Chapter 177: Ice-Fire
The Hungering Reefs shattered.
Its wall fell apart, limestone thundering in pieces of the quartz-white sand; I howled anew as another entrance punched into my dungeon, mana flooding out in the break. As something slithered through the gap, crowned in dust and a ringing horror.
It was a monster. As a dungeon core, I didn't use that term lightly, but there was nothing else to describe it as.
A nightmare's cross between a wurm and a centipede, twisting and coiling in on itself, carried by hundreds of insectoid legs—it surged forward with hooked claws and orange-red protrusions over its back, unnatural grace. A frill extended from its head, wide and taut between bristling spines, scraping at the ceiling so high overhead. Mandibles clustered over its gaping maw. Ice-blue armour, offset with the ruby-red of its fiery spines, a volcano's warmth wavering around.
Its eyes—pure white, nothing behind them. Bulbous and arachnid, all hunger.
Fucking hells, what was this?
It hissed and spat, a chittering nightmare of multi-jointed limbs and crackling flames. It had broken past the wall with its innumerous claws and the dust over them immediately caught fire, smoking away in acrid smoke; it coiled on the beach, over quartz-white sand and the lap of waves beneath. It wasn't from the mountains. It couldn't be. But then from where? How had the War Horde gotten their claws on a beast like this?
The opening.
I had precious little mana left after closing the Skylands, but I didn't have a choice; I gathered all I had and threw it at the wall, at the entrance, at the gap in the stone. My mana bucked, trembling—it knew that was an entry, considering the monster was still slithering its centipede's length through the gap, but no. It was stone. It was stone, and nothing more, and my mana would stop escaping me and this was my–