Chapter 219: Transformation
He stepped behind her chair, grabbed the chains wrapped around her torso, and tore them apart with a brutal wrench of his bare hands, freeing her limbs.
The moment her wrists cleared the iron, Gold didn’t waste time. She grabbed the hilt of the fallen guard’s longsword and whipped it upward in a blinding arc as a bolt of lightning magic fired by a third-tier combat mage at the hall doors struck her flat blade, shattering harmlessly into a shower of sparks across the ceiling.
"We need to talk," Gold snarled, her amber eyes blazing, "seriously. After this."
"Looking forward to it," Eren said, and meant it.
He turned to find Branagh still seated at the head of the table, his massive body unmoved, his cigar finally lit and puffing gentle smoke into the chaos. He watched them with the patience of a spider who’d already eaten, his expression unreadable, his fingers drumming a slow rhythm against the armrest.
Within five minutes, the lavish dining hall had turned into an absolute mess.
Good painted the beautiful white walls, severed forearms and shattered sabers cluttered the rug, and the shrieks of dying men echoed through the peaceful room. Eren moved with brutal efficiency, cracking skulls with warped iron chains around his knuckles, while Gold was in her own league, carving through flesh with surgical precision.
But Branagh remained seated. He had bot even flinched by the brutality. He simply took drags from his cigar, watching the body count climb to an irreplaceable level.
"Useless," Branagh finally sighed, tapping the ash onto the rim of a blood-spattered crystal goblet. "Every single coin I invested into private security goes straight down the sewer to absolute half-wits who can’t even subdue two unarmed strays. Incompetent cattle, the lot of them."
He crushed the smoldering stub, the massive frame of the Lord of the Flesh slowly uncoiling from the master armchair.
"Now I have to soil my own tailoring," he grumbled, shaking his bald head.
Branagh stepped forward with thudding strides, moving directly toward the far end of the banquet table where Baron Kiliyan was currently curled into a trembling ball of snivel beneath the dropped tablecloth.
Seeing the mountain turn his back, Gold seized the opening. Her longsword reversed into a two-handed thrust aimed dead-center between Branagh’s shoulder blades.
Without looking backward, Branagh’s left hand blurred with unnatural, horrifying velocity. His thick fingers clamped around the flat of the descending blade, halting its momentum without effort. Before Gold could release the hilt, he caught her throat and lifted her.
With monstrous strength, Branagh slammed her downward, her back shattering clean through the center of the heavy oak banquet table.
Gold coughed out a ragged, breathless choke as she lay pinned beneath the debris.
Branagh didn’t even check to see if she was breathing. He pivoted his massive bulk toward Eren.
BOOM!
The floorboards groaned and cracked under his boots. Despite carrying nearly four hundred pounds of fat, the Lord of the Flesh crossed twenty feet of open hall in less than half a blink, kicking up a concussive shockwave of displaced air.
"Fuck," Eren muttered under his breath in disbelief at the impossible acceleration.
Before he could sidestep, Branagh’s massive hand clamped around Eren’s throat like an iron vice. The force carried Eren clean off his feet, driving his back violently into the wall behind him.
THUD!
Plaster fell around Eren’s ears, hairline fractures spiderwebbing through the brickwork behind his skull. Eren gasped for air, his blue eyes flashing with irritation.
Without hesitation, Eren drove the sharpened base of his heavy iron candelabra straight into the side of Branagh’s neck.
CLANG.
The hollow metal bent. Branagh’s thick, leathery hide barely yielded, not a single drop of blood emerging from the impact. Eren drove a knee into the lord’s liver, followed by a furious gouge toward his eyes.
Branagh didn’t flinch. His pupils remained dead, glassy, and completely detached, as if the physical pain had been scrubbed clean from his nervous system entirely.
"You’ve caused quite a headache for Rujgard, boy," Branagh rumbled, his grip tightening until the cartilage in Eren’s throat began to creak. "In all the centuries this border haven has stood, no one has ever survived three straight days playing hide-and-seek with Vane’s hounds. I give you credit for the endurance. Truly impressive."
"Unfortunately... the curtain falls here."
From the wreckage of the shattered banquet table, Gold lunged with lethal desperation. She didn’t bother with his neck or chest; using the broken half of her ruined sword, she drove the jagged steel straight down through the arch of Branagh’s polished leather shoe, pinning his foot to the floorboards. In the same breath, she swept her leg in a violent roundhouse kick, driving the foot into the side of his knee to buckle his balance.
Branagh’s knee gave out an inch, his fingers reflexively loosening around Eren’s throat.
Eren dropped to his boots, coughing violently as air rushed back into his starved lungs. He slipped away few feets, shaking out his knuckles with a raspy wheeze. "Thanks, goldy..."
"Don’t celebrate yet," Gold hissed, scrambling backward onto her feet, her eyes were wide with pure, petrified dread behind the mask. "Look at him!"
Branagh hadn’t fallen. He had barely leaned.
For two seconds, everything was quiet.
Then—
CRACK-CRUNCH.
The sound of snapping bone echoed through the hall.
Branagh threw his head back, his jaws unhinging with a wet, grotesque tear as an inhuman roar tore from his throat. The tailored three-piece suit shredded apart like tissue paper under the violent, explosive expansion of his frame.
His muscles mutated, swelling into grotesque, pulsating mounds of grey, vein-corded meat. Bony, blackened spurs ruptured outward through the skin of his forearms and spine, dripping with dark, tar-like ichor. His eyes lost their pupils entirely, turning into boiling pools of neon-cerulean mana, his stature inflating until he stood nearly ten feet tall, scraping the ornate moldings of the ceiling.
Gold backed away, her breath shallow and trembling against her mask.
"He’s consuming it..." she rasped out in horror. "He’s consuming The Substance!"
Eren stared up at the towering, grey-skinned abomination of twisted muscle and bone spurs currently snarling down at them.
"FUCK!" Eren muttered.