The dust from the boulder punching through the ceiling hadn't even settled before Dimitrescu's furious shriek was echoing through the chamber.
"You two filthy outsider rats. You destroyed my castle. You hurt my daughters. I'm going to chew your bones to splinters."
Lady Dimitrescu's face, once striking in its aristocratic beauty, was now a ruined landscape of uneven flesh where the Mold had forced its repairs.
Her half-meter claws sliced through the air with a sound that set teeth on edge, her eyes churning with a hatred so concentrated it was almost solid.
Behind her, three swirling masses of flies recongealed into the shapes of her three daughters. Their clothes were just as shredded, their faces scarred with the ugly marks of fire, hissing in piercing shrieks, looking ready to tear Ryan apart with their bare hands.
Ryan brushed the dust off his coat. Completely unbothered.
"Well, well. Which soccer mom brought the kids along this time?" Heisenberg glanced at Lady Dimitrescu and curled his lip.
"Shut your mouth." Dimitrescu whipped her head toward Heisenberg as he clawed his way out of the rubble, a mocking sneer twisting her lips. "And you, Karl. A pathetic waste of space who spends his days playing with scrap metal, and you actually dare betray Lady Miranda? That laughable little power of yours doesn't amount to a damn thing next to her true divine might. Today, this place becomes your grave."
"You oversized vampire bat that nobody wants even for free, shut the hell up." Heisenberg spat a bloody wad onto the ground and fired right back. "I'd rather die than end up looking like a charbroiled sweet potato like you."
While the two of them were busy trading insults, Miranda's patience ran out entirely.
"The farce is over."
Miranda's voice rang out cold as a death sentence. The six black wings on her back snapped open, and the fungal core beneath the earth seemed to sense its master's fury, erupting into a frenzy.
The ground shook as thousands of black Mold tentacles burst from every direction like a nest of massive serpents, all converging on Heisenberg and Ethan at once.
"Get off me!" Heisenberg swung his war hammer with a roar, the magnetic storm around his body shredding every tentacle that got close.
But Miranda's Mold was endless. Heisenberg's hammer swings grew slower and slower, his stamina draining fast.
On the other side, Ethan was barely hanging on. His guns were toys against tentacles as thick as barrels. After several desperate rolls, he was bleeding from multiple wounds, a razor-sharp Mold spear inches from punching clean through his chest.
At that exact moment, a high-explosive rocket trailing a long tail of flame detonated with pinpoint accuracy right in front of Ethan. The blast wave shredded the lethal tentacle into a rain of black mist.
Ryan had appeared at the highest point of the battlefield. He'd pulled an RPG launcher from behind his back and shouldered it.
Miranda's brow creased slightly as she moved to counterattack with the Mold.
Then she saw something more absurd than anything she'd witnessed in her entire century of life.
One rocket after another streaked from the single-shot launcher without Ryan so much as reloading.
"What the fuck?!" Miranda snapped out of her shock at the last possible second, pouring everything she had into the Mold, weaving layer after layer of defensive barriers in front of herself.
Ryan hadn't reloaded once. He was firing a single-shot RPG at Gatling gun speed. High-explosive rockets poured out like a meteor shower, each one trailing a blinding tail of flame, blanketing the airspace around Miranda in a solid wall of ordnance.
The entire underground chamber was swallowed by deafening explosions and blinding light. Shockwaves rolled outward in relentless succession, forcing Heisenberg, Ethan, and even Lady Dimitrescu to scramble backward, diving behind whatever cover they could find.
The blasts stacked on top of each other in the enclosed space, shaking loose a steady rain of stone from the walls.
The barrage went on for nearly a full minute. Ryan didn't let up until the launcher tube had gone cherry-red and started to warp from the heat.
Behind cover, everyone was mentally writing Miranda's obituary. Lady Dimitrescu swallowed hard, already planning her exit route.
The smoke cleared.
Somehow, Miranda hadn't been reduced to dust. Her Mold shield had tanked the punishment to its absolute limit before shattering completely. It had barely saved her life, but it couldn't save her dignity.
Hovering in midair, Miranda was a wreck. Her ornate golden crown had been blasted off to parts unknown. Her black wings were charred stumps. Scorch marks covered her body from head to toe. Every trace of that lofty divinity was gone.
As everyone stared in stunned silence, Ryan tossed the still-glowing RPG aside like a piece of junk. Then he cracked his neck, rolled his wrists, joints popping.
His eyes went sharp. He vanished from where he stood, leaving nothing behind but a crater where his foot had been.
A sonic boom cracked through the air. Miranda threw up a Mold shield instantly.
Ryan was so fast he left an afterimage, appearing directly in front of Miranda in the blink of an eye. No flashy moves. He drove from the hips, his right fist carrying a terrifying amount of force straight into the Mold barrier.
"Mortal flesh dares to..." Miranda started to sneer.
The shield cracked.
Miranda's words died in her throat. The barrier, thick and hard as steel, shattered like glass the instant Ryan's fist made contact, his punch blowing a gaping hole clean through it.
His fist carried through and connected solidly with Miranda's shoulder.
Miranda rocketed backward like a shell from a cannon, slamming into the cavern wall hard enough to crater the rock into a massive spiderweb of fractures.
"Impossible." Horror flooded Miranda's eyes. She threw up her hand, and thousands of fine black filaments swarmed over Ryan's arm, trying to pierce his skin, infect his nervous system, assimilate him.
Nothing happened.
The Mold, capable of penetrating anything, hit Ryan's skin and simply... stopped. Like it had encountered something it couldn't begin to process. The filaments pushed desperately to breach even a single layer of skin cells and couldn't. They strained so hard they snapped apart on their own.
"What... what are you?" Miranda's voice cracked high with shock. "Why... why can't the Mold assimilate you?"
Ryan laughed softly, reached back, grabbed one of Miranda's wings at the root, twisted from the hips, and ripped the self-proclaimed god off the wall. He swung her overhead like a sledgehammer and drove her into the ground.
The floor buckled from the impact.
What happened next shattered every assumption anyone in that cavern had ever held.
No gunfight. No clash of supernatural powers. Just raw, brutal, close-quarters violence.
Ryan's skin was too tough. He abandoned defense entirely.
Miranda's razor tentacles and Mold blades scored his clothes at best. Ryan didn't care. White marks appeared and healed over instantly. Every punch and kick he returned carried enough force to shatter reinforced concrete.
Fists crashing, bones breaking, the floor cratering with every impact.
For the first time in her existence, Miranda's vaunted Mold regeneration couldn't keep up with the rate her body was being destroyed.
She'd barely sprouted half a wing before Ryan ripped it out by the root, black fungal blood spraying like a burst pipe.
Her face, once sculpted and imperious, caved and collapsed under blows that carried no technique, only overwhelming force. Eventually it couldn't even hold a human shape anymore, degenerating into a writhing mass of ruined flesh frantically trying to piece itself back together.
A century of godhood, beaten back to raw meat by nothing but brute force.
"Impossible... this is impossible..." Miranda's voice was no longer cold judgment. It was a ragged, whistling scream laced with the despair of shattered faith.
The Mold she'd spent a hundred years cultivating, the power she believed was a gift from god, had become a joke in front of this man. Having a century of evolutionary logic physically ground to dust hurt worse than having her body torn apart.
They fought from the ground to midair, then punched through the cavern wall and back again.
Every collision sent out visible shockwaves. The hardened underground chamber crumbled around them like paper, entire sections of rock collapsing, massive Mold roots ripped apart like thread.
This wasn't a human fight. This was two kaiju wearing human skins going at it like gods at war.
In the corner by the altar, Heisenberg, Lady Dimitrescu, and Ethan stood frozen like statues. They watched the once-invincible Miranda get ragdolled like a broken sack, smashed into the ground over and over, the Mold unable to infect her opponent by even a fraction.
Only one thought remained in their minds: Ryan, the one who'd been passing as human this whole time, was the real monster here.
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