SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors

Chapter 79: 79. Turns Out ’Holding Back the Ocean With Bare Hands’ Was Not a Metaphor

The battle transitioned into a frantic, high-stakes game of celestial chess, where every move was a desperate attempt to pin down a god in the making.

Glacielle moved first, her movements a blur of frost and focused intent. Her ice was the cleanest tool they possessed for this surgical nightmare.

Unlike fire that consumed or steel that severed, her frost could encapsulate without crushing, providing a rigid, crystalline cage that could hold a man without necessarily killing him. The moment Corvus lunged forward, his eyes burning with a violet, chaotic light to launch a devastating offensive strike, Glacielle slammed her staff into the earth.

"Glacial Anchor!"

A massive, jagged pillar of Glacielle-quality ice erupted around Corvus’s legs, surging upward with the speed of a striking serpent. It didn’t just freeze him; it encased his lower body in a solid, multi-ton block of absolute zero crystalline structure, grounding him instantly.

For a second, the momentum of his strike died in his throat.

But Corvus was no longer just a man. A guttural, inhuman roar tore from his lungs as the Calamity energy within him surged.

With a violent, sickening crack, the ice didn’t just shatter; it exploded outward in a spray of razor-sharp shards as he forced his mana through the frozen prison. He broke free in a mere four seconds, the sheer, violent pressure of his corrupted aura turning the ice into shrapnel.

It was a terrifying display of power; it was more than Lucian had hoped for in terms of their ability to restrain him but far less than he had feared of his raw, unbridled strength.

"Don’t let him breathe!" Lucian roared, his voice straining against the roar of the wind.

Marshal was already moving to intercept the second surge. She unleashed a technique Lucian had never witnessed in their training: the binding variant of her luminous chain approach.

Golden, ethereal chains erupted from her Dawn Reapers, lashing out like hungry vipers. They didn’t aim to pierce his flesh; they wrapped around his torso and arms with a heavy, luminous weight, designed to hold without cutting, to bind without wounding.

Corvus snarled, a sound that was half man, half beast. He didn’t fight the chains with strength; he fought them with decay.

He channeled the dark, necrotic energy of the Calamity directly into the links. Lucian watched in horror as the golden light began to sizzle and blacken, the corruption traveling up the chain material and dissolving the divine energy at the point of contact.

It was a war of attrition. Corvus’s partial fusion gave him access to a well of essentially infinite energy, but he couldn’t use it all at once.

Each countermeasure he burned through cost him precious seconds—seconds that Lucian was desperately using to close the distance.

Then came Octavia’s gambit, the most brutal and visceral of their coordinated efforts.

As Corvus broke free from Marshal’s golden light, six massive, powerful tentacles of pressurized seawater erupted from the ground, lashing around his limbs and chest. This was Octavia’s most effective restraint, but it was also the most personally agonizing.

Because the tentacles were physical, semi-liquid constructs, the corruption didn’t just bounce off them; it invaded them.

Lucian felt the sensation through the synchronization bond, a phantom ache that made his own skin crawl. He could feel the dark, oily corruption of the Calamity lashing out at the six points of contact, attempting to infect and rot the water material from the inside out.

Octavia endured it with the terrifying, professional equanimity of a veteran who had long ago made peace with pain. Her teeth were gritted so hard he feared they might shatter, her knuckles white as she maintained the pressure.

The regeneration of the tentacle material was fighting a losing battle, barely staying ahead of the necrotic spread, the water turning a sickly, bruised purple where it touched his skin.

Through their constant connection, the perfect efficiency bond let Lucian sense Octavia’s condition in painful detail. He could feel the exact moment her concentration wavered, the exact moment the corruption threatened to overwhelm her will.

Without a single word, Lucian sent a sharp, mental command through the party link, a desperate, focused plea for intervention.

’Serenia. Now, Octavia.’

Serenia didn’t hesitate. She didn’t even look up from the massive protective dome she was maintaining.

She simply shifted the frequency of her continuous support pulse. A wave of pure, incandescent golden light washed over the battlefield, but it didn’t just hit the enemies; it surged through the synchronization bond, lancing directly into Octavia’s tentacles.

The effect was instantaneous. The holy light acted as a divine cauterization.

The regeneration rate of the water constructs didn’t just stabilize; it skyrocketed, surging past the corruption’s ability to decay. The temporary, agonizing equilibrium that had been draining Octavia’s life force vanished, replaced by a sustainable, divine flow.

The tentacles hardened, turning from a bruised, sickly violet to a brilliant, shimmering azure, holding the calamity-fused man in a grip that was no longer just physical but spiritually absolute.

"Much appreciated, darling," Octavia gasped, her voice a strained, jagged thing.

She was smiling, but it was a grimace of pure, unadulterated agony, her teeth gritted so hard that Lucian could almost hear the enamel grinding. Even with Serenia’s divine grace reinforcing her, the sheer pressure of holding a demigod in a liquid vice was a feat of soul-crushing willpower.

The battle descended into a rhythmic, high-octane cycle of violence and containment. Lucian became the conductor of this orchestra of carnage.

He wasn’t just fighting; he was managing a catastrophe in real time.

"Glacielle, reset! Now! He’s shifting his center of gravity!" Lucian roared, his eyes darting between the shifting mana flows.

The moment Octavia’s tentacles began to fray under a new surge of Corvus’s dark pressure, Glacielle slammed her staff down, a fresh wave of frost erupting to freeze his joints before he could lunge.

"Marshal, the chains! He’s trying to anchor himself with the corruption!"

"On it!" Marshal yelled back, her golden light lashing out to wrap around Corvus’s wrists just as he began to flex his muscles, the sound of his straining sinews audible even over the roar of the wind.

Lucian called the targets, dictated the timing, and directed the frantic shifts between restraint techniques with a desperate, frantic precision. He was trying to prevent Corvus from finding a rhythm, from finding that singular moment of stillness where he could unleash a counterstrike that would shatter them all.

But as the minutes bled away, a cold, gnawing dread began to settle in the pit of his stomach.

The ninety-minute window, the countdown to the end of the world, was shrinking with every frantic breath they took. And yet, the results of this brutal, exhausting struggle remained stubbornly, terrifyingly inconclusive.

They were holding him, yes. They were bruising him, breaking his momentum, and draining his energy.

But Corvus was a tide, and they were merely trying to hold back the ocean with their bare hands.

Something was wrong. It was a sensation he couldn’t quite name, a primal instinct screaming at him that they were missing a fundamental truth of this fight.

They were winning the battle of strength, but they were losing the battle of essence.

The brief, agonizing clarity came roughly forty minutes into the confrontation.

A massive surge of calamity energy had forced a temporary stalemate. Octavia had pulled her tentacles back to allow a fresh layer of holy reinforcement, and Glacielle had just finished a massive ’Frozen Prison’ reset that had momentarily anchored Corvus’s torso in a mountain of ice.

For a fleeting, surreal fifteen seconds, the roar of the battlefield seemed to dim to a low hum. The combatants were caught in a breathless, trembling pause.

Lucian slumped slightly, his lungs burning, his vision swimming with the afterimages of the violet and gold light. He felt a presence beside him and turned, expecting a comrade ready to lunge back into the fray.

Instead, he found Glacielle.

She hadn’t just moved to his side; she had sat down on the bloodstained, frost-cracked earth. It was an act of total vulnerability, something she had never done in any battle they had shared: not in the dungeons, not in the forests, not even when the world was falling apart.

Her usual stoic, crystalline composure had fractured. Her hands, usually so steady when weaving her frost, were trembling visibly against her knees.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and shimmering with a terror that surpassed the fear of death. It was the fear of something much larger.

"Master," she whispered. Her voice was quiet, a fragile thread of sound that seemed to cut through the heavy, tension-filled air more effectively than any battle cry.

It was the voice of someone speaking a truth that was too heavy to carry, a truth that had to be said even while the world screamed around them.

"Master..." she repeated, her gaze flickering toward the violet eye of the ritual, "I’m scared."