SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors

Chapter 72: 72. Eleven Minutes of Slaughter and He Had the Audacity to Clap

The armies erupted from the treelines on both sides of the plateau with terrifying synchronicity. It was a calculated slaughter; Corvus hadn’t just been waiting, he had been baiting them, holding his forces back until the geography of the plateau turned the defenders into a cornered, immobile target.

Lucian watched the movement, his mind a cold engine of tactical analysis. He filed away the timing, the positioning, and the sheer malice of the deployment.

To defeat a monster, one had to think with the same ruthless efficiency as the monster itself.

The vanguard was a nightmare of two hundred corrupted warriors, their armor etched with glowing purple seals that pulsed like a fever in the dimming light. Above them, the sky groaned as thirty chimeras wheeled in a loose, predatory formation, preparing for a coordinated, bone-shattering dive bomb run.

And behind the infantry, the ground shuddered under the weight of ten behemoths, monstrous, mountain-sized entities that moved with the momentum of collapsing buildings, their eyes burning with the suppressed rage of creatures long held in magical bondage.

Serenia didn’t wait for the impact. She raised her staff, and the air itself seemed to bow to her will.

The golden dome that erupted from the tip of her staff was a different beast entirely from her previous works. It wasn’t just a shield; it was an expansion of divinity.

The Divine Sanctuary surged outward, ballooning in scale until it encompassed the entire two hundred-foot radius of the assembled force. It swallowed the hundred soldiers, the A rank adventurers, and the iron willed General Ironheart at the rear.

It wrapped around the five warriors, anchoring them to the center of the storm.

The dome settled with a heavy, resonant hum, the sound of an absolute truth. As the light washed over the army, Lucian felt a surge of power so profound it felt like his veins were being filled with liquid starlight.

The synchronization didn’t just improve; it transcended.

"Divine Sanctuary, eternal version," Serenia remarked, her voice conversational, almost bored, as if she were merely adjusting the curtains in a parlor. "This should cover things."

"Party, advance formation!" Marshal’s command was a whip crack. "Octavia, open the line! Everyone else, follow her wake!"

Octavia moved like a force of nature. She hit the first wave of corrupted soldiers with all six tentacles deployed, her water barrier blazing with a blinding, pressurized intensity.

The corrupted soldiers, despite their mechanical, puppet-like coordination, were utterly unprepared for the sheer violence of her opening salvo.

The impact was brutal. Three soldiers were snatched from the earth and slammed into one another with a sickening crunch of plate armor and splintering ribs.

Two more, caught in a tactically perfect formation for a standard charge, found themselves precisely where Octavia’s water whip arrived at a velocity that turned their bodies into red mist and shattered bone.

The sound of the corrupted’s counterattacks hitting the dome wasn’t a clash of steel; it was the wet, desperate thud of a dying animal realizing it had run out of options.

Lucian felt the triple synchronization lock into place. It was a seamless, effortless channel of pure combat essence. There was no strain, no heavy breathing, no sense of a man fighting against his own limits.

There was only the crystalline clarity of the bond. He felt Glacielle’s freezing precision, Marshal’s solar aggression, and Octavia’s multidimensional spatial awareness as if they were extensions of his own nervous system.

He wasn’t just a fighter; he was the conductor of a symphony of destruction.

"Left flank, freeze them!" Lucian commanded.

Glacielle’s Frozen Apocalypse tore through the air. A wave of absolute zero swept upward, catching the chimeras mid-dive.

The sound was horrific: the screech of wings snapping and the wet crack of frozen organs. The chimeras, once masters of the sky, were instantly transformed into heavy, jagged projectiles of meat and ice, plummeting toward the earth like stones.

"Right flank, burn!"

Marshal unleashed her Solar Nova. A concentrated burst of white-hot intensity incinerated the right flank in a singular, blinding flash.

The corrupted soldiers didn’t even have time to scream; they simply turned to ash, their armor melting into their skin before they hit the ground.

Octavia turned her attention to the behemoths. While a single tentacle might be a nuisance to such giants, six tentacles applied with optimized, surgical precision turned the tide.

She danced between the massive, lumbering legs of the beasts, her limbs lashing out to strike pressure points and joints, turning their own massive weight against them.

From the rear, Serenia was the silent heartbeat of the massacre. She moved with unhurried calm, her eyes darting to the microscopic gaps in the dome where high-speed projectiles threatened to breach.

She closed them before they could even be perceived. Simultaneously, she ran continuous, high-speed healing cycles.

Soldiers who were slashed open or had limbs crushed were mended almost as fast as the blood could spill. No one fell below seventy percent; those who reached the threshold were restored to full capacity before the adrenaline could even fade.

It was a masterclass in coordinated slaughter.

It took eleven minutes.

The carnage was absolute. The plateau, once a pristine expanse of mountain rock, was now a grotesque mosaic of violence.

The two hundred and forty corrupted soldiers had been systematically dismantled; the ground was slick with a mixture of cooling blood, shattered plate armor, and the steaming remains of those caught in the crossfire of elemental fury.

Some lay in heaps of broken limbs, their bodies twitching as the purification energy fought the last vestiges of the purple corruption, while others sat in a dazed, hollow-eyed stupor, trying to comprehend the whirlwind of death that had just passed through them.

For a long, heavy moment, the only sound was the whistling mountain wind and the distant, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of the ritual circle, a sound that felt less like magic and more like a massive, subterranean heartbeat.

In the center of that pulsing violet wound stood Corvus. He hadn’t moved an inch.

He stood amidst the swirling miasma, watching the survivors with a manic, wide-eyed grin that seemed etched into his very soul. Then, he began to clap.

It was a slow, rhythmic, theatrical sound: the applause of a man watching a particularly entertaining play.

"You made it through!" he called out, his voice carrying easily over the silence.

He sounded genuinely delighted, as if he were a proud mentor watching a student pass a difficult exam. "I’m genuinely impressed!"

"That was a magnificent display of coordination. Truly, well done!"

Lucian stepped forward, his boots crunching on the gore-stained stone, his eyes locked on the man who had orchestrated this nightmare. "The show is over, Corvus! We’re coming to end it!"

Corvus laughed, a jagged, hysterical sound that echoed off the surrounding peaks. He spread his arms wide, gesturing grandly to the carnage of the ritual circle, to the thousand shackled souls screaming silently in their chains, and to the sky above, which had turned a bruised, sickly indigo, swirling in patterns that defied every law of nature.

"Oh, you think you’ve won?" Corvus’s voice dropped, losing its playfulness and gaining a razor-sharp edge of madness. "You haven’t even begun to understand, you fool!"

"Look at my masterpiece! Look at the architecture of the end! Look at what I have built with the blood of the innocent!"

Then, the world shuddered.

It wasn’t a tremor, and it wasn’t an earthquake. It was a deep, structural groan that seemed to originate from the very core of the planet, a violent, tectonic shift that made the massive mountain feel as fragile as glass.

A massive pressure wave erupted from beneath the obsidian stones of the circle, a physical manifestation of something colossal and ancient thrashing in its sleep.

The carved runes of the circle ignited simultaneously, erupting in a blinding, violent violet light. The swirling energy above the plateau suddenly collapsed inward, creating a vacuum of darkness that seemed to suck the very breath from Lucian’s lungs before exploding outward in a devastating shockwave.

The Divine Sanctuary held, the golden dome rippling under the impact like a pond hit by a boulder, but the captives inside the circle... they felt the full, unmitigated brunt of it. A thousand voices rose in a singular, harrowing shriek of agony as the energy tore through their very souls.

"The Calamity stirs!" Corvus screamed over the roar of the energy, his eyes wide and shimmering with a terrifying light.

Behind the manic grin, there was a new emotion flickering not quite awe, not quite fear, but a profound, religious ecstasy. He looked like a man who had spent his entire life building a cathedral, only to realize, in the moment of its completion, that he was standing inside a god.

"Everything I promised! Everything this world thought was impossible!" he roared, his face illuminated by the violet apocalypse. "Everything I built this for! It is here! The end is here!"