At the bottom of the freezing Floor 60, the sound of a disgusting heartbeat echoed, bouncing off the Glacier's ice pillars. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The sound did not originate from the chest of the monster before them, but rather from the crater wall at the back of the hall.
Alfia and Aria stood side by side. Their eyes were no longer fixed on the Corrupted Spirit—the mountain of rotting flesh with the form of a pale woman at its peak—but on the giant structure clinging firmly to the ice wall behind it.
The Fleshy Womb. The dark reddish tumor womb pulsed with a sickening rhythm, as large as the main Guild building on the surface. From there, six giant, thick, and veiny umbilical cords extended outward, plugging directly into the back of the anomaly's mountain of flesh. The glow of thick purple liquid could be seen flowing rapidly through them, pumping nutrients, regenerative power, and infinite magic energy directly from the depths of the Dungeon.
"No wonder its endurance defies common sense," hissed Alfia, wiping a bit of ice dust from her cheek. Her heterochromatic eyes radiated a cold calculation. "Its raw power is indeed equivalent to Level 8, but its magic energy is infinite. As long as those umbilical cords are still connected to its tumor womb, this labyrinth will continue to revive it even if we smash it to dust a thousand times."
Aria nodded slowly. The Great Spirit's face looked tense, but her eyes radiated undeniable resolve. She could feel the flow of foul energy channeled by the Dungeon through that parasitic structure.
"We cannot win a war of attrition against the labyrinth itself," said Aria. Her gaze shifted from the giant tumor to Alfia. "The only way is to forcibly cut off its food supply. We sever those umbilical cords and destroy the womb all at once."
An arrogant yet graceful smile slowly bloomed on Alfia's lips. The mage stretched the fingers of both hands, letting the glow of black and white mana begin to crackle around her body.
"Destroying a target that large from this distance in a single strike... I have the perfect magic," Alfia said with absolute confidence. "But, this is super-long chant magic. I need quite a bit of time to manifest it perfectly. Furthermore, that anomaly will not let me chant in peace if it knows what I'm aiming for."
Aria stepped forward, positioning herself right in front of Alfia. An emerald wind began to swirl gently around her, chasing away the cold and miasma from the air.
"Focus your mind on your chant, Alfia. Pay no mind to whatever happens around you," Aria commanded, her voice flowing full of authority. "Let me be your shield. I swear upon the name of the wind, not a single speck of filth will touch the hem of your cloak."
Hearing that promise, Alfia closed her eyes. She lowered her shoulders, focusing all the Mind (magic energy) within her body. Alfia did not need to worry about dodging or defending. She had entrusted her back entirely to the Spirit of Wind.
Before them, the Corrupted Spirit noticed the drastic atmospheric change. The pale woman atop the mountain of flesh widened her pupilless eyes. Her monster instincts screamed of extreme danger upon seeing Alfia begin to concentrate magical energy whose scale could distort the surrounding area.
The anomaly knew what these intruders were aiming for.
GYAAAAAAARRRGH!!
The giant creature roared, unleashing a sound wave that cracked the ice floor. The mountain of flesh at its base churned wildly. Six giant tendrils as thick as tree trunks shot forward, acting like executioner's whips ready to cleave Alfia's body. At the same time, the pale woman summoned dozens of purple magic circles in the air, firing a rain of poisonous ice spears and storms of black fire simultaneously.
It was the desperate rampage of a Level 8 monster trying to protect its life.
However, Aria did not flinch. The Great Spirit spread both her arms with the elegance of a queen conducting an orchestra.
"You are facing me, disgusting anomaly."
Aria did not summon buffs or destructive storms. She focused her wind purely on manipulating the air density around her. With a single sweep of her hand, a wall of wind compressed to maximum density exploded, forming a semi-circular dome right in front of them.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
The six giant tendrils shooting at bullet speed slammed into Aria's wind wall. Instead of piercing through, the centrifugal force and absolute air pressure violently repelled the fleshy tendrils until the bones within them snapped. The rain of ice spears and black fire following behind them suffered a worse fate. When the curse magic attacks came into contact with Aria's wind domain, they were shredded by a vortex of microscopic air blades, shattering into dust before they could even touch a five-meter radius of where Alfia stood.
Behind Aria's absolute protection, Alfia opened her lips. The chanting of an ancient spell began to flow, breaking through the cacophony of destruction around her.
"O tolling bell of a falling heaven..."
Along with the first verse spoken, the air right above Alfia's head began to vibrate violently. A silvery-grey light glow manifested from nothingness, gathering to form a giant geometric structure in the air. The density of the magic produced was so massive that the gravity around Alfia felt multiplied, causing the ice beneath her feet to crack in a spiderweb pattern.
Sensing that impossible magic fluctuation, the Corrupted Spirit went even crazier. The creature forced all the energy from the Dungeon into its body. The pale woman vomited black blood from her mouth as she chanted magic in inverted spirit language.
The ice ground beneath Aria's feet exploded. Dozens of giant bone spears laden with miasma poison shot up from below, trying to pierce the defensive dome from its blind spot.
Aria merely glanced down with a condescending look. She stomped one foot on the floor.
WHOOOSSSHH!
A shockwave of dense wind element swept across the ice surface. The bone spears that had just pierced the floor were instantly cut flat to the ground as if slashed by a giant invisible sword. Aria did not give the monster a single millimeter of an opening to disrupt Alfia.
"Descend and bring merciless judgment. Leave no dust, leave no groans."
Alfia's chant entered the second verse. The silver light above her head expanded at an exponential rate. Fifty meters, eighty meters, and continued to grow. A giant shadow began to cover half of the Floor 60 hall, dimming the blue phosphor glow of the Glacier ice.
The Corrupted Spirit realized that it would not be able to pierce the Great Spirit's defense in time. In its absolute panic, the giant monster changed tactics. If it could not stop the magic, it had to protect the source of its immortality at all costs.
The mountain of flesh shifted backward. The creature forcibly tore its own flesh from its lower half, then formed layered barricades in front of The Fleshy Womb. Walls of rotting muscle, bone pillars as thick as steel, and layers of poisonous ice were erected simultaneously to wrap the umbilical cords, creating a fortress of despair dozens of meters thick.
"Building walls to shelter from the sky?" murmured Alfia, her smile widening, radiating a terrifying charm. "Futile."
Alfia tilted her head back. The chant of her pinnacle magic finally reached the last verse.
"Destroy form, destroy soul. Let the echo of the void bear witness to the annihilated arrogance!"
Above Alfia's head, the form of her annihilation magic had manifested perfectly. It was a gigantic silvery-grey bell. Its size was truly nonsensical, possessing a circular span of over a hundred meters. The bell of pure energy hovered with a suffocating majesty, emitting restrained sonic waves that made the air across all of Floor 60 hum violently.
This was Genos Angelus—strategic annihilation magic that had once leveled battlefields beyond human reason.
Aria removed her defensive wall, giving absolute space for the mage's execution.
Alfia opened her eyes, which radiated a magical glow. she aimed both her palms forward, straight toward the fortress of flesh and The Fleshy Womb hiding behind it.
With one hard downward swing of both arms, Alfia delivered an absolute verdict.
"—Genos Angelus!"
The gigantic silvery-grey bell tolled.
It was not the sound of clashing metal. The toll produced by Alfia's magic was a physical manifestation of destruction. Blocks of sound waves compressed beyond physical limits exploded from the bell, sweeping an area over a hundred meters wide straight ahead like a silver tsunami.
CRAAAAAAASSSHHHHHH!!!
The giant sonic wave crashed into everything in its path indiscriminately. When that annihilating energy struck the walls of flesh, bone pillars, and ice shields built by the Corrupted Spirit, those fortresses did not merely shatter. They evaporated. The sound blocks destroyed the cellular bonds of those objects, turning the defensive barricades into red vapor in a thousandth of a second.
The explosion from Genos Angelus continued to surge forward without losing the slightest bit of its destructive power, squarely hitting the main targets: the six giant umbilical cords and The Fleshy Womb clinging to the crater wall.
The silver light swallowed the giant tumor whole.
A barrage of sonic explosions tore, shredded, and pulverized the Dungeon's energy-sucking tumor down to a sub-atomic level. The six veiny umbilical cords snapped and vanished instantly. The solid ice wall of Floor 60 behind it even collapsed, swept away by the wave, leaving a giant concave crater whose surface had become as smooth as a mirror due to the extremely intense sonic friction.
Floor 60 shook violently, accompanied by ice dust and freezing vapor billowing high until it touched the hall's ceiling.
There were no flesh walls remaining. There was no pulsing tumor. The anomaly's conduit of immortality had been severed forever.
In the middle of the slowly quieting hall, the Corrupted Spirit fell limply with a pitifully heavy thud. The creature twisted its broken head backward, widening its empty eyes toward the smooth crater where its tumor womb had once been.
An absolute emptiness suddenly struck the core of its essence.
The infinite flow of energy that had been feeding it, nurturing it, and giving it power... had vanished without a trace. Its connection with its mad mother, the Dungeon, had been forcibly severed. The giant creature was now merely a pile of flesh isolated from its source of life.
GYAAAAAAARRRGHHHHHHH!!!
The scream that shattered the silence was different from before. It was not the angry howl of a monster, but the pure whimper of despair and pain of a beast realizing its death had arrived.
The Corrupted Spirit thrashed wildly on the ice. Without the Dungeon's energy intake, the rotting flesh on its lower body that had been torn by previous attacks was no longer able to knit itself back together. Its wounds rotted rapidly, dried up, blackened, and peeled off, leaving puddles of foul blood that no longer possessed any magic power.
At the other end of the hall, Alfia slowly lowered both her hands. The giant bell above her head faded into silver light particles falling like snow. A smirk of triumph and absolute satisfaction lingered on her beautiful face.
"Its death knell has rung," hissed Alfia sharply, her eyes staring at the dying anomaly. "Its umbilical cord has been cut. It is no longer an immortal Level 8 existence. Without the Dungeon's intake, that pile of filthy flesh only needs one or two more pushes to return to ash."
Aria let the remnants of her protective wind fade, stepping gracefully to Alfia's side. The Great Spirit of Wind's eyes glared sharply at the pale woman continuing to scream atop the shrinking mountain of flesh.
Aria's face no longer radiated wrath. Behind her firmness, there was a glint of ice-cold compassion—compassion for a fellow spirit that had been so deeply corrupted by the labyrinth.
"The immortality that tortured it has been revoked by us," said Aria softly. The wind around her began to gather again, sharper and deadlier. "Now, we grant it silence. Death is the only liberation for it."
However, just as Alfia and Aria prepared to step forward to deliver the final execution, the Corrupted Spirit's agonizing screams suddenly stopped.
An unnatural and gripping silence descended upon the giant hall.
The pale woman fused with the fleshy petals twisted her body slowly, looking straight at Alfia and Aria. Her expressionless face tensed horrifyingly. In the middle of her chest cavity, the remnants of the giant purple crystal that was the core of her spirit were no longer dim from energy depletion. Instead, the crystal began to emit an incredibly dense, blindingly bright radiation of purple light, crackling unstably like a star ready to collapse.
The anomaly had finally realized its absolute reality. It could not defeat the two monster entities before it. It would be killed. It would be destroyed at the bottom of this ice hell, far from the light of Aria's purity that its parasitic instincts so desperately craved.
That raw fear and despair instantly mutated into a very dark final will. If it could not live to devour that light, if the Dungeon abandoned it, then it would drag everything breathing in this hall into nothingness with it.
Floor 60 trembled, this time far more violently than any magic explosion. The purple crystal in the Corrupted Spirit's chest began to suck the remaining life energy from all its own flesh tissues, forcibly compressing it into a single stopping point.
The monster's giant body shrank rapidly, sacrificing its physique to create a suicidal explosion (Self-Destruct) whose destructive power was guaranteed to be capable of leveling the entire Glacier until it was shattered to pieces.
"Alfia...!" Aria widened her golden eyes, sensing the extreme energy fluctuation expanding in a matter of seconds. "It's compressing its spirit core! That crazy creature intends to blow itself up!"
Alfia gritted her teeth, her eyes narrowing at the deadly purple light that began to blind her vision in the middle of the hall. The battle they thought was over had apparently left one final nightmare. The anomaly did not intend to die alone; it was preparing to take the mage and the Great Spirit with it to the bottom of nothingness.
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