SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors

Chapter 77: 77. He Cried, I Offered a Third Option, He Said No, We Fought a God

Corvus stood motionless, the violet light of the ritual casting long, dancing shadows that made him look like a ghost caught between worlds. He stared at Lucian for a long, agonizing moment, and for the first time in all their bloody encounters, the mask finally cracked.

The manic, theatrical villain vanished. The calculated architect of ruin dissolved.

In the hollow of his eyes, Lucian saw something far more terrifying than madness: he saw the wreckage of a man. He saw the shape of a human being that had been hollowed out by a grief so profound and so jagged that it had acted like an acid, dissolving everything that made him whole.

It was the look of someone who had tried to survive a storm by becoming the storm itself.

"I’m too far gone," Corvus said.

His voice wasn’t a boast or a dramatic declaration; it was flat, hollow, and terrifyingly calm the way a man might read a terminal diagnosis of his own soul. "The Calamity isn’t just a force anymore."

"It’s... it’s in me."

"I can feel it pulsing in the places where warmth used to live."

"In the places where I used to feel... love. Or fear."

He pressed a trembling hand against his chest, his fingers digging into his robes as if he were trying to physically pin his soul to his ribs, checking to see if anything was still there. "It’s wonderful. It’s magnificent. And it is absolutely terrible."

"I am shedding the skin of a mortal, Lucian..."

"I am becoming something without a ceiling. Something without a limit."

As he spoke, a vein in his temple pulsed with a sickly, violet light, and a faint, wet sound like something shifting in a jar of oil emanated from his chest.

Beside Lucian, Serenia let out a sharp, stifled gasp. It was the sound of a healer recognizing a wound that was already too deep to stitch.

"He’s not just channeling it," she whispered, her voice trembling with a clinical dread that reached the rest of the party. "He’s partially fused."

"The Calamity’s consciousness is lacing itself into his nervous system like a parasite."

"Their minds are braiding together." She turned her eyes to Lucian, her expression grim. "If we don’t sever the connection and separate them within ninety minutes, the fusion will be complete."

"The ’Corvus’ you know will cease to exist, and in his place, there will be a single, unified entity."

"And Lucian... that thing will be a god of ruin. It will be infinitely harder to kill than a man."

Ninety minutes.

The number hit Lucian with the force of a physical blow, but it didn’t bring panic. Instead, it brought a cold, crystalline clarity. He had started this entire ordeal two hours ago.

The grueling slog through the corrupted legions, the brutal, bone-shattering fight through the reserve forces, and the desperate struggle against the elder dragons—all of it had eaten away at his clock. He had already lost thirty minutes to the sheer attrition of war.

The world seemed to narrow. The roar of the battlefield, the pulsing of the ritual, the heavy breathing of his comrades—it all fell into the background, leaving only the essential variables.

The time was compressing, the space for error was vanishing, and the pressure was forcing his mind into a state of hyperfocus.

He stepped forward, the tip of his sword carving a shallow groove in the blood-soaked earth. He didn’t look at Corvus as a monster to be slain but as a man standing on the edge of an abyss, still possessing a shred of agency.

"Corvus!" Lucian’s voice rang out, hard and unyielding, cutting through the hum of the violet energy. "Listen to me!"

"This isn’t a grand destiny; it’s a slow suicide!"

"I am offering you a genuine choice, the last one you will ever have!"

"End the ritual! Release the captives!"

"Let the fusion fail before it’s too late!"

"We can find another way! Whatever ghost you are chasing, whatever pain you are trying to drown in this power, we will solve it differently."

"But you have to choose now."

Corvus looked at him, and for a heartbeat, the air between them seemed to thicken with a heavy, suffocating empathy. The sadness in his eyes was genuine, a raw, bleeding thing that Lucian hadn’t expected to find in the heart of a monster.

It was the look of a man who had already mourned himself.

"That is a remarkably kind offer, Lucian," Corvus said, his voice cracking like dry parchment. "Coming from the man who has spent the last three months trying to put a blade in my throat."

He turned his head, gesturing with a trembling hand toward the perimeter of the ritual circle. "But look at them! Really look at them."

Lucian followed his gaze, and a cold knot tightened in his stomach. A thousand captives were strung in heavy, mana-dampening chains around the pulsating violet eye of the circle.

They were a mosaic of human misery. Some were weeping silently, their eyes hollow and vacant from weeks of starvation and terror; others were staring with a feral, wide-eyed madness, their faces etched with the permanent lines of extreme stress.

The air around them was thick with the collective scent of unwashed bodies, fear-sweat, and the metallic tang of old blood.

"I can’t undo the blood on my hands," Corvus whispered, a single tear tracking a path through the grime on his cheek. "I can’t give back the years they’ve lost, or the sanity they’ve bled away."

"Even if I chose to stop now, the ritual has already tasted enough life."

"The circle is gorged. It has consumed the momentum it needs."

"To stop now would be to turn all that suffering into a meaningless waste."

"To stop now is to admit that every scream was for nothing."

"Then give us a third way!" Lucian shouted, his voice echoing off the jagged rocks of the plateau. "Break the cycle! If the ritual is too far gone, then break the man holding the leash!"

Corvus’s expression flickered a rapid, violent succession of doubt, rage, and a final, terrifying resignation.

"I don’t have a third way," Corvus said, and as he spoke, the violet light in his veins flared, turning his eyes into twin voids of darkness. "So let us do this the way we agreed."

"Let us settle the debt in blood."

The final confrontation erupted not as a planned maneuver, but as a chaotic, beautiful evolution of combat. The combination techniques that emerged from the five-person coordination were not the polished, rehearsed strikes from their training sessions; they were primal, instinctive reactions born from the desperate necessity of the moment.

They were not designed; they were discovered in the heat of slaughter.

The first miracle of synchronicity occurred when the battlefield became a crucible of elemental extremes. A desperate wave of corrupted soldiers, armored in jagged, dark plate, surged toward the center.

Glacielle reacted instantly, slamming her staff down to erupt a massive, jagged ice corridor that tore through the earth, catching the front line in a freezing embrace. Simultaneously, Marshal launched a concentrated solar strike from the opposite flank, a lance of pure, blinding heat intended to pierce the enemy line.

The two forces collided mid-air, slamming into the cluster of soldiers with the force of a falling star.

The physics of the impact were impossible. The instantaneous meeting of absolute zero and solar fury didn’t just create steam; it triggered a catastrophic thermal shock.

An aurora-colored, crystalline explosion bloomed in the center of the enemy formation. Thirty corrupted soldiers were caught in a horrific, suspended state, partially frozen into jagged statues of ice, yet simultaneously glowing with a white-hot internal combustion.

They were trapped in a moment of agonizing stasis, their screams caught in their throats as their armor cracked and their flesh bubbled.

Before the physics of the explosion could even resolve, Serenia saw the opening.

"Radiant Purge!" she commanded, her voice a clarion call of divine judgment.

She didn’t aim for the soldiers; she aimed for the crystalline matrix itself. The holy light hit the aurora-colored explosion and, instead of shattering it, the light used the crystal as a conductor.

The purification energy raced through the frozen, burning lattice at impossible speeds, a golden lightning bolt that branched out into thirty distinct paths. In a single, blinding flash, the corruption was ripped from the souls of all thirty men simultaneously, the holy light cauterizing the darkness within the ice before the men even realized they were being saved.

The explosion of light cleared the path, leaving nothing but shimmering frost and the scent of ozone.

"That..." Marshal panted, her golden aura flickering as she felt the sheer intensity of the mana surge through the synchronization bond, "that was better than expected."

"We just turned a collision into a conductor."

"Don’t get comfortable," Lucian snapped, his eyes already scanning the next movement of the enemy, his mind working at a fever pitch as the ninety-minute clock ticked relentlessly in the back of his consciousness. "File it for later..."

"We have a god to kill."