Chapter 201: More Than One (1/2)

I turned towards Chrona while pointing at the figure, ”Wait, that thing is Emagrotha?”

She shook her head, ”Her voice comes from the pit, but it's warped.”

Torix pulled Althea, moving them behind the three of us. He smacked his staff against the ground while pulling out his grimoire, the pages flipping by themselves,

”Prepare yourselves.”

Torix snapped me out of being stunned. I smashed my fists together, my gray armor denting under the force. My runes charged in a second, my mana saturating my blood for a singularity. Chrona and Krog stared at the pit, stunned into utter silence by the sight of it. From the top of Torix's staff, a white light rose to the top of the room, blasting it with a beam of illumination. The light exposed the brutality playing out before us.

The Hybrid appeared in its full fury. It stood with a titanic frame smothered in gray wires and machinery. Bulbous, pulsing capsules of orange liquid rippled across the surface of its metal skin. It had no eyes nor face, though it was humanoid in shape. Its arms pierced into a pit of pale, lavender muck. Matrices of metal extended out from its hands into the lilac pool, reaching throughout the abyss.

At the top of the hole, white gemstones floated on the surface. They connected together through a series of dark viens along the top of the pool. Shockwaves of energy pulsed through this demonic entity, ushering out plumes of waste with each passing second. Emagrotha was drowning Giess in a toxic wave of sludge.

I couldn't understand how the hell this happened or why. In their last fight, everyone described a bright flash of white light which I assumed was nuclear in nature. It might not have been something to destroy Emagrotha, however. Maybe Lehesion wanted to send a message to anyone that tried to oppose him, using Emagrotha as an example.

Maybe this was why he disappeared.

As I inspected the pool, a mouth opened at its center, giving way to jagged teeth. A warped voice groaned out in desperation,

”Kill me...Please.”

My stomach sank as Chrona burst into tears, falling onto her knees. She hyperventilated as she gasped, ”I remember. I remember...He never killed her. He never killed her. He...”

Krog had the opposite reaction, his chest puffing out as his eyes narrowed. He siphoned mana from his surroundings, rage pouring out from him. He growled,

”Fight in her name, Chrona. Save her from being food for this demon.”

Althea pulled out her rifle, growing her arm into the complex arrays of metal. She extended a blade of bone from it, ready to tear the Hybrid apart. Torix flipped the pages of his grimoire, creating a bubble of air around Chrona's head. Her breathing slowed as she gained a measure of stability.

As our team handled personal crises, the Hybrid tilted its head at us, twitching about at random. It cleared the facility weeks ago and never expected anyone to arrive. That was good. It gave us time to collect ourselves.

Before the peace shattered, Krog slapped his tail across the face of Chrona. He shouted, ”Now is your time to prove your worth to Emagrotha. We may save her from this horror. Rise, Chrona. Die in glory or live in regret.”

Chrona nodded, getting her shit together. Her eyes widened and dilated as she stood tall. She wheezed, ”For my lady, I can do anything.”

As the tension reached its fever pitch, I analyzed the creature and found out what I could.

Version 2.0(lvl: 18,928~ | Species: Unknown | Guild: Unknown) - An abomination, created from twisted minds that will be destroyed without mercy by Schema's forces. This creature is unbelievably tenacious and difficult to kill. There is little to gather from its existence outside of comparisons with the other Hybrid. It was far easier to analyze, carrying less analysis blocking measures.

Considering this is a far more refined version and has been draining what appears to be a deformed version of Emagrotha, this isn't something you can hope to kill on your own.

Good luck.

Behind me, Althea charged arcane magic into her shots. Torix readied an elemental armada of missiles, his control of the staff already absolute. Krog amplified a cloud of blue mana around the creature's face, smothering it with sound and light. Chrona created a ball of blue energy above her head, a spacetime ripple pulsing around us. As the odd sense of temporal dilation passed over me, I reached out my hand.

It was time to kill.

I generated a singularity at the center of the monster's chest. At the same time, I condensed Event Horizon over the beast. A tiny gravity well formed before reaching a point of near infinite pull. The Hybrid stood within it, unfazed as its chest disappeared into a black void. Seconds passed before the black hole erupted in a wave of radiation and kinetic force. The facility quaked, rock chips and dust pluming outwards in every direction.

Torix pushed his staff out sideways, parting the seas of dust. The wave cleared the room, showing the hybrid standing with orange blood oozing from its arms and legs. The destructive explosion hardly harmed it, its tenacity exceeding anything we'd ever seen. The only damage done to it was from the singularity pulling in matter from the monster.

It reassembled itself, repairing in seconds. Removing its arms from the pit took more time than healing, however. Before it accomplished the task, we unloaded our full arsenal onto it.

Althea bombarded it with harpoons of bone charged with arcane energies. The crack of each bullet behind me echoed through the room like a detonation of a grenade by my ear. Torix pummeled the creature with a medley of elemental spells, each of them designed to synergize with one another. They cast the Hybrid into a plume of sapphire shaded fire, ripples of purple lightning arcing out from the explosions.

Krog roared out with magical enhancements, sending out another shockwave across the room. Every electronic screen shattered while metal ripped near the center of his booming outcry. It carried a deep sadness, chilling me to my bones. Behind him, Chrona opened her jaws, and a plume of purple fire erupted from her maw. The combined onslaught brought the Hybrid to its knees. It crumpled to bits and pieces, splattering across the ground. The moment our assault lessened, I learned why it did not fear us.

It did not need too.

The monster did more than survive. The vitality of the creation sprang forth, overwhelming and absolute. It reformed in seconds, its body pulling back together. Without its arms stuck in the pit, it leaned over, its orange pustules emptying. An orange aura of mana condensed over it at the shadow of the figure loomed behind it. It stood up to the edge of the room, breathtaking and abominable.

Like a lightning berserker, it burst off the ground with speed unrivaled. I met its charge, detonating my runes as I dashed off the floor. I dipped into my mana, creating gravitational flows to enhance my mass and weight. I wielded telekinetic implants to give myself firmer footing. I prepared myself to stop its charge with all of my power.

And I was nothing.

It tore through the inertia of my charge as if passing through a wall of water. My teeth shattered. The bones in my chest collapsed. My lungs punctured. My blood splattered. My organs burst. I caved in, every piece of my body imploding under the onslaught of this monster's might.

It was cataclysmic. It was something unmatched. Never before had I been so utterly devastated with a single attack. In one dash, this thing turned me into a soup of metal, my bones reduced to chunks. With my body splayed out against a wall, I glanced around, my vision blurry. At least it missed my head, as if it needed to aim.

I peered off to my side, finding a rock wall behind me. The Hybrid saturated the stone with orange, augmentation mana. This reinforced the structure, making it hard and dense enough to crush me against it. In front of me, the Hybrid was digging his arms into my chest. Tiny wires dug into my body, like tendrils of fire squirming through my veins.

This was the deciding point of the battle. If the Hybrid could consume me like this, we never had a chance to begin with. It would wrap around me and destroy me from the inside, feasting on my body while destroying the others. Understanding this, I aimed for one thing only.

Keep the beast at bay.

With the bit of consciousness I still had left, I tried moving my arms to grab the Hybrid's shoulders. They wouldn't budge. Knowing they were too broken to move, I attempted something else. I drilled out with needles of my armor, piercing into the body of the hybrid. Like a two-headed Ouroboros, each of us ate the other, competing to see who would win.

It was a standstill, the both of us inching for ground. From its wires, mechanical prosthetics expanded, assimilating my blood and bone. My own needles extended outwards water freezing into a snowflake, sapping its vitality. In a display of horror, we tore at the other, the sound of tearing sinews echoing through the chamber.

After holding my ground, I discovered I was at a loss. It was overwhelming me, though only by the slightest of margins, it overtook fragments of an inch at times. My loss was inevitable. Given time, it would consume me into itself, growing into a being of untold might.

My loss mattered little, however. I wasn't the only one fighting this monstrosity.

Aimed with precision, a spear cut through the head of the Hybrid, pinning it into the enhanced wall it created. Realizing I wasn't fodder it could devour in seconds, the Hybrid attempted latching off from me. Too late for that. Before it could escape, I molded my armor through my body, creating pillars of black ore through my limbs. These metal bars acted in place of bones, giving my muscles something to pull off of.

With function returning to my limbs, I grabbed the monster. The thing swung its hulking arm at my braced neck. The metal bones of my spine caved in, bending under the Hybrid's freakish might. I kept my hold despite my arms weakening, stopping it from charging towards Althea and the others.

A series of elemental shards pierced into the hybrid's body as I distracted the monster. Splinters of condensed ice, acid, and fire exploded from within the beast. These spells kept contained, not spreading like the previous magic had, protecting me.