Chapter 64: Clash of the Titans 2

Chapter 64: Chapter 64: Clash of the Titans 2

When the churning water finally settled, the swamp basin was unrecognizable.

SPLASH.

Draven pushed himself up through the churned mud, spitting a mouthful of dark crimson into the silt. "Again!"

Aria coughed up brackish water, hauling herself upright.

The strike force surged forward in lethal unison.

Aria flash-froze the beast’s rear leg joints.

CRACKLE

Darius drove jagged earth-spikes through its balance.

THUD

And Seraphina hurled twin lances of crackling, violet-blue lightning directly into the exposed meat of its ruptured chest plate.

SKREEE-BZZZT!

Draven took every frantic counterattack head-on, his Titan-reinforced bones groaning under the concussive pressure.

Behind him, Felix blurred across the front lines, a steady, high-density HUMMM radiating from his hands as emerald healing mana stitched torn muscle and sealed arterial sprays the second they opened.

"Incoming!" Felix roared.

The Tyrant’s jaws unhinged once more, another hyper-pressurized hydro-beam whining to life between its fangs.

Draven didn’t flinch. He walked straight toward the maw, coating his entire frame in a blazing mantle of blue fire and stone-hard Titan mana, letting the devastating blast slam flush against his chest.

KRA-BOOOOM!

"Felix!" Seraphina gasped.

"Watch him," Felix commanded, eyes locked forward. "He’s got it."

The beam shrieked against Draven, but the compressed blue fire burned right through the torrent, vaporizing the water into roaring clouds of superheated steam.

He took one heavy step. Then another. He marched straight through the roaring column of water until he stood inches from the beast’s open jaws.

WHAM!

Draven drove his gauntleted fist deep into its gullet, detonating an internal blast of cobalt flame that severed the attack mid-breath.

The Tyrant stumbled back, its chest plating completely pulverized, leaving exposed organs and shattered ribs bare to the air.

"EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!" Draven bellowed over the steam.

The entire unit opened fire simultaneously.

Jagged ice lances, tectonic stone pillars, razor-sharp wind sickles, and Seraphina’s electrified water spears crashed into the ruined chest cavity, shredding muscle and scale into a red haze.

BOOM! CRASH! SLSHH!

The Tyrant swayed, its massive crocodilian skull drooping toward the water.

Draven gave it zero room to breathe. Launching his massive frame skyward.

CRACK

His right arm ignited with a blinding, sun-bright blue blaze. He drove his fist straight into the epicenter of the beast’s exposed chest.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!

The flame detonated directly inside the beast’s primary cardiac chamber.

The Tyrant’s entire seventy-meter body went rigid. Its slit-golden eyes dilated, a hollow, bubbling death rattle tore through its throat, and the massive titan toppled forward.

CRRR-AAAASH!

Seventy tons of armored, dead bulk crashed into the mire, throwing up a fifty-foot wave of mud and stagnant water before falling dead, utter silence.

The Swamp Tyrant, the apex SS-rank ruler, was dead.

The World Awakens

SKRRRRRR—!

Before a single cheer could leave anyone’s throat, a piercing, high-frequency screech sheared through the sky.

High above the swamp canopy, the massive black rift began to twist and buckle violently. The dark, starry mana along its rim tore apart into fraying wisps, shrinking inward by meters every second.

Aria’s head snapped upward, eyes wide. "The portal! The boss is down, the gate’s collapsing!"

CRRR-RUMBLE!

The ground beneath their boots began to shake.

Not a standard tremor, the entire tectonic plate was vibrating with sickening intensity.

THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.

From every direction: north, south, east, and west, a sound like endless rolling thunder roared across the red wasteland.

Far on the horizon, towering tsunamis of red dust surged hundreds of feet into the orange sky.

Ryan scrambled atop a shattered granite boulder, peering through his tactical visor. The color drained from his face until he looked like a corpse.

"Report!" Darius barked.

"Monsters..." Ryan’s voice cracked over the radio. "All of them. Every predatory reptile on this entire continent is running straight for us!"

Felix felt the incoming mana signatures through the earth before he even looked.

Hundreds of thousands. Millions of feral beasts.

The sudden death of their absolute SS-rank apex predator had triggered an instinctual feeding frenzy across the entire ecosystem.

The continent was converging on the swamp in a mad, starving stampede and spearheading the charge were thousands of crushing auras: swarms of A-ranks, packs of S-ranks, and ancient, primeval horrors moving like a living ocean of fangs and armor.

If surrounded, thirty-one exhausted hunters wouldn’t last three minutes. They would be pulverized into red paste.

"The core!" Felix yelled, pointing directly into the smoking crater of the Tyrant’s chest. "We cannot leave an SS-rank core behind!"

Leaving ordinary carcasses to the dust was standard protocol, but abandoning the core of an SS-rank boss and its two S-rank guardians would turn a miraculous survival into a catastrophic loss. Those three stones alone were worth an empire’s fortune and decades of strategic research.

Draven didn’t waste half a breath. Plunging his arm elbow-deep into the scorched, bloody cavity of the Tyrant’s ribcage, he gripped the core with both hands.

With a savage, guttural roar, he wrenched free a pulsing crystal the size of a boulder, blazing with brilliant cobalt and deep crimson mana.

SHLICK—THWUM!

He jammed the massive stone into an oversized spatial containment sack, throwing the strap across his broad chest.

"Got the damn thing!" Draven bellowed, the veins in his neck bulging like thick cables.

"RUN! ABANDON EVERYTHING! SPRINT FOR THE RIFT!"

Nobody looked back.

They ran.

Thirty-one elite heroes pushed their battered bodies past their absolute limits, tearing through the churned mud toward the plateau.

Ahead of them, the retreating A- and B-rank vanguards were already sprinting for the light.

"Move it!" Felix shouted, locking his fingers tightly around Seraphina’s hand.

She channeled her Lightning straight through both their leg channels.

BZRRRT!

Their speed instantly doubling as their boots skimmed friction-free across the bog water.

Behind them, the ancient swamp trees at the clearing’s edge snapped like matchsticks.

ROOOAAAR!

The vanguard of the reptilian swarm broke through the mist: horned behemoths, armored serpents, and spiked raptors trampling over their own dead in a frantic rush to butcher the intruders.

Overhead, the orange sky turned pitch-black as thousands of winged reptilian dove toward the mud.

"Keep pushing! Don’t look back!" Draven roared from the rear guard, hurling wide, sweeping waves of crimson fire behind him that incinerated the lead beasts in blinding flashes.

FWOOSH

CRACKLE.

Fifty meters to the gate.

Thirty meters.

The rift had already shrunk from three hundred meters down to a rapidly collapsing ring of less than twenty, its black spatial mana twisting violently on the verge of implosion.

"Dive!" Aria yelled.

The first wave of hunters threw themselves headfirst through the black membrane, vanishing into blinding white light.

Ten meters.

A massive, winged A-rank predator swooped down from the clouds, razor talons reaching straight for Felix and Seraphina’s throats.

Seraphina didn’t even break stride. With a casual flick of her left wrist

SHRRK!

A razor-thin blade of electrified water cleaved clean through the monster’s neck, sending its thrashing carcass skidding into the dirt behind them.

"Go!" Felix vaulted her forward.

They threw themselves into the swirling vortex side by side.

Draven crossed the threshold last, the boulder-sized SS-rank core anchored tightly against his back.

He reached the portal just as a dozen colossal snapping jaws slammed shut inches behind his heels. He hurled his massive frame into the void.

SNAP!

The spatial tear imploded into a microscopic pinprick of light, vanishing entirely from reality.

THUD!

Felix slammed hard onto the cold, reinforced alloy flooring of the Hero Association staging hangar back on Earth.

Around him, thirty hunters lay collapsed across the metal decking: gasping for oxygen, drenched in sweat, caked in swamp sludge, and bleeding from dozens of cuts.

The SS-rank gate was gone. The air was sterile and quiet.

Beside Felix, the scout unhitched his pouch, dropping the two glowing S-rank cores onto the steel plates.

CLANG,

While Draven collapsed against an equipment crate, unstrapping the massive, blinding SS-rank core from his shoulders.

The three colossal crystals pulsed in the center of the bay, bathing the room in radiant cobalt, gold, and crimson light.

They hadn’t looted the dungeon, but they held the greatest treasures the rift could possibly yield.

Felix rolled flat onto his back, staring up into the bright fluorescent ceiling lights as his chest heaved. Beside him, Seraphina sat up slowly, catching her breath, her fingers still loosely, quietly tangled with his.

Across the staging bay, Garrick Draven stared at the three glowing cores, dragged a bloody sleeve across his grin, and let out a deep, rolling, exhausted laugh.

They had made it home by a single second.