With one final, heavy impact, Ryan grabbed Miranda's ruined wings and hammered her entire body into the deepest wall of the underground chamber like driving a nail into stone.
Rubble and black fungal blood sprayed in every direction.
Ryan let go and stepped back. He cracked his neck, casually brushed a few specks of dust from his sleeve, and let out a long breath.
"Decent regeneration speed. Damage resistance gets a passing grade, barely." Ryan shook out his hand, his tone easy. "Haven't had a good workout in a while. That was a solid warm-up."
"Warm-up???"
The word echoed through the dead-silent cavern, almost offensive in its casualness. Ethan quietly clicked the safety back on his gun. He was pretty sure it wasn't going to see any use today.
Heisenberg didn't even have the energy left to smoke. He slumped against a pile of rubble, staring at Ryan the way you'd stare at something that shouldn't exist.
Lady Dimitrescu had outdone them all, having already hauled her daughters several hundred meters away.
From deep inside the crater in the wall came a nauseating sound of flesh knitting itself together.
Miranda peeled herself out of the crack in the rock. She'd lost all human shape. She looked like a heap of mud barely held together by black fungus. Four of her six proud wings had been ripped clean off. The remaining two hung limp and useless.
She raised what was left of her face, the features no longer even symmetrical, and fixed her gaze on Ryan.
"What... are you." Miranda's voice was a shattered rasp, hollow with the despair of someone whose faith had just collapsed. "A human body cannot possibly possess this kind of power."
Ryan slid his hands back into his pockets and looked down at her.
"Me? I'm just someone who's a little interested in that big Megamycete you've got buried down here."
"Interested..."
Miranda froze. Then her twisted face erupted with a fury beyond anything she'd shown before.
For a century, she'd treated the Mold as her personal domain, the sole key to resurrecting her daughter Eva. And this man, who'd just ground her divine power into the dirt, wanted the Megamycete? And he spoke of it like it was nothing?
"Unforgivable... you heretic who blasphemes against god."
Miranda snapped completely. She abandoned her human form. Her entire body detonated into a storm of viscous black fungus, merging directly with the massive Megamycete core nearby.
The entire underground chamber shook violently.
Every Mold root came alive, intertwining and devouring each other, coalescing in midair into a towering black fungal colossus over ten meters tall. Miranda's features ghosted across its face, radiating a suffocating, monstrous pressure.
"Die."
The fungal colossus let out a roar that shook the walls, swinging two arms like pillars holding up the sky, carrying enough force to flatten an entire mountainside, crashing down toward Ryan.
"Every damn boss has a phase two!" Ryan sighed. Facing a blow that could level the landscape, he didn't dodge. He stepped forward into the shadow falling over him.
No technique. No flourish. He clenched his right fist, poured everything he had into that single point, and punched straight up into the descending arm.
Fist met fungal limb, tens of tons of mass colliding, and a white ring of vapor blossomed outward from the point of impact.
A brief moment of deadlock. Then the colossus's arm began to disintegrate from the contact point outward, crumbling inch by inch. Ryan's enhanced physical destructive force tore through the arm and spread across the giant's entire body like a chain reaction.
The ten-meter fungal colossus exploded into a downpour of black rain under a single punch.
Miranda's broken true form tumbled out of the sky like a kite with its string cut, crashing at Ryan's feet.
She tried to call on the Mold again to repair herself, but this time the response was agonizingly slow. A body that once took seconds to reassemble could now only squirm like a dying worm.
The sustained physical destruction had pushed the Megamycete core past its energy threshold. Ryan had beaten her regeneration back to nothing.
Ryan glanced down at Miranda, still twitching at his feet. Close enough.
He crouched down and looked at that ruined face.
"Stop fighting it. Your regeneration's tapped out." Ryan's tone was flat. "Now, maybe we can have a civilized conversation about working together."
"Working together..." Miranda forced out a few wretched laughs from her throat, her eyes wild with suicidal resolve. "Don't you dare... you destroyed my life's work... for Eva's sake, I would detonate the entire Megamycete before I ever bow to you."
Just as Miranda prepared to burn the last of her life force and take everyone with her, a faintly ridiculous sound of carriage wheels creaked to life at the edge of the battlefield.
"Please, show mercy, most esteemed and terrifyingly powerful guest."
An enormous figure squeezed laboriously out of an ornate carriage. The Duke had appeared at the edge of the ruins at some point. He removed his top hat and gave Ryan a deep bow.
"The Duke." Ethan frowned. He'd never been able to figure out whose side this mysterious merchant was on.
Ryan straightened up, unsurprised. He seemed to have known the man would show.
The Duke dabbed the cold sweat from his forehead, glanced at the wreck of Miranda on the ground, and spoke with a note of pleading. "Sir, Miranda may be obsessive and deranged, but she is the keystone of this land. If you eliminate her completely, the Megamycete underground could lose all restraint. The entire village and everyone nearby would be buried with her."
"Oh? So you're saying I should let her hold me hostage?" Ryan looked at The Duke.
"Of course not." The Duke waved his hands frantically. "I merely hope there might be a more... elegant solution than annihilation."
"An elegant solution. I've got one, actually."
Ryan ignored The Duke and looked back down at the barely-alive Miranda. His voice was quiet, but it struck directly at her most vulnerable nerve.
"Miranda, you've spent over a hundred years running experiments, turned yourself into a monster, all for one thing. Bringing your daughter Eva back. Right?"
Miranda's clouded eyes went wide. Her ruined body shook violently.
Ryan looked at her and played his ace.
"What if I told you I might have a way to bring the daughter you lost to the flu back for real? Not as some Mold abomination. As an actual, living human being."
Dead silence in the cavern.
Miranda stopped struggling. She stared at Ryan, her eyes a tangled storm of doubt, terror, and a spark of desperate hope she couldn't kill no matter how hard she tried.
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