BAM!
Without a single microsecond of delay, Jas Maddox’s right leg slamd down from the shadows like a falling anvil.
The precise force of the heel strike connected squarely with the creature’s skull, instantly and completely turning the entire upper head of the lesser Calamity Lord into a flat, unmitigated paste of grey matter and dark blood across the black sand.
The core shattered into glittering dust before a single syllable could leave its throat.
Maddox slowly pulled his boot back, the bright, playful smile returning to his youthful face as he looked down at Hide.
"You shouldn’t go too close to such beasts," Maddox chuckled seamlessly, his brown eyes flashing with a cold, absolute warning that made the air in the camp turn ice-cold. "It was about to attack you, Hide. Even if you are strong and have handled these before you can never be sure."
At that exact mont, the world dropped.
It was a sudden, suffocating weight that slamd down onto Hide’s shoulders. The ambient mana in the air solidified into lead.
It was the exact sa crushing force he had experienced back in Maddox’s office at the headquarters. It wasn’t at its maximum, but it was heavy enough to make Hide’s internal organs ache and his breath hitch in his throat.
Hide knew exactly what it was. It wasn’t a warning about getting too close to a beast’s fangs. It was a warning to never, ever utter the na Estopia again.
Beneath the crushing pressure, Hide’s blood boiled. A vicious mixture of raw rage, profound confusion, and a bizarre, tingling sense of lethal danger swirled in his chest.
Maddox knew the truth. The old fox knew about the artificial gates, about his mother, and about the invisible geopolitical strings manipulating the Exterminator world. Yet, he was... he was doing nothing for that.
Hide forced his jaw to unclench. He didn’t react harshly. He didn’t summon Zenith or Aegis.
Instead, he slowly stood up under the crushing weight. He reached up with the back of his sleeve and casually wiped a splatter of the beast’s dark blood from his cheek.
Hide looked directly into Maddox’s ageless brown eyes and offered a polite, chillingly empty smile. "You’re right," He murmured smoothly, stepping back from the pulverized corpse. "Thanks for the save, old man. I’ll be more careful."
The crushing weight vanished instantly.
Maddox’s smile widened by a fraction, clearly acknowledging that Hide had understood the silent transaction.
Behind them, the rest of the squad was violently short-circuiting.
Gideon Vance was on his knees in the sand, staring at the headless, limbless pile of muscle with his mouth hanging wide open. He looked from the corpse to Maddox’s spotless sumr shirt, completely failing to process the casual, unbothered violence he had just witnessed.
Ryan pushed his thick spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a trembling index finger. The scholar wasn’t writing in his notebook anymore.
He was hyperventilating slightly, his pale face reflecting the breakdown of his academic understanding of power scaling.
Were lesser Calamity lords so easy to kill? The fucking textbooks and the trainers, all of them had lied to them about how terrifying they could be. But now that he had seen one getting crushed under a boot, it flared a new sense of superiority and dread, for the human monsters, in his heart.
He walked to Hide and placed a firm hand on his shoulder, he was a head shorter than Hide. "Are you okay, Volter?"
Gideon scrambled to his feet and made it to Hide as well, looking at him with concern. His question too, must have been the sa as Ryan’s and so he didn’t say it out loud.
Hide glanced at Ryan.
Ryan smiled pulling his hand away nervously. "I an, you are fine... but like, you know -"
"Yeah, I am fine." Hide smiled back at him, as he took a few steps back and sat at his original place just besides the now standing up Sora. "Thank you."
Sora, however, refused to break. The wind-attribute assassin clicked her tongue loudly, turning her head away with a sharp, exaggerated toss of her hair. She forcefully jamd her daggers back into their sheaths, crossing her arms tightly over her chest.
"Tch. Show-off," Sora muttered, glaring at the dark ocean waves instead of the corpse. "It’s not like we actually needed you to step in, Uncle. We could have handled it without your leg, of course."
Hide caught the way her fingertips were pale and pressed rigidly against her biceps to stop them from shaking. She was completely terrified, not of the beast but Jas Maddox, the earlier show of crushing weight must have been a area wide thing, but her pride absolutely refused to let her grand-uncle see it.
Maddox rely laughed, dusting off his hands. "Sure you could, kiddo. But it’s getting late, and growing kids like you need their sleep to have proper health." He gestured toward the roaring campfire. "Rest up. We start your actual training at dawn."
"Rest?" Gideon choked out. "Are you out of your mind, Commander? We are inside an unmapped Four-Star gate with a Higher Calamity Lord running around sowhere!"
"You’re perfectly safe right here," Maddox replied lazily, dropping back onto the fallen log and stretching his legs out toward the fire.
As the teenager’s adrenaline began to recede, their senses slowly expanded past the imdiate light of the campfire. The mont they looked toward the dense, tropical tree line, a collective shudder ran through the squad.
The jungle was not empty.
Hovering just beyond the periter of the firelight, hidden entirely within the thick shadows of the canopy and the underbrush, were hundreds of glowing eyes. Red, yellow, and bruised-purple irises stared unblinking at the camp. There was an entire horde of Calamity Beasts—dozens of packs that had been silently drawn to the sll of roasted at and the commotion of the Calamity Lord’s death.
Yet, not a single branch snapped. Not a single beast growled or took a step onto the beach.
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