My Overpowered Bunny Girls

Chapter 96: The Storm’s Eye (3)

Nathan dropped to one knee on the slick wood, his lungs burning. He checked his wrist. Fifteen percent left in the Capacitor. The Leyline Ring was humming, trying desperately to rebuild his reserves, but his core felt bruised and hollow.

"Status," Nathan commanded, his voice tight.

"Minor cuts," Dillon reported, landing lightly beside him. The Cloud Serpent wrapped around his neck, looking sluggish. "We’re good."

"Undamaged!" Mirko called down from an ice bridge. "But flying enemies lack the conviction of a true duel!"

Elise dismissed the ice stairs, descending smoothly alongside her Golem. "The final floor. The Tempest Matriarch."

Nathan stood up, forcing his breathing to slow. He couldn’t afford a single wasted movement in the boss room.

"Standard spread," Nathan said, his eyes hard. "We clear this, we go home."

They stepped into the portal.

The eye of the storm was completely, terrifyingly calm.

They emerged onto a perfectly circular platform of polished black stone, floating dead-center in the heart of the hurricane. Surrounding the edge of the platform was a cage of continuous, blinding lightning, walling them in. Inside the cage, the air was unnaturally still. Looking straight up, the swirling vortex of the storm parted, revealing a single, pale star shining in the dark.

At the center of the platform, resting on a throne of jagged obsidian, sat the Tempest Matriarch.

She was a god of the sky. Her wingspan stretched easily over thirty feet. Her feathers were jet black, pulsing with thick veins of liquid yellow lightning. Her curved talons gleamed like polished scythes.

But it was her eyes that made Nathan’s breath hitch. They were literal, contained hurricanes—tiny, violent vortexes of spinning grey clouds and flashing lightning housed within her sockets.

[Ding! Boss Encounter: Tempest Matriarch.]

[Threat Level: High Class Boss.]

"Mirko, front!" Nathan yelled, fighting the sudden, overwhelming pressure in the air. "Elise, Golem, lock her down! Dillon, take the sky! Kuro, find the seams!"

The Matriarch beat her wings, and the calm shattered.

A wall of hurricane-force wind blasted outward from her wings. The sheer kinetic force of it was enough to rip the top layer of stone right off the platform.

"Anchors!" Elise screamed.

The Frost Golem slammed its fists down. Massive, jagged spikes of ice erupted from the floor just as the gale hit. The party grabbed them, bracing desperately as the wind tried to throw them into the lightning cage.

Through the tearing gale, Nathan’s Insight tracked the Matriarch as she hovered above the throne. She swept her wings forward, unleashing Wind Blades. But these weren’t crescents, they were massive, greatsword-sized vacuums of screaming air that carved trenches into the solid stone floor.

Mirko stepped out from her anchor, planting her shield. CRACK-CRACK-CRACK. The massive blades slammed into [Impenetrable Fortress], pushing the Knight backward, her steel boots screaming against the stone.

"She has power!" Mirko roared, gritting her teeth against the strain. "But no finesse!"

"Her wing joints!" Nathan called out, holding his anchor with one hand and drawing Moonlight with the other. "Ground her!"

Dillon launched himself upward. The wind tried to batter him down, but his Cloud Serpent cut a slipstream through the gale. He used [Flash Step] to blink through the barrage, appearing directly above the Matriarch’s right wing.

[Thunder Edge] roared to life. Dillon brought the katana down in a brutal, two-handed strike. KRAK-BOOOOOM. The lightning severed the protective layers of thunder-feathers, drawing a spray of glowing golden blood. The wing seized.

Before the Matriarch could recover, Elise stepped out from her ice wall. A [Glacial Lance] formed in her hands, radiating absolute zero. With a sharp exhale, she hurled it upward.

The spear of ice punched flawlessly into the Matriarch’s damaged left wing joint. CRRRRACK. The sheer cold flash-froze the exposed tendons, locking the joint entirely in a block of heavy, unyielding ice.

Crippled and unbalanced, the Matriarch plummeted, crashing onto the stone platform hard enough to shake the entire arena.

She did not stay down.

Screaming in fury, the Matriarch dragged her frozen wing and rose to her full, terrifying height. The veins of lightning in her feathers pulsed violently. Deep within her throat, a blinding white light began to gather, glowing through the skin of her neck.

"Incoming!!!" Dillon yelled, scrambling backward.

The Matriarch opened her beak and screamed.

It wasn’t a projectile; it was a continuous, conical beam of pure, deafening electrical plasma. It blasted across the platform, flash-melting the stone in its path.

The party scattered, but Garrett stepped dead-center into the line of fire.

"Red, behind me!" Garrett roared. He planted his feet, brought Volcan up in a two-handed guard, and met the beam head-on.

The plasma slammed into the mace. The obsidian and volcanic core of the weapon acted as a massive thermal ground, absorbing the unimaginable electrical heat. Garrett screamed through his teeth, his armor smoking, his boots sliding inches backward as the beam tried to vaporize him.

"I’ve got it!" Garrett bellowed, the metal of Volcan glowing white-hot. "Hit her!"

Using the blinding light of the beam as cover, Kuro struck. Dropping from [Invisibility], she landed softly on the Matriarch’s back. [Assassinate] flared darkly as she drove both daggers parallel into the base of the Matriarch’s spine. SHINK-SHINK.

The boss convulsed, her vocal cords seizing. The [Thunder Scream] abruptly choked out.

From the flank, Mirko charged. She channeled her tenth [Unstoppable Force] strike—compounding the kinetic energy of every massive Wind Blade she had just blocked—and brought her greatsword down directly onto the frozen wing joint.

CRACK.

The block of ice detonated, shattering the joint entirely. The Matriarch shrieked in agony, spinning wildly. The stump of her severed wing lashed out, catching Mirko in the chest. The Knight was thrown like a ragdoll, crashing hard into an ice anchor.

"Mirko!" Nathan yelled.

"I am fine!" she snarled, already pushing herself up, a spiderweb of cracks running across her chest plate.

Wounded, grounded, and backed into a corner, the Matriarch went nuclear.

She spread her one remaining wing. Her hurricane-eyes began to spin at a terrifying speed. The lightning cage surrounding the arena began to violently contract. Bolts of electricity struck the platform, inching closer and closer to the center. She was compressing the storm, preparing to detonate the entire arena.

"If that dome closes, we’re ash!" Elise yelled.

"Then we end it now!" Nathan commanded. "Break her core!"

The Frost Golem lumbered forward, throwing its massive crystalline weight into a brutal uppercut. CRUNCH. The strike shattered the heavy armor feathers on the Matriarch’s chest, causing her to stagger backward.

Dillon rode the momentum. Blurring with [Flash Step], he materialized right in front of her. [Thunder Edge] drove directly into the fracture the Golem had created, the intense electrical discharge short-circuiting the Matriarch’s internal storm.

She opened her beak to scream again, but Kuro was there. Hanging off the creature’s collarbone, the assassin drove her twin blades directly into the Matriarch’s hurricane-eyes. SHINK-SHINK. The miniature storms inside her sockets violently ruptured.

Mirko followed instantly, her [Aegis Strike] slamming into the chest cavity, tearing the fracture wide open.

"Garrett!" Nathan roared.

Garrett and Red hit her like a freight train. The Mad-Sheep’s horns buckled her knees, and Garrett brought a white-hot Volcan down directly onto her exposed chest. The thermal pulse blew the sternum wide open, revealing a pulsing, blinding heart of captured lightning and compressed wind.

Through the chaos, Nathan stood perfectly still. He had been holding the draw on Moonlight for sixty seconds.

His body was failing. The Capacitor was dead empty. The Leyline Ring was screaming against his finger. His muscles trembled violently, and the edges of his vision were entirely black. F-Rank. He was pushing past the absolute limits of his biology, pouring the very last dregs of his soul into the Tyrant’s Eye.

Now, Master, Mirko’s voice echoed in his mind, fierce and unshakable.

Nathan let the string slip.

THWOOOOOOOOOM.

The arrow was a solid, perfect beam of silver light. It crossed the arena in a microsecond, punching flawlessly through the Matriarch’s exposed chest, annihilating the lightning heart, and exiting through her spine to embed itself deep in the obsidian throne.

The Matriarch froze. Her ruptured eyes flickered once. Twice. Then, she collapsed.

The contracting lightning cage instantly dissolved. The deafening wind abruptly died. The dark clouds above rapidly broke apart, revealing a clear, serene grey sky.

The platform was left in absolute, ringing silence.

[Ding! Tempest Matriarch Defeated!]

[Ding! Floor 5 Cleared!]

[Ding! Tower of the Storm’s Eye: Full Clear!]

[Overall Clear Rank: A]

[Clear Time: 1 hour 34 minutes.]

[Level Up! Nathan Cross: Level 44]

[Level Up! Dillon: Level 36]

[Level Up! Mirko: Level 41]

[Level Up! Kuro: Level 30]

[Reward: Matriarch’s Storm Eye (Legendary Material).]

[Reward: Tempest Feather (Rare Material).]

Nathan slowly lowered Moonlight. His arms were shaking uncontrollably, his knees threatening to buckle. The hollow ache in his chest was profound. The battery was dead. He had survived purely on mechanical skill and his team.

"Three down," Dillon breathed, falling onto his back against the stone, the Cloud Serpent dissipating into mist around his neck. "Halfway to Valerie’s quota."

"Almost at Level 50," Elise said, leaning heavily on her staff. Her Golem cracked and faded away. "Halfway to Drak’thar."

Garrett sat on the floor, Volcan resting across his lap, smoke still rising from the metal. Red was laying beside him, exhausted. "We’re getting closer. But Nathan, you were running on fumes out there."

"I know," Nathan whispered, touching the dead Capacitor on his wrist. "The F-Rank ceiling is hard. I can patch it with gear, but the fundamental limit is still there. I just have to keep adapting."

Then we adapt, Kuro said, shifting back to rabbit form and resting lightly on his shoulder. Her mental voice was exhausted but resolute. That is what we do.

Mirko sheathed her greatsword with a sharp, echoing click. "We just shattered a god of the sky! We have broken ice queens and iron legions! Let the Court send their shadows. We will break them, too!"

"Let’s hope so," Nathan said softly, his eyes on the swirling exit portal that had just appeared. "Because Clamour, smithy and whoever they serve are still out there. And they aren’t going to just let us keep climbing."

He took a deep breath, the clean, quiet air filling his burning lungs.

"Let’s go home, guys."