Chapter 245: Trap (II)
The echoing voice hung in the freezing, dust-choked air of the cavern.
Hide shoved Elara behind his back with his left arm, his boots digging into the loose gravel. His blades swept up in a tight, cross-guard stance, their edges bleaming with mana.
In the center of the subterranean hall, roughly twenty paces ahead, there was no flesh-and-blood warrior waiting for them.
Hovering a few inches above the jagged stone was a small, dense sphere of black sand no larger than an apple. The sphere rotated with unnatural, high-speed friction, emitting a low, abrasive hum.
Then, the cavern floor beneath it began to liquefy.
Tons of coarse, volcanic earth and pulverized black sand rose into the air, swirling. The mass expanded rapidly, twisting and hardening as it took the shape of a towering, four-armed monstrosity. The creature stood nearly seven feet tall, its broad, monolithic torso forged entirely from shifting, compressed sand. In the center of its featureless, angular head, a single cyclopean eye burned with a sickly, amber-yellow light, positioned directly above gaping slit that served as a mouth.
The entity settled its four massive, clawed hands onto the air, and an overwhelming, suffocating pressure washed across the chamber.
'This mana output...' Hide's teeth clenched.
His True Sight flared, dissecting the dense, swirling frequencies radiating from the creature. This was the Dungeon Master—the Calamity Lord anchoring this territory. But according to the official operational briefing issued by Walter Bigiva and the International Corporation, this event had been designated as a 3-Star Dungeon Break. A 3-Star territory was supposed to house a C-Rank Lesser Calamity Lord at most. A creature manageable by coordinated B-Rank squads or high-tier auxiliary units.
The monster standing before him was not a C-Rank.
The density of its mana, the scale of its elemental control, and the oppressive gravity radiating from its body placed it firmly in the upper echelons of a B-Rank Calamity Lord.
They had been deceived.
This wasn't an unmapped anomaly or a miscalculated reading. Walter Bigiva had deliberately thrown the Black Shield Agency into an active 4-Star death trap, sending Hide and his newly formed unit straight into the jaws of an executioner without backup.
"Elara," Hide spoke, his voice dropping into a low, razor-sharp whisper that barely moved his lips. "Count to five and run."
Elara, clutching her crystalline wand with trembling hands, stared past his shoulder at the towering sand abomination. Her face had lost all color. "Wh-what?"
"I believe you can make it out safely," Hide continued, never taking his eyes off the cyclopean beast. "Warn everyone outside that this is a damned 4-Star Dungeon."
"Wh... what? A 4-Star?" Elara stammered, her voice cracking in pure disbelief. "But the Corporation said it was a 3-Star! The barrier team checked the readings at the perimeter—"
"They lied to us," Hide cut her off with chilling, absolute certainty. "You have to go out. NOW!"
"Are you ignoring me?" the sand creature rasped. The jagged slit across its face split wider, revealing rows of grinding stone teeth as its single amber eye flared with visible irritation. "How rude."
Hide didn't waste a single breath on dialogue.
The exact microsecond Elara took a step backward toward the collapsed tunnel, Hide exploded forward.
BOOM!
The bedrock beneath Hide's boots pulverized under the explosive force of his dash. Leaving afterimages of dark mana in his wake, he crossed the twenty-yard gap in a fraction of a second, his obsidian blades tracing two lethal, intersecting arcs aimed straight at the creature's neck and chest.
SHING!
The blades cleaved through the entity with effortless speed—but there was no sensation of cutting flesh, no crunch of bone, and no spray of black ichor. The blades passed cleanly through dry, frictionless sand. The moment the steel exited its torso, the grains poured inward, seamlessly repairing the wound as if the strike had never occurred.
The Calamity Lord didn't even attempt to counterattack. It simply drifted backward through the air, its four arms folding behind its back with mocking ease.
"My lord wishes you dead," the creature said, its grating voice echoing from every wall of the cavern simultaneously.
"HIDE!"
A sharp, terrified scream shattered the air from behind him.
Hide's head snapped back.
Behind them, the collapsed rock wall where Elara was attempting to retreat suddenly erupted. Dozens of massive, jagged slabs of obsidian stone burst out from the floor and ceiling, violently slamming together around the young mage like the jaws of an iron bear trap.
"Elara!" Hide roared, pivoting instantly and lunging back across the chamber.
Before he could reach her, the stone slabs sealed shut with a deafening crash, encasing Elara in a solid, impenetrable earthen tomb that began compressing inward.
"You think I will let her leave?" the sand monster laughed, stepping casually through the air as the cavern walls rippled with its dark mana. "No one who enters this garden of dust walks out alive. She will be ground into paste beneath the bedrock, just like the others."
Hide gritted his teeth so hard blood seeped from the corners of his mouth. He couldn't shatter the stone tomb with his blades; the shockwave from his strike would crush Elara's fragile human body inside.
'There's no other choice.'
Hide raised his left hand toward the sealed stone tomb, his ocean-blue eyes glowing.
Ther was a spatial skill he had acquired not long ago, one with a punishing twelve-hour cooldown that he had kept strictly reserved for life-or-death emergencies.
Elara's body was consumed by dark particles and completely dissapeared, before appearing outside the cave's closed mouth, as it formed from the dark particles once again.
CRUNCH!
The earthen tomb snapped shut, crushing empty air into pulverized dust.
The Calamity Lord's single amber eye widened slightly in surprise. "You can even do tricks like that?"
Hide lowered his hand, a chilling calm descending over his entire demeanor. With Elara safely clear of the blast radius, the last trace of restraint vanished from his chest.
"You talk too much," Hide said coldly.
WHOOSH!
Hide unleashed his abilities. A torrential flood of pitch-black, corrupted dark mana exploded outward from his body, turning the temperature inside the cavern into a freezing vacuum.
Abyssal Frost!
Dense, jagged sheets of black ice erupted from the floor, rapidly spreading across the stone like crawling spiders. The freezing wave surged up the sand monster's legs, instantly crystallizing the grains of earth and freezing its towering, four-armed frame into a solid, motionless statue of black ice.
Without waiting, Hide flashed forward, leaping high into the air, his right fist coated in a dense, rotating shell of dark energy.
CRACK!
Hide's punch pulverized the frozen sand monster into millions of shattered black ice crystals.
Yet, before the shards could even hit the ground, the severed head of the statue laughed.
"Foolish Human," the voice echoed from the ceiling above. "I got to say, you are not normal."
Hide looked up. From the jagged stone roof, thousands of tons of loose sand were already pouring downward, coalescing into a brand-new, identical four-armed avatar. The shattered ice on the floor dissolved back into dark dust, drawn seamlessly back into the cavern's network. The creature wasn't using a physical body—its consciousness was synchronized with the entire mountain. As long as the bedrock remained, its form was limitless.
"Try burning, then," Hide muttered, his eyes narrowing into predatory slits.
He opened both palms, drawing upon the most terrifying of his skills.
Abyssal HellFlame!
A roaring tempest of pitch-black fire edged in violent crimson erupted from Hide's hands. The flames, capable of burning mana itself, surged through the cavern, incinerating every speck of sand in their path and melting the solid stone walls into glowing, bubbling sheets of black glass.
The four-armed avatar shrieked as the black fire consumed its construct, burning the sand into absolute nothingness without leaving a trace of ash.
Yet, the ground beneath Hide suddenly buckled.
RUMBLE!
From the deep fissures running along the cavern floor, six colossal behemoths rose into the air. They were towering obsidian golems, each four times the size of a human.
"I have an entire world of stone to play with," the Calamity Lord's voice boomed from the walls as a third sand avatar began reforming fifty yards down the corridor. "How long can you last, little boy?"
"Zenith," Hide commanded silently.
A massive geyser of dark smoke erupted from Hide's shadow. The towering, seven-meter-tall executioner phantom stepped onto the vitrified floor, its heavy black-steel greatsword resting on its broad shoulder as its featureless visor pulsed with cold, violet light.
"Shatter them," Hide ordered.
Zenith lunged forward with blinding speed, its colossal blade cleaving the first two obsidian golems cleanly in half with a deafening concussive roar.
Hide turned his attention back toward the reforming sand lord, preparing to charge down the corridor.
However, in that split-second of divided focus, the Calamity Lord struck.
BOOM!
The right wall of the cavern violently exploded outward. A colossal pillar of solid stone and compressed sand—measuring ten feet in diameter—erupted horizontally from Hide's blind spot with the velocity of an artillery shell.
Hide crossed his blades, his Abyssal Scale Carapace hardening over his ribs to absorb the blow.
CRACK!
The sheer kinetic force was astronomical. Hide's dual blades held, but the impact lifted him completely off his feet, driving his body straight through the opposite cavern wall.
SMASH! CRASH! BOOM!
He tore through three consecutive stone partitions, shattering tons of ancient rock as his body skipped across the rough earth like a thrown stone, finally grinding to a violent halt in a deep, pitch-black underground chamber.
COUGH!
Hide pushed himself up onto one knee, coughing a mouthful of blood onto the cold dirt. His ribs throbbed with a dull, heavy ache.
He took a slow, steadying breath, running a dirt-caked hand through his silver hair as his True Sight pierced the darkness of the new chamber.
The air here was dead. There was no flowing draft, no dripping water, and no light.
Hide slowly stood up, sweeping his glowing blue eyes across the floor.
At the far end of the collapsed archway, half-buried beneath heaps of shattered concrete blocks rested two mangled human corpses.