Chapter 484
Chapter 484
As Jake reached the makeshift entrance, he mentally reached out to some of his wyrmcallers, instructing them to head out to the areas where he and Owen had fought the ravagespawn.
Between the two of them, they had defeated quite a lot of elite monsters. Since each elite monster could yield a specific type of genetic material, leaving those bodies unharvested would have been a tremendous waste.
So he instructed his wyrmcallers to deploy a few crawlers so they could collect a piece of flesh from every fallen elite mutant and bring the samples back to the Apex Hollow for extraction.
After stepping through the opening into the nest, Jake paused to take a look around. He found himself in a vast, hollowed-out area. The inner walls were gone, and the ceilings that had once divided the stories had been stripped away as well, leaving the structure open from floor to roof and turning the whole interior into a massive shaft. Only the outer walls remained, but those were formed entirely by the organic matter of the Ravage Contamination.
As Jake looked up, he saw something huge and quite unpleasant-looking. It was an organic object suspended near the level of the fifth floor. Thick fleshy cords, each as wide as a human torso, stretched from the walls to the grotesque mass, holding it aloft at the center of the cavernous interior.
The object was several dozen feet across and vaguely resembled a human heart. The organic thing pulsed visibly, drawing mana from the air and pumping it through the cords into the nest walls with every beat. Jake recognized it at once for what it was: the core of the nest.
He remembered the Commander’s words during their very first conversation that to destroy a nest, its core needed to be obliterated.
Owen stood at the center of the floor, looking at Jake. When Jake finally tore his gaze from the throbbing core to his counterpart, D activated his power boots again and dashed across the floor. Upon reaching one of the walls, he immediately began to run up it, the plane of gravity shifting for him again. Jake didn’t need any explanations, as it was quite obvious what D was planning to do next.
When his counterpart reached the height of the fifth floor, he stopped and jumped. Since his power boots were still active, gravity didn’t pull him down. Instead, from Jake’s perspective, the jump looked almost perfectly horizontal.
D twisted midair to face the core, and the instant he reached it, he deactivated the boots. Normal gravity seized him at once, but before he could fall, four scythe-blades erupted from his back and stabbed into the fleshy mass of the core, locking him in place.
He began to crawl across the core like some monstrous insect, using the scythe-blades as legs. Two would pull free and advance while the other two remained embedded, keeping him anchored.
But he didn’t just aimlessly crawl across the core. With his power claws, he slashed into the core over and over, gouging deep furrows into its pulsing flesh. Dark ichor immediately seeped from every wound.
At one point, he struck one of the cords and severed it cleanly. The cut length whipped away, ichor spraying from both torn ends.
As Jake watched his counterpart crawl from one spot to another, he wondered if he himself could deal any kind of damage to the core. If it was as damage-resistant as the outer walls of the nest, and he had no reason to believe otherwise, then he wouldn’t be able to inflict any lasting damage on it.
As for D, he had no trouble damaging it with his power claws. The Spartans used some kind of energy weapons that were very effective against the ravagespawn. Since the Spartans’ weapons and D’s power claws were developed by Mad Mick, they both must have been made from the same tech, working on the same principle.
Sure enough, the nest didn’t appreciate having its core damaged. The core emitted a wave of energy that caused numerous growths to appear on the inner walls of the nest. They grew and transformed into monsters much faster than usual, becoming fully developed within seconds.
Some tore themselves free and dropped to the floor to attack Jake, while others rushed toward the core itself, either leaping onto it or racing along the cords.
At first, Jake thought he needed to keep the ravagespawn away from D to let him focus on destroying the core. So he employed his ranged abilities like Grappling Hook and Rotary Blade Launcher to either yank creatures off the organic mass or blast them away with spinning saw blades.
But he soon realized he shouldn’t have bothered, as D had no trouble dealing with the ravagespawn that made it to the core without his aid. From the look of things, D didn’t really need Jake’s help at all, being fully capable of destroying the core while simultaneously fighting off the ravagers the nest kept unleashing all on his own.
So for the next several minutes, Jake kept fighting the ravagespawn while D kept damaging the core and severing its fleshy supports. At some point, only two cords remained, extending from opposite walls. As for the core itself, by that point it was marred by numerous gashes D had inflicted on it, each oozing vicious dark ichor.
When D severed one of the two remaining cords, the core swung through the air like a pendulum and crashed against the wall. D’s scythe-blades kept him anchored fast to the core. He then severed the final cord, and the core plunged to the ground.
It hit the floor with a wet, brutal thud, and the impact was enough to make it burst apart like an overripe melon. While Jake leaped clear just in time, some of the ravagespawn weren’t so lucky and were crushed beneath the splattering remains.
For a brief moment, the shattered fragments lay still. Then blue light began to shine from every crack and gash on every piece. Jake felt energy building within them, but before he could brace for what was coming, a powerful wave burst outward from the broken core, sweeping through the entire area before quickly fading.
Immediately after that, all the ravagespawn within the structure, as well as the outer walls of the nest, began to shrivel, collapsing into dust that quickly dissipated. Within mere seconds, the entire nest was gone.
Not only the nest itself, but the immediate area around it had also been stripped clean of the organic contamination. All that remained was the skeletal shell of the original building, consisting of nothing more than bare columns and girders.
Now that they were basically standing out in the open, Jake saw that they were not quite alone.
Not far from the bare structure loomed an enormous creature that was at least five stories tall. Its body consisted of two parts. The lower one looked like the body of a scorpion, with a huge segmented tail and four legs. The legs, however, looked more like those of a spider rather than a scorpion. The upper body resembled a human torso with four arms, each ending in curved claws. The long head was shaped like a cone. The entire body of the monster was covered in thick chitinous armor.
Jake summoned the monster’s description and quickly studied it.
Name: Titan (Elite)
Level: 200
Special Abilities:
Abyssal Rain – Repeatedly slamming its tail against the ground, the Titan opens portals over the battlefield, raining spears of dark energy.
Gravity Well – With a supernatural cry, the Titan conjures a sphere of warped force at a chosen spot on the battlefield.
Astral Rend – With each slash of its claws, the Titan tears a fracture into the fabric of reality.
The Titan was only nine levels above Jake. Still, considering its size, it should be quite powerful.
Not that it was the first time he had confronted such an enormous monster. Back in the Maze of Torment, the final boss had been enormous as well, and Jake had mostly crawled across its body like a bug, drilling through its armor to weaken it and then following up with devastating blows from his smashfists. The same approach might work here too.
Jake remembered the Commander telling him and Catalina that a Titan appeared whenever the core of a nest came under attack. That meant the Ravage Contamination had likely started summoning this one the moment D began assaulting the core. And now it was up to the two of them to take care of it.