SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything

Chapter 185: Twin Evolution

Hide stood still on the smooth, vitrified black glass, staring at the glowing golden numbers lingering in his vision. Level 61. He had done it. He had actually done it.

The overwhelming relief of finally possessing the means to purchase the Mana Purification Catalyst for Risa washed over him, momentarily dulling the stinging pain in his exhausted muscles.

But the Universal Adaptation System was not finished.

Hide had been anticipating a notification. He knew that reaching Level 50 would trigger his evolution from D-Rank to C-Rank. What he had not calculated—what his mind hadn’t even considered in the heat of the slaughter—was that the gap between C-Rank and B-Rank was only ten levels.

By hitting Level 61, he hadn’t just crossed one evolutionary threshold. He had violently shattered through two of them simultaneously.

Before Hide could even dismiss the experience points window, the translucent blue interface violently glitched, flashing a blinding, catastrophic crimson.

[Congratulations, You have reached the threshold for Class Evolution]

[Class Rank C Evolution requirements met. Initiating...]

[Congratulations, You have reached the threshold for Class Evolution]

[Class Rank B Evolution requirements met. Queuing in sequence...]

Hide’s glowing blue eyes widened to a fraction of their normal size. "Wait—"

He didn’t even get to finish the word. It felt exactly as if he had swallowed a live, high-yield explosive and it had detonated directly inside his chest.

"GAAAAAAH!"

Hide’s back arched violently as a catastrophic, blinding agony tore through his internal organs. This wasn’t like his first evolution to E-Rank, where he had passed out from the searing heat, nor was it like the D-Rank ascension, where his bones felt like they were being melted and reforged in a furnace.

This felt like his cells were eating themselves.

The overwhelming volume of dark mana required to bridge two major evolutionary ranks in a single breath was too much for a human vessel to process at once. Hide’s dark-steel Carapace forcefully shattered, the S-Rank scales exploding off his skin as his body violently rejected the external armor to focus entirely on internal survival.

He fell hard to his hands and knees on the scorched glass, violently retching. He puked a massive puddle of thick, dark, corrupted blood. He kept heaving, his stomach violently contracting until there was absolutely nothing left inside him, leaving him choking on dry, agonizing rasps.

His vision swam, the edges of the world turning a fuzzy, bleeding black. He felt incredibly, terrifyingly weakened. It was as if every single ounce of his superhuman strength, his enhanced agility, and his accumulated powers had completely evaporated, violently stripped away by the system to fuel the core’s expansion. He was entirely vulnerable.

Unable to hold his own weight, Hide collapsed face-first onto the warm, smooth glass. He slowly rolled onto his back, his breathing ragged and shallow. He lay there, paralyzed, staring up at the endless Ufrifan sky.

The bruised, bleeding colors of the sunset had finally died, giving way to a deep, suffocating canopy of dark purple and black. The stars were hidden behind a thin layer of atmospheric dust, and the moon had not yet taken its place in the sky. It was just an empty, silent void.

"My Liege!" The sudden, frantic telepathic shout echoed directly into his fracturing mind. It was Drogon. The ancient lightning dragon’s voice was stripped of its usual majestic calm, vibrating with panic. "My Liege! Your human vessel is failing! It is trying to tear itself apart from the inside!"

"My Liege," the deep, resonant voice of the Doom Overseer immediately followed, its tone thick with heavy concern. "Your core is attempting to expand beyond its current physical parameters. Do not fight the pain. Let the dark mana flow through your whole body. You must surrender to the restructuring."

Hide gritted his teeth, tasting the metallic tang of his own blood. He couldn’t speak, but he heard them and he hated it, but the genuine, desperate concern radiating from the two Calamity Beasts anchored to his soul grounded him.

He focused on his breathing, forcing his violently trembling muscles to relax, letting the system tear him apart and build him back together.

After what felt like an eternity of silent, agonizing torture, the burning heat in his chest slowly began to recede. A tiny fraction of his strength seeped back into his exhausted limbs.

A golden window chimed softly in his vision.

[Evolution Complete]

[Class Rank Increased: (D-Rank → C-Rank)]

[20 Unallocated Stat Points awarded.

Evolution points awarded.

You have Acquired a 5 Star Talent.]

Hide let out a long, ragged sigh. He couldn’t move his neck, but he blinked heavily, giving a faint, mental nod of acknowledgment to the system window. The C-Rank evolution was complete and he had gained another talent, a 5 star one at that.

[Initiating Second Sequence...]

[Class Rank B Evolution commencing.]

Hide groaned as a secondary, deeper wave of heat began to build at the base of his spine. The second evolution process had started, locking him into a state of complete, unyielding physical paralysis.

But as the system began to rewrite his muscular density for the B-Rank threshold, Hide’s passive Enhanced senses suddenly flared.

Despite his physical state, his sensory perception was still active. He felt a strange, massive, and entirely unnatural increase in the surrounding dark mana. It wasn’t coming from his own core, and it wasn’t the ambient mana of the desert. Heavy. And it reeked of malice.

Crunch. Hide’s blue eyes snapped wide open. It was the distinct sound of a heavy boot stepping on a fragment of shattered ice.

Crunch. Crunch.

Footsteps!

Someone was walking toward him across the vitrified glass.

Using every ounce of willpower he possessed, Hide slightly rolled his head to the side, peering across the dark, flat expanse of the crater. His breath caught in his throat.

The headless, mangled corpse of Julian was standing upright.

A thick, suffocating mist of freezing white and corrupted black mana was aggressively swirling around the decapitated neck. Hide watched in paralyzed horror as the mist began to violently condense.

The Doom Overseer’s earlier words flashed in Hide’s mind. When a Calamity Beast attempts to take over a human body, they reach a stalemate and form a contract... Hide had squashed Julian’s head, instantly killing the human soul. But he hadn’t destroyed the Calamity Beast’s core. With Julian’s resilient soul finally dead, the B-Rank monster was no longer suppressed. It had full, unmitigated control of the S-Rank human vessel.

The thick mist swirling above the severed neck rapidly solidified. Flesh, bone, and jagged ice violently knitted together, growing a brand new head out of the freezing fog. But it wasn’t Julian’s face. It was the head of the original Calamity Beast—a terrifying, demonic skull resembling a prehistoric wolf, crowned with jagged horns of black ice and possessing four burning, multi-faceted white eyes.

As the new head locked into place, the human body below it began to mutate. The tailored suit shredded into literal dust as the corpse grew. The muscle mass violently expanded, the bones snapping and elongating until the entity stood a towering, colossal fifteen feet tall—nearly thrice Julian’s original size. Thick, impenetrable scales of ice violently erupted across its chest, arms, and digitigrade legs.

The monster rolled its massive, frozen shoulders. Then, in a sickening display of biological manipulation, the beast’s colossal muscles shifted, compressing and reshaping its bestial anatomy into a terrifyingly perfect, humanoid shape. It was still fifteen feet tall, still covered in icy scales and crowned with a demonic skull, but it now stood with the upright, arrogant posture of a Ruler.

The beast tilted its massive head, its four burning white eyes locking directly onto Hide’s paralyzed, bleeding form. Its jaws parted, revealing rows of interlocking, jagged fangs, and it let out a deep, grating laugh that vibrated the very glass beneath Hide’s back.

"You did great by killing that dumbass," the beast insisted, its voice no longer overlapping with a human’s. It was a single, ancient, earth-shaking rumble of pure monstrous power.

The Calamity Lord took a slow, deliberate step toward Hide, the temperature in the crater instantly plummeting back to absolute zero.

"I was trapped in a stalemate with that arrogant human for ten years," the monster laughed, the sound dripping with sadistic glee. "You are pretty special, boy. You might be a fragile little human, but I can taste the density of your blood. You have a core capable of absorbing and processing pure dark mana."

The beast spread its massive, ice-taloned hands, looming over Hide like an insurmountable god of death. "Now... how about I take that." It laughed even louder, a manic, triumphant roar that echoed into the empty, moonless sky. "With a core like yours, I won’t just rule a pathetic estate. I will conquer the entire continent!"

Hide lay completely paralyzed, unable to lift a single finger as the B-Rank evolution continued to tear his internal cells apart. The beast raised its massive foot, preparing to stomp Hide’s skull into a fine paste.

But Hide was a Dark Liege. And a King never fought alone.

"You dare raise your hand against our Sovereign?" A voice, deeper and far more ancient than the ice beast’s, suddenly resonated through the entire basin. It didn’t come from Hide. It came from everywhere at once.

Hide’s chest violently glowed. A massive, torrential ocean of pitch-black, corrupted dark mana exploded outward from his body, entirely eclipsing the freezing mist.

From the center of that bottomless, swirling darkness, a colossal figure stepped into the physical world.

The Doom Overseer took its full, glorious form. The massive, dark-furred feline stood thirty feet tall at the shoulder, entirely dwarfing the ice beast. Its blinding emerald eyes burned with the supreme, unquestionable authority of an A-Rank Calamity Beast. The majestic, deep-blue ribbon-antlers crowning its head pulsed with a terrifying psychic pressure that instantly cracked the ice forming on the desert floor. The Doom Overseer lowered its massive head, standing as an impenetrable, furry shield directly over Hide’s prone body.

But the defense did not stop there.

High above the crater, the empty, moonless sky suddenly ripped open. A deafening, apocalyptic thunderclap violently shattered the silence of the night.

The B-Rank ice monster snapped its head upward in shock. The dark purple heavens were suddenly boiling with massive, churning storm clouds. From the epicenter of the unnatural typhoon, colossal arcs of dark-violet lightning chained across the sky.

Drogon, the Blue Lightning Dragon, had taken the heavens.

The massive, luminescent serpentine dragon moved fluidly between the storm clouds, its colossal, antlered head breaking through the cloud cover to look down at the frozen beast. The static electricity radiating from its massive body was so intense it superheated the freezing air, turning the falling ice crystals into instant steam.

Hide lay on the glass, a bloody, exhausted smirk slowly curving his lips as his two strongest Phantoms physically materialized to protect him. The C-Rank Calamity Lord of Ice was suddenly trapped between an A-Rank psychic behemoth and an airborne, lightning-breathing leviathan.

"You will not take your next breath."