For now.