Chapter 165: Killer Form
Rico was quiet for almost three minutes after they left the ruin.
That worried everyone more than his usual noise.
The Obsidian Canyon stretched ahead in its black and jagged hostility, all broken glass ridges, narrow ravines, and knife-edged shadows. The way back to Fort Erymanthian was known now, but “known” did not mean safe. The canyon had already proven that its threats did not stop at spiders and cockroaches. Every crack might hide a new grotesque thing. Every overhang might hold eggs, silk, claws, or something worse.
Team Nemean moved in formation, exhausted but steady.
Emma carried the wrapped vajra close to her side.
Jack walked with a new weight in his left leg, still adjusting to the Yeak’s bone.
Dominic and Alexei took the heavier positions despite their injuries, because both of them were constitutionally incapable of letting other people stand in danger first.
Alex’s eyes kept moving, her body still recovering from the Berserking Strawberry backlash but her awareness sharp.
And Rico walked in the middle. Head down, tail stiff, tiny paws clenched.
Jake glanced at him once, then twice.
“Should we be worried?”
Joanne looked at the raccoon, then at the canyon ahead.
“They should.”
A spider dropped from the left wall.
It was level forty-something, long-legged and pale-bellied, its body-snatcher instincts already unfolding with its limbs. Before Alex could raise a construct, before Dominic could shift his shield, Rico stopped walking.
Very softly, he said, “No.”
The spider landed.
Rico’s head snapped up. His eyes burned with the pure fury of a Kamen Rider who had missed the boss fight.
The baby treant on his back responded instantly.
Its little bark-like body shivered. Leaves snapped outward. Vines uncoiled from its limbs and dove into the plant harness around Rico’s torso as if the two of them had practiced this transformation too many times in secret.
Rico threw both paws across his chest in a dramatic pose.
“Henshin! Killer Form!”
Living plant matter erupted over him.
Not bulky, like Judgment Form, or the artillery monstrosity of Fortress Form that made Phong question the very basics of life.
This armor grew sleek.
Dark green and black, layered close over Rico’s small frame like a predatory exoskeleton. Flexible plates of living bark locked over his chest, shoulders, and thighs. Thin vine-cables tightened around his joints. Shiitake padding formed under the armor, acting as plant-base toe beans. His helmet snapped into place last, shaped with sharp ridges sweeping backward like horns.
Then the arms changed.
Oyster Mushroom blades unfolded from both forearms.
For one stunned second, Team Nemean only stared.
Then Rico vanished.
He moved so fast his body became a green-black streak across the canyon floor. Gas jetted from the vents behind his back, launching him forward in bursts too sharp for his normal size. He hit the spider before it finished preparing to lunge.
The first Oyster Mushroom blade took off two legs.
The second opened its belly.
Rico twisted midair, planted both hind paws against the spider’s side, and kicked away while firing a tiny puff of gas from his back to redirect himself. He landed on the wall, ran sideways for three steps, then launched again.
The spider screamed.
Rico drove one mushroom blade into the wound he had opened.
Something small and white slid from the blade into the flesh - a clove of garlic.
He bounced off, skidded to a stop, and snapped one paw closed.
The spider exploded from the inside.
No one joked. No one could.
Because three cockroaches came around the bend next, heavy shells scraping obsidian, antennae vibrating with hunger, and Rico did not slow down.
Gas burst behind him.
He shot under the first roach, blades carving twin lines through the underside. A second puff, darker and wetter, vented from his back and rolled into the face of the next insect. The roach staggered, legs scraping, its mandibles clicking uselessly as Weeping Onion choking gas flooded its breathing channels.
Rico climbed it like a murder squirrel. One blade went into the throat. The other into the eye.
He planted something ginger-colored into the open wound before kicking away.
Necroginger.
The roach died six seconds later.
Then its corpse twitched.
A ginger root pulse ran through it. Its broken legs jerked. Its head lifted at the wrong angle.
The dead cockroach rose as a temporary minion and hurled itself at its still-living companion.
Jake opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again.
“Nope,” he said finally. “I have nothing.”
Killer Form turned the next ten minutes into an atrocity with theme music only Rico could hear.
Judgment Form had always been about durability and physical presence, an armored hero punching far above his weight. Fortress Form was raw firepower, range, carrockets, Enoki machine guns, and chili rounds applied with the tactical subtlety of a drunk artillery battalion.
Killer Form was different. Killer Form was speed, precision, and war crimes.
Rico did not fight monsters so much as dismantle them and use their corpses to inconvenience their friends. Oyster Mushroom blades opened wounds too cleanly for comfort. Garlic Mines planted inside those wounds detonated after just enough delay to make enemies think they had survived the first pass. Necroginger turned fallen spiders into twitching ambush puppets for a few terrible moments. Weeping Onion gas poured from the vents on his back in low choking clouds, collapsing roach breathing rhythms and making spiders recoil from invisible misery. Bright Sunflower Seeds were scattered and used like flash bangs.
The canyon itself was a parkour playground for Rico.
Wall-run, gas burst, slash, plant, vanish.
Rico dropped from a ridge, cut tendons, vent choking gas, then rebound off a corpse.
The raccoon slid beneath a cockroach’s mandibles, left a garlic clove in the soft mouth tissue, kicked backward, and it detonated.
At one point, three spiders tried to coordinate from above, using silk to restrict his movement.
Rico fired a jet of speed gas straight downward, shot upward between them, sliced through the silk lines, then used a Bright Sunflower Seed to blind the one closest to him. The second received a Necroginger seed through the thorax. The third got two Garlic Mines planted into its abdomen before it even understood where the raccoon had gone.
The explosions echoed through the canyon.
Alex watched with narrowed eyes.
Dominic watched with the expression of a man reconsidering every decision that had led to this animal being allowed near caffeine.
Emma, after the third corpse reanimated long enough to drag another monster into a detonation, said, “Phong is never letting him use this near cameras.”
Joanne, still pale and sore, replied, “Phong is never letting him use this near anyone.”
Séline said nothing, but her eyes had the distant focus of someone mentally cataloguing technique.
Camille smiled faintly.
“That one suits him.”
“Killer Form?” Jake asked.
“No. The crimes.”
“You're fine with him upgrading from street level misconducts to war crimes?”
After nearly ten minutes, the canyon ahead was quiet.
Too quiet.
Not because there were no monsters, because the monsters had received a message and decided survival required distance.
Rico came sprinting back with one last burst of gas, slid across the obsidian floor, and stopped directly in front of Dominic.
The living armor peeled away in layers. Vines withdrew, bark plates folded back into the baby treant, which gave a tiny exhausted shiver and resumed its place on Rico’s back like an innocent plant child that had not just enabled an ecological massacre.
Rico stood there for half a second.
Then flopped onto his belly.
“I require transport.”
Dominic stared down at him.
Rico lifted one paw weakly.
“Hero has cooldown.”
Alexei sighed, crouched with great care because his ribs still had opinions, and scooped the raccoon up.
Rico immediately relaxed.
“Acceptable paladin taxi.”
Dominic shook his head and kept walking.
They made it halfway back before the canyon ahead changed color.
Red. A lot of red.
At first Jake thought it was a field of strange fruit scattered across the black ground. Then the fruit moved, rolling and bouncing in little aggressive waves over the obsidian path. Tiny snarls rose from them. Tiger-faced tomato skins wrinkled with murderous purpose.
Timatoes.
An army of them.
Behind and among the rolling fruit tyrants came mice of the Great Burrow, each one armored in scraps, straps, and small packs, moving with the calm efficiency of logistics personnel escorting unstable explosives.
One of the mice scampered ahead and bowed deeply to Dominic.
“Farmer-king worried,” the mouse said. “Notification came. Big boss killed. World shouted. Farmer-king sent Timatoes army to find team and escort home.”
Team Nemean went still.
Then Alex looked away. Her expression did not soften much, but everyone who knew her understood the shift.
Phong had seen the notification. And instead of celebrating, he had panicked enough to send an army of lava-vomiting fruit murderers into the canyon after them.
Joanne muttered, “That idiot.”
Emma’s mouth curved. “Our idiot.”
The Timatoes seemed extremely proud of themselves.
Several rolled in circles around the team, puffing up and making tiny aggressive growls at distant shadows. One particularly large Timato spat a warning glob of boiling tomato juice at a crack in the wall where absolutely nothing appeared to be hiding. The crack smoked anyway, as if deciding not to argue.
With the Timatoes and mice around them, the final stretch back to Fort Erymanthian became almost peaceful.
Almost.
There was something deeply surreal about walking through one of the deadliest canyon routes they had ever crossed while escorted by an army of sentient tomatoes that every local monster had learned to fear with religious sincerity. Spiders withdrew before they came into range. Cockroaches vanished into side tunnels. Even the lingering smell of Timatoes aggression seemed to make the obsidian walls feel less hostile.
Then Fort Erymanthian came into view.
And it had grown.
Again.
The first version had been a fortified foothold. A claim. Walls, watchtowers, plants, defenses, and the skull above the gate declaring that something new had taken root in the canyon.
This version was infrastructure.
Scaffolding stretched along nearby ridges. Pulley towers had been built into the cliffside. Enchanted ropes ran between platforms, thick and faintly glowing, humming when tension moved through them. Gondola baskets large enough for cargo and personnel hung from reinforced lines, swaying over gaps in the canyon where walking would have cost hours and lives. A crude but functional elevator system had been cut into one vertical face, operated by a combination of counterweights, pulley arrays, and mana-powered spell mechanisms.
The H’Re had been busy.
The blind, bandaged people of the Dry Sea had taken Phong’s food—more than they could eat in a year, because Phong had never understood moderation when feeding the hungry—and returned payment in labor, engineering, and strange survival knowledge. Their hands had shaped mechanisms where normal surface engineers would have hesitated to even stand.
Team Nemean understood Phong’s intention with one look.
He was not building a fort.
He was building a network.
Interconnected forts, walled bases, elevator points, gondola routes, supply stations, and plant-backed safe zones above and through the Obsidian Canyon. A web over black glass. A way to make four miles become two, then one, then almost nothing. A way to let soldiers, traders, scouts, and craftsmen move through a place that had once belonged only to spiders, cockroaches, slugs, and dead civilizations.
Emma stared up at the gondola lines and let out a slow breath.
“He’s doing it again.”
Dominic nodded. “Turning a death zone into a road.”
One of the Great Burrow mice puffed up proudly.
“Giant Crickets of United Tribes thrive here. Dry canyon good for them. Farmer-king laid expansion plan for this reason.”
That made sense.
The lizardmen and Kamohai had hated how dry the canyon was. Both peoples were already happier back near Lake Baratok, where water, trade, and easier movement suited them better. The older Tortura would have loved the dry high terrain, but bringing them deeper into Floor 3 defeated the entire purpose of their exile from Cà Rồng’s reach.
But giant crickets?
They could thrive here.
They carried loads, climbed routes, supported logistics across vertical terrain. Phong had seen that and arranged accordingly, the same way he had turned Camp Orthrus into Baratok Town, a walled trade settlement controlling half of Lake Baratok almost before anyone else understood what he was doing.
Fort Erymanthian’s gate opened.
Workers, mice, H’Re engineers, cricket porters, and stationed guards all turned as Team Nemean entered under escort of rolling Timatoes. Relief passed through the fort like wind through grass. The sight of them alive mattered more than the notification had.
Phong was waiting inside.
Of course he was.
He looked exhausted in the specific way he got when worry had been converted into productivity because doing nothing would have driven him insane. His eyes went first to Alex, then Dominic, then the rest, counting injuries. Only after he had confirmed everyone was alive did his gaze drop to the bundled vajra, Jack’s altered stance, and the silver skeletal hand wrapped in cloth.
Rico lifted his head from Alexei’s arms.
“Good news,” the raccoon announced weakly. “I discovered secret wall snack.”
Phong closed his eyes, just for a second. Then he opened them and said, “Why does that sentence scare me more than the global boss notification?”
No one answered.
Because they all understood.
With the Timatoes settling into defensive circles, the gondolas creaking overhead, and Fort Erymanthian growing around them like another root in Phong’s impossible kingdom, Team Nemean finally made it home.
Now they only had to learn what Rico’s “secret wall snack” really was.