NABC Chapter 858: Adapting Beast
Chapter 858: Adapting Beast
The liquid ran silver-grey and thick, and it moved like it was still deciding what to be.Shapes surfaced and dissolved inside the flow: a coral spire, a stand of frozen pines, a sandstone archway, each one flickering into form and melting back down.
Through Alice’s enhanced perception, Kaiden felt the sheer density of compressed mana inside it and understood.
’Liquid dungeon mass. Twenty dungeons, melted down and kept.’ Everything the Kaiju had ever devoured was still inside it, rendered into raw material. ’That’s not just blood but its hoard as well.’
The Kaiju howled again, and this time the sound carried a new intent.
Its chest heaved, and it vomited a river of the silver-grey liquid across the plain in a sweeping arc.
Where the flood splashed down, the white floor grew teeth. A coral forest crystallized to razor height in seconds. Sandstone columns punched upward under the Maulfiend lines and scattered them. A hillside of black thorns swallowed the ground the Quakelords had claimed, and the dead dungeons the creature had eaten came back as a battlefield, stitched together wrong.
"It can rebuild terrain," Nyx called out, eyes tracking the spreading collage. "Damn it..."
The wounded started coming back through the lines, and the rear formation proved itself.
Dungeon-Born pairs ran the gaps, guiding Skyfiends down through the chaos with crushed Maulfiends slung in harnesses beneath them, while their shield-bearers walled off every yard of the route to the healing ring.
Alexandra’s light met each arrival before it finished landing.
She worked with her tongue caught between her teeth and her hands sure, golden warmth sinking into abyssal plating for the first time in her life, and when the first mended Maulfiend rose and dipped its massive head to her before charging back toward the front, she broke into a proud smirk and kept healing through it.
The Kaiju noticed.
Six burning eyes had been reading the battlefield between blows, and they found the pattern: broken things flowed toward the golden light and came back whole.
The creature that had learned to bank cards mid-match needed nothing more than that to pick out the most worthwhile target on the field. Its fissure-mouth swung toward the healing ring.
"Blondie, don’t resist!" Nyx had been waiting for exactly this since the first mended Maulfiend stood back up.
The mouth wrenched open and fired a column of liquid dungeon mass at Alexandra, the compressed weight of dead worlds falling toward one healer, and space folded around her in the same instant.
Nyx tore her backward three hundred meters in a single fold, faster than any warning could have been spoken, and there was no time left for a second one.
The wounded beneath the column’s shadow had no legs to run on, and the Dungeon-Born had never once lied to themselves about the size of their role on this field.
Two broken warriors on their stretchers and the three shield-bearers walling them off looked up at the descending dark, found Alexandra where the fold had carried her, and saluted their healer.
The column landed where the golden light had been.
[Unit losses: Dungeon-Born x5.]
Alexandra reappeared beside Nyx with her scream finally catching up to her, both hands reaching toward the crater, golden light spilling off her fingers with nowhere to go.
"Put me back! They were right there, I can still... I have to..."
"You can’t." Nyx’s voice came gentle and completely immovable, eyes never leaving the Kaiju. "They chose this. The only thing left to do for them is keep the rest alive."
"I know that, but!"
"No buts."
Kaiden marked the debt without a word, and the next Wrath detonation he drove into the creature’s open seam carried all of it.
After that, the healer stopped having feet.
Nyx hardened a pocket of folded space against her own back and set Alexandra into it, and wherever the Space Babe moved through the battle, her golden cargo came along, light reaching out of the pocket to mend whatever bled within reach.
"You heal, I drive." Nyx grinned, settling the weight against her spine. "My adorable backpack healer."
"..." Alexandra pressed her tears flat with the heel of one hand, and the light that rose off her palms after that came steadier than it had all duel. "We’re like a budget Kaiden-Alice duo..." she managed, a wet giggle breaking through halfway.
Then the Kaiju crouched.
Every line of its colossal body loaded downward, four legs folding like siege engines compressing, and Kaiden’s blood went cold with recognition.
He’d seen this on the staging plain on Earth, when the creature ripped the planet’s own bedrock out from under itself and rode the wreckage into the sky to escape his mother’s hold, then aimed its entire falling mass at the people he loved.
There was no dungeon gate to hide behind this time.
"It’s jumping!" he roared, and the whole army was already bracing.
...
The Kaiju leapt, and the sky of the duel dimension turned the color of stone.
It went up the way it had on Earth, and it came down the same way, legs folded, crown aimed, six eyes locked on the center of Kaiden’s formation through the veils of darkness still clinging to its face.
A mountain range had decided to become a meteor.
This time, they answered together, and nobody had to assign the catch.
"Mine," Bastet declared to the team, bare feet already turning toward the impact line, and Kaiden poured weight down her bond in answer, everything Lust Stance could shape arriving at once.
The catch point, the one spot where her weight could meet the falling mass head-on, sat three hundred meters to her left, and the slowest member of the team did not run.
Luna materialized beside her in a crack of red lightning, hooked an arm around the taller woman’s waist, and took off with the felinid held sideways like a rolled carpet.
"You could at LEAST kick your legs or something!"
"Kicking is undignified. I knew you’d come for me." Dust trailed off Bastet’s dangling toes. "Faster, please."
Luna dumped her at the catch point with a string of curses, and Bastet’s bare soles settled against the ground as gold flooded her eyes and Divine Dominion reached up.
She could not stop that much falling mass, so she did not try.
She set her weight against the meteor’s leading edge and pushed sideways instead, the same skew she had used on charging bosses all match long, scaled up until the golden cracks beneath her feet spread wider than the formation behind her. The descent slid by one degree, then two.
"Nyx." Her voice came through her teeth. "It is heavier than the mountain it pretends to be."
"On it."
Nyx hurled every loose ton of sandstone the creature’s own flood had given her into the creature’s leading shoulder, compounding the drift, while Aria’s lattice, Alice’s beam, and Scarlet’s columns hammered the underside in stacked succession. Vespera’s shadows rose from the plain as a forest of lances angled against the falling crown.
The Kaiju missed.
It came down two hundred meters wide of the formation with an impact that threw the entire army off its feet.
"SHELL!" Taigi’s roar to her warriors beat the shockwave by half a second, and the shield-bearers locked into a bronze dome over the wounded as the blast swept the rear line like a wave breaking over a harbor wall. Boots carved furrows across the ground, but the dome held, and above it Nyx rode the blast backward through folded space with her backpack healer’s light wrapped around them both.
The creature tried to rise, and the beating began.
Bastet did not let the weight lift. She walked toward the sprawled colossus one unhurried step at a time, golden cracks spreading from her soles, and her dominion settled across its spine like the sun bearing down on a world that had no choice but to orbit.
"Know your place," the Manifestation of Dominion decreed to the mountain at her feet.
Vespera’s cables wound through the same knees she had held once before, back when it cheated her grip by tearing the ground out from under them both. There was no bedrock to rip loose this time; the floor of a duel dimension did not come up. Her red gaze fixed on the creature’s nearest thrashing leg, and she gave it a single flat word.
"Down."
Kaiden dropped Lust, let the warmth in the bonds go quiet, and swapped to Gluttony as he drove his gauntlet into the seam Calypso held open and drank.
The Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet had been built to harvest blood, and it accepted the liquid dungeon mass the way a furnace accepts oil.
Power flooded up his arm in volumes he had no baseline for, Gluttony siphoning alongside it, and then a window flickered at the corner of his vision that made him grin in the middle of a war.
[Hostile dungeon reserve detected.]
[Draining... DMP +180.]
[Draining... DMP +540.]