183. The S-Rank Dungeon (XV) (Patreon)

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The Reaper Queen was still reloading. It had burned itself out. It needed to recharge. There was nothing it could do but watch, horrified as Zane closed in. It was too big. It couldn’t even turn away in time.

He cocked his fist all the way—straining in one vicious chain from his legs, to his back, to his arms, big muscles bulging with essence, with sheer wound-up power. 

And unloaded a Stormfire Smash. 

BOOM! 

His fist sank deep into its side. It looked like punching a cliff wall—textures and everything. Whole sections of rough skin sank in, splintering, cracking—and in its wake there lay a smoldering, blazing crater.

The Reaper Queen screeched. 

You could see the force rippling up its skeleton, branching out, striking its whole body. Wherever it touched, whatever it touched, shattered. Bone, ligament, tissue—one brutal network going CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK! Zane relished the sound. It started close at first, spreading faster and faster…a symphony of clean crisp destruction. 

And he had plenty where that came from.

He blasted again, then again. 

And the Reaper Queen hacked blood. A lake of it in one go. Staining the waters above a deep pure red. 

Zane saw it had defensive Skills, healing Skills. It was drawing on the waters to heal it. Drawing on its Electrification Concept to knit its bones back together—but it was like trying to bail out the Titanic.

It was just as Zane suspected.

This creature could not handle his power.

Bellowing he slammed in another punch. And another. And the entire side of its body caved in, went up in Stormfire. Rough strips of skin, thick as metal plates, flayed off. Crisped to nothing.

The Reaper Queen tried fleeing—got nowhere. Zane kept smashing, smashing, relishing every brutal stroke—

It let out a screech, a last resort, pure desperation. And a supersonic boom crashed through him. A burst of sudden power shucking him off.

But this time he braced hard. Firming all his muscles. 

And that shockwave did not destroy his organs. It rippled through skin. And slowed. Met a wall of dense power, and broke against them, sputtered to nothing. What little got at his organs only upset them. But nothing ruptured.

He came out of it nearly unscathed.

He snorted. 

And at last he got out his Chains.

By how badly Zane was thrashing it, you wouldn’t think it was that much stronger. But Zane felt that difference in every punch. This was Core Formation—it was the difference between being his punching bag, and disintegrating in an instant.

He remembered the System description as he sank another fist into the beast—this thing had only an ‘Inferior’ Grade Core. That didn't sound very good.

He wondered if there were better grades, and how many. He wondered what his Core would be like when he got there.

Soon.

For now he’d finish the job.

He had a wounded, bleeding enemy. More prey than enemy in his mind now. It was struggling to gather itself. It saw him advancing again—and he saw fear marked out plain on its ugly, drooling face, in the horrified droops of its mouth. With Sage Mind, he felt how it perceived him.

Some killing machine, a relentless destroyer. It could not believe how strong he felt. It couldn’t understand how it was possible. All it could do was wail. 

Zane raised his hammers. And laid waste to it for the last time.

Stormfire Smash blew it to oblivion. It struck three times—once between the eyes. Once slamming up the belly. And the finisher fed through the mouth.

By the end of it, almost everything that could be broken was broken. You could hardly make out its form anymore. Only a bloodied, burning, crackling pulp. What happened when you subjected organic matter to an ungodly amount of force.

By the time Reina rushed over to heal him, she found he hadn’t even gotten under 50%. He was breathing hard, but that was all.

“I feel good,” he assured her. “Great, actually.” 

She checked over his body, and found he hadn’t been wounded anywhere vital either. She looked stunned.

Then— 

Level up! 

Essence Level 185 -> 186

Floor 3 Boss has been defeated! 

Floor 3 has been cleared! 

*** 

In the end, everyone was a little surprised by how straightforward it turned out to be. Even Zane.

Other than that little blip at the start, he’d dominated the thing totally. He showed it his power, and it crumpled.

…This was usually how his fights went, now that he thought about it. But he didn’t expect to do it like that to their first Core Boss.

That Godbeast bloodline made a bigger difference than almost any power-up he’d gotten so far. It was on par with Plasma. 

The Boss dropped a single treasure. A reward floating in a halo of soft white light.

A breastplate. A silver S-ranked breastplate called the ‘Plate of Ozymandias.’

They all had good armor already though.

Zane eyed the thing, frowned at it. All that fighting had left him a little hungry…

It looked tasty. He wasn’t sure why. Could he…?

He tried putting it in his mouth. Lacing his teeth with plasma.

“No way,” said Avery.

He started chewing. This did not work.

Avery, Evan, and Reina all stared at him mystified for a second. He kept chewing on it. He frowned. He did not stop. He chewed harder.

It worked.

He was quite pleased with himself as he slurped down melted S-rank treasure metal.

If something is not working, you should do it again but harder. Eventually, it will work. This was a good rule for life in Zane’s opinion.

Soon he’d swallowed the whole thing. They were all rather stunned watching him do it. 

“You’re boyfriend’s something else,” Avery told Reina, shaking her head. 

“He is, isn’t he?” said Reina. She smiled, amused. Somehow she found this endearing.

He didn’t get a Level from just that, but he did feel it doing something. Working its way into his body… these he directed into his muscles instead of his skin. They had plenty of room to grow, it felt like.

“Does anyone have armor to spare?” he asked.

Avery had an S-rank helm. Evan had A-rank greaves. It was enough.

Skill up!

Behemoth Muscles I -> II

Zane was quite pleased at himself for making this discovery. He had opened up an entirely new food category for himself. 

Physical power was the best resource. With enough of it, in his experience, you could overcome pretty much any problem in life.

He wasn’t sure what he’d find down there. But if it wanted to survive him, it had better hope it had the power to match him.

***

The fourth floor opened up—and they descended.

You have entered: 

Final Floor, Challenger Deep

To Clear the Dungeon: 

Slay the Great Nebula Jellyfish 

The walls started narrowing in from all sides, drawing a tight craggy funnel. Dropping lower and lower and lower… soon his friends were struggling to even stay upright. They were fighting just to keep their place. It would be hard for them to move around, dodge much—this dungeon wasn’t suited to them.

He told them to give him a little space, help him from afar. He wanted to be able to block if something jumped them out of the dark. It was the Final Boss of an S-Rank Dungeon. He couldn’t know what it was capable of until he met it.

Evan hesitated and nodded, and so did Avery. Reina was especially reluctant to keep distance from him—she wanted to stay close to heal him better. But she agreed.

*** 

The darkness down here grew absolute. The silence too. It was eerie. Not even the gurgling of deep-sea vents, or the sloshing of fish, or currents churning this way and that. Just endless weight crushing down from above, and the relentless cold of the deep, and the nothing.

Then a big red dot popped up on the mini-map. Right in front of them. 

And all at once, a cloud of little lights poked through the dark. It was as though the Final Boss had popped up out of nothing.

At first Zane thought he was looking at a forest of weird ghostly kelp. Then he realized those were its tentacles, run through with spikes tipped sickly bright purple—tipped with a foreign Concept. He looked up.

Thousands on thousands of light-nodes twinkled inside a ghostly dome of a head. Pouring pale light over the tentacles. 

And each tentacle was stocked with an absurd amount of essence. Mostly on those little purple-tipped spikes.

The whole Monster must’ve been a hundred feet long end to end, and half as wide too. Just floating there, patient as any hunter. Waiting.

Zane felt a certain calmness seeping out from it. Like an undead. The thing was barely even sentient. But like any Monster, there was a flickering hatred buried deep in its gnarled soul.

It only knew one thought.

Seek and destroy.

Great Nebula Jellyfish (Monster)

Essence Level 213

For a moment they just sat there in silence.

Zane took a quick scan of it with Sage Mind. A few things popped out to him. Its main power seemed to be ‘Death’s Grasp’—swarming those tentacles around its prey and injecting them full of its signature venom, a uniquely powerful concoction granted by its Bloodline. Both almost instantly paralyzing and horribly venomous, one of the most feared poisons of its kind. The description warned that just one drop could cripple most physiques. Just one vial would kill a typical Foundation cultivator in seconds. And its tentacles had gallons of the stuff… 

It wielded the Tier 5 ‘Law of Toxic Sludge.’ Wood and Water. 

Zane thought about it for a bit. 

Then he got out his hammers.

The Jellyfish just waited there. As though it were offering him a challenge. Saying, let him come. 

Zane could feel it planned to take him head-on. 

This was all he needed to see. 

He took a heavy Stormfire Step—and waded into the thicket. 

Sure enough the Jellyfish didn't shy away. The moment he leaped, its tentacles flashed up too—dozens snared up at his legs from below. More lanced into his arms, showering sparks up his skin as those spikes big into him—he roared a battle-cry and sank two hammers into that mushroom-cap head.

BOOM-BOOM!

In one blow, he flattened almost a fifth of it. Clouds of flaming ectoplasm burst out; countless soft organs erupted. A great redness bloomed amid the ghostly white.

The thing was wracked with massive pain. Then surprise at that pain—it had a defensive Skill in place. It had expected Zane’s shot to bounce off. Its little mind couldn’t quite grasp what’d just happened to it. 

But none of that mattered now.

Zane had put himself right in the Jellyfish’s grasp. Right in the middle of that tentacle swarm… and they shot up over him. Blocking out the world, blocking out his friends, blocking out any hope Reina had of healing him—

It was like he’d thrown himself in a snake pit.

And they all descended on him at once. Dozens of tentacles lashed onto his arms, his legs. Tying him in place. It was much stronger than he expected—there were some deceptively powerful muscles working under that translucent skin, bunched up in dense cords. Locking him in, stretching him out so tight it was painful.

Dozens of others—tipped with a poison so vicious it hissed when it touched his skin, melting him, ripping into him.

Zane’s skin was hard. But those spikes were honed to fine points—and they were laced with poisons so vicious they worked like acids. 

In an instant they’d lashed him like cracking whips—strong enough to draw blood. Strong enough to dig hooked ends into his skin, securing them...

They began injecting the deadliest poison any creature on Earth had ever felt. 

Straight into his body, all over him. By the gallon. And it had him splayed out spread-eagled, stretched out tight… 

Instantly Zane felt the burning. He groaned. An itching, scalding sensation ripping down his whole body—then a numbing, like his muscles were being preserved, frozen under thick ice. One by one. A spell of wooziness struck him up the head…

It said a lot about how strong this poison was that it had an instantaneous effect even on his body. 

All the while he felt more and more tentacles lashing on. Tying them until he was sure there was no pulling him and the Jellyfish apart. 

His Health had dropped 15% in seconds. Even worse he could feel his limp body starting to paralyze. Starting to fail, piece by piece… 

If he stayed like this just a few seconds longer he’d be in serious trouble. 

But there was a reason he leaped right in. Let this Final Boss sink itself into him. Let it tangle them together so deeply. 

He had hoped this would happen. He was making a simple gamble. 

He was not stuck here with it.

It was stuck here with him.

He gritted his teeth. Clenched his fists. 

And for the first time since the fight began, deep in the clutches of this Core Formation Final Boss, he let loose the full potential of his body. 

All his dormant muscles came suddenly alive. Flared suddenly with rivers of essence; flared against that invading ice. And forcibly halting it where it stood. 

He bellowed.

And his Bloodline began to burn.