SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors

Chapter 78: 78. Turns Out ’Don’t Kill the Villain’ Is the Hardest Difficulty Setting

The battlefield had become a laboratory of divine violence, a place where the laws of magic were being rewritten in real time by the sheer will of the five warriors.

The second miracle of their synergy: The absolute necessity of containment birthed the second miracle of their synergy. from the absolute necessity of containment. A stampede of corrupted Behemoths, monstrous, mountain-sized entities of muscle and shadow, thundered toward the party, their footsteps shaking the very foundations of the plateau.

Octavia moved with a predatory grace, her eyes glowing with a deep, oceanic light.

"Tidal Fortress!" she roared.

With a violent sweep of her arms, she didn’t just summon water; she commanded the very moisture in the air to coalesce into a massive, swirling dome of high-pressure seawater.

The dome expanded at a terrifying speed, a roaring wall of blue that slammed into the charging behemoths, trapping them within a liquid prison. The sheer force of the water’s impact was enough to make the beasts roar in confusion, their massive limbs thrashing against the viscous walls.

But Octavia wasn’t finished. She looked toward Serenia, a silent command passing through their synchronization bond.

Serenia stepped forward, her hands glowing with a blinding, incandescent gold. She didn’t aim her magic at the monsters; she aimed it at the water.

"Flow!" she commanded, thrusting her palms into the liquid mass.

The healing magic didn’t just hit the surface; it used the water as a high-speed carrier medium. The dome became a massive, swirling delivery system for mass purification.

Through the synchronization, the holy energy raced through every molecule of the water, turning the dome into a pressurized vessel of divine light.

Inside, the Behemoths began to scream, not in pain, but in a terrifying, soul-deep shock. The purple, necrotic seals of corruption began to burn away in jagged, smoking sections, dissolving from the outside in. The dark energy The holy tide literally washed away the dark energy. washed away by the holy tide.

When Octavia finally dropped the dome, the transition was jarring. The monstrous, controlled weapons of war were gone.

In their place stood three massive, confused, and utterly terrified animals, blinking their eyes as if waking from a fever dream, wandering aimlessly away from the carnage in search of something to eat that wasn’t human flesh.

"Tidal Fortress: Evolved," Octavia breathed, a rare, triumphant smile tugging at her lips as she wiped a spray of saltwater from her cheek.

Then came the third, and most terrifying, manifestation of their power.

Lucian felt it building in his marrow, a resonance he had been cultivating for three agonizing days of relentless practice. Every incremental improvement, every drop of sweat in the training sessions, and every ounce of blood spilled in the recent battles had been stacking, layering upon itself like the scales of a dragon.

As a corrupted S-rank warrior, a nightmare of jagged bone and dark mana lunged toward a momentarily vulnerable Serenia, and Lucian moved. He didn’t just run; he detonated.

He tapped into the dragon-breathing technique, pushing his physical capabilities far beyond the breaking point of a mortal man. The air around him screamed as his lungs expanded with pressurized mana.

’I can di this... For the fate of the world!’

He channeled the triple synchronization, braiding the elemental essences of his companions into his own soul. Ice, solar fire, and the crushing weight of the ocean were woven into a single, terrifying braid of energy, all anchored by the primal, draconic strength of his breathing.

"DRAGON’S WRATH!"

He swung his blade in a single, horizontal arc. The strike didn’t just cut the air; it tore it.

The impact was a visceral, bone-shattering event. The S-rank warrior didn’t just fall; they were obliterated.

The blade passed through the creature’s armored chest with a sickening crunch of collapsing ribs and a wet thwack of severed organs. But it was the elemental payload that truly finished the job.

As a side effect of the Serenia bond’s partial activation, a surge of pure, holy light bled from the edge of his steel. The warrior was caught in a momentary explosion of elemental fury, frozen by ice, scorched by solar heat, crushed by water, and finally, purified by the holy element that tore the corruption from their very essence.

The warrior hit the ground with a heavy, lifeless thud, their body steaming as the last of the dark mana evaporated into the air.

Lucian stood over the remains, his chest heaving, his muscles twitching from the sheer output of energy. He looked down at his trembling hand, the skin glowing faintly with the fading residue of the elemental braid. The sheer, unadulterated power of the strike still vibrated in his bones.

"I didn’t know..." he whispered, his voice raspy and thick with awe, "...that a human could produce that much."

Serenia, her eyes never leaving the massive dome she was still maintaining to protect them, offered a small, knowing smirk.

"Dragon Breathing is accelerating ahead of schedule, sweet boy," she said, her voice steady despite the chaos. "You’ve been having a very... exciting few weeks."

"Don’t get used to the ease; the real monster is still waiting."

The phase of the battle that followed was unlike anything Lucian had ever experienced. Since the moment he had woken up in that desolate valley, confused by a mysterious gacha system and possessing zero understanding of the world he had been thrust into, he had learned one fundamental rule: kill or be killed.

But here, in the shadow of the ritual, the standard logic of combat was not just broken; it was a death trap.

They were caught in a horrific, high-stakes paradox.

They could not kill Corvus. The system notifications, flickering in the corner of his vision with a cold, mechanical urgency, were terrifyingly clear: if Corvus died now, the ritual would not end; it would detonate.

If he died, it would trigger a huge, uncontrolled explosion of energy that would speed up the Calamity’s arrival beyond the point of no return. To kill him was to doom the world.

Yet, they could not let him continue. Every second he stood there, directing the flow of mana, the circle grew hungrier.

Every moment he lived, he was a conduit for more sacrifices, more screams, and more blood to feed the violet eye.

The objective had shifted from slaughter to surgical restraint.

They had to pin him. They had to break his will and his body without breaking his life.

They needed to interrupt his ability to direct the ritual with such granular, terrifying precision that they could strip him of his combat capability without delivering a single fatal blow. They had to shatter his bones without piercing his organs; they had to crush his limbs without stopping his heart.

The margin for error was thinner than a razor’s edge.

This was a nightmare of combat geometry. Most of their training had been built on the practical, brutal assumption that the goal was to stop an enemy permanently.

When you fight a monster, you aim for the throat, the heart, and the skull. You want the sound of breaking bone to be followed by the silence of death.

But this? This required a discipline of restraint that felt almost unnatural.

It was the difference between a butcher swinging a cleaver and a jeweler working with a needle, all while being pelted by a storm of dark magic.

They had to know exactly where the line lay, the microscopic boundary between a limb that was incapacitated and a limb that was irreversibly destroyed.

This was the moment where the grueling, soul-crushing weeks of training under Marshal’s relentless instruction finally paid their dividends. Lucian could feel the echoes of her voice in his mind, a rhythmic, commanding cadence that had drilled the concept of controlled violence into his very marrow.

"Don’t just hit him, Lucian!" she had barked during those dawn training sessions, her eyes burning with intensity. "Don’t just commit to the strike!"

"Feel the impact, sense the resistance, and pull the force back at the microsecond of contact!"

"A warrior who can only kill is a blunt instrument; a warrior who can control the depth of his wound is a god!"

He had hated those drills at the time. He had hated the way his muscles screamed from the constant, agonizing effort of stopping a punch an inch before it hit a target, or the way he had to catch a falling weight without letting it settle.

But now, as he lunged toward the violet-eyed man, those drills were his lifeline.

The ability to adjust the force and direction of a strike in real time to feel the exact moment his blade would transition from a shallow cut to a lethal puncture was the only thing keeping them from accidental genocide.

He wasn’t just fighting a man anymore; he was performing a dance of controlled devastation, where a single millimeter of misplaced strength could trigger the end of everything.