The giant serpent thrashed violently, its colossal coils tearing through the dirt. With a final guttural roar, its horned head tore free and crashed to the ground, sending dust billowing outward.
For a second, the battlefield went dead silent. Then crackling of the comms filled the quiet air as units erupted into cheers.
"The Mutanti, the Giant Serpent, has been eliminated."
"The boss has been defeated!" someone shouted from the frontline.
Another soldier sighed, wiping the sweat from his brow. "We can finally go home and use my bonus for this raid."
A young man with black hair that fell over his ears and crimson eyes dashed past the three soldiers who were deep in conversation.
"Why is No. 014 in such a rush?" one asked the other.
"Can't blame the dude. It's payday." The other soldier waved his hand.
... Why isn't the rift fading?
The young man pondered as he glanced at the serpent then at the sky in silence.
Its massive maw hung open, frozen mid-scream as thick, purple blood pooled beneath its scales, staining the ground.
For a fleeting instant, Shiro's eyes appeared ordinary by comparison. Then the edges of his irises were encircled by a thin ring of glowing red.
The world instantly changed. Colors bled away, replaced by raw thermal signatures.
Under normal circumstances, the monstrosity's corpse should have been cooling down, dissolving along with the dimensional rift itself.
But it wasn't.
Heat was rapidly rising, gathering in a mass at the forehead of the corpse. Something was crawling out from inside the dead flesh, something completely foreign to the original creature.
The heat spiked violently as the skull began to rupture.
Shiro's ringed eyes widened.
"Everyone, get down!"
The explosion wasn't loud. It was absolute.
A sphere of violent purple energy erupted outward from the corpse's body, silently erasing nearby units and flattening buildings within a hundred-meter radius. Then, just as suddenly as it burst, the energy went completely still.
As the dust and debris began to clear, it revealed a landscape of pure devastation. Corpses lay burning on the shattered ground, some already reduced to scorched, skeletal remains.
A female soldier pulled off her cracked helmet, her ears ringing with a deafening hum. Her eyes fell on a comrade lying just a few feet away. The top half of his head was simply gone, completely burned away by the flash. His single remaining eye stared blankly into nothingness, his jaw twitching slightly in a silent, final plea for help.
Her scream tore through the sudden, awful silence of the wasteland.
"...Two monstrosities?" Shiro murmured, slowly lowering his arm from his face. His eyes widened as he caught sight of the horrific destruction before him.
Nearby, Misuzu pushed herself on her feet, her ears deafened by the blast. As she took a stumbling step through the rubble, her boot knocked against something solid. A severed hand lay beside her foot, its fingers still curled tightly into a fist.
She stared down at it, completely numb.
"What kind of sick game is this?"
She forced herself up from the scorched ground, her mind racing as she surveyed the utter annihilation of their units.
...Most of the units were completely annihilated in a single blow.
Her hands trembled, but she forced her jaw to tighten, desperately burying her rising panic beneath a wall of pure arrogance.
'No... This thing is no different from the other Anomalies.' she told herself, trying to rationalize the nightmare standing in the crater. 'They were weak. But me? I was made for superiority.'
A surge of defiant energy flared around her.
"Screw you!" she roared in frustration.
Misuzu stood her ground as raw energy gathered frantically around her palms. The glowing orbs thrummed with volatile power, growing brighter and hotter until they reached a terrifying breaking point.
She never saw it move.
One moment she was launching her assault. The next, her entire left side was simply erased.
A single, confused sound escaped her lips.
"Huh...?" With a blinding flash, the unstable energy orbs exploded violently, completely consuming what was left of her.
A perfectly straight, scorched line had been carved into the earth, stretching outward from the center of the crater.
Lloyd's eyes widened in sheer disbelief.
...What overwhelming strength.
As a Chimera Hunter, he couldn't sense any energy conversion or warning signature from that attack. It didn't behave like any other Mutaintie or monstrosity spawned from the dimensional rift.
It was something else entirely.
Something worse.
Lloyd stared at the faceless silhouette as it slowly lifted its head toward them.
The creature possessed no eyes, nose, or ears. Its face was a smooth, unsettlingly blank mask of deep purple. Yet hovering directly over its sightless visage was a brilliant, glowing halo of ethereal violet energy, humming with a quiet, terrifying pressure.
Even without eyes, Lloyd could feel its absolute, crushing gaze locked entirely on him.
This was well beyond the scope of any human creation.
"The... the Captain is dead." The young soldier stared at the battlefield, unable to move his eyes away from the destruction. He stumbled and fell to the ground.
"No, no, we weren't trained for this!" The soldier cried out, scrambling backward. "This is beyond what I signed up for! That thing is going to shred us into pieces!"
He threw his hands over his head, as if blocking the sound would stop the reality in front of him.
"Don't you dare be a weakling!" The lieutenant grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upright.
"You have a family, right?"
The soldier nodded, his voice trembling.
"Then you have people to protect. This... this is exactly what you signed up for."
The lieutenant's grip tightened. His gaze swept across the rest of the units.
"..FIRE!!"
Bright, blinding beams of plasma and high-density rounds tore through the battlefield, converging directly on the Calamity.
For a moment, it seemed to stagger. Then the violet halo hovering around its visage pulsed violently with light.
Suddenly, dust and debris began to lift off the ground as if gravity had become irrelevant. Broken infrastructure and units began to float. The creature swelled, glowing with blinding, unstable power.
Then the gravity snapped back.
Before they could even brace themselves, a brilliant bolt of lightning erupted from the Calamity toward the sky. Upon contact with the bruised dark purple clouds, it instantly branched outward in every direction across the horizon like a glowing root system.
Without warning, the jagged bolts tore outward omnidirectionally, tearing through the unlucky falling debris and units alike, turning them to ash.
Then it stopped.
In the next moment, the Calamity lunged at Shiro. Reacting on pure instinct, Shiro pulled his gun and fired a direct shot at the creature's head, but the impact did absolutely nothing. Before he could even chamber another round, the creature slammed him violently into the ground.
The crushing force made Shiro cough up blood. Refusing to stay down, he whipped his legs upward toward the Calamity, unleashing a blast from his foot. The explosion launched the monster backward, sending it crashing heavily into a nearby building.
But the impact did not even slow it down. Its claws dug deep into the shattered wall. The Calamity tore a massive chunk of concrete and hurled it straight at Lloyd.
Lloyd, already airborne, snapped his fingers. The descending debris detonated right down the middle. Lunging cleanly through the smoke and shattered concrete, he bore down on the Calamity with immense speed, slamming the creature back into the ground.
This time, Lloyd did not dodge the incoming fist. He grabbed it, transferring his power to the Calamity's arms, causing both to detonate.
Grroar.
The sheer force of the detonation sent the Calamity skidding backward across the ground. Ignoring the thin line cracks widening across its torso, it snapped its head up. Energy gathered inside its open maw.
But it was a second too late.
Lloyd launched himself forward into the air with blinding speed. Thrusting through the debris, he brought his blade in a horizontal slash, completely cutting the Calamity along with the building it had slammed into in half.
Slice-
Yet the victory lasted only a fraction of a second. The two halves of the creature snapped back together as if magnetically pulled. It vanished from sight, reappearing directly in front of Lloyd.
Its fist connected with his jaw.
"GAH!"
The blow lifted him off his feet and hurled him into a mass of floating rubble. The Calamity did not wait. It coiled its legs and leaped toward him.
Before it could close the distance, Shiro intercepted it. Flames coiled around his arms before bursting outward in every direction.
In the next moment, a vast, roaring pillar of radiant flame crashed into the Calamity, driving it into the earth before exploding and swallowing it in an instant.
Enveloped by the flames, it thrashed for a few seconds before its frame dissolved into orange-red radiance. Everything within the area was annihilated as well, reduced to nothing beneath the searing inferno.
For a single, breathless moment, the world drowned beneath a sea of obliterating heat. The edges of the crater glowed orange under the pressure of the flames.
Then something cleaved through the inferno, scattering the flames across the battlefield in a storm of sparks.
From the heart of the fire, the Calamity pushed forward. Its body was burned and fractured, patches of its flesh reduced to blackened, charred remains. Yet it continued to advance through the flames.
A sudden, crushing wave of pressure rolled off the creature, pinning Shiro where he stood. Before he could even force his heavy limbs to move, the air ripped open with a blinding flash.
For a fraction of a second, time seemed to slow as a streak of dark-red energy brushed past his left side.
Then his arm swelled grotesquely. The muscle stretched past its limit, and the bone groaned beneath the sudden, violent strain.
BOOM.
Shiro's left arm burst apart.
"My arm!"
The scream tore from his throat before he could stop it. Blood splashed across the scorched floor, and the sudden loss of balance sent him staggering sideways. Agonizing pain tore through him, so intense that for a moment his vision turned entirely red.
'Is this what it was all for? All those countless days for death?'
The Calamity gave him no chance to recover.
Its body convulsed. The cracks running across its charred frame spread wider as fresh flesh crawled over ruined muscle, expanding the creature's size with every passing second.
"No. 014, snap out of it!"
Lloyd's voice cut through the ringing in his ears, a desperate shout meant to snap Shiro from the reality of the numb silence creeping over his mind before the thrashing creature could crush him.
"Lloyd..." Shiro forced the name past his gritted teeth, his strained gaze struggling to cut through the smoke and embers.
Lloyd dropped from the sky with terrifying speed. Blue energy surged around his arm as it condensed into a massive lance. He struck without hesitation. The weapon punched through the Calamity's chest and drove deep into the earth beneath it.
The ground shattered.
A pillar of blue light erupted upward, engulfing both Lloyd and the monster as the purple-bruised clouds spiraled inward overhead.
The sky itself seemed drawn toward the lance.
Its body absorbed the impact with terrifying durability, yet the cracks spreading across its frame revealed a fatal flaw: every desperate cycle of regeneration was tearing it apart from within.
More power was needed. Lloyd knew it. It was a desperate gamble, but their only chance.
For a moment, the Calamity disappeared within the blinding light.
Then movement returned.
The blue energy leaking through its fractures flickered as the monster slowly pushed back against the tip.
Lloyd's vision darkened at the edges. Blood seeped from his pores as his body hit its absolute limit, his combat suit tearing apart beneath the savage recoil to expose the skin sizzling under the surging power. His arms shook violently. Every nerve screamed for him to stop.
Still, Lloyd held on.
The Calamity was adapting faster than it was taking damage, but in that moment, he felt no fear. No regret. Just a deep exhaustion.
"I've done all I can... Shiro, I leave the rest to you." Lloyd rasped his final words before gritting his teeth, forcing the pillar to brighten into a blinding glare.
"GRRRAAAAAAGH!"
The roar tore across the battlefield. The pressure building inside the monster became impossible to contain, shaking the lance to its core.
Lloyd's expression hardened.
The cracks covering the creature spread from head to toe, glowing brighter than ever beneath its darkened skin as its purple halo pulsed.
Then dark-red lightning erupted, not from the storm overhead, but directly from the Calamity itself. A column of violet energy tore skyward, locking onto the tempest above.
For a brief, breathless instant, everything went dead silent.
Then it detonated.