Chapter 44: | Abominations
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The waters trembled.
My limbs blurred forward, latching, tearing, ripping through skin, flesh, and bone.
I smiled.
My body had already recovered its vigor, pulsing with fresh strength after just a few hours of killing and devouring.
All thanks to Glutcycle Ascension, my one and only Ascension I skill.
The more I kill, the more I consume, the faster I grew.
This was the sixth floor of the dungeon.
I didn't care how slow my level progress was.
My raw strength had already tripled, maybe more, after stacking my two transformations.
Bloomcore Leviathan and Bloomcrown Cataclysm Form.
Now, my body was armored in layered flora and sediment plates.
When struck, my plates released thorned vines that lashed out in retaliation.
Spiked ridges, gem-encrusted and jagged, bloomed across my limbs when I willed it.
Fang-lined petals crowned my skull like a shattered halo, each one trembling with coiled mana.
If I wanted to make my tentacles more lethal, I could coat them in the poison my body passively secreted… or allow fresh spikes to bloom across the length.
If I really wanted destruction, I could channel different types of mana through each strike.
Even my crown wasn't useless.
It could discharge a weak lightning-based attack, though it was far less impressive than the exaggerated descriptions had promised.
Bored, I gazed ahead.
Carcasses floated before me, evidence of my passing.
My creations devoured them hungrily, but their growth was still... disappointing.
Yes, they were evolving. Slowly.
But they needed thousands of corpses to gain even a hint of strength.
That rate doubled for me.
I barely gained anything from Stage 0 or weak Stage 1 monsters, and those were all my minions had to work with.
To raise an army, I'd need countless monsters and constant supervision.
I didn't have time for that.
I lashed a tentacle in frustration.
A hologram flickered to life nearby.
I ignored it.
Something more interesting had arrived.
Lord-Class monsters.
Their forms loomed in the depths ahead, some grotesque, some eerily majestic, but I didn't care.
I could smell their skills.
That scent alone made me laugh.
This wouldn't be a battle.
This would be a feast.
Spores bled from my body, spreading through the water like ink.
I exhaled slowly, letting the current carry their subtle influence.
The first of them emerged, an armored beast that resembled a dunkleosteus, though its plating shimmered with metals I couldn't identify.
Not adamantine.
Not mithril.
Something denser, magically augmented, and throbbing with mana.
The second, a humanoid creature made of gnarled wood, its body armored in bark-like exoskeletons.
Tentacles extended from its spine, but not like any cephalopod.
They moved wrong.
And its aura... wronger still.
The last two arrived together.
One was a massive grouper clad in mithril mixed with adamantine, its gills flaring with each slow breath.
The other, a demonic eel with wings, horns, and a vampiric maw.
A single eye pulsed on its forehead.
All of them was dangerous.
Each of them.
But not to me.
They vanished in synchronized blurs, attacking from multiple angles.
My compound eyes tracked them all.
My tentacles lashed out, intercepting every strike before it landed.
Reflexes born of instinct.
Strategy born of hunger.
I laughed.
Then my body bloomed.
Spikes erupted across my armor, thousands of them, and with a grunt, I detonated them in all directions.
Blood followed.
Gouts of it, carried in the current.
My enemies, my allies, none were spared.
I turned to one of my own guards, its head impaled by a cluster of my spikes.
But pity vanished a second later.
It was regenerating, violently, forcing the spikes out with wild cellular growth.
I looked back at the Lord-Class monsters.
The demonic eel was dead, decapitated, four spikes embedded in its twitching body.
The grouper writhed, its insides ruined by barbed punctures.
It gasped with ragged, bloody heaves.
Only the dunkleosteus and treant had emerged unscathed.
Their durability had held, for now.
Phase two began.
The dunkleosteus surged toward me, a living missile of armored death.
The treant hovered behind, gathering mana from the water.
Magic circles bloomed like flowers around its body.
Dangerous.
Yes.
But I saw an opportunity.
My tentacles vanished, blurring through the water like smoke.
I reappeared directly in front of the treant and stabbed forward.
Nothing.
Its stomach regenerated immediately, trapping my tentacles inside its body.
The wood warped around me, sealing tight.
I laughed at my own mistake.
Stupid move.
Grunting, I forced my way out, shredding bark and woodflesh alike.
But it kept healing, locking me back in.
Every second I stayed, I heard it,the creak of fibers breaking, the groan of flesh repairing, again and again.
Then pain.
The dunkleosteus bit into me from behind, its maw tearing through the flesh near my gills.
Again.
Again.
Its jaws clamped down, relentless.
Life drained from me.
Victory hovered before them.
But it wasn't theirs.
It was mine.
Nullbloom Abyssveil had activated long before the fight even began.
The spores I'd released earlier weren't for show.
They had already begun infecting their minds, whispers of victory, illusions of control.
I let them believe they'd won.
Then came the second wave.
Toxic spores erupted from my gills, flooding the battlefield.
They distorted perception, disoriented instincts.
Then I coated my tentacles in the same spores and struck, driving my stingers into their flesh.
Again and again.
Dream and reality blurred.
They didn't know which one they were in.
Didn't matter.
My tentacles split open.
And they devoured every Lord-Class monster, whole, writhing, and alive.
A stream of notifications blinked to life before my eyes.
I didn't bother reading them.
I already knew.
I had won.
But I felt nothing.
The fight ended too easily.
All I did was let them hallucinate, then attack, then devour.
There was no thrill.
No pressure.
No challenge.
It was just them displaying their weakness.
I hated it.
A tasteless kill, a boring victory.
I don't want that.
I have no knowledge of their strength.
Were they even worthy?
Could they corner me?
Wound me?
Kill me?
Questions flooded my mind as I glided through the currents toward the center of the plains, toward the Overseer's domain.
I would fight it.
I would find answers.
I would test if it could kill me.
My desire for battle surged.
The more I lost of myself, of who I once was, the more I became a creature of instinct, a thing that craved carnage.
The squid that nearly ended me... I no longer hated it.
I admired it.
I wanted to fight it again, defeat it, devour it, assimilate its skills into my being.
Not just take them.
Fuse them.
Strengthen them.
Make them mine.
My momentum halted.
A question formed.
Was this truly my path?
The path of carnage and destruction?
If so... then I would not be a beast.
I would be intelligent.
Tactical. In control.
Yes.
A sovereign not just of brute force, but of mind.
A ruler.
A schemer.
A creature that wins through power and precision.
That... that would be my path.
Hahaha. I see.
Then pain.
A clean slice.
My dorsal fin was gone.
I didn't see it.
Not even a ripple.
My compound eyes scanned the open terrain.
My gills flared.
Spores flooded the water around me in instinctive reaction.
But there was nothing.
This wasn't a jungle.
This was a barren plain of current and stone, visibility should have been absolute.
So how did it vanish?
How did it strike?
My thoughts sharpened to a blade.
No ordinary bastard could do this.
Unless... it was a High King.
Unless... it possessed stealth and speed-type Ascension skills.
Yes.
Based on the precision of the cut, this was no Thalasian variant.
Not like the Wrathfin Seraph.
Another cut.
Then another.
My tentacles sheared again and again, blood and muscle peeling from me in layers.
Then it hit me.
A conclusion.
My mouth widened into a grin that split me past the bone.
A new species.
Hahaha.
BahaHA!
Something unknown.
Unseen.
That meant if I devoured this bastard... a new skill would be mine.
Something I didn't understand yet.
Something to discover and mutate.
My instincts shrieked in approval.
Spores exploded from my gills in thick, choking clouds.
The water around the murals turned to poison.
My creations backed off, heeding the signal.
They surrounded the battlefield from a hundred meters out, forming a wide perimeter.
Then came the drums.
They beat their tentacles against the seabed.
They cheered.
Fanatics.
They screamed with joy, with zealot's devotion, as they watched their creator battle.
I smiled.
I opened my Maw and let loose a bellow that rippled across the abyss.
Not soldiers.
Subordinates.
And they responded.
The battlefield trembled with their chants.
Vibrations tore through the current, and I felt the stealth break.
The bastard had been forced to reveal itself.
There.
It was pitch black.
Living darkness.
Its blue eyes burned with ghostly light, staring straight through me.
Its serpentine body shimmered, muscles coiled, wings like fins stretching wide.
Power bled from them like toxin from a wound.
Its horn turned transparent, then its entire body followed.
Ghost-like.
My flesh tore again.
Then the pain.
Unfiltered.
Savage.
A toxin I couldn't identify raced through me, corroding my insides.
Every cut it made spread it further.
Every wound amplified it.
And still I smiled.
Because this thing... this darkness... this bastard.
Would be mine.