Chapter 267: An SS-Rank Cannibal with a Cannibalism Ability

I know this Chapter might not sit well with some of you, but this is the very first battle that would show the extent of what Silas, in full-power mode as an SSS-Rank, legit, can do. Right now, he is still inexperienced, so a little spoiler for the Chapter is that... There will be a manifestation, but after he’s given a dose of hardcore defeat.

Thank you for understanding, and I will understand if you jump me lol. I brought it upon myself.

***

Swef Ashi raised his colossal, black-skinned arms, and the sky itself seemed to curdle.

His massive jaw unhinged with a wet, nauseating crunch, splitting open down to his collarbone. Rows upon rows of jagged, lamprey-like teeth erupted from his throat, lining his maw in concentric circles.

The black blood pooling around his feet didn’t just sizzle; it reversed direction, flowing upward into his cavernous mouth like a crimson vortex.

[Monster Trait: Astoria Cannibalism - Active]

[Entity Classification: SS-Rank]

The air warped as the severed bits of his own flesh and the necrotic miasma hanging in the air were violently swallowed whole. In a matter of seconds, the gaping hole in Swef’s torso stitched itself closed with brutal efficiency. ℯℯ𝑙.

Black muscle fibers braided together, bone plates fused, and his crimson tattoos flared with twice their former intensity.

By pure numbers and raw system classification, an SS-Rank entity should have been hopelessly outmatched by an SSS-Rank user. A full rank gap was an abyssal divide that no standard warrior could cross.

But Swef Ashi was not a standard warrior, and this domain did not run on human system logic.

Swef was an ancient predator who had survived centuries of brutal, intra-species war within the depths of Cansita. He had consumed thousands of his own kind, digesting their traits, harvesting their battle instincts, and refining a millennium of killing experience into pure, instinctual lethality.

Silas had raw, god-like potential, unmatched talent, and overwhelming stats, but Swef possessed something far more dangerous: thousands of years of knowing exactly how to butcher a god.

"You rely on your little skills, boy," Swef spat, his voice layered with the haunting echoes of the hundreds of souls he had devoured. "You think those colorful things make you untouchable? That is just a human nursery rhyme. Here, experience is the only currency that buys life."

Silas let the glowing frame of Cupid’s Bow vanish into light. Long-range projectiles were useless against a monster that could bridge space in a millisecond. He gripped his Saber-tooth Wolf Fang dagger tightly in his right hand and summoned a second dagger woven entirely from hyper-condensed pink light in his left.

He was going to settle this face-to-face, utilizing every single drop of his physical strength and racial arsenal.

"Talk is cheap, tusk-face," Silas snarled.

Before the last word even hit the air, Swef vanished.

There was no sound, no shockwave, no warning flare of energy. It wasn’t raw speed... it was pure, instinctual spatial efficiency, a combat movement perfected over ten thousand battlefields.

Silas’s [Heartweaver Ability: Thread-Core Detection] screamed, but before his mind could process the sudden shift in probability, Swef was already in his personal space. The Astoria leader’s massive fist bypassed Silas’s defensive guard completely, sliding beneath the angle of his blades like a phantom.

BANG!

Swef’s heavy strike caught Silas square in the solar plexus, and the sheer impact shattered Silas’s forward momentum, blowing the air from his lungs in a red mist. But Swef didn’t stop there. He didn’t throw one powerful blow; he chained five fluid, ruthless, lethal strikes in the span of a single heartbeat.

A brutal elbow to Silas’s jaw, a devastating knee to his floating ribs, a backhand sweep that caught Silas’s pink wing, tearing through the exquisite, deadly feathers, and finally, a vice-like grip that clamped directly around Silas’s throat.

"Gah-!" Silas choked, his eyes widening in shock as he was lifted off his feet.

Swef didn’t hesitate to capitalize. His mouth unhinged again, leaning down to tear a chunk of flesh straight out of Silas’s shoulder.

[Heartweaver Ability: Razor Thread & Web Domain - Active!]

[Cupid Ability: Targeted Obsession - Active!]

Silas didn’t try to pull away.

Embracing the brutal pain, he used Targeted Obsession to lock Swef’s focus onto his throat, sacrificing his shoulder as bait. The moment Swef’s fangs sank into his flesh, Silas unleashed a storm of microscopic, razor-sharp pink threads directly inside the wound while driving both daggers upward into Swef’s armpits.

The threads detonated outward, shredding the inside of Swef’s mouth, while the blades severed the monster’s arm tendons. Swef roared, forced to release Silas’s neck as black blood sprayed into the air.

Silas hit the ground, skidding across the bone plain, his shoulder bleeding profusely. He spat a mouthful of red, his chest heaving as his [Heartweaver Ability: Thread Stitch] worked frantically to bind his shoulder and repair his cracked ribs.

Swef wiped the black blood from his mutilated jaw, his cannibalistic trait instantly digesting the bite of Silas’s SSS-Rank flesh he had managed to tear away.

As the elite flesh dissolved in Swef’s stomach, a surge of raw, refined power flared through the monster’s veins, regenerating his shredded jaw and tendons in seconds.

"Delicious," Swef growled, his crimson eyes glowing with absolute, predatory malice. "Your rank makes your flesh sweet, boy. The more you fight, the more you feed me."

"Then choke on it!" Silas roared.

Silas propelled himself forward, his single pink-feathered wing sweeping back to create a pressurized burst of speed.

Silas unleashed everything, making his raw physical stats surge to their absolute peak. He interwove hundreds of golden-pink, razor-sharp strands into an impenetrable spiral around his Saber-tooth Wolf Fang dagger using Thread Spear, while his off-hand blade swung in a flurry of lethal arcs.

CLANG! CLANG! BANG!

Blades clashed against black, calcified skin.

Silas used Desire Manipulation and Charm Reflex to induce subtle, micro-hesitations in Swef’s footwork, exploiting every gap in the monster’s ancient guard. Silas ducked beneath a sweeping claw, drove his dagger deep into Swef’s thigh, and twisted the blade, unleashing Thread Resonance inside the muscle tissue.

Swef bellowed in rage as internal explosions tore his leg apart, forcing him down on one knee. Silas leapt into the air, his beautiful, dangerous pink wing flaring wide, loose razor-feathers raining down to slice deep gashes into Swef’s back.

Silas raised both daggers for a decisive execution strike to Swef’s core. "It’s over!"

"You fool," Swef whispered, his blood-soaked face turning upward with a chilling, demonic smile. "I told you... experience beats rank."

Swef hadn’t failed to block; he had deliberately baited Silas into committing his entire weight mid-air.

[Astoria Secret Art: Soul-Devouring Extinction]

Swef’s entire body collapsed inward, condensing into an orb of pure, volatile black-and-crimson miasma, before detonating outward in a localized, cataclysmic blast.

The absolute, ruthless power of an ancient SS-Rank cannibal’s ultimate technique exploded straight into Silas.

CRACK-THUNDER!

The sheer shockwave was horrific. The attack caught Silas mid-air at point-blank range. The black energy tore through his body with merciless precision.

His magnificent, pink-feathered Heartweaver wing was completely obliterated, disintegrating into bloody dust. The blast shredded his entire left hand, leaving nothing behind but charred, ruined bone at the wrist, and caved in his chest, pulverizing his sternum and ripping open a massive, gruesome crater across his torso.

Silas didn’t even have the chance to scream. His vision instantly blacked out as his health plummeted to critical single digits, his conscious mind snuffed out like a candle in a typhoon.

The overwhelming kinetic impact of the attack, combined with the catastrophic collapse of Swef’s soul-energy, shattered the very foundation of the realm. The sky fractured like cheap glass, and the bone plain dissolved into nothingness.

The pocket dimension shattered into millions of glowing shards.

***

Outside, in the real world, Silas’s team was still on their knees, coughing up blood, bruised and utterly exhausted as they desperately tried to recover from their narrow escape from the domain’s outer boundary.

Suddenly, a rift tore open in the sky above them.

A broken, bloodied body tumbled out of the void, trailing a stream of crimson. Silas crashed violently into the center of his team, rolling across the dirt and coming to a motionless halt in a pool of his own blood... wing gone, left hand vaporized, chest ruined, and his heart barely beating.