Chapter 336: She Decided To Drag Them All
And then, the silence broke again, this time by a thunderous wave of footsteps echoing through the underground tunnels.
My eyes narrowed as I saw what was coming.
It was another group of Abominations.
These were different—larger, heavier, and darker. They moved with more power, and even their presence was little different. Every single one of them was level 199. But that wasn’t what caught my attention.
There were patches of Deathmist clinging to their bodies—dark, smoky tendrils curling along their limbs, leaking from beneath their torn skin. These monsters were results of some hybrid experiment. Whatever the Holts and the Ferans had done... it was working. At least partially.
I extended my perception and scanned through the deeper levels of the prison.
There were nearly two hundred of these things rampaging across the lower levels. Cells were torn open. Prisoners screamed. The Abominations weren’t waiting for orders anymore, they were attacking everything that moved.
I nudged my link with Lyrate, sending a mental signal.
Lyrate, who had been floating calmly behind Steve and North, trembled slightly. Her glowing red eyes flared brighter. Without a word, she drifted forward, her sword already in hand.
At the far end of the corridor, four Abominations emerged, their roars shaking the walls. Steve and North tensed immediately, preparing to strike—
But Lyrate lifted her sword and slashed once through the air.
A single, wide crimson wave burst from her blade, cutting straight through all four of them.
There was no scream, just silence, followed by the sound of massive bodies collapsing in pieces, blood and mist soaking into the stone floor.
Then, without stopping or even glancing back, her form dissolved into a stream of crimson mist and shot toward the prison’s core.
Steve and North blinked.
"She just..." Steve started.
"...handled it," North finished, breathless.
Both of them looked at each other once and then rushed after her.
The crimson mist rushed through the narrow, blood-slick corridor like a phantom wind.
Lyrate moved within it.
The hallway trembled as three Abominations at the front snarled and stomped forward, each towering over thirty feet.
Their rotten bestial features were twisted into unrecognizable forms: chunks of flesh missing, bones jutting through broken muscle, metal clamps fused into their limbs.
One had a snake’s lower body, another the warped jaw of a lion, its fangs drooling black liquid. The third bore tusks and claws, its back covered in mossy fur matted with dried blood.
They had been waiting to charge, expecting resistance.
But they hadn’t expected her .
The mist solidified without a sound behind the lion-jawed one.
Her feet barely touched the ground as she appeared—red eyes glowing faintly, sword already mid-swing. The blade cleaved through the creature’s left ankle, cutting tendon and muscle in a single, seamless strike.
The beast let out a gurgled roar and stumbled sideways.
Before it could fall, roots exploded from the ground beneath it, coiling around its other leg and pulling hard.
The lion-faced abomination collapsed sideways with a thunderous thud, its skull smashing into the wall with enough force to crack the stone.
The tusked one roared and lunged.
Lyrate dissolved again, melting into crimson haze and rushing to the ceiling.
She reformed midair, just above the creature’s head, flipped once, and came crashing down with her sword driving through its eye socket. The blade lodged deep into the skull, and a thin, dark-red pulse rippled down the steel as her vitality drain activated.
The creature spasmed. Its limbs twitched wildly, black veins pulsing with the energy being stolen from it.
She twisted her blade, then yanked it free.
Another roar came from behind her.
The snake-bodied one lunged with open jaws but the moment its body arced forward, thick black roots burst from the ground and skewered it like a harpoon.
Four, five, six spikes of root, each as thick as a man’s torso, impaled it through the chest and stomach. It let out a shriek and began to thrash, but the roots moved with it—anchoring it down, growing longer, thicker, digging into its flesh and pulling it toward the earth.
Lyrate didn’t wait.
She blurred forward in a misty dash, then appeared beside its long, arched neck and drove her sword straight into the back of its head.
The creature stilled. The roots tightened once more, and then shattered its body with a series of cracks like splintering bone.
She landed softly, hair drifting around her face. Her glowing red eyes swept the corridor.
Then she moved forward again.
The tunnel opened into a larger chamber—rows of shattered prison cells lined the walls, the floor littered with blood, flesh, and silence. Not a single sound came from inside the cells.
Lyrate paused and peered inside one.
A human man lay crumpled in the corner, his neck twisted unnaturally, eyes open and glazed. In the next cell, a man’s body was sprawled in pieces, as if torn apart by claws. One after another, the cells revealed the same thing.
Dead prisoners.
Dozens of them.
Then came another stomp.
A wall burst inward, and three more Abominations entered the chamber. These ones were leaner, like predators. One resembled a hyena twisted upright, its spine doubled in jagged angles, drool sizzling on the stone floor.
Another had a wasp-like abdomen fused into a bear’s upper torso, while the third looked like a wingless bat with limbs too long for its body.
All of them charged straight at her.
Roots burst from beneath them the instant they stepped forward, tangling their legs and anchoring them in place.
She dashed again, crimson mist trailing in her wake.
She slashed through the bat-faced one’s neck in a clean, horizontal arc. Its head rolled before the body collapsed.
The bear-wasp screeched and fired spikes from its back, but she dissolved before they hit. Reappearing beneath its stomach, she stabbed upward, piercing the center of its chest and twisting hard.
The vitality drain activated again, its body began to twitch violently, then sagged like a collapsing puppet.
The hyena snarled and snapped its jaw.
Lyrate didn’t give it the chance.
She raised a hand, and five spear-like roots shot from the floor and punched through its torso, pinning it to the far wall like an insect on a spike.
She looked at her work for a moment, then turned around to face the three massive tunnels ahead, each of them long, narrow, lined with rows of prison cells, and echoing with guttural snarls. Roars and scraping claws rang through the darkness, the sound of Abominations stirring, hunting, smelling blood.
Lyrate stood silently.
For a few seconds, nothing moved.
Then she dropped her sword.
It struck the stone floor with a hollow clang and dissolved into crimson mist, vanishing without a trace.
She brought her hands together like someone praying at a temple.
Few seconds passed then the ground beneath her feet cracked.
Hairline fractures webbed outward in all directions.
Behind her, the stone split open with a deep groan as something ancient and powerful surged upward. A ten-foot-wide black tree trunk erupted from the earth, growing rapidly, bark pulsing as if alive. Within seconds, it reached twenty feet high, and two more identical trunks burst out beside it.
Each of the three trunks trembled, then began to split apart near the top.
Massive branches grew outward in sharp, swift motions, thick as logs, twisted with pulsing black veins.
From each branch sprouted more limbs, splitting again and again, until a web of tendrils extended from the trunks like a net of living roots.
At the tip of every branch formed a claw, five thick root-fingers curling inward like fists waiting to close.
The roots moved.
Dozens of thick branches shot forward, one set toward each of the three tunnels.
They moved low to the ground, writhing like serpents, their fingertips dragging across the stone.
Lyrate remained still.
Her hands never moved again.
But her power rippled through the roots as if they were her limbs.
Inside the tunnels, roars turned to howls. The Abominations sensed something coming.
But it was too late.
One by one, the fingers at the ends of the branches darted forward and closed around monstrous legs, twisted arms, scaled torsos.
The creatures screeched, clawing at the walls. Some tried to charge forward. Others snapped at the roots with their maws.
It didn’t matter.
The roots held.
The branches began to pull, slowly at first, then with crushing force.
The tunnels trembled as the captured beasts were yanked backward, dragged over broken stone and shattered cells.
One Abomination, a bat-faced beast with horns, slammed its claws into the walls to hold itself, but the branches tore chunks of flesh and stone as it was ripped free and pulled into the open.
Another, with jagged bone limbs fused to a bear’s body, twisted and thrashed, but the roots only coiled tighter around its torso and hauled it screaming into the chamber.
One by one, Abominations were dragged out—helpless, snarling, jaws snapping at air. Some left trails of blood. Others flailed until they were flung hard into the open.
Within moments, the chamber before Lyrate filled with monsters.
Her head tilted slightly.
She raised one hand.
And the roots began to tighten.