[The Parted Sea – The Kraken's Wrath]
The atmosphere within the Sea of Echoes didn't just turn cold; it became a graveyard. The transition from the first floor's victory to this sudden, violet-hued slaughter was so rapid that reality itself seemed to stutter. The Void Kraken hung suspended in the air like a colossal, rotting moon, its central eye pulsing with a rhythmic, sickening hunger that made the very marrow in their bones ache.
"Don't you think you talk too much for a monster?" Cynthia challenged. Her voice was a razor-thin blade of ice cutting through the humid salt air. She stood at the front of the group, completely unarmed. She carried no sword, no shield, and no relics—only the terrifying, primal heat of the Red Flames that danced across her knuckles like restless spirits. She didn't look up at the leviathan with fear; she looked at it with the bored disdain of an apex predator.
"Woman... you will pay for this insult!" the Kraken bellowed, the sound vibrating through the water walls held back by Neweland.
A singular, jagged beam of violet void-energy shrieked downward, aimed directly at Cynthia's heart. Without shifting her stance, she raised a single, bare hand. The beam hit her open palm and hissed, the dark energy being consumed by the red heat of her mana. With a casual flick of her wrist, she crushed the remaining energy into harmless sparks that fell like dead stars. "Is that all?" she asked softly.
The Kraken's eye bled into a deep, murderous crimson. It didn't respond with words. Instead, all twelve of its gargantuan tentacles curled inward, opening thousands of fleshy pores.
[ABYSSAL BARRAGE: ZERO-POINT BEAMS]
Suddenly, the world exploded into a strobe light of violet death. Hundreds of beams erupted simultaneously, turning the dry canyon into a chaotic web of erasure. Techyon's world became a blur of pure instinct. His Auto-Counter skill flared to life, his body moving in impossible, jagged patterns. He felt the singe of the beams on his skin as he danced through the infinitesimal gaps in the barrage.
Gaia reacted instantly. she slammed her bare palms together, the impact creating a shockwave of silver mana. "Get behind me! Now!" she commanded, her hands glowing as she forced a shimmering, translucent barrier to expand around the survivors.
But the barrage was too fast for the vanguard. The beams didn't just hit; they deleted.
Goto, Kokoi, Siyo, and Lilia—the team that had survived the Gladiator only minutes ago—were caught in the open. The violet light enveloped them for a fraction of a second. There was no blood, no screams, and no remains. When the light faded, they had been instantly vaporized, their existence reduced to fine ash that scattered into the black water walls like gray snow.
"Nooooo!" Saina screamed from inside the safety of Gaia's shield, her hands clawing at the silver barrier. Her friends, the people she had joked with since the start of the journey, were simply gone.
"Focus!" Lapis roared, his Honoured Eyes bleeding from the sheer strain of tracking the beams. He thrust his hands forward, the space in front of the barrier twisting like a shattered lens. "[SPACE WARPING: DIMENSIONAL REFLECTION]!"
The next wave of beams hit Lapis's distorted space and bent 180 degrees, screaming back toward the Kraken. The monster let out a roar of agony as its own energy scorched its tentacles, but the victory felt hollow. The cost of the Second Floor had been paid in the souls of their comrades, and the water walls were starting to tremble.
The silence that followed the vaporization of the vanguard was shattered not by a scream, but by the cold, melodic snap of Cynthia's patience. The air around her didn't just heat up; it began to vibrate with a frequency that turned the surrounding black water into steam before she even moved.
"Enough," she whispered. The word carried more weight than the Kraken's entire physical mass.
In a blur of red light that defied the heavy gravity of the Second Floor, Cynthia launched herself upward. She didn't use a platform or a spell; she simply stepped on the air, her feet igniting with small, controlled bursts of mana.
"What—?!" the Kraken bellowed, its massive central eye spinning frantically to track the white blur rising above its head. It began to charge a desperate, point-blank beam from its core, but it was already too late. Cynthia was looking down at the leviathan from the apex of the dark sky, her hands held wide.
"[FUSION FLARE]!"
Between her bare palms, a spark of absolute zero-point energy ignited, expanding in a micro-second into a gargantuan spear of white-hot plasma. The weapon was a monstrosity of geometry and heat, stretching nearly twice the length of the Kraken's entire three-hundred-meter body. The light it emitted was so intense that Gaia and Techyon were forced to shield their eyes to avoid permanent blindness.
With a look of icy indifference, Cynthia thrust the spear downward.
The collision was beyond the scale of a traditional battle. When the Fusion Flare pierced the Kraken's mantle, the resulting explosion was a cosmic anomaly—an event estimated to be 700 times stronger than a supernova.
The "Sea of Echoes" ceased to exist for several miles. The billions of tons of stagnant black water were instantly vaporized into a fine mist, leaving the ocean floor exposed for the first time in millennia. The Kraken itself didn't have time to feel pain; its biological matter was converted into pure energy, its scream lost in the roar of the white fire that scoured the dungeon walls.
As the blinding pillar of flame finally dissipated, the heavy mist began to settle like a shroud. Cynthia descended through the steam, her red hair flowing behind her, landing on the cracked, bone-dry seabed with the grace of a falling feather. She didn't have a single scratch on her skin, and her mana signature hadn't even begun to waver.
She glanced at the spot where the Kraken had once dominated the sky and let out a small, bored breath.
"Too weak," she said, her voice echoing through the now-empty abyss.
Techyon watched her, his heart hammering against his ribs. He knew she was strong, but this was a level of destruction that bordered on the divine. As the realization that their friends were gone settled back into the group,