CHAPTER 226: REVERSED HUNT

The creature advanced, its tentacles lashing the air with a calculated, sinister slowness. Each movement was a provocation, a demonstration of its absolute superiority. It had no need to hurry. It was the clock and the executioner.

Zirel, his face twisted with impotent rage, leapt first. His daggers carved silver arcs in the amber glow, desperately seeking the pulsing core. The blades sank into the slimy flesh—for a fraction of a second, savage satisfaction—and then were expelled with crushing force, as though the creature had simply... breathed. The shock shot up his arms, a flare of pure pain shattering bone and nerve. One dagger slipped from his grasp, spinning through the air before clattering to the ground with a pitiful sound.

Before he could catch his breath, a tentacle whipped forward, mimicking the exact path of his attack but multiplied in speed and power. The strike slammed into Zirel, hurling him like a rag doll against the rock wall. The crack of breaking ribs rang sharp and terrible, drowned by his muffled scream. He collapsed, unable to breathe, blood streaming from his lips.

"She reflects everything back!" roared Rony, but his voice was little more than a terrified croak.

Inès, hands trembling, took aim and fired. The crossbow bolt cut the air and sank into the pulsing mass with a dull thud. For a brief moment, nothing happened. Then the amber core absorbed the projectile, and the flesh around it contracted violently. A perfect replica of the bolt, wrought of pure amber energy and viscous matter, shot back. Inès didn’t even have time to see it coming. The spectral missile tore through her shoulder, pinning her brutally against the wall. Her scream broke into a gurgle of pain, her arm dangling uselessly.

Every effort, every scrap of courage, was being twisted into an instrument of their own torment. Even their fear seemed to feed it, to give it weight. The core pulsed harder, faster, its glow nearly blinding, beating to the rhythm of their defeat. A perverse, cold, intelligent satisfaction radiated from the creature.

Armin, watching his companions fall one by one, lost the last shred of restraint. With a guttural cry, he charged, shield raised, axe in hand. He did not strike to kill—only to hit, to leave even a scratch. His axe crashed down on a tentacle that coiled forward to meet him. The impact was swallowed in suffocating silence.

The tentacle retracted, then whipped out, perfectly replicating the axe’s swing with surgical precision. Armin’s shield shattered into splinters under the reflected force of his own blow. The shockwave hurled him backward, twisting his arm at an unnatural angle. He crumpled, screaming, clutching the mangled limb.

Silence fell, thick and heavy, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the steady, ravenous beating of the creature’s core. It stood motionless in the center of the cavern, its tentacles slowly unfurling like the petals of some metallic-organic flower. It had barely moved. It had let them destroy themselves.

Maggie, who had held back, watched with a face of stone. She had not struck. She knew. Every blow was an offering, a prayer the monster answered by breaking them.

The creature made a sound then. A wet gurgle, almost like stifled laughter. Then its composite voice, woven from their own fears and those of countless predecessors, echoed once more—this time tinged with something new: boredom.

"Again..." it whispered, the word dragging like a deadly caress. "Show me... your best."

It was taunting them. Waiting for the next act of the spectacle. The feast was served, and it was savoring the appetizer.

A shiver ran through the air, different this time. It was no longer the creature’s voracious vibration, but a wave of cold, sharp determination. Maggie turned her gaze from the battered bodies of her companions to Elisa. The young woman was trembling, not from fear, but from the effort of holding back the torrent of power boiling within her.

"There’s no point in holding back," Maggie said in a low voice that sliced through the groans and the nucleus’s foul beating like a blade. "We will die if we go on like this."

Elisa looked at her, her golden eyes wide with anguish. "What do you want? You want us to use our powers? You know the risk—"

Maggie cut her off, her tone brooking no argument. "It would come out anyway." The implication was clear: if they died here, their secrets died with them. If they survived, far greater problems awaited.

A silence. Then Elisa nodded slowly. A new resolve hardened her features. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she reopened them, they burned with a supernatural emerald glow that spilled into the gloom. Her short hair stood on end as if electrified. The two lead spheres still floating near her temples spun faster and faster until they became vibrating greyish rings, emitting a high-pitched whine that grated against the eardrums. With a swift motion, she seized her spear, its tip trembling, infused with the same quivering energy.

Maggie, for her part, turned to the two stunned soldiers clutching her massive halberd. With a nod, she took it back. Her fingers closed around the smooth wooden shaft. A deep rumble rose from her chest. A reddish, telluric glow suddenly enveloped her, as though she stood at the heart of an invisible forge. Hot vapor hissed from her nostrils, the air around her shimmering with heat distortion. Her muscles, already swollen, seemed to swell further with primitive power. The halberd in her hands was no longer a weapon, but the deadly extension of her will.

The creature, motionless, stopped mocking. The amber core throbbed faster, no longer with hunger but with sudden curiosity—perhaps even a flicker of alarm. It felt the change. The nature of the prey had shifted.

Elisa struck first. No cry, no wasted gesture. She simply leveled her spear at a tentacle that slithered too close. The air between tip and flesh tore open. An invisible, brute force surged through it. The tentacle did not explode—it was shredded, as though seized by giant, deranged hands that twisted and ripped it into tatters of slimy flesh and whitish bone that scattered in chunks. A jet of black, corrosive sap gushed forth, hissing as it ate into the stone. The creature shuddered, a spasm of mute pain writhing through its mass. This was not a returned strike—it was a violation of its form.

Before it could retaliate, Maggie entered the dance. She did not charge. She simply appeared at another tentacle’s side, her halberd already in motion. The blow was of deadly simplicity: a horizontal sweep. But the air screamed around the blade. The power she had poured into it was monstrous. The tentacle was severed cleanly, not as if by a blade, but by the raw force of an avalanche. The severed hunk flew across the cavern and splattered against the organic wall with the sound of an overripe fruit.

The creature recoiled—for the first time. Its core was racing, amber light flickering erratically. It tried its old trick: a new tentacle sprouted where the old one had been, paler, thinner, and lashed through the air, replicating Maggie’s halberd strike with multiplied force.

Maggie grinned, a predator’s snarl. She simply drove the iron-shod butt of her halberd into the stone floor and took the blow.

The shock that would have pulverized a wall of rock surged through the weapon, into her body, and was absorbed, channeled, controlled. The halberd’s shaft thrummed like a tuning fork, but Maggie didn’t move an inch. The vapor around her grew scalding.

"My turn," she growled.

She wrenched the halberd free from the ground and, in the same motion, struck again. This time it was no cut but a thrust. The tip pierced the air and impaled the new tentacle—but instead of stopping, Maggie pushed. A wave of concentrated force erupted from the weapon’s point, pulverizing the tentacle for several meters, reducing the flesh to a viscous mist.

Meanwhile, Elisa advanced, her eyes blazing with concentrated fury. She no longer needed her spear. Her hands stretched toward the central core. The veins at her temples bulged. The two lead spheres melted into a single amorphous mass that shot forward like a meteor and smashed into the amber light.

The impact was not physical. It was psychic. The entire cavern shook. The creature emitted a sound no longer a murmur but a piercing shriek—made of a thousand voices screaming in unison, in agony. The core wavered, its light faltering.

For the first time, they had truly hurt it. Not by reflecting its strength, but by striking it with something utterly alien, purely other.

The monster’s shriek reverberated through the cavern’s bowels, fracturing the very air, as if every stone, every drop of water vibrated with its pain. Its frenzied tentacles battered the walls, shattering rock columns, smashing pools that erupted into black geysers. It was no longer attacking. It was convulsing.

Maggie and Elisa exchanged a look—the look of two women who know that what they have unleashed can never again be stopped.