Chapter 51: The Calamity!
The Umbral Stalker’s shadow-form had dissipated, its feline body thrashing uncontrollably as the Sightless Marrow-Hound’s jaws remained firmly locked onto its shattered front leg.
The accidental ambush had effectively neutralized the Tier 3 predator.
Krax, the Vanguard scout, pressed his back against the petrified bone wall, his breath hitching in shallow, terrified gasps. He explicitly believed that the Supreme Flesh-Crafter possessed a terrifying, omniscient command over the battlefield, casually manipulating a rabid, radiation-poisoned hound to cripple an elite assassin without lifting a single finger.
Sunny maintained his flawless, chilling mask of absolute apathy, taking another slow sip from his chilled skull-goblet. Internally, he was profoundly relieved. He explicitly had zero combat experience, and the prospect of engaging a shadow-assassin in a pitch-black cave had terrified him.
"We return to the vault," Sunny commanded, his voice a flat, emotionless void. He had secured the necessary dark marrow.
Before Krax could even nod, a low, tectonic rumble echoed from the darkest, unexplored depths of the cavern network.
The ambient dark Qi in the room didn’t just spike; it completely vanished, violently sucked toward the source of the sound like water down a drain. The temperature plummeted to a freezing chill.
Krax froze, the rusted dagger slipping from his trembling fingers and clattering against the stone floor. The scout’s eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror, fixated on the cavern ceiling.
A massive, suffocating presence descended from the darkness above.
It was not a beast; it was a localized apocalypse. A colossal, serpentine head, explicitly the size of a Vanguard siege-tower, slowly lowered itself from the petrified ceiling. Its scales were the color of coagulated blood, etched with ancient, glowing runes of pure death. It possessed no eyes, merely a smooth, armored dome, but its jaws parted slightly, releasing a putrid, suffocating wave of rot that instantly wilted the Abyssal Choke-Weeds clinging to the walls.
The entity moved with agonizing slowness, its massive, scaled body sliding silently against the petrified bone.
Sunny felt his civilian heart stop entirely. The sheer scale of the nightmare suspended above them was incomprehensible. It was a subterranean leviathan, a creature that likely predated the Demonic Sect itself.
The monstrous head drifted downward, its massive, eyeless visage turning toward the chaotic struggle between the Umbral Stalker and the Marrow-Hound.
The creature did not roar. It did not strike. Its jaws simply unhinged, opening to an impossible, physics-defying width.
In a single, terrifyingly silent motion, the leviathan swallowed both the thrashing Umbral Stalker and the rabid hound whole. There was no struggle. There was only a sickening, wet crunch as the beast’s internal muscles instantly pulverized the elite fiends into bloody paste.
Krax fell to his knees, completely paralyzed by mortal dread. He explicitly forgot how to breathe. He stared at the massive, blood-red scales, entirely convinced that the grim reaper had physically manifested to drag his soul to the abyss.
Sunny explicitly forgot he was supposed to be a sociopathic warlord. His mouth went dry. He casually activated the Supreme Merge System, desperate to comprehend the scale of his impending death.
[Target Identified: Abyssal Blood-Wyrm (Ancient Mutant)]
[Monster Level]: Tier 6 (Calamity)
[Monster Grade]: Perfect
[Monster Attribute]: Blood / Earth
[Monster Weakness]: Extreme Yang-Fire (Calamity-Grade)
Sunny stared at the floating blue text, absolute despair washing over his exhausted mind. Tier 6. Calamity grade.
This was explicitly the creature the System had casually demanded he harvest marrow from to upgrade his Ghoul Ape. The sheer, suicidal absurdity of that requirement was now horrifyingly apparent. The Wyrm’s body continued endlessly upward, coiled throughout the upper cavern network. It was so massive that its mere movement should have collapsed the tunnels, yet it slithered with supernatural, earth-attribute buoyancy.
The Abyssal Blood-Wyrm, having consumed its trivial appetizer, slowly turned its massive, eyeless head toward Sunny.
It explicitly sensed the dense, concentrated dark Qi radiating from the Sovereign Ghoul Ape, the toxic aura of the Phantom Ash Scorpion, and the rich Yin energy of the Sanguine Void-Leech tethered to Sunny’s arm. To the ancient predator, Sunny was essentially a walking, five-course gourmet meal.
"Flee," Sunny rasped, his voice barely a whisper, completely dropping his aristocratic facade in the face of absolute annihilation.
He didn’t wait for Krax to process the command. Sunny explicitly turned and sprinted toward the narrow corridor leading back to the isolation vault.
Krax, violently snapped out of his paralysis by the Supreme One’s explicit retreat, scrambled to his feet and ran blindly into the dark, entirely abandoning his dignity.
Sunny mentally commanded the Sovereign Ghoul Ape to remain behind as a barricade. It was a horrific sacrifice, but a Tier 5 construct was the only thing capable of delaying a Calamity for even a fraction of a second.
The Ape explicitly understood the command. It stood firm, its dark-metal bones groaning as it flared the Abyssal Heart in its chest, preparing to unleash a suicidal wave of absolute cardiovascular resonance against the Wyrm.
The Abyssal Blood-Wyrm, however, did not charge.
It explicitly possessed the lethargic, arrogant personality of an apex predator that had ruled the subterranean depths for centuries. It had just consumed two elite fiends and was not particularly inclined to chase fleeing prey through narrow, jagged tunnels.
Instead, the massive serpent turned its eyeless head toward a thick outcropping of petrified leviathan marrow extending from the cavern wall. Its jaws unhinged, and it casually bit down, shattering the rock-hard bone as if it were a brittle biscuit. The Wyrm began slowly grinding the ancient marrow into dust, lazily supplementing its omnivorous diet.
Sunny and Krax sprinted until their lungs burned, finally collapsing near the ruined, heavy metal door of their isolation vault.
Sunny leaned against the cold iron, gasping for air, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He explicitly realized that his ’damage transfer’ soul-tether with the Scorpion would have been completely useless if the Wyrm had swallowed him. He would have simply dissolved in a localized lake of corrosive stomach acid, unable to transfer the sheer, overwhelming volume of trauma before his body melted entirely.
"S-Supreme One..." Krax wheezed, clutching his chest. "Your... your tactical retreat was flawless. You explicitly recognized that the Calamity was merely grazing, and conserved your fiends’ energy..."
Sunny glared at the scout, internally bewildered by the man’s relentless, terrified sycophancy. He explicitly hadn’t recognized anything; he had run for his life because a giant snake was looking at him. However, he maintained his cold silence, explicitly allowing the scout’s paranoia to construct another layer of his terrifying mythos.
...
Far above the subterranean network, within the Grand Command Hall of the floating Vanguard flagship, Elder Shen He stared intently at a massive, glowing blood-scrying array.
The array explicitly monitored the catastrophic energy signatures across the Abyssal Front.
"Grand Elder," a heavily scarred lieutenant reported, pointing at a massive, pulsing red rune on the map. "The ancient Abyssal Blood-Wyrm has stirred from its torpor beneath Sector 4. Should we deploy the orbital bone-cannons to suppress it before it breaches the surface?"
Shen He narrowed his aged eyes, explicitly noting the location. "Sector 4 is the designated isolation zone for the Supreme Flesh-Crafter. Let the Wyrm feed."
The lieutenant frowned. "But Grand Elder, the beast is a Calamity. It will explicitly eradicate any disciple caught in those tunnels."
"The Vanguard requires absolute supremacy," Shen He stated, his voice dripping with cruel pragmatism. "The Young Master has continuously demonstrated a terrifying, arrogant mastery over the dark arts. He casually slaughtered a Paladin Commander. Let us see if his impossible flesh-mending theories can withstand the jaws of an ancient myth. If he perishes, his bloodline was weak. If he survives..."
Shen He did not finish the sentence. He explicitly intended to use the Calamity as a lethal stress-test to measure Sunny’s true potential.
...
Back in the isolation vault, Sunny had explicitly abandoned the idea of sleeping on the rusted cots.
He huddled in the darkest corner, the Abyssal Void-Sac floating nervously above him, while the Phantom Ash Scorpion maintained a rigid, paranoid watch at the ruined doorway. The Sovereign Ghoul Ape had silently returned from the cavern, its dark-metal frame unmarred, explicitly confirming that the Wyrm had ignored it.
They remained in absolute, terrifying silence until the faint, distant booming of the holy artillery above ground signaled the arrival of a new cycle.
"We return to the cavern," Sunny commanded softly, forcing his exhausted body to stand.
Krax looked at him in sheer, unadulterated horror. "Supreme Patriarch! The Calamity! It may still be lurking in the dark!"
"It fed," Sunny replied, his voice a flat, freezing void. "Apex predators slumber after consumption. We require the marrow."
Sunny explicitly knew the logic was sound, though he was internally terrified. He desperately needed the dark marrow to formulate the stabilization paste for his fiends.
They retraced their steps through the winding, petrified corridors, the silence broken only by the crunch of crushed bone beneath their boots.
When they reached the cavern, the destruction was absolute. Massive chunks of the walls had been casually bitten away, leaving deep, jagged craters in the petrified marrow. The blood-lake was undisturbed, the surface still and dark.
Sunny scanned the perimeter, his crimson eyes glowing.
"Hold..." Sunny whispered, pointing a pale finger toward a shattered section of the cavern wall.
Amidst the rubble of crushed bone and dried dark-sap, a faint glint caught his attention. It was explicitly not a natural formation.
It looked like a cluster of violet crystals embedded within the petrified marrow, exposed by the Wyrm’s casual destruction.
