Chapter 87: Saint Hilarius Hospital (19)
The moment Sia uttered those words, the entire B2 floor trembled!
It was not a normal earthquake; it was a biological tremor caused by a muscular contraction the size of a city!
The massive crimson lake stopped bubbling.
The blood began to gather at the center, a hundred meters below the walkway.
A colossal vortex, like a terrifying crimson hurricane, began to form.
The blood was being pulled upward, defying physical gravity, forming a towering column of dense red liquid!
The suspended patients on the ceiling began to convulse violently like never before, their muffled groans turning into horrifying gurgles and true agony, as if they were being drained at maximum capacity to feed this monstrosity.
The enormous blood column began to take shape and solidify into a nightmarish form.
It was not a creature with a human face or defined animal limbs.
It was a massive gelatinous, fleshy mass, over thirty meters tall, and wide enough to block a third of the cavern!
Its body consisted of thousands of tons of compressed, coagulated blood, thick pulsating black veins like tree trunks acting as a flexible skeleton, and massive pockets of disgusting green acidic fluid floating within its partially translucent body, like a living chemical reactor.
It had no eyes.
It had no single mouth—instead, dozens of openings randomly opened and closed across its viscous surface, revealing rows of broken bone-like teeth, devouring falling bodies from the ceiling and dissolving them within seconds to increase its size and density!
This was S-rank. The absolute nightmare of the blood farms.
"The Viscous Reaper." A biological monstrosity beyond description.
"My... God..." Damian took an involuntary step back.
As a tactical commander, his mind calculated the probability of victory at insane speed.
The result was a resounding zero.
How do you fight an ocean of acidic blood that possesses awareness? There were no vital points. No single heart.
The Viscous Reaper roared.
It was not a sound—it was a vibrational wave of compressed fluids that struck the air like a vacuum bomb, making the metal walkway groan and nearly break, and causing Sia and Damian’s ears to bleed.
"Sia! Poison it! Try to strike its mass center!" Damian roared in desperation as he aimed his weapon.
"Have you lost your mind?!" Sia shouted back, retreating as her professional medical mind analyzed the creature at terrifying speed.
"This is an S-rank monster! It’s not a single organism—it’s a colony of trillions of acidic cells! My blue toxin is designed to kill living tissue and poison circulatory systems, but this thing is the acid itself! My poison won’t do anything but scratch a drop in an ocean! And your lightning won’t be enough to evaporate even 1% of its body before you die of exhaustion!"
Sia looked at Damian with wide eyes and gave an order he wasn’t used to hearing from her:
"We are not fighting this thing! We have to run! Now! To that gate!"
But the Viscous Reaper was not waiting for their discussion.
From its massive body, five enormous "tentacles"—or whips—made of dense blood and green acid shot out, each two meters thick, moving at lightning speed toward the walkway they stood on!
"Run!"
Damian roared.
He did not try to block the attack entirely—he knew his armor wouldn’t hold.
Instead, he shoved Sia forward forcefully to start running across the metal walkway toward the distant steel gate, while he stayed behind as cover.
Damian slammed his palm against the metal mesh, releasing a massive amount of lightning Eitra to form a slanted blue electromagnetic dome, like an umbrella, designed to deflect the attack rather than stop it.
BBOOOOOOM! SPLAAAAASH!
The blood whips slammed into the angled shield.
If it were normal blood, it would have been electrocuted and vaporized.
But this blood was saturated with pure sulfuric acid at a terrifying S-rank concentration!
The acidic blood reacted with the electromagnetic shield instantly, producing a burning hiss (tssssss) and toxic green smoke that melted parts of the shield within seconds.
The whips slid off the shield due to the angle, striking the metal walkway behind and in front of Damian.
Solid steel melted like plastic wax the moment the acid touched it!
The walkway began collapsing into the lake.
"Fall back, Damian! The bridge is collapsing!" Sia shouted as she leapt over a three-meter gap melted by acid and kept running.
Damian sprinted at full speed behind her, his heavy armor weighing him down, his steps shaking what remained of the walkway.
It was a nightmarish chase.
The Viscous Reaper moved within the lake parallel to them like destructive waves, launching acid whips every few seconds.
Damian and Sia ran across a suspended bridge melting beneath their feet.
They leapt between concrete pillars, swung on hanging pipes, and Damian used short, intense bursts of lightning to detonate incoming acid whips mid-air before they reached them—draining his energy catastrophically.
"The gate’s ahead! Fifty meters!" Sia shouted as she saw the massive steel door leading to an exit or emergency stairwell.
But the Viscous Reaper understood their intent.
The creature stopped using its whips.
Instead, it compressed its lower gelatinous mass and jumped out of the lake!
A mass the size of a five-story building rose into the air, landing directly in front of the steel gate, completely blocking the escape route—and destroying the final section of the walkway!
Damian and Sia skidded to a halt on a small isolated metal platform no larger than ten square meters, trapped between the melted abyss behind them and a mountain of red acid in front.
"It’s blocked the path..." Damian panted, the lightning around him fading, his muscles trembling from exhaustion.
"We can’t get through."
The Viscous Reaper, as if mocking them, opened a massive cavity in its center like a mouth and unleashed a huge wave—a horizontal cascade—of compressed green acidic blood directly toward the small platform!
"Siaaa! Behind me!"
Damian roared, stepping forward, planting his armored feet into the metal, channeling all remaining lightning in his core to form a massive barrier.
But the wave was too wide.
Damian’s electromagnetic wall split the wave in half, diverting it into two streams that passed him on the right and left.
But... one large droplet—or rather, a splash—of concentrated green acid broke off from the collision and bypassed the shield... heading directly toward Sia, who stood behind Damian.