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Black Gate.
Two words, and every person in the monitoring room was on their feet.
On screen, the swirling black particles at the Flower's corpse site had torn a ragged seam in the air. The seam widened, deepened, and solidified into a doorway of absolute darkness. No light escaped it. No light entered it. A wound in reality where reality had decided to stop existing.
"Why now?" Harrison's voice was tight. "The spatial monitoring showed stable readings all week."
"Because of the dragon." Victor was already moving. "Fae Spirit Hollow's spatial fabric can sustain Six-Star forces. That's its ceiling. The dragon's power, after whatever passive enhancement triggered on summon, pushed into Legendary tier. The fight with the Flower cracked the tolerance threshold."
"Move. Now." Victor opened the emergency portal. "Everyone in."
Harlow, Harrison, and Victor went through first. Inside the Hollow, Victor fired off commands without breaking stride.
"Townsend, Brandt. Get to the other four. I don't know if the spatial instability is localized. Extract them and get out."
"On it." The two Emperor Realm principals launched skyward and vanished.
Victor, Harlow, and Harrison accelerated toward Luke's position. Seconds that might matter.
A leg punched through the Black Gate. Segmented. Chitinous. Covered in iridescent obsidian shell. It planted on the ground, and the earth cracked under the weight.
Then the rest followed.
「 Abyss Predator 」 Race: Extradimensional Beast Quality: Rare Level: ★★★★★★★ (Seven-Star) Skills: Hunt, Absorb, Dimensional Transit, Bone-Eater Swarm
A beetle the size of a house. Six legs, each thick as a tree trunk. Bioluminescent carapace that pulsed with sickly light. And across its head, dozens of compound eyes, each one independently tracking a different target. Several locked onto Black Star. Several locked onto Luke.
The creature didn't flinch at the dragon. Things that drifted between dimensions had seen worse.
Its carapace split along the dorsal ridge, and a torrent of fist-sized insects poured out. Black-shelled, mandibles built for one purpose. They swarmed outward in a living cloud, thousands of chittering bodies blotting out the light. Half targeted Black Star. Half targeted Luke.
Bone-Eater Swarm.
"Mana!" Luke summoned her back without hesitation. Against a Seven-Star, he needed everything.
Mana materialized beside him, and the mana drain doubled instantly. A countdown he could feel in his bones. But Mana didn't need instructions. One glance at the black cloud converging on Luke was enough.
She grabbed him by the arm, kicked off the ground, and Magical Hats activated. The question-mark hat appeared where they'd been standing. A second hat materialized fifty feet to the right, behind a cluster of fallen trees. Mana emerged from the second hat pulling Luke with her, dumping him behind cover before the swarm even reached the first hat.
The bone-eaters converged on the decoy and shredded it in seconds. By the time they realized the target wasn't inside, Mana was already airborne.
"Stay behind cover, Master! I'll keep them off you!"
She swept her staff in a wide horizontal arc. Dark Burning Attack. The expanding wave of dark energy ripped through the bone-eater swarm from left to right, vaporizing hundreds in a single pass. But more were pouring out of the beetle's carapace, replacing the losses faster than she could burn them.
Above, Black Star took a different approach. The dragon banked hard, dove at the Abyss Predator's back, and raked its claws across the carapace in a screaming pass. Sparks flew. The claws left gouges in the shell, but they were shallow. Surface scratches on armor that was designed to survive dimensional transit.
The Predator barely reacted. One of its forelegs swiped upward, fast for something that size, and Black Star had to roll mid-flight to avoid being skewered. The dragon's wingtip clipped a tree on the way out of the dodge, shearing it in half.
"The shell's too thick for physical attacks," Luke muttered, watching from his cover. "Star Flare Shot. Aim for the leg joints."
Black Star heard the command. On the next pass, instead of diving for the carapace, the dragon pulled up and fired. Star Flare Shot compressed the black flames into a tight, spiraling projectile that screamed toward the gap between the beetle's front-left leg and its body.
Direct hit. The joint sizzled. The Predator let out a grating screech and stumbled, that leg momentarily buckling.
"There!" Mana saw the opening. She'd been weaving between trees, firing rapid Dark Magic Attacks at the swarm to keep them off Luke's position, but the moment the beetle staggered, she pivoted hard. Staff raised, Dark Magic Inheritance already active, Spell Tome pages riffling. She poured everything into a concentrated bolt aimed at the same damaged joint.
Dark magic and dragon fire residue collided at the weak point simultaneously. The joint cracked. Chitin splintered. Viscous fluid leaked from the wound.
The Abyss Predator screamed. A sound that didn't belong to any animal Luke had ever heard, a frequency that rattled his teeth and made his vision blur at the edges. One of its working legs lashed out sideways, a blind retaliatory swipe that caught three trees at once and turned them into kindling.
"It felt that." Mana grinned. "Ugly thing has weak spots after all!"
But the beetle adapted fast. Its body rotated, tucking the damaged joint underneath where neither attacker could easily reach it. The bone-eater swarm shifted pattern, no longer spreading outward but forming a dense protective cloud around the beetle's lower body, shielding every joint from direct line of sight.
A living shield of insects protecting the weak points. Smart for something that ran on instinct.
Mana fired a homing Dark Magic Attack, curving the bolt around the swarm wall to reach the underside. The swarm intercepted it. Hundreds of bone-eaters threw themselves into the spell's path, absorbing the damage with their bodies. The bolt fizzled before it reached the joint.
"They're sacrificing themselves to block spells." Luke's jaw tightened. The beetle was using the swarm as expendable ablative armor. Each individual insect was weak, but as a collective barrier they could soak damage meant for the main body.
Black Star tried from above. A sustained breath weapon, sweeping dragon fire across the top of the beetle's carapace to burn through the swarm from a different angle. The fire incinerated everything it touched, but the swarm simply split and reformed around the flames, closing the gap the moment the breath weapon passed.
For every hundred bone-eaters destroyed, two hundred more crawled out of the carapace.
Luke felt his reserves dropping. Minutes. Maybe less. The dual summon was draining him at a rate that left his hands tingling and his vision starting to narrow at the edges. The Abyss Predator wasn't going down fast. It might not go down at all. Not like this.
But his face stayed calm.
He had one more card to play. And the conditions for using it were about to be met.
Miles away, the chaos was spreading.
Beasts from the deep zones were fleeing toward the Hollow's outer territories. The comfortable hunting grounds Marcus's group had been picking through were suddenly flooded with panicked creatures running from something far worse than themselves.
"Is the Hollow on DRUGS today?!" Hailey yelled, pulling Tyler behind a rock formation as a pair of Five-Star beasts thundered past without even glancing at them. The beasts weren't hunting. They were running.
"Something's happening in the deep zones," Marcus said grimly. "Something big."
They didn't know what. They didn't want to know what. But the ground was shaking, the air tasted like ozone and char, and every creature in the Hollow was heading in one direction: away from whatever Luke had found.
Author: sorry for not posting these days I was sick 🤢