Chapter 121: The Pillar That Wouldn’t Fall 3

Chapter 121: Chapter 121: The Pillar That Wouldn’t Fall 3

The drake lunged forward with open jaws, but the strike team met it like a tidal wave.

Aria struck first.

A massive, eight-meter spear of pure, blue-tinted ice materialized in mid-air. She hurled it with all her strength.

SHING!

The spear punched clean through the beast’s left shoulder joint, freezing the surrounding muscle solid and locking the limb in place.

Darius roared, slamming both hands into the road. Massive stone pillars erupted from the ground, wrapping around the beast’s hind legs.

The drake thrash wildly, cracking the stone, but before it could break free, Kael and Lena struck together.

Kael blasted an ocean of fire while Lena whipped the flames into a spiraling tornado of superheated air.

The roaring firestorm engulfed the drake’s head, scorching its eyes and burning away its breath attack before it could fire.

CRACK.

Mira tore a spatial rift open right beside its ribs.

FLASH.

Orion vanished into the rift, reappearing directly under the beast’s belly to drive a lightning-coated blade straight into its soft underbelly, short-circuiting its nervous system.

BZZZZT.

Ryan charged in from the front, roaring as he slammed his heavy shield into the monster’s lower jaw.

BOOM!

The brute-force blow snapped the drake’s mouth shut, staggering the three-ton giant backward.

"Now!" Aria shouted, leaping into the air.

Her silver spear drove down like a lightning rod, piercing the monster’s left eye. The beast shrieked in agony, flailing blindly.

Seraphina surged in from the left flank. Hundreds of pressurized sapphire blades rained down in a continuous buzzsaw.

SHRED-SHRED-SHRED!

It carved a massive, bloody crater directly into the center of the drake’s chest scales.

Liora dropped from the shadows behind it.

Thick, black shadow tendrils laced with blue severance light erupted from the pavement, wrapping around the monster’s neck, wings, and tail, pulling its colossal frame flat against the ruined street.

THUD!

The beast was pinned. Its chest was wide open, pulsing with ugly, toxic violet light.

"Darius! GO!" Felix yelled, throwing himself onto the beast’s snout and driving a dense emerald spike through its upper jaw to keep its fangs locked.

Darius sprinted across the ruined road.

Every muscle in his body screamed, his earth mana coating his entire right arm in thick, jagged rock armor.

He reached the pinned drake, leaped into the air, and drove his fist straight into the bloody crater on its chest.

CRUNCH!

The stone armor shattered on impact, and Darius plunged his bare arm elbow-deep into the open wound.

The moment his fingers brushed against the monster’s heart, the corrupted booster energy reacted like an angry hornet’s nest. Violent, pitch-black lightning surged out of the wound, coiling up Darius’s forearm.

"AAGGGHHH!" Darius roared in agonizing pain.

The dark lightning chewed through his flesh. The skin on his fingers blackened and tore away. His veins bulged with black poison, his knuckles cracking under the violent mana backlash.

"Don’t let go, Darius!" Felix screamed, blood dripping from his own mouth as he held the thrashing jaws shut.

"I’M NOT LETTING GO!" Darius bellowed through clenched teeth.

His fingers sank deeper into the hot, pulsing muscle until he felt it: a hard, jagged crystal of foreign mana wrapped tightly around the beast’s main artery.

"FOUND IT!" Darius roared.

"RIP IT OUT!" Aria yelled.

Darius channeled every single drop of his earth mana into his mangled fingers. He clamped his grip down on the foreign core and pulled with everything his soul had left.

"GET THE HELL OUT OF MY WORLD!"

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

A shockwave of earth mana detonated inside the drake’s chest cavity.

SNAP.

The foreign mana snapped like a severed wire.

The thick black veins crawling across the drake’s scales flickered once, twice and died.

The suffocating SS-rank aura instantly popped like a punctured balloon. The beast’s swollen muscles shrank back down, its jagged spikes softened, and its terrifying pressure plummeted straight down to ordinary S-rank.

Darius ripped his arm out of the chest. He staggered backward, his right arm dangling limp and ruined, his hand completely destroyed, blackened to the wrist by the corrosive backlash.

His knees buckled.

FWIP.

Felix was there before Darius could hit the dirt, catching the big man under the shoulder. "Got you, brother."

Darius looked down at the blackened, bleeding stump where his right hand used to be. He let out a weak, raspy laugh. "Well... that definitely stung a bit."

Felix’s face was grim. Green light instantly flared around the stump, sealing the severed arteries, stopping the bleeding, and purging the black poison before it could reach Darius’s heart.

The flesh smoothed over into clean, healed skin, but the hand itself was gone. Darius looked at Felix’s pale face.

Felix pulled in a ragged, heavy breath, sweat stinging his eyes. His mana core was completely empty, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

"I’m out of juice, big guy," Felix murmured honestly, his voice rough. "Give me a couple of hours to recharge. You’ll get your hand back. I swear it."

Darius chuckled weakly, resting his left hand on Felix’s shoulder. "I trust you, Felix. Now go finish that lizard."

Felix turned around.

The drake was still alive, weakly struggling against Liora’s chains, but it was just an ordinary, battered S-rank now.

Aria stepped forward, leveling her spear at its skull. "Everyone. End it."

The entire strike team converged at once.

Seraphina’s lightning blades carved through its throat. Liora’s darkness crushed its ribcage.

Kael and Lena’s firestorm incinerated its exposed organs. Mira warped space to crush its spine, Orion’s lightning short-circuited its brain, and Ryan brought his heavy shield down onto its snout.

Aria vaulted high into the air, her spear glowing like a falling star.

"Goodbye," she whispered.

SHIIIIING!

The spear plunged straight through the center of the beast’s weakened core, shattering it’s heart into glittering dust.

Felix stepped in from the side, condensing the absolute last ember of his green mana around his right arm, and swung with a low roar.

SLASH.

The drake’s massive head rolled free from its shoulders, hitting the asphalt.

THUD.

The colossal body collapsed. The ground shook once. Then, total silence fell over the ruined city.

The gentle morning breeze blowing dust through the shattered skyscrapers.

Kael collapsed flat on his back right in the middle of the road, staring up at the clear blue sky.

"Okay," he wheezed, throwing his arms out.

"Now I am officially admitting that I was terrified."

Lena jogged over, dropping to her knees beside him and grabbing his collar. "You absolute idiot!"

Kael blinked. "What?"

"I thought you were going to die!" she yelled, her eyes red.

"Hey, I’m alive, aren’t I?"

Lena punched him hard on the shoulder. "That is not the point!"

"Ow! Hey, I’m a wounded veteran here!"

"You’re completely healed, shut up!"

Aria lowered her spear, exhaling a long, shuddering breath. She looked around the street.

The buildings were battered, the road was destroyed, and black monster blood filled the gutters. But every single member of the squad was alive.

She turned toward Felix.

He was sitting on a crushed concrete barrier, breathing heavily. Seraphina stood silently on his right side, her shoulder lightly brushing against his.

Liora sat on the curb to his left, her head resting tiredly against his knee. Darius sat beside them, calmly examining his wrapped stump.

Aria walked over, her silver armor clinking softly.

"Felix."

Felix looked up, wiping soot from his forehead with the back of his arm. "Yeah?"

"Thank you," Aria said simply, her eyes full of genuine, quiet respect. "Without you, we would have lost half the squad today."

Felix gave a small, tired shake of his head.

"That’s what a team is for, Aria."

"Still," she insisted, looking at the two dead SS-rank corpses lying in the street. "You held the line. You kept everyone alive."

"Everyone did their job," Felix replied, looking across at Kael, Lena, Ryan, Mira, and Orion. "If Kael hadn’t bought time, if Ryan hadn’t blocked the shockwave, if Darius hadn’t ripped that core out with his bare hands... we wouldn’t be sitting here."

"You did the most," Seraphina murmured softly from his shoulder.

"Way more than anyone else," Liora agreed, closing her eyes against his knee.

Felix chuckled, leaning his head back against the concrete wall. "Alright, alright. Don’t make my head too big."

His eyes drifted upward toward the sky.

Over the central plaza, the massive, violent S-rank gate was already beginning to fracture. Spiders of white spatial cracks were crawling across its purple surface. The connection was severing.

Felix turned his head toward the distant horizon, looking in the direction of the abandoned bunker where their own portal sat.

The sky over that sector was shimmering faintly with blue light, but the spatial fabric wasn’t collapsing fast.

"We finished way ahead of schedule," Felix observed. "Their gate is dying, but our return portal won’t close for at least twelve hours."

Aria checked her tactical chronometer, nodding.

"We have plenty of time. We harvest the cores, collect the drug samples from the dead elves, and converge back at the bunker."

"Good," Felix said, closing his eyes for just a moment to let his pounding headache settle.

"Let’s take thirty minutes to catch our breath first."

"Agreed," Aria said, finally sitting down on a clean patch of street.

Kael groaned loudly from the pavement. "If anyone asks me to stand up before noon, I’m setting them on fire."

Lena let out a soft laugh, resting her chin on her knees.

For the first time in what felt like weeks, the battlefield felt completely calm.

Two artificially boosted SS-rank horrors lay dead in the dust. The innocent world had been saved before a single civilian could be harmed.

The quiet wouldn’t last forever, the masterminds behind the black pills were still out there, hiding in the dark.

But right here, under the bright morning sun, one of the humanity’s strongest strike team had held the line.

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