Chapter 260: The Omelette of Doom (1)

The descent into the Starlight Realm was supposed to be a magnificent, poetic dive into celestial glory.

It was not.

The moment Creed crossed the event horizon of the swirling sapphire rift, the spatial orientation of the universe threw up both hands, inverted itself, and shoved him down an invisible garbage chute.

The howling wind and radiant starlight dissolved into a sickening, centrifugal blender of spatial turbulence that spun him like a ceiling fan with a death wish.

’Portals are the worst invention in the history of sapient life,’ Creed screamed internally, bile rising in his throat as the world tilted at an angle that defied high-school geometry.

’Every single time! It’s never a nice, gentle escalator! It’s always an industrial washing machine set to high spin!’

With a sudden, violent pop, the spatial suction spat him out into the sky.

Gravity—unforgiving, heavy, and delightfully vindictive—grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.

The clouds tore away beneath him, revealing an endless canopy of massive, bioluminescent vegetation, jagged purple peaks, and ancient shattered monoliths.

"Okay, okay, steady," Creed muttered through clenched teeth, his teeth rattling.

His Profound Realm Path of Freedom kicked in, the translucent, geometric aerofoils flaring behind his shoulder blades like captured starlight.

He arrested his terminal velocity, shedding the downward kinetic shock until he was gliding horizontally, scanning for a sensible landing zone.

Below him sat a lush, concave depression nestled between three colossal, glowing fungal trees that looked like giant lavender umbrellas.

In the center of this clearing was a raised mound covered in thick, plush, silver-white moss.

It looked soft. It looked inviting. It looked like a five-star mattress laid out by the hospitable gods of the realm.

"Perfect," Creed smirked, descending in a graceful arc, his boots angled downward to slide smoothly into the moss.

"See? Experience. Finesse. The great Creed Walden lands with the grace of an eagle—"

CRACK-SQUISH.

Creed’s boots didn’t hit moss.

They punched straight through a thin, calcified, leathery shell the thickness of tempered glass.

His legs sank in up to his knees.

A sickening, warm, gelatinous yellow fluid splashed upward, drenching his tailored dark-blue trousers and splattering against the front of his pristine Astral Vanguard jacket.

The stench that erupted into the air smelled like a unholy mixture of rotten cabbage, ammonia, and sulfur that had been baked inside a volcanic oven for six centuries.

Creed froze, half-buried in the mound.

He slowly looked down.

Beneath his boots were the shattered remnants of what had been a three-meter-wide, translucent, pulsing egg.

Floating in the viscous yolk beside his ankle was the twitching, hairy, segmented leg of an unborn arachnid monstrosity.

And directly beneath that one... were thirty more eggs.

SQUISH. POP. CRUNCH.

His landing shockwave had chained through the clutch. A domino effect of subterranean destruction.

Every single egg in the nest ruptured, showering the glade in thousands of gallons of embryonic yolk.

Creed stood ankle-deep in the dead spawn, his face completely blank.

"I am cursed," Creed whispered to the empty air, his eye twitching so hard it threatened to detach from his optic nerve.

"I don’t need a fortune teller. I don’t need an ancient oracle. I have been cosmically, genetically, and spiritually cursed by a god of comedy. I landed in an omelet. A giant, hairy omelet."

Before he could pull his boot out of the primordial soup, the earth beneath the fungal clearing groaned.

SKRRRRRRRRR-CLACK.

The temperature didn’t drop. It vanished.

The air grew so pressurized, so suffocatingly thick, that Creed’s eardrums popped with a wet sound.

The leaves on the lavender umbrella trees withered and blackened in a microsecond, the biological matter decaying under the sheer, unbridled weight of an aura that did not belong to the mortal world.

From the deep, cavernous fissure beneath the roots of the fungal trees, eight massive, hairy, obsidian pillars rose into the sky.

They weren’t pillars. They were legs.

Each leg was thirty meters long, covered in jagged, metallic spines that dripped a sizzling black venom capable of dissolving solid granite on contact.

Rising above those legs was an abdomen the size of a three-story fortress, pulsing with thousands of glowing, sickly-yellow eyes that opened in terrifying synchronization.

A Stage 3 Beast King.

The Abyssal Brood-Matron.

In the hierarchy of the world, humans measured strength in fragile increments. Awakened climbed from Bronze to Silver, clawing their way toward Gold. Diamond-level combatants were considered continental demigods.

And a Beast King?

A Beast King was an apocalyptic, walking natural disaster that could erase a Tier 3 Bastion from the face of the Earth in an afternoon.

To fight one, bastions mobilized multi-division armies, high-orbit laser batteries, and coalitions of Diamond-stage elders.

When the giant eagle Beast King had descended upon Infernal Ice Bastion, Creed had run until his lungs bled, barely saved because an ancient black-and-red plaque with the number "3" had exerted an absurd, unnatural authority over the bird.

And now?

He had no defensive army.

He had no Bastion walls.

His summons—Lilith, Tierra, and Meredith—were asleep in cocoons deep within his spiritual tattoo.

And he had just turned the creature’s entire upcoming generation into scrambled eggs.

The thousands of yellow eyes on the spider’s abdomen locked onto Creed’s yolk-covered boots.

The silence lasted for one agonizing, horrific second.

Then, the Brood-Matron opened its primary maw—a gaping, concentric ring of rotating, jagged bone mandibles that could swallow a city bus whole.

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

The sonic shockwave wasn’t a sound. It was an atmospheric sledgehammer.

The three colossal fungal trees were instantly sheared off at their trunks, blasted into splinters that vaporized mid-air!

The shockwave tore a fifty-meter-wide trench through the bedrock, ripping Creed out of the yolk and hurling him three hundred meters backward through the forest canopy!

CRASH! CRASH! BOOM!

Creed smashed through six ancient trees, skipped across a boulder, and slammed into the side of an obsidian cliff face, embedding himself three feet into the rock.

He coughed, spitting a mixture of blood, pulverized bark, and yellow spider fluid from his mouth.

"Okay..." Creed wheezed, his ribs groaning under the impact. "That was definitely personal."

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The entire mountain range shuddered.

The Abyssal Brood-Matron was not crawling. It was blurring.

The colossal arachnid moved with a terrifying, impossible agility that mocked its titanic mass, its eight legs impaling the earth, leaving behind boiling craters of acid.

It was coming to turn the murderer of its children into human paste.

’Can I kill it?’ Creed’s mind raced with cold, desperate mathematical calculations, his analytical combat instincts flaring.