Chapter 109 - Dungeon - XVII
The battle began before we even understood how we were supposed to react.
Down below, in the heart of the profane chamber, three shadows moved with inhuman speed around the monstrosity that had just emerged from the swamp. The grasshoppers, elemental chaos warriors, glided across the battlefield like slicing specters, their six blade-arms in constant motion, leaving shimmering trails in the air. Each strike was followed by an invisible slash—blades of pure wind, shaped by the inner energy of their bodies.
Despite the cave's depth, natural lighting was strangely present. Long cracks in the ceiling allowed vertical beams of orange light to enter, filtered through red crystals embedded in the stalactites. These beams danced in the swamp's steam, creating a diffused atmosphere, as if the very air was slowly combusting. The glow was enough to see, but nothing seemed clear. The light flickered as if afraid to reveal too much, casting unstable shadows that rippled with the heat and the energy of battle.
Those cutting waves hissed through the air like death's own whistle, slicing even through rock as they passed.
But what they faced was no ordinary beast.
The crocodile was an abyss of flesh and darkness.
Its regeneration was grotesque, absolute—each wound sealed shut in seconds, as if pain itself meant nothing to it. And around its body, a black aura flickered with oppressive density, like a fog that didn't just obscure light... but devoured it.
It was Darkness—yet not the kind that kills, not the kind that ends.
It was the kind that consumes.
That thing carried not the stillness of death, but the eternal hunger of darkness: emotionless, peace-less, purposeless beyond its constant devouring. Wherever it moved, light was sucked away, and shadows stopped being mere absence of light and became a living substance. Twisted shapes slithered around the crocodile, as if space itself bent to flee its presence.
And even so, the grasshoppers didn't retreat.