Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 191: Chapter 191: Descent to the Core

Chapter 191: Descent to the Core

The deafening roar of the surface war slowly faded into a dull, heavy rumble.

Draven stepped over a pile of molten slag. The prototype siege cannon fired by Cole had carved a perfectly smooth, glass-like tunnel straight through the lower foundations of the city.

The extreme thermal energy had fused the broken cobblestones into a slick ramp leading deep into the crust of the mountain.

Nyx and Lucien followed closely behind him. They left the bright morning sun behind, descending into the pitch-black maw of the earth.

The darkness of the abyss was suffocating.

BZZZT!

Blue lightning crackled brightly down the length of Lucien’s new rapier. The elegant swordsman held the glowing blade up like a torch. The electric blue light cast long, flickering shadows across the blackened stone walls.

"The ambient mana is growing incredibly dense," Lucien noted softly. He kept his eyes locked on the darkness ahead.

"It feels like we are walking into the stomach of a dead god."

Nyx spun her pitch-black daggers effortlessly. The void-steel seemed to drink the blue light from the rapier.

"Cole outdid himself with these blades," Nyx murmured.

"But this tunnel is too quiet. The King Level Beast is cornered. It will not just let us walk down to its core without a trap."

Draven maintained a slow, highly deliberate pace.

Every single step sent a sharp, agonizing spike of pain through his fractured ribs. His human host body was failing on a fundamental, cellular level. The internal bleeding was severe.

He suppressed a violent cough, tasting hot copper in the back of his throat. He did not show a single ounce of weakness to his squad.

The smooth glass tunnel abruptly ended.

They stepped out of the artificial trench and into a natural, jagged subterranean cavern. The air here was completely stagnant.

A thick, sickeningly sweet odor hit their noses. It smelled like rotting flowers and old blood.

"Wait," Nyx warned sharply.

She raised a dagger. The shadows clinging to the jagged ceiling of the cavern began to swirl in an unnatural, chaotic rhythm.

HISSSSS!

Hidden vents in the rocky walls violently purged. A massive, incredibly dense cloud of glowing green gas flooded the entire passageway.

It rolled across the cavern floor like a tidal wave of toxic fog, rapidly filling the space from floor to ceiling.

"Do not breathe it in!" Lucien ordered.

He quickly pulled the high collar of his uniform over his nose and mouth.

It was completely useless. The trap was not a simple, inhaled poison. It was a highly concentrated, hallucinogenic fear-gas.

The King Level Beast had rigged the upper abyss to physically and mentally shatter the minds of any intruders. The green gas seeped effortlessly through their clothes and directly into their pores.

Nyx stumbled backward. She squeezed her dark eyes shut.

The dark poison rapidly hijacked her nervous system. The stone cavern vanished. She suddenly saw the bloodied faces of the Eclipse Hunters she had failed to save in the prison.

The phantom bodies reached out from the fog, grabbing her ankles. The agonizing guilt clawed relentlessly at her brain, threatening to paralyze her completely.

Lucien gritted his teeth. A cold sweat broke out across his forehead. Phantom thunder cracked loudly in his ears, showing him horrifying visions of his noble house burning to ash. His mind began to spiral into a deep, inescapable panic.

Draven did not flinch.

The fear-gas washed over him, but it found nothing to exploit. His mind was an impenetrable fortress of cold, cosmic isolation.

He had lived a hundred lives. He had seen horrors that would break a god. A simple chemical hallucination could not breach his discipline.

He calmly raised his left hand.

[Vector Manipulation]

Draven grabbed the kinetic momentum of the toxic gas particles floating in the air. He did not try to blow the gas away. He violently pushed the specific chemical vectors outward in a perfect, continuous sphere.

He created a localized, heavily pressurized kinetic vacuum bubble right in the middle of the toxic cloud.

The green fear-gas slammed hard against the invisible barrier and bounced off harmlessly. The area inside the ten-foot bubble was instantly purged of toxins. The air was left perfectly clean and heavily oxygenated.

Nyx gasped loudly for breath. Her dark eyes snapped open. The horrifying phantom hands vanished instantly. She fell to one knee, panting heavily. Lucien blinked rapidly, shaking his head to clear the lingering visions of fire.

"Stay close," Draven commanded softly.

"Do not step outside the bubble. We keep moving."

Nyx and Lucien quickly recovered their composure. They moved closer to Draven, staying securely within the invisible kinetic shield.

They marched straight through the dense toxic fog. The kinetic bubble parted the glowing green gas effortlessly, like a sturdy ship sailing through a violent green ocean.

After twenty grueling minutes of deep descent, the narrow cavern finally began to widen. The green gas completely dissipated, sucked away by heavy subterranean drafts pouring from below.

Draven dropped the kinetic bubble to conserve his rapidly fading mana reserves.

They stepped onto a high, flat ridge made of pure black obsidian. They looked down into a cavern so massively large it completely defied all natural logic.

They had finally reached the core of Thaldrasil.

Towering, colossal wooden roots thicker than heavy naval warships hung suspended in the center of the subterranean dome.

They were the ancient, magical lifelines of the World Tree. But the beautiful, glowing wood was entirely desecrated.

Thick, pulsing layers of dense dark matter coated the ancient roots. The corruption was sickening to look at. The shadows actively breathed and writhed like diseased living flesh.

"There is no giant spider," Lucien noted quietly.

He pointed his glowing lightning blade downward toward the center of the massive root system.

"The form we fought in the council chamber was just a disposable shell," Lucien deduced.

Draven looked at the exact center of the cavern.

"That is the core," Draven said flatly.

The true body of the King Level Beast was a horrifying, disgusting culmination of pure cosmic corruption. It was a nightmare forged from stolen magic and digested souls.

Suspended between the massive, corrupted wooden roots was a colossal, beating heart. It was easily the size of a grand cathedral.

But it was not made of muscle or organic tissue. The entire heart was constructed from millions of dark, unblinking eyes.

The eyes darted wildly, staring in every single direction at once, endlessly searching for threats.

THUMP.

THUMP.

The massive eye-heart beat with a sickening, incredibly loud wet rhythm. The sound echoed painfully off the obsidian walls.

Thick, heavy chains made entirely of writhing, solid shadows anchored the massive heart to the cavern ceiling.

Extending straight upward from the top of the colossal heart was a towering, humanoid torso.

It had no head and no face. It was just a shifting, terrifying mass of dark matter and jagged bone spikes that reached blindly toward the dark roof of the dome.

But the true horror lay at the bottom of the entity.

Acting as massive veins connecting the colossal heart directly into the roots of the World Tree were dozens of gigantic, pulsating parasitic worms. They were bloated, glowing with the stolen magical energy of the mountain.

At the head of every single giant worm was a stretched, agonizing human face.

They were the assimilated faces of the Beast’s past victims and hosts. Lord Lionel’s face was plainly visible on the thickest, central worm.

His human mouth was stretched unnaturally wide as he screamed in a perpetual, silent torment.

The faces were fused permanently into the flesh of the worms, acting as living conduits for the dark magic.

The sheer psychological weight of the abomination was staggering. Just looking at the endless eyes and the screaming faces was enough to make a normal warrior completely lose their grip on reality.

Lucien leveled his crackling rapier. His hand remained perfectly steady despite the overwhelming horror.

Nyx vanished entirely into the shadows cast by the ridge. Her bloodlust spiked to unprecedented levels, her void-steel daggers humming with lethal anticipation.

The millions of unblinking eyes in the colossal heart all simultaneously stopped darting. They shifted in perfect unison. They locked directly onto the rugged, middle-aged human guard standing on the obsidian ridge.

"YOU CAME TO DIE IN THE DARK."

The voice did not echo in the cavern. It bypassed their eardrums entirely, vibrating violently against their skulls.

It was a terrifying mixture of a thousand overlapping human screams layered beneath a deep, rumbling demonic growl.

Draven stared down at the towering, chained abomination.

His fractured ribs screamed in protest. His failing lungs bled internally. His mana core was burning on its very last fumes.

Draven slowly unbuckled the heavy iron chainmail of his host body. He let the ruined, blood-soaked armor drop to the ashen floor.

He rolled his shoulders, adjusting his posture into a flawless, relaxed fighting stance. His scarred, bearded face clearly reflected the glow of the millions of red eyes staring back at him.

"I am going to break your heart," Draven replied softly.

His voice was completely devoid of fear or hesitation. The extreme chill in his tone cut through the demonic pressure like a surgical scalpel.

The final boss fight had officially begun.

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