The huge fissure was right in the thick of the endless caverns. Everyone could now see clearly the condition down there, and the sight that greeted them was nothing short of apocalyptic.
The entire underground network had turned into a sea of liquefied poison, glowing rivers of green with black and purple swirls. Chunks of collapsed tunnels floated atop the viscous surface, half-dissolved bodies of countless beasts bobbing in the toxic tide.
The air was thick with smoke and miasma, but even through that haze, the truth was impossible to miss. Everything was dead. Even after everything was dead and half-dissolved, there were corpses everywhere. Countless beasts had died, and the river of poison seeped out.
The fad hive of the Beast Lords, their strongest defense, their sacred ground, was utterly and completely annihilated.
"T-That’s... impossible!" Rhazir stumbled back, his face pale, words dying in his throat. His scorpion made sure to get out of the zone of poison, as it clearly couldn’t handle even the vapors coming out of the poisonous leakage.
Zothar’s serpent hissed in distress, its scales flaring and then flattening in submission. The Beast Lord himself stared down into the glowing chasm, his calm expression finally fracturing. "Impossible..." he whispered, his voice low, shaking.
Both Narsi and loman grinned. They too quickly moved back, retreating at top speed. "You said sothing about your ho base being untouchable?" The two laughed.
"Let tell you sothing, our Dune of Graves also no longer exists. You can check it for yourself. There is just plain old desert now where untouchable miasma existed for countless decades. When our Dune of Graves couldn’t last for a single breath against our Master, how did you think your glorified insect hive would hold up against him?"
Zothar’s knuckles whitened around his sword, his composure unraveling by the second. The massive snake beneath him writhed and hissed, sensing its master’s agitation as the stench of annihilation rolled over the dunes.
The poison seeping from the fissure wasn’t spreading, it was devouring everything it touched. Even the sand hissed, lting into glassy sludge that reflected the sky in sickly hues of green. He tried to speak but only managed a hoarse growl.
"You do not understand. The entire lower hive has seven core beasts, each capable of leveling a fortress. The Broodmother alone..."
Before he could say anything further, another voice interrupted him. A white robed figure appeared, teleporting out of thin air. "Zothar, watch what you are saying? Why are you talking to the outsiders about the matters of the-"
And just like that, he too stopped speaking as he watched the huge fissure in the middle of their ho base and a deadly, poisonous miasma seeping out of the ground.
The next second, all five of them had to use their own ans to get away from the scene further, as the poison was becoming too much to handle.
The air warped from the sheer density of toxins, the dunes buckling and hissing under the corrosive touch of the spreading vapors.
The newly arrived man, clearly one of the Beast Lords’ inner circle, covered his mouth, his robe already corroding at the edges as green-black fus licked at the fabric. "W-What... what have you done?" he rasped, his voice trembling between disbelief and fury.
Zothar didn’t answer. His eyes were still fixed on the fissure, on the glowing inferno that had once been their empire beneath the sands. His veins bulged as he tried to suppress the tremor in his hands.
"This is not... possible," he muttered again, as though saying it aloud might undo the reality before him. "Not even a B rank could erase my hive in one breath."
"Oh?" loman sneered, his tone dripping with mockery. "Then perhaps you should consider yourself blessed, because what crawled into your hive is far beyond a B rank."
The white-robed elder turned sharply toward him, eyes narrowing with rage. "You dare!"
Before he could finish, the ground shuddered again, harder this ti. The fissure pulsed like a living wound, and from its depths ca a low, guttural roar. Everyone instinctively fell silent.
A column of black-green light erupted from the fissure, spiraling into the heavens and tearing through the clouds. The miasma roared upward, forming a storm that blanketed the entire horizon. Lightning crackled through the haze, not blue or gold, but deep, venomous erald.
While loman and Narsi quickly erected barriers around themselves, staring at the phenonon with a look of reverence in their eyes, the others did not look so pleased. "Master!" The two of them even went as far as kneeling in front of the column of poisonous air that seed to be capable of destroying their whole world.
However, the white-robed elder mockingly sneered at them. "You fools! That is not your master! That is a creature that shouldn’t have been woken up! She is the broodmother we have been slowly mutating over decades and decades."
"...That thing is no longer a beast. It’s a calamity!" the white-robed elder shouted, his voice cracking with panic as the toxic storm howled louder. "You idiots brought her rage upon us all!"
"She is going to destroy this whole continent!"
His words barely left his mouth before a new pulse of energy surged out from the fissure. The shockwave hit like a divine hamr, sand dunes flattened, and beasts scread. Everything in the region fled in shock and terror.
The serpent beneath Zothar coiled around itself in terror, its scales bleeding molten venom. The robed man’s protective barrier shattered instantly, sending him tumbling backward through the air.
But what erged from the fissure next was even more heaven-breaking.
A colossal shadow moved beneath the liquefied poison, its shape barely discernible, too vast, and too wrong. Dozens of glowing eyes opened across its body, each one a different hue of venom, swirling and blinking in chaotic rhythm.
Tendrils of poison rose like arms, clawing at the desert above, dragging the rest of its imnse form from the pit.
The Broodmother was here.
***
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