Chapter 143
The small, translucent blue body of Ayla plummeted straight down into the crushing depths of the midnight-black oceanic trench. The deeper she descended, the heavier the water parameters became.
The sheer weight of the miles-deep frozen ocean pressed against her fluid mass with enough physical force to implode an entire vanguard armada of high-grade celestial iron ships, but Ayla’s maximized Peak Gold Crusader density didn’t care about the pressure at all.
Her glossy jelly surface remained flawlessly smooth, and her Apocalypse Gold Metal Core continued to pump out a thick, protective layer of golden mana that completely neutralized the hostile deep-sea conditions.
"Nexus, the water down here is getting very thick," Ayla communicated through the mind link, her mental voice carrying her standard flat tone of complete and utter indifference. "It feels like I am swimming through wet clay. Is the big fish close?"
"It is directly beneath your coordinates, little monster!" Nexus’s voice echoed back inside her head, sounding incredibly excited as a massive, pulsing crimson warning radar expanded across Ayla’s right holographic lens. "The sonar mapping is picking up a colossal biological grid. This thing has been sleeping at the absolute bottom of the trench since the first epoch of Niflheim. Its core signature is so dense that it is actively warping the local spatial parameters of the sea floor!"
Ayla panned her golden-ringed pupils downward, slicing through the deep-sea darkness with her enhanced vision.
At the very bottom of the vertical trench, a truly massive cavern opened up in the petrified sea floor. Rising slowly from the center of that dark abyss was a creature of absolutely terrifying proportions. It was a giant, prehistoric Kraken Leviathan, easily over four hundred feet long. Its massive, central bulbous head was covered in layers of ancient, calcified blue ice armor that had grown into jagged spikes over thousands of years. Beneath its head, twenty colossal tentacles—each one thicker than a stadium pillar and lined with thousands of razor-sharp, bone-toothed suction cups—whipped slowly through the heavy current, creating violent underwater whirlpools that tore the ancient sea floor rocks to pieces.
The Kraken possessed a single, central master eye that was over thirty feet wide. The moment Ayla’s golden aura pressure leaked into the trench, that giant eye snapped open, glowing with a brilliant, blood-red bioluminescent light that completely illuminated the pitch-black abyss.
This was the Ancient Deep-Sea Monarch of Niflheim. It was a true, unmanaged cosmic apex predator, possessing a physical framework that sat firmly at the pseudo-Crown Rank tier. Its entire body was saturated with a heavy anti-magic frost attribute that could completely freeze the soul containers of regular rankers just by looking at them.
The giant Monarch did not appreciate a tiny piece of blue fluid invading its private birthing grounds. It let out a deep, low-frequency sonic roar through the water parameters. The vibration was so immensely powerful that it created a massive, visible shockwave through the current, causing the five-hundred-foot ice sheet miles above their heads to crack and split apart with a thunderous boom.
Before the sound waves could even finish rolling across the trench, the Kraken whipped four of its colossal tentacles upward, aiming to swat Ayla out of the water like a stray bubble. The tentacles cut through the dense current with a terrifying velocity, creating a massive vacuum pocket that dragged hundreds of boulders into the air parameters of the trench.
Ayla didn’t bother using her Abyssal Shadow Blink to avoid the incoming strike. A wild, uncontrollable wave of pure, unadulterated primal hunger instantly erupted from her golden core. Her translucent blue mass expanded slightly, absorbing the intense water pressure of the sonic roar before she launched herself directly toward the fastest tentacle.
"Rend of the World-Order," Ayla commanded flatly inside her mind.
Five majestic, pitch-black claws instantly extended from the front of her fluid mass with a sharp, synchronized metallic click. The intricate golden runes covering her claws flared with a blinding, divine light, greedily drinking the wild, ancient mana of the deep-sea trench to reinforce her strike.
She swung her fluid arm in a simple, lazy downward sweep right against the incoming four-hundred-foot tentacle. The thick, calcified blue ice armor and the anti-magic frost attribute that protected the Kraken’s limbs did not offer a single ounce of resistance against her law attribute trait. Ayla’s black claws completely ignored eighty percent of its physical defenses, slicing cleanly through the ice plates, through the rubbery hide, and straight through the massive muscle structures like a hot wire cutting through a block of soft lard.
Clang. Crack. Crash.
A series of loud, metallic sounds echoed through the deep water as the first colossal tentacle was instantly sliced into two neat pieces. A massive shower of thick, glowing blue blood erupted from the severed stump, turning the surrounding current into a dark, swirling cloud of raw cosmic essence. The permanent bleeding effect of her trait instantly latched onto the Monarch’s soul container, causing the ancient beast to shriek in pure, unadulterated agony.
The Kraken had never experienced physical injury or pain in its entire multi-thousand-year life cycle. The sudden, burning torment of the soul-bleeding effect drove its primitive brain into a state of immediate, frantic madness. It whipped its remaining nineteen tentacles violently, creating a massive, chaotic storm of crushing physical force that smashed the surrounding mountain walls into fine sand.
It tried to open its massive, beak-like jaws beneath the tentacles to vomit a colossal torrent of absolute-zero freezing liquid toward her coordinates, aiming to seal her fluid mass into a permanent glacial block.
Ayla did not give it the opportunity to discharge its freezing breath. She activated her Gale Acceleration trait, her gold-ranked body becoming an invisible, high-speed blue projectile that sliced through the bloody current with extreme velocity. She avoided the thrashing tentacles by mere inches, soaring straight toward the giant, thirty-foot-wide central master eye of the monster.
The Kraken noticed the tiny blue blur flying directly toward its face. Its giant eye contracted in pure survival terror, and it frantically tried to cover its head with its remaining limbs to protect its main sensory organ.
Ayla was far too fast. She materialized right in front of the giant blood-red eye, her golden-ringed pupils expanding to their absolute maximum width as she focused her Twin Lens of the Weaver directly onto the creature’s central nervous system. She deployed her ultimate mental function across the pseudo-Crown entity with everything she had.
"Combination," Ayla commanded, her multi-layered mental voice booming like a heavy thunderclap directly inside the Monarch’s fading soul container.
She forcefully took the agonizing, burning torment of the soul-bleeding wound and jammed it together with a massive, artificial surge of absolute, paralyzing serenity.
The extreme, conflicting conceptual data collision hit the Kraken’s primitive brain pathways like a falling meteor. The results were instantaneous, silent, and completely brutal. The four-hundred-foot Ancient Deep-Sea Monarch didn’t even have time to release its freezing breath torrent or utter another roar of confusion. Its giant, thirty-foot master eye instantly lost its blood-red bioluminescent light, turning into a dull, expressionless gray color as its entire cognitive nervous system was thoroughly short-circuited within a single millisecond.
The violent thrashing of its remaining nineteen tentacles stopped completely. The massive, calcified blue limbs went entirely limp, dropping downward and draping uselessly across the petrified sea floor rocks like giant, dead pieces of kelp. Without the basic law of neural coordination, the primitive beast simply surrendered its entire physical framework to her control.
Ayla did not waste a single moment to appreciate her victory. She rolled across the dark, slippery surface of the Kraken’s head, using her pitch-black claws to slice right through the thick layers of calcified ice armor. She tore the heavy meat open with a clean, tearing sound, exposing the massive, cathedral-sized blue energy core that was vibrating weakly inside the center of the skull cavity.
She opened her translucent blue mass to its absolute maximum limit, creating a giant, swirling fluid vortex that slowly drew the entire colossal pseudo-Crown core straight into her center.
The moment her fluids wrapped around the unmanaged cosmic master core, a blinding, multi-colored pillar of blue and gold light shot out from Ayla’s body, piercing straight up through the miles-deep ocean and completely vaporizing the five-hundred-foot ice sheet above their coordinates for a ten-kilometer radius.
The sheer volume of the ancient primitive energy was so immense that Ayla’s entire jelly form completely transformed, turning into a solid, flawless sphere of dense, polished gold that radiated a terrifying cosmic pressure. Her Apocalypse Gold Metal Core swallowed the Monarch’s essence smoothly, absorbing the ancient aquatic world code to perfectly saturate her biological framework.
[ System Notice: Ancient Kraken Leviathan Core successfully digested. ]
[ Your internal mana pool capacity has increased by a massive one hundred and twenty percent. ]
[ Your golden foundation has achieved the status of: Peak Gold Crusader (Maximized Overload). ]
[ The frozen world parameters of the Niflheim Sector have been one hundred percent conquered. ]
Ayla floated quietly above the massive, collapsing corpse of the Kraken, letting out a deep, satisfied ripple as the brilliant golden light around her body slowly settled back into her standard translucent blue color. She felt heavier, faster, and infinitely more stable than she ever had before. Her gold core was completely full, humming with a majestic rhythm that signaled her readiness to step onto the true Crown Rank path.
"That was a very excellent breakfast, Nexus," Ayla muttered flatly, her golden-ringed pupils glowing brightly in the dark trench. "The fish down here are definitely of much higher quality than the academy students."
"You did it, little monster!" Nexus cheered happily, popping a massive block of completed achievement logs across her right vision screen. "You successfully solo-killed a pseudo-Crown deep-sea apex predator and completely conquered a Class 3 primitive planet! Your internal energy density is now high enough to face the absolute highest student authority back at the academy! Let’s go home and see if that silver-haired Senate president actually dares to try and format your core!"
Ayla bobbled her round blue body in complete, deadpan satisfaction. She turned her mass toward the pitch-black spatial tear that Nexus was beginning to open in the water parameters, ready to return to her residential suite and unleash her maximized Peak Gold power across the entire main academy sector.