Chapter 246: Trap (III)
The chamber was suffocatingly cold, thick with the stench blood and fresh pulverized stone.
Hide knelt on the jagged earth, his chest heaving as his True Sight cut through the darkness. He dragged himself closer to the collapsed archway, his trembling fingers reaching out toward the debris.
The rubble did not hide monsters.
Pinned beneath two massive, cracked slabs of concrete were the mangled remains of two young Exterminators. Their matte-black agency vests were shredded and soaked through with crimson, but the silver embroidered crest on their collars was unmistakable: the emblem of the Black Shield Agency.
Vanessa and Harry.
They were two of the five eager rookies Hide had personally recruited three weeks prior. Harry had been a quiet boy with a modest 3 star talent and dreamed of sending money back to his mother whol ived in one of the lower areas, while Vanessa was a sharp-eyed scout, one of the stronger and smarter ones, reaching C-Rank is just a year and half, and who had proudly showed off her new agency badge before boarding the transport aircraft.
Now, Harry's chest was crushed into a concave crater of bone and ruptured organs. Vanessa lay beside him, her neck twisted at an unnatural, horrifying angle, her blank, lifeless eyes staring at Hide's own.
A sudden, violent spasm seized Hide's throat.
His stomach convulsed violently. Dropping to his hands and knees, Hide gagged, dry-heaving before violently vomiting a mixture of dark bile and blood onto the cold dirt. His soul prickled with a cold, agonizing needles-and-pins sensation that made his vision blur.
'It was a trap,' the realization hammered into his skull with brutal, sickening clarity. 'This whole 4-Star breach was build and targeted at me.'
Walter Bigiva and the International Corporation hadn't just lured him into an ambush—they had used his entire agency as bait. He was the one who had commanded them to split into pairs. He was the one who had brought them to the Central Continent. If they hadn't joined his agency, if they hadn't followed his lead, Vanessa and Harry would still be breathing.
They died solely because they stood up with him. Followed him.
"Look at you... weeping over broken clay," a grating, grinding voice mocked from the ceiling above.
The Calamity Lord did not wait for Hide to recover.
BOOM!
The entire chamber convulsed as the walls liquified into roaring waves of high-density sand and jagged obsidian boulders. From all four corners of the subterranean room, massive earthen spikes the size of telephone poles converged upon Hide in a blinding, instantaneous crossfire.
Hide didn't have time to dodge. He could barely lift his head from the pool of vomit.
CRASH! CRASH! BOOM!
The kinetic onslaught struck him like a battery of falling meteorites. Tons of compressed earth and stone pulverized against his body, driving him flat into the solid bedrock and collapsing the entire ceiling directly onto his spine.
[Abyssal Scale Carapace — Overdrive Active]
[Damage absorbed: 40%]
[Pain suppression: 70%]
Beneath his jaket that hd somehow survivded it all, the translucent Abyssal Slime stretched to its absolute microscopic limit, desperately distributing the concussive kinetic shock across his ribcage to keep his internal organs from bursting into liquid.
Through the dense cloud of pulverized dust, a figure slowly rose from the crater.
Hide pushed the two-ton stone slab off his back, throwing his scaled arms upward to shield his face.
His appearance was no longer human as his skill took over.
Overlapping, pitch-black draconic scales had erupted from beneath his skin, covering his forearms, chest, and neck in an impenetrable, jagged carapace of dark metal. The scales crept aggressively up along his jawline and temples, framing his pale face in an alien armor. Resting atop his messy silver hair, forged entirely from the same scales that covered his body, was the jagged, pointed obsidian crown. His ocean-blue eyes had completely drowned in twin rings of predatory violet that burned with a terrifying luminescence.
Hovering fifteen feet in the air, the four-armed sand monster reformed its towering, cyclopean avatar, looking down at Hide with amusement in its single amber eye.
"You have taken quite an interesting form, Hide Volter," the Calamity Lord rasped, its four massive stone hands folding across its chest. "A human wearing the skin of an beast, you do look like one now. But scales cannot change the fact that you are buried alive beneath an entire mountain."
Hide's scaled fingers curled into tight, iron fists, dark mana crackling across his knuckles like black lightning. "I am going to grind your core to dust."
"Is that so?" The monster chuckled, the sound like grinding gravel.
Before Hide could explode forward, the sound of hurried, heavy footsteps and panting breaths echoed through one of the wide connecting tunnels leading into the main chamber.
Two figures burst through the dusty opening.
It was Fuu and Kai.
Fuu was covered in dust, his face pale as he hoisted his massive alloy tower shield, while Kai stood beside him, clutching his elemental water staff with mana flaring from his fingertips.
Hide's heart plummeted into a freezing abyss. "NO! KAI! FUU! GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE! IT'S A TRAP—"
"Ah, more little bugs to crush," the Calamity Lord interrupted with a sinister hiss.
The monster didn't hesitate. It threw all four arms outward.
RUMBLE!
Instantly, the floor, walls, and ceiling surrounding Fuu and Kai ruptured. More than thirty massive, razor-sharp spires of solid obsidian stone shot out from every direction simultaneously, converging upon the two teenagers like a closing cage of iron lances.
"ZENITH! AEGIS!" Hide roared at the top of his lungs, kicking off the pulverized earth with explosive speed.
BOOM!
Hide pushed his agility to the absolute limit, but the Calamity Lord raised a massive wall of compressed sand directly across his path, violently halting his charge.
"Stay behind me, Kai!" Fuu screamed, his voice cracking with terror and defiance.
Fuu dropped his stance, slamming the bottom edge of his heavy tower shield into the stone floor. Pushing every single drop of his mana into his arms, he activated his newly obtained defensive talent. A glowing, translucent barrier flared over the metal face of his shield just as the first wave of stone spires slammed into it.
CLANG! CRACK!
The concussive force pushed Fuu's boots backward through the stone, tearing his shoulder muscles, but the young defender refused to yield an inch. "Hold on!"
Behind him, Kai swung his staff in a wide arc.
Torrential Surge: Hydro Slicer!
Massive, pressurized ribbons of dense blue water erupted from Kai's staff, spiraling around Fuu's shield like a liquid vortex. The high-pressure water blades sliced into the incoming sand pillars, completely saturating the earth and turning the compressed stone into loose, heavy mud before it could crush Fuu's barrier.
"Die, you ugly bastard!" Kai yelled, sending a massive geyser of water straight up toward the ceiling to shatter the descending stalactites.
Their coordination was flawless, a testament to months of brutal training. But the gap between C-Rank Exterminators and an apex B-Rank Calamity Lord was an insurmountable chasm.
"AEGIS! SHATTER IT!" Hide's roar ripped through the cavern.
THUD!
Behind the wall of sand, the colossal iron phantom Aegis materialized from Hide's dark mana, slamming its colossal form directly into the earthen barricade with bone-shattering force, blowing a massive hole through the stone.
SWOOSH!
Zenith flickered into existence, using Phantom Step to blur through the opening.
Hide sprinted through the breach, his boots skidding across the wet, mud-soaked stone.
"KAI! FUU!"
The dust cleared, and the scene before Hide turned every drop of blood in his veins to ice.
The water vortex had collapsed.
Fuu's reinforced tower shield was shattered into twisted metal scraps. Standing at the center of the mud, Fuu remained upright, his arms still raised in a defensive posture.
A massive, three-foot-thick obsidian spire had punched straight through the center of the alloy shield, penetrating directly through the center of Fuu's chestplate and erupting out of his back.
Thick, crimson blood poured freely from Fuu's mouth, dripping down his chin and staining his broken armor. His eyes were wide, glassy, and completely vacant, staring into the dark ceiling with no light left behind them.
He had taken the fatal blow meant for Kai.
Two feet behind him, Kai was pinned to the stone floor, a secondary stone shard impaling his right thigh, tearing through muscle and artery. Blood gushed across the stone as Kai clawed at the rock, his face pale and twisted in unbearable agony.
High above Kai, a colossal, four-ton pillar of solid stone was already falling, aimed straight at his head to crush him into paste.
CLANG!
Zenith blurred into position at the final microsecond. The black-steel greatsword met the falling stone pillar mid-air, cleaving the massive boulder cleanly in half and deflecting the debris away from Kai's body.
Kai gasped, looking up through his tears at Fuu's impaled, motionless corpse.
The agony and massive blood loss overwhelmed Kai's nervous system. His eyes rolled back into his head, and his body slumped limply onto the red-stained mud, losing consciousness.
Fuu did not move. Noel Fuucerious was already dead.