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Chapter 316: The Juggernaut Resurfaces
Caught completely off guard, Ryuu's body flew backward like a ball struck by a massive hammer, utterly unable to halt her momentum.
"What?!"
Still suspended in midair, Ryuu's eyes reflected a chaotic swirl of shock and sheer horror. She never expected Jura to be hiding a second Lambton. If he had simultaneously controlled both beasts throughout their fight, even the renowned Gale at full strength would never have won so easily.
This man hadn't viewed her as a true opponent from the very beginning. He was simply playing around, waiting like a patient hunter for his real prey to surface.
Crash! Ryuu slammed heavily into a massive crystal outcropping at the back of the cavern. The tremendous impact drove the metallic taste of blood up her throat, nearly forcing a violent cough. She forcibly suppressed the surging internal pressure and kicked hard against the crystal wall, steadying her precarious footing.
However, just as she prepared to recklessly charge at Jura once more, a roar echoed through the air.
It was a monstrous sound that defied all linguistic description. The instant the roar erupted, the entire cavern—no, the entirety of the 27th Floor—was plunged into an eerie, suffocating stillness. A tangible chill, akin to a polar storm, instantly enveloped the battlefield.
The Lambton that had just arrogantly sent Ryuu flying let out a short, miserable whimper the moment it heard that roar. Its massive, mountain-like body stiffened, and then, as if every bone in its body had been extracted, it slumped limply to the ground. Its six pairs of amber eyes were filled with primal terror, its colossal frame trembling uncontrollably.
The breath of the wolf-man youth hitched in his throat. Even Jura's one-armed body, twisted in ecstatic rapture just moments prior, suffered a violent, uncontrollable spasm.
As for Ryuu, her entire body went rigid. She froze in place like a flash-frozen sculpture.
The top-tier adventurer's intuition she had honed through countless life-and-death struggles, combined with the pure biological instinct of prey facing its natural predator, simultaneously hammered a deafening alarm in her mind. That chilling wind of absolute termination swept through the hearts of every conscious being present in a mere fraction of a second.
At the far end of the cavern, at the mouth of the tunnel connecting to the deeper darkness... a pair of hazy, blood-red eyes quietly emerged from the abyss, looking as though they had been condensed from the thickest gore.
A single glance from those eyes felt like an invisible, giant hand firmly grasping everyone's hearts and slowly squeezing. A figure stepped into the illumination of the ceiling's crystal light.
It was a slender yet gargantuan body. It possessed clearly distinguishable arms and legs, resembling some crude, malice-filled humanoid replica. Its arms were disproportionately long and thin compared to its massive torso, looking as though they might snap at any moment, exuding a deeply unsettling aura of grotesque incoordination.
Its equally long, impossibly thin legs featured reverse-jointed structures completely opposite to human anatomy. Every step it took was perfectly silent, yet it felt as if it possessed the weight to fracture the earth itself.
Most terrifying of all was the sheer lack of muscle on its enormous frame. Covering its twig-like, skeletal body was a pitch-black exoskeleton that resembled high-tech armor. Wrapping the surface of this shell was a mysterious, deep blue-purple radiance that spread outward like an oil slick on water.
A hardened, four-meter-long tail covered in bone spikes extended from its lower back. Every unconscious swish of it left fleeting afterimages in the air. Its head, laden with complex protrusions, looked exactly like the bleached skull of an unknown beast devoid of all flesh.
Deep within its hollow, bottomless eye sockets sat two burning orbs of blood-red light, brimming with pure sadism and hatred.
At this moment, it was defying all laws of physics—hanging upside-down from the cavern's ceiling. Its razor-sharp claws effortlessly pierced and gripped the diamond-hard crystal rock, allowing it to look down upon everything below with the majestic authority of absolute contempt.
Even while hanging upside-down, its body easily exceeded three meters in length. Without a doubt, this entity squarely fell into the Large-Class category.
Yet, the most anomalous and despair-inducing feature of this creature was the six appendages that one might initially mistake for fangs. They were the six elongated claws capping its thin arms.
Each of the six claws was disproportionately oversized, several times longer than normal fingers, and gleamed with an eerie, deep-purple light as if coated in a virulent toxin. Rather than "claws," they were six innate, unparalleled murder weapons—blades existing solely for the purpose of tearing and dismembering.
The instant she saw this figure, Ryuu's emerald eyes were completely swallowed by an ash-gray hue named "despair."
Meanwhile, a twisted smile of obsessive, adoring infatuation resurfaced on Jura's fear-stiffened face.
It's here... It's here, it's here! It's here!!!
The moment the figure's features became clear, Ryuu felt as if she had been struck by an invisible bolt of lightning. Her entire being plunged back into the blood-and-rain-soaked shadows of the past. Her body began to tremble violently, her teeth chattering together with a soft clack-clack sound.
It was exactly the same as that day four years ago.
Her reason screamed at her to fight, to resist. But her body, her deepest instincts, commanded her to run. Run. Flee this place immediately.
That was the culprit... the perpetrator that annihilated the Astrea Familia.
It was this!
It was this singular monster that took them—the girls hailed as the future hope of Orario, the talented, righteous, and kind maidens everyone believed would inevitably reach First-Class—and ruthlessly, sadistically crushed and tore them apart one by one, like trampling wildflowers on the roadside.
Two Level 3s.
Eight Level 4s.
A full roster of ten elite Second-Class adventurers standing at the summit of Orario had to sacrifice their lives entirely just to barely "repel" that nameless monster.
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