Chapter 256: Fall (Golden Ticket Bonus)

The words rang in Hide’s ears like the toll of a funeral bell.

Two months.

The masked girl’s voice echoed in his memory, her gentle lie shattering into dust: “Nine hours”. It hadn’t been hours. He had been chained here for two months while the outside world bled.

What had happened to the frontlines? Was Kai alive? What about Sora, Gideon, and Evelyn? And Claire?

In that split second of existential paralysis, Arius struck.

The veteran exterminator did not hesitate. Capitalizing on Hide’s vacant, unmoored gaze, Arius surged forward in a soundless blur. He closed the distance mid-flight, his heavy body twisting as he passed alongside Hide, swinging his broadsword in a brutal arc aimed straight at Hide’s neck.

Hide’s instincts fired a fraction of a second too late.

He snapped his left arm up to block the descending edge.

SWISH.

The broadsword phased right through his forearm as if it were vapor. The blade emerged on the other side of his wrist, rematerializing as solid steel as it rocketed toward the side of Hide’s skull.

CLANG—SKRRR!

A blinding shower of sparks erupted across Hide’s face.

The steel collided against the thick, overlapping scales shielding Hide’s cheek and temple. Arius had miscalculated—rushing the strike, he had solidified the blade an inch too early, failing to phase the edge past the outer perimeter of the Abyssal Scale Carapace. The serrated teeth of the broadsword gouged deep grooves into the black metal scales, sending a rattle through Hide’s skull, but the armor held.

The impact hurled Arius past him. The knight hit the tiles in a low, sliding skid, his boots screeching as he twisted his bulky frame to face Hide once more.

Hide was already gone.

Before Arius could bring his broadsword to bear, reality tore open on his right flank.

A black fist rocketed out of the gloom like a falling meteor, carrying the full destructive weight of Hide’s physical stat, aimed straight for Arius’s ear.

SWOOSH.

Arius phased. Hide’s fist punched cleanly through the man’s illusory skull, striking empty air with a sonic crack that blew a gust of wind through the hall.

Dropping low, Arius swept his boot upward, driving a vicious kick straight into Hide’s diaphragm.

THUD!

The concussive blow caught Hide off-balance. The force lifted him off his feet, launching his body backward across the corridor.

CRASH!

Hide slammed into another massive pillar. The thick concrete monolith buckled under the impact, spiderweb fractures racing up its surface before the outer shell blew apart, burying Hide in a cascade of shattered stone.

Arius exhaled a ragged breath, lowering his sword slightly as he watched the dust settle, fully expecting the boy to be stunned.

He was wrong!

Hide did not stay down.

BOOM!

The pile of rubble exploded outward. Hide burst from the dust like a predator uncoiled, his eyes now burning with feral malice.

Arius’s single eye widened in terror. He tried to trigger his phasing, tried to throw his weight backward, but Hide’s acceleration broke his calculation and reason.

SWOOSH—RIIIP!

Before Arius’s intangibility could fully activate, Hide’s dark-scaled talons managed to catch the man’s limp, shattered right arm.

Hide pulled and so did Arius, desperate to get away.

With a wet tear of muscle, tendon, and artery, Hide ripped the arm completely off Arius’s shoulder.

“AGHHHHHH!”

Arius shrieked in ungodly agony, hot crimson blood erupting from the torn socket like a geyser. Stumbling backward over his own feet, the mutilated knight used his remaining left hand to fling his colossal broadsword away.

He didn’t throw it at Hide. Instead, Arius hurled the heavy weapon across the chamber in the complete opposite direction.

Hide didn’t bother tracking the blade.

All he saw was that the knight was disarmed, defenseless, and broken.

In a single, explosive bound, Hide closed the gap. His right hand shot outward, his dark talons clamping around Arius’s skull like an iron vice closing over an egg.

“Die,” Hide snarled.

He hoisted Arius’s entire body into the air with one arm and violently drove the man’s head straight down into the floor.

BOOM!

The tiles shattered. But there was no crunch of skull.

At the microsecond of impact, Arius triggered his phasing talent. His physical body phased out of reality, passing straight through the floorboards like mist. Every ounce of Hide’s titanic force transferred directly into the ground.

The floor cratered. Massive fissures tore through the concrete, radiating outward like a spider’s web.

CRACK—KABOOM!

Behind Hide, a deafening structural snap ripped through the amphitheater.

Arius’s thrown broadsword, whistling through the shadows, had buried itself hilt-deep into a third central support pillar. Severed by the blade, the already stressed pillar snapped cleanly in half, collapsing inward.

The high ceiling groaned.

A deep, grinding roar echoed through the facility as the overhead foundation began to tear apart. Massive chunks of concrete and iron girders dropped from fifty feet above, smashing laboratory consoles into scrap.

Hide snapped his head around, his breath seizing.

‘Risa!’

The massive stasis vat stood in the primary collapse zone.

“Damn it!” Hide cursed, abandoning the phased knight entirely.

He sprinted across the buckling floor. Vaulting over a falling slab of stone, Hide reached the twenty-foot cylinder just as a massive iron girder plummeted from the ceiling.

Hide pulled his fist back and drove it into the reinforced glass.

SMASH!

The thick glass cylinder shattered into millions of glittering, emerald-stained shards. Hundreds of gallons of pressurized stasis fluid burst outward in a tidal wave, washing across the floor.

Hide lunged into the deluge, catching Risa’s limp, weightless body in his arms before she could strike the broken glass.

Her skin was freezing, slick with stasis liquid. She was completely unresponsive, her head resting against his chest.

Hide spun around, spotting an intact white laboratory coat draped over an overturned terminal. Snatching it with one claw, he wrapped the thick fabric carefully around her pale, naked form, bundling her tightly against his ribs.

Above him, the ceiling gave out completely.

CRASH—BOOM!

The first basement level was the middle floor of the underground complex. Directly above them, the ground floor collapsed inward with apocalyptic force.

Dozens of fleeing researchers, medical technicians, and corporate guards who had crowded the upper security stairwells fell screaming with the wreckage, buried alive beneath thousands of tons of falling steel and pulverized concrete.

Hide dropped to his knees, hunching his broad shoulders forward and curving his spine into an impenetrable shell. He gathered Risa completely beneath his chest, sealing her within the hollow of his frame while his Abyssal Scale Carapace flared to maximum density.

WHAM! CRASH! BOOM!

Massive slabs of structural masonry, iron beams, and tons of debris slammed down onto Hide’s back. The concussive shocks hammered into his carapace like falling boulders, the pain suppression redlining as his scales absorbed the brutal onslaught. He gritted his teeth so hard blood trickled down his chin, refusing to yield an inch.

The earth groaned beneath the astronomical weight.

The floor of Basement 1 could not withstand the cataclysm.

SCREEECH—SNAP!

The rebar sheared apart. The entire foundation of the middle level fractured completely.

The ground unraveled beneath Hide’s boots. The rubble, the shattered laboratory, the corpses, and the collapsing wreckage plummeted downward, swallowed whole as the entire facility caved in, plunging into the second basement level below.