SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors

Chapter 76: 76. We Cleared the Gatekeepers and Corvus Said ’Impressive’ Like That Helped Him

The inner perimeter was a wall of nightmare. Corvus had played his hand with cold, calculated cruelty, positioning the five elder dragons not as frontline combatants but as living, breathing siege engines.

They were too massive, too conspicuous to weave into the chaotic melee of the infantry, but as Lucian crested the final ridge of the plateau, he saw their true purpose: they were the ultimate gatekeepers.

They sat like gods of ruin, their massive, scaled bodies coiled to unleash hell upon anyone attempting to breach the final distance to the ritual circle.

Lucian’s mind, expanded by the synchronization, didn’t just see five dragons; he saw five vectors of impending annihilation. In the heartbeat before the first roar tore the sky asunder, he made the allocations.

"Glacielle! The left flank! Take the first one!" he commanded, his voice carrying through the synchronization channels with the weight of an iron decree.

Glacielle didn’t hesitate. The nearest dragon, a colossal beast of obsidian scales, unhinged its jaw to unleash a torrent of roaring, white-hot flame.

The fire surged toward the ice corridors Glacielle had meticulously constructed, intending to melt the very path of their advance. But Glacielle was faster.

"Frozen Prison!" she screamed, her voice cracking with the sheer effort of her mana output.

A tidal wave of absolute zero frost erupted from her staff. It didn’t just surround the dragon; it hunted it.

The ice surged forward with predatory intent, slamming into the beast’s maw and cutting off its breath mid-roar, the fire dying in a hiss of steam and shrapnel-like ice shards. The dragon thrashed, its massive claws gouging deep, bloody trenches into the plateau, but the encasement was relentless.

The ice climbed its neck, sealing its throat, and finally encased its entire massive frame in a tomb of translucent sapphire.

Lucian, synchronized to Glacielle at a staggering hundred percent, felt the cold biting at his own marrow. He didn’t just see the opening; he felt the structural weakness in the dragon’s hide.

He channeled the synchronization, pouring his kinetic energy into Glacielle’s frozen momentum. A lance of ice-enhanced light erupted from the center of the prison, shattering the dragon’s scales and piercing the exact point where the pulsing purple control seal sat.

With a sickening crunch of splintering bone and frozen flesh, the dragon’s internal structure collapsed. As the massive carcass began to tilt, Serenia’s voice rose in a holy chant. "Radiant Purge!"

A beam of pure, cleansing gold struck the falling beast. The necrotic purple veins of the corruption sizzled and evaporated, turning to foul-smelling smoke before the body even hit the stone.

In that final, dying second, the madness left the dragon’s eyes, replaced by a haunting, lucid moment of peace. It died free.

"Marshal! The center! Now!" Lucian roared.

Marshal was already a blur of golden motion. She didn’t wait for the second and third dragons to complete their lunges.

She didn’t wait for them to find their footing. She danced between them, a flicker of light in the maw of death.

This was the Sunforge Legion’s finest: the art of managing multiple catastrophes through perfect, lethal timing rather than clumsy defense.

As the two dragons lunged, their massive heads converging on her position, Marshal planted her feet and let out a primal, guttural cry. "Solar Nova!"

She didn’t aim the blast outward to clear space; she aimed it inward, compressing the explosion into the narrow gap between the two behemoths. The result was a catastrophic convergence of solar fury.

The air screamed as the pressure built, then erupted in a blinding, white gold supernova. The sound was like a mountain being pulverized.

The dragons’ heads were caught in the epicenter; the heat was so intense that their scales didn’t just burn, they turned to liquid, and the internal pressure caused their skulls to burst in a gruesome spray of molten marrow and blackened blood. They collapsed simultaneously, their massive forms twitching in the smoking craters they had created.

The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the crackling of scorched earth and the heavy breathing of the warriors.

"That..." Glacielle whispered, her eyes wide as she maintained the integrity of her frozen prison, her hands trembling slightly from the mana drain, "that was her most powerful output yet."

"She didn’t just hit them; she erased them."

"She’s not holding anything back," Lucian said, his voice grim but filled with a fierce, burgeoning pride.

Through the synchronization, he could feel the truth of her. He felt the raw, terrifying heat of Marshal’s combat reserves, burning at a level he had never sensed before.

It wasn’t the reckless, wild fire of a berserker; it was the total, absolute commitment of a master. Her tactical mind, usually a machine of calculation and caution, had shifted.

It had decided that the time for preservation was over. Every ounce of her strength, every drop of her mana, and every ounce of her will was now dedicated to a single, singular purpose: total, uncompromising destruction.

If the previous engagement had been a symphony of destruction, Octavia’s confrontation with the final two elder dragons was a terrifying, silent ballet of anatomical deconstruction.

To a military strategist, it would have looked like a masterclass in unorthodox grappling, using fluid dynamics to neutralize massive kinetic advantages. To a poet, it would have looked like a goddess of the abyss reclaiming her kin.

But to Lucian, watching from the heart of the synchronization, it was something far more visceral. It was a display of absolute, predatory dominance.

Octavia didn’t just fight the dragons; she intertwined with them. As the two massive beasts lunged, their jaws wide enough to swallow a carriage, she didn’t dodge.

She surged forward, a blur of dark, shifting mass. Her tentacles, thick as ancient tree trunks and slick with seawater, lashed out with whipcrack speed.

One coiled around the primary wing joint of the first dragon, the sheer force of the constriction producing a sickening, wet crunch as the bone structure began to buckle under the pressure.

The second tentacle drove itself deep into the dragon’s open maw, not to tear, but to flow a torrent of high-pressure water, flooding the creature’s respiratory passages and filling its lungs with a heavy, suffocating weight that turned its roar into a desperate, bubbling gurgle.

She was a whirlwind of impossible physics. She used the dragons’ own massive weight against them, pivoting her body around their necks, her tentacles acting as hydraulic levers that wrenched their heads into unnatural angles.

She was a parasite of motion, finding the exact pivot points where their strength failed and her leverage succeeded. The air was filled with the sound of struggling, heavy breathing, the slapping of wet flesh against scales, and the rhythmic, terrifying thud of massive bodies being brought to their knees by a single woman.

And through the synchronization, Lucian could feel it. There was no fear in her.

There was no strain. There was only a dark, intoxicating sense of... satisfaction.

She was enjoying the sensation of the gods breaking beneath her touch.

With a final, violent heave, she yanked the tentacles back, the sudden release of tension causing the dragons to slump into the mud with a heavy, exhausted groan.

They weren’t dead, but they were broken, their spirits crushed as thoroughly as their physical forms. They lay there, breathing in shallow, ragged gasps, their eyes wide and clouded with a confusion that bordered on reverence.

"Done," Octavia said, her voice remarkably steady, almost bored.

She reached up with one hand to casually tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear, while her other hand made a dismissive flicking motion, sending the remaining tentacles retracting into the shadows of her cloak like retreating serpents.

The silence that followed was heavy, thick with the scent of ozone, scorched earth, and the copper tang of dragon blood. The path was clear.

The ritual circle loomed twenty meters ahead, a pulsing, violent eye of violet energy that seemed to throb in time with the world’s dying heartbeat. At its epicenter stood Corvus.

He was no longer the composed architect of ruin. As the party approached, his silhouette framed by the flickering, unnatural light of the ritual, his composure was fraying.

The manic, wide-eyed grin was still there, but it had lost its charm; it looked like a mask that had been bolted onto his face, held in place by sheer, desperate willpower even as his eyes betrayed a flickering shadow of doubt.

"You made it," Corvus said, his voice straining to maintain its theatrical flair. He took a step back, his hands twitching at his sides. "I’m... actually impressed... Truly!"

"I had calculated the variables and accounted for the legends, but the sheer... the sheer audacity of your momentum... it wasn’t in the math."

He laughed, a jagged, nervous sound that died quickly in the heavy air.

Lucian stepped forward, the tip of his blade leveled at the man who had tried to rewrite existence. His eyes were cold, reflecting the violet madness of the circle behind Corvus.

He felt the collective strength of his companions behind him, a wall of tempered steel and divine light.

"We didn’t come here to satisfy your curiosity, Corvus," Lucian said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble that cut through the hum of the ritual. "We didn’t come to be part of your grand design."

"End the ritual... Walk away from this madness while you still have the legs to carry you."

"Because if you don’t..."

He tightened his grip on his sword, the synchronization humming a lethal note in his veins.

"...we will end it for you."