The creature moved first.
Not with the speed of the Deep Stalkers or the coordinated precision of the earlier monsters, but with sothing slower and considerably more absolute. The movent of sothing that had stopped needing to be fast because nothing it had ever encountered required it to be.
One of its upper limbs extended toward Damon across the chamber.
The pressure that radiated from the motion was purely physical, not an ability, just a consequence of its existence, the air around the limb compressing as it moved in a way that told him the impact would be nothing like anything the previous chambers had produced.
He stepped into the shadows.
The limb passed through where he’d been a second ago and struck the smooth stone floor.
It shattered it completely. It wasn’t a simple crack or a small fracture line, but a crater-like impact that would’ve obliterated anything in its path.
Damon reappeared twenty ters to its left and reassessed the monster from afar.
The two pale blue lights turned toward him without the creature’s body moving.
Then the body followed.
It moved across the chamber floor with the unhurried certainty of sothing that had nowhere else to be and no particular concern about the gap between them. Each step landed with a weight that resonated through the stone beneath Damon’s feet despite the distance.
He moved toward it rather than away.
The second strike ca faster than the first; the creature clearly had registered that the first one missed and adjusted accordingly.
Damon ducked under it, drove his blade into the junction between the lower right leg and the body, where the stone surface was thinnest.
But the blade fell short.
It wasn’t deflected, but simply stopped with a resistance that felt similar to a barrier rather than flesh.
Before pulling his weapon out, Damon activated the black ice.
The shards of ice blossod along the blade of his weapon, spreading in every inch of space it could, but just as small cracks popped across the surface, the creature pivoted.
Damon stepped into the shadows at the last mont, narrowly avoiding the incoming strike.
The chamber gave him no cover. The flat circular floor offered nothing to work with, no columns, no platforms, no fissures wide enough to matter. Just smooth stone and a four-ter creature that was getting increntally faster as it calibrated.
’It’s learning,’ he noted, noticing the way it kept adjusting its attacks, the speed, angle of them.
He changed his approach.
Instead of shadow stepping away, he stepped toward it on the next strike, inside the arc of the limb, where the creature’s size worked against it, the close range too tight for the full extension of its reach. His blade found the small crack he had left behind earlier and drove in deeper, black ice following imdiately.
The fracture widened.
The creature’s pale blue lights brightened.
A sound followed, the first one it had made since they entered the chamber. It was low and resonant, as if stacked sowhere between a frequency and a word, the kind of sound that registered inside the stomach before the ears.
Then, the monster suddenly froze.
The pressure in the chamber intensified enormously, not the radiating weight it had emitted earlier, but a drawing sensation that pulled everything toward it in the way the rift entrance had pulled the light around it.
The carved patterns on the ceiling above began to glow in the sa pale blue as its eyes, the entire chamber activating around it.
’It’s activating an ability,’ Damon noted as he was already moving to make sure it didn’t.
He activated lightning.
The purple arc left his hand at the sa mont the creature’s charge reached whatever threshold it needed, the two energies eting in the space between them with a sound like the world deciding sothing.
The creature’s ability discharged outward in a pulse that Damon caught the edge of despite the distance, the Aegis Veil absorbing the bulk of it, while the remainder hit him hard enough to slide him three ters across the smooth floor.
He caught himself a mont later.
The creature’s surface had cracked along seven new stress points from the lightning impact, the cold from his earlier black ice, and the electricity interacting through the fracture lines.
He moved before it could begin another charge.
With a single step between the shadows, he appeared directly in front of the monster and drove his sword straight into the fracture.
CRACK.
The surface partially gave way, just enough for the tip of his sword to pierce the flesh.
It wasn’t enough for a kill, far from it.
The creature was already moving, trying to get him off, but before it could, Damon activated both the black ice and the lightning simultaneously across his weapon.
The charged shards of black ice tore the monster’s insides with ferocious tenacity and speed, pausing its raised arm before it could even retaliate.
The monster’s pale blue lights flickered, then dimd before going dark entirely.
The creature dropped with the totality of sothing that was not ant to fall, sending a low tremble across everything around them before the chamber went silent.
[You have slain a Level 114 Void Tyrant]
[New Monster Index Bonus: 41 Strength, 37 Vitality, 29 Dexterity, 33 Mana]
[You have reached Level 83. You have received 1 Stat Point.]
[You have reached Level 84. You have received 1 Stat Point.]
[You have reached Level 85. You have received 1 Stat Point.]
Above the altar at the far end of the chamber, hung the rift core.
It was smaller than the boss had suggested it should be, pulsing with the sa darkness every rift he had encountered so far did, though this ti it seed to have a small trace of pale blue hue, as if it had devoured the pale blue light that belonged to the monster he had just killed.
Yuki, who watched the entire battle from afar with an amused expression, appeared beside him the mont the monster fell.
She looked at the fallen creature, then back at Damon, and her smile widened.
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