Chapter 96 The Devourer King, Ironman's Arrival
Rumble!
The colossal alien starfish, Starro, tilted its massive central eye upward, glaring at the tiny figure that had landed on its head.
"Talk… about what?"
Starro was overflowing with rage, but perhaps because it knew Xi Nian was the one who broke the prison of the research facility, it still gave a grudging response.
Its reply echoed like a psychic thought directly in Xi Nian's three-in-one mind.
"Do you recognize me? I am a Flerken…" Xi Nian's cold voice had not even finished—
Boom!
A giant tentacle suddenly lashed toward its own head. Xi Nian darted away like a streak of black lightning, dodging with incredible speed and reappearing above the tentacle.
"Don't mention the Flerken!"
As though pouring oil on an already raging fire, Starro's fury exploded. It whipped its head and flung the black kitten-shaped Xi Nian away. "This city is mine! Leave now, and I will not harm you!"
At the same time, perhaps from absorbing the energy of the rebel soldiers around it, Starro's already gigantic body swelled even larger. It grew into a thirty-meter-high mountain of a starfish, completely shattering what remained of the research facility into rubble and dust.
Amid the spreading debris, shadows of men and women slipped away in retreat.
Above the modern city of Corto Maltese—
The kitten-shaped Xi Nian, hurled like a cannonball, suddenly expanded tenfold in midair like a black feline balloon, halting himself a hundred meters above the ground.
He instinctively felt there was some misunderstanding with Starro.
But now, with his humanity twisted by darkness and evil, he was losing rationality. Impatience colored all his decisions.
Throw me, will you…
The black kitten grinned wickedly. Its forepaws melted into sticky black liquid that shot forward like tendrils, stretching across the distance and clamping onto Starro's body.
Then, like a black cannonball, Xi Nian broke the sound barrier, streaking across the city sky and slamming directly into Starro's forehead.
Boom!
A shockwave erupted, raw force born purely from a body beyond mortal limits.
Members of Task Force X who had escaped a hundred meters away froze in disbelief. That massive starfish monster, as big as a mountain, had been knocked flat by nothing more than a palm-sized black cat!
Starro roared in pain as it toppled backward, its enormous bulk shaking the earth like an earthquake.
"You wish to be my enemy as well?! Then be consumed!" Starro's furious psychic cry thundered in the air.
At once, the floating rainbow-colored miniature starfish and jellyfish-like spheres split from its body, swarming toward Xi Nian in waves.
Xi Nian's three-in-one form, still hovering in the air, was wrapped within seconds. The jellyfish spheres clustered around him, forming a sphere two to three times his cat body size.
Then, layers of smaller starfish stacked over it, circling inwards until they created a massive five-meter-radius orb.
A hundred meters away—
"Big Cat Boss… this isn't good…"
King Shark, Nanaue, battered and bleeding, grew tense as his small eyes shrank. "Those jellyfish things… they have insane devouring power. My shark skin… they pierced through it like nothing. Luckily there weren't too many on me, or else I'd already be eaten alive."
The remaining Task Force X members grew anxious. Compared to Starro, their hearts leaned toward the black kitten—they wanted him to win.
Harley Quinn subconsciously touched the black cat paw mark on her neck.
"Cleo, can you summon your rats?" Even Robert, who had a crippling fear of rodents, couldn't help asking the girl.
But they quickly noticed—
The black rat on Ratcatcher II's shoulder had awakened, trembling violently, but refusing to act.
"That cat… it's still here," Cleo whispered in terror, gazing toward the ruined remains of Jotunheim. "And the rat swarm… they've retreated even further back."
…
Above the ruins—
The rainbow-colored sphere of jellyfish and starfish trembled faintly for a few seconds, then suddenly exploded outward from within.
Splat!
Countless black, razor-sharp tendrils tore out from the center, shredding the split-off spawn like fragile bubbles. A powerful, evil aura flooded outward.
Whoosh—
A streak of black lightning shot free from within, landing once again atop Starro's head.
But this time, Xi Nian was far from polite.
The black kitten opened its jaws wide, biting down savagely on Starro's arm. At the same time, countless dark tendrils whipped outward from its body, wrapping the mountain-sized starfish like ropes.
Who was consuming who? The roles had reversed.
At this moment—
The kitten's mouth became a black hole, an endless void. The terrible suction force, combined with the pull of the tendrils, dragged the thirty-meter titan toward its maw.
"This… impossible! You really are a Flerken…"
Starro's last psychic thought was one of shock and disbelief. Before it could resist, its massive body was swallowed into the black void.
Xi Nian landed lightly on the ruins, exhaling slowly as he suppressed the raging evil inside.
The Flerken's inner dimension resembled a micro-universe. Though called "micro," in truth it was larger than an entire galaxy.
Xi Nian carefully placed Starro into the middle layers of the Flerken's dimension—relatively stable and safe. The Tesseract and Scepter, however, he moved deeper, into the deepest, most secure level.
As for the unstable, chaotic bottom layer…
There floated alien corpses, wreckage of warships—
Wait.
A sudden thought struck Xi Nian. Xiao Huang was just a Flerken cub. When had it ever swallowed so many alien beings?
And why had it instinctively recognized, and relentlessly sought out, Starro—who had been imprisoned in Jotunheim for over twenty years?
Could it be…
Before Xi Nian could think further, a distant glimmer appeared in the blue sky over the island. With a sonic boom trail marking its path, a metal figure streaked closer and closer.
Over the city—
A platinum-colored Iron Man suit descended sharply, crashing down with a heavy clang directly in front of Xi Nian's three-in-one form.
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