The Martial Unity

RUMBLE!!!

The world shook.

At that moment, every lifeform native to the dungeon felt a single emotion in its highest, unadulterated form.

Primordial fear.

Tranced or otherwise, they could feel it in their bones.

They could feel the eminent clash between two unstoppable forces. Forces that may as well have been calamities of nature.

Unfortunately, they were not wrong.

The moment csooner than Rui could have ever expected.

From within the depths of the core of the dungeon, he saw it.

He saw the objective of his operation.

He saw what he had dedicated the past two years to overcome.

He saw the Master-level beast that guarded the core of the Mellow Dungeon.

And it evoked a single emotion from within the depths of his heart.

Horror.

Pure, unadulterated horror.

It was a monster.

A true monster.

It was an amalgamation of every monster nightmare, every monster drawing a child had ever drawn, every visual manifestation of the concept of a monster.

It was worse than them all.

It had multiple heads.

A dragon, an angel, and a phoenix.

Its body appeared to be a hybrid fusion of countless creatures. It contained both the scales and the feathers of a phoenix and a total of six pairs of wings: four angel wings, a pair of dragon and phoenix wings each.

It was as though someone had butchered various lifeforms and then tried to mash them into a single creature.

Its very appearance evoked horror in the hearts of all living beings that beheld its grotesque, monstrous form.

It was a monster.

The monster.

The enlightenment of the Tree of Life helped him understand exactly what he was looking at.

"A chimera...!" A horrified whisper escaped Rui.

Chimeras.

These were a particularly abominable species within the Tree of Life of Gaia. It was a species characterized by its most prominent genetic ability to absorb its prey alive and integrate it into its body. It was considered to be an apex predator species that, like all apex species, was able to undergo self-evolution as a lifeform.

In the case of this particular species, it simply did so by integrating desirable parts and portions of any creature that it consumed while carefully ensuring that its prey never actually medically died. Furthermore, it didn't directly take control of the assimilated and integrated parts of its prey into its own nervous system.

No.

The truth was a lot more horrifying.

It consumed its prey alive, never letting it die while preserving its brain and nervous system to use as an interface to control the body parts it integrated into its body. The brain of the chimera species contained a neuroparasytical lobe that extended into the prefrontal cortex of its prey's brain to gain manual control over the consumed prey.

In other words, it controlled the brains of its prey to control their bodies inside its own body. A disgusting, grotesque brain control network that made use of its prey's mind, experience, and muscle memory.

Yet, despite its horrifying ability to usurp the minds of the disjointed prey alive inside its body, a single truth had becclear to Rui the moment he bore witness to the creature that emerged from the core of the dungeon on the other side of the planetoid.

"...It's in a trance." A horrified voice escaped him. "The chimera and all the life forms integrated into its body are all under a trance of the dungeon!"

The puppeteer had been reduced to a puppet.

Horrifyingly poetic, it didn't bode well for Rui.

The various eyes of the heads of the chimera turned toward the source of danger. Their pupils dilated as the creature identified the threat to the dungeon that it was dispatched to eliminate.

RUMBLE!!!

The world shuddered as heaven and earth screamed in pain. With a single leap, the monstrous horror reached the other side of the dungeon as its powerful wings propelled it at an unfathomable speed, crossing a hundred kilometers in the blink of an eye.

In just a moment, it had arrived at Rui's location.

A horrifying cacophonic roar sent shudders down every life form in the entirety of the dungeon, evoking despair in the hearts of all those who heard its cry of bloodlust.

A blood-curdling tsunami of horrifying peril erupted from the chimera, washing over all living beings in the dungeon, paralyzing them with horror and fear.

Not Rui.

While the biosphere of the Mellow Dungeon crumpled with fear and despair, his heart surged with will and drive as boundless determination radiated from within him.

Within the depths of his pitch-black eyes stirred an endless darkness.

A void.

One that consumed everything that it beheld.

"Come." His tone was chilling.

It obliged.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSHHHH!!!!!

With a single flap of its angel wings, a mighty tornado was conjured—one with the power to level a mountain range. A calamity with the catastrophic power was spawned with minimal effort.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSHHHH!!!!!

With a second flap of its angel wings, the titanic attack surged towards Rui at the speed of lightning. An attack more powerful than anything Rui had ever experienced flashed towards him.

It threatened to erase him.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!!

In that moment, the world may as well have died.

At that moment, heaven and earth screamed in pain as the chimera effortlessly inflicted a horrifying wound on it.

The tornado, which gouged a crater thirty kilometers deep and wide, triggered an unprecedented tsunami that crashed into the Mellow Dungeon, threatening to wipe out all life in the blink of an eye.

Countless creatures died instantly.

The sum totality of the aquatic ecosystem of the Mellow Lake inside the Mellow Manifold died.

It died on the spot.

No living being in the dungeon could survive its horrifying might.

No life form in the dungeon could resist its horrifying might.

Or, so it thought.

Yet, there he stood.

There he stood, within the depths of the abyss. Within the depths of the abyss birthed by the creature's horrifying power, he stood.

Countless wounds littered his body.

Yet, he smiled.

He stared a horror among horrors in the eye.

Yet, a wild grin emerged on his face, brimming with endless excitement.

At the bottom of the abyss, he stood grinning as he took his signature stance.

"What's the matter? Is that the best you can do?"