The air at the bottom of Floor 60 stopped flowing. Time seemed to freeze, crushed by an energy pressure that violated all laws of nature.
In the middle of the giant ice hall whose pillars were beginning to crack, the Corrupted Spirit stared at the two existences that had cornered it. The pale woman atop the mountain of rotting flesh was no longer screaming. Her empty, pupilless eyes radiated an absolute despair that quickly mutated into a deadly will.
It understood. There was no chance of winning.
Before it stood the Great Spirit of Wind, whose power resided in a completely different dimension. Beside the spirit, stood a mage whose anomalous power was equivalent to a Level 9 natural disaster. Meanwhile, despite being backed by the labyrinth and possessing absurd endurance, its power was capped at Level 8. And now, with the destruction of The Fleshy Womb, even the energy intake that made it immortal was gone.
Die slaughtered or die exploding, taking its enemies to hell with it. For a monster born from the womb of hatred, the second option was the only instinct left.
The giant purple crystal in its chest cavity blinked uncontrollably. Its light no longer radiated the majesty of spirit magic, but a dense radiation sucking every drop of remaining life from its own flesh cells.
"Alfia...!" Aria widened her eyes, sensing the magic fluctuation expanding at an exponential rate. "It's compressing its spirit core! That crazy creature intends to blow itself up!"
Alfia took a step forward, her eyes narrowing sharply. "You must be joking. Compressing a spirit core takes at least ten breaths of time!"
Alfia focused her mind to fire a sonic block of Satanas Verion with the aim of destroying the crystal before it reached its critical point. However, what happened next was beyond the mage's calculation.
The rotting flesh around the purple crystal suddenly shriveled, withered, and was sucked inward instantly. The Corrupted Spirit did not use normal magic compression methods. The creature forced a vacuum implosion into itself, destroying its physical form to accelerate the chain reaction. The ten seconds Alfia predicted were cut down to less than two.
A dense purple light swallowed the pale woman. An energy singularity the size of a small ball formed in the center of the room, emitting a high-frequency hum that made ears bleed.
"Too fast!" shouted Alfia, abandoning her intention to attack and immediately crossing both arms in front of her chest.
"—Silentium Eden!"
Instantly, Alfia forced the Mind within her body to detonate the silver magic-nullifying armor to its maximum thickness. Silver light wrapped her body like a steel cocoon.
By her side, Aria was no less quick. Realizing that this explosion would erase everything, the Great Spirit brought both her palms together.
"Aegis Caelum!"
A golden-greenish-white wind shield exploded around Aria, solidifying into a high-pressure storm wall.
However, even on the brink of this minor apocalypse, Aria's first instinct was not to look toward the explosion, but to turn toward the back of the hall—toward the block of eternal ice where her daughter slept.
A faint smile filled with relief was etched on her face.
The holy blue glow from the prism ice remained stable and peaceful. The Frozen Garden of Talia, the absolute ice magic left behind by Celdia, stood firm like a law of nature itself. Aria knew, the essence of that ancient ice rejected the slightest temperature change and was immune to miasma corruption. Ais would survive, even if this entire floor collapsed.
The absolute certainty that her daughter was protected allowed Aria to focus one hundred percent on withstanding the impact of the explosion targeting her life.
Then, the purple singularity in the center of the hall detonated.
There was no sound of an explosion in the first milliseconds. The wave of energy released was so massive it tore through the threshold of hearing, creating a terrifying vacuum of silence. Only a split second later, the roar of the end of times slammed into their ears.
KABOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!!!
Purple and white light blinded every corner of Floor 60. The shockwave created by the explosion of the Level 8 spirit core swept across at meteor speed, flattening air, ice, bone, and rock into dust.
The Glacier ice pillars, whose diameters exceeded the size of houses, snapped like dry twigs and were thrown in all directions. The floor surface, made of permafrost ice, shattered to pieces, creating giant craters drilling down to the deepest layers of the floor's supports.
When the purple heatwave filled with corrosive miasma slammed into Alfia's Silentium Eden, the mage was pushed backward until her feet scraped the ice floor half a meter deep. Her silver armor crackled loudly, devouring and nullifying the magic energy trying to burn her. Had she lost focus for even a second, the corrupt energy would have struck her body.
Beside her, Aria's Aegis Caelum cleaved the explosion wave like the bow of a ship crashing through a giant wave. Its storm wind redirected the fire and energy pressure, but the kinetic blast of the explosion still forced the Great Spirit to plant her feet firmly.
The destruction lasted for dozens of seconds that felt like an eternity. The ceiling of the Floor 60 hall collapsed onto the earth. Ice chunks the size of mountains fell, crushing whatever remained beneath them. The Glacier ecosystem that had existed in the dungeon was wiped off the map in a single breath.
Slowly, the rumble of the apocalypse subsided. The purple light faded, replaced by dense dust and ice fog that choked visibility.
In the middle of the crater ruins, which now looked more like a cauldron of hell, a streak of silver and emerald light still shone.
Alfia lowered her slightly trembling arms. Silentium Eden faded into the air. Her black cloak was slightly tattered from physical ice shards that slipped past her magic armor, and a trickle of fresh blood flowed from the corner of her lips due to the extreme kinetic impact. However, she still stood tall, her eyes glaring sharply through the dust.
"You crazy creature," cursed Alfia, wiping the blood on her lips with the back of her gloved hand. "If I had been late in solidifying my shield by a single second, I might be injured right now."
Aria floated nearby, dispelling the wind wall of Aegis Caelum. The Great Spirit was slightly dirtied by the dust. However, the first thing she did was look back.
Amidst the scattered giant ice debris, the Talia prism ice block still stood tall without a single scratch. Its blue light radiated peacefully. Ais was still fast asleep, completely untouched by the explosion that had just leveled the deepest floor of the labyrinth.
Aria let out a long sigh of relief, closing her eyes for a moment to give thanks to fate.
"It's all over," murmured Aria softly, opening her eyes again and staring at the expanse of destruction before them. There was no more miasma residue. There was no more filthy flesh. The Corrupted Spirit had truly erased itself from existence.
Floor 60 had been totally functionally destroyed. More than eighty percent of its structure had collapsed. Even now, massive-scale earthquake tremors could still be felt traveling upwards. Alfia, who possessed sharp spatial instincts, could estimate that the floors above them, including Floors 59 and 58, must be experiencing partial collapse due to the domino effect of losing this main foundation.
"We must immediately lift your daughter's ice and find a way out of here, Sylphie," said Alfia, rolling her stiff shoulders. "This floor has lost its structural stability. I don't want to be buried under tens of thousands of tons of glacier chunks just because we stood watching the rubb—"
Alfia's words were forcibly cut off.
Not by the sound of collapsing ice. But by a sound... a heartbeat.
Thump-thump.
The sound echoed. It didn't come from a single point, but radiated from all the labyrinth walls surrounding them.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Instantly, the temperature on Floor 60, which had previously been freezing due to the glacier, slowly turned into an unnatural heat. A blood-red light began to seep out from the cracks of the collapsed ice pillars and the fractured floor.
Aria turned her head quickly, her eyes narrowing sharply. The spiritual dissonance that had just vanished with the death of the Corrupted Spirit was now replaced by something far more primal, more absolute, and filled with pure wrath.
"Alfia..." called Aria, her tone turning as sharp as a sword. "This labyrinth... it is screaming."
Alfia frowned, her eyes sweeping her surroundings. The blue phosphor glow typical of the destroyed labyrinth was now completely replaced by a blood-red light pulsing like an angry artery.
And Aria was right.
The labyrinth was wailing. A soundless howl echoed in the air, vibrating the diaphragms of both of them. It was a cry of pain, burning rage, and absolute hatred.
The Dungeon was a living biological entity. The destruction of more than eighty percent of Floor 60's foundation was an extremely severe physical wound. However, the true wrath of the Mother Labyrinth was not solely because her stone floors were destroyed.
The anomalous monster that had just exploded, the Corrupted Spirit, was her proud "child." A disgusting masterpiece she had nurtured, cared for by feeding it energy from The Fleshy Womb, with the goal of making it an absolute weapon of destruction to bring down the surface world. And now, the investment she had cultivated was smashed to ashes by two small existences who dared to pierce her depths.
The Dungeon was furious. And when the Dungeon suffered massive structural damage, its absolute defense mechanism—its immune system—would awaken to swallow the virus causing the damage.
"Damn it..." hissed Alfia, a dark realization hitting her brain. Old memories of the Hera faction's expeditions resurfaced in her mind. "Massive floor damage. Red light. A pulse. Sylphie, get ready! This labyrinth is summoning its 'Immune System'!"
"Immune System?" Aria squinted, compressing the wind element in both her hands.
"The Slaughterer. Juggernaut!" replied Alfia, drawing into the tightest combat stance she had taken today.
The ice walls at the far right and left of the giant crater suddenly swelled unnaturally. The hard surface of the permafrost ice bulged out like a living giant tumor, throbbing wildly in time with the labyrinth's heartbeat. Reddish-black blood seeped heavily from the cracks, spilling onto the floor like the amniotic fluid of death.
This labyrinth was undergoing a forced labor.
CRAAAAASSSSHHH!
Both swollen walls exploded simultaneously, spewing chunks of ice and labyrinth blood into the air.
From within the gaping wall cavities, two figures shot out whose forms violated all rules of ordinary labyrinth monster design. They were born directly from the womb of the Dungeon's despair, landing on the ice debris with a deadly silence.
Their forms were horrifying and elegant at the same time. Moving on four limbs like beasts, their upper body structures were covered by thick bone armor plates reflecting magical glows. There was no skin, only dark purple muscle fibers twitching to support the exoskeleton framework. Their tails were long and segmented like a spinal whip, equipped with natural blades at the ends. Their single eyes glowed behind flat skulls lacking lower jawbones.
The aura emitted by the two creatures made the hairs on Alfia's neck stand on end—a tension that could only be caused by the threat of absolute death.
"This is different," muttered Alfia, her breath catching slightly as a memory from her faction's glory days flashed by. "In the past, when a Hera familia expedition accidentally destroyed a large portion of the floor structure in the depths, the labyrinth also spawned this thing. But the monster back then that forced the Empress to step in directly to destroy it... its size was not this massive and terrifying."
Alfia's analytical instinct realized the truth. The Juggernaut—the labyrinth's immune system—did not have a fixed level. Their strength, speed, and the thickness of their magic-dampening exoskeleton armor were absolutely measured and adjusted based on how deep the floor where they were born was and how great the threat damaging the labyrinth was.
These two existences that had just hatched before them were born at one of the deepest points of the labyrinth—Floor 60—as a direct response to the massive damage and the death of the Dungeon's beloved corrupt spirit. The pressure they exuded surpassed the monster that the Captain of the Hera Familia had fought in the past.
"The pressure of nullified power around them... the thickness of that armor..." Alfia clenched her fists tightly, her eyes narrowing sharply. "Their speed and reflexes are no longer in the realm of boss monsters. Each of them... possesses raw power and agility equivalent to a Level 9 adventurer."
Two Level 9 Juggernauts. The labyrinth's immune system created solely to kill relentlessly with absolute speed. They had no magic stones in their chests; their existence was purely powered by the will of the labyrinth, their lifespans merely a matter of minutes, but those minutes were the span of an apocalypse for whoever became their target.
The two Juggernauts turned their flat skulls, focusing their red eyes straight at Alfia and Aria.
There was no roar. There was no declaration of war.
BAM!
The ice floor beneath the feet of one of the Juggernauts shattered, forming a crater, and the creature disappeared from sight. Not a speed utilizing muscles, but an explosion of pure acceleration rejecting the resistance of air friction.
In less than a fraction of a millisecond, dazzling bone claws were already a span away from Alfia's neck.
"Aegis Caelum!"
Aria reacted almost beyond the logic of time. A storm wind shield appeared a split second before the claws beheaded the mage.
CLAAAAAANG!!!
The sound of the collision between the exoskeleton bone claws and Aria's absolute wind wall created a blinding green spark, followed by a shockwave that leveled the ice debris around them. Alfia's eyes widened. Aegis Caelum, which had previously been able to parry the Corrupted Spirit's tendrils without a scratch, now crackled violently and showed small cracks at the point of impact with the claws.
The Juggernaut's armor was not just hard; their exoskeleton material possessed an absolute anti-magic property capable of shattering Aria's protective magic particles.
The creature bounced backward with equal speed, landing gracefully on the sloped ice wall, before finally shooting back along with its partner from two different directions. Their trajectories formed zig-zags that broke human spatial common sense, leaving a series of blurred afterimages in the air.
"They are shattering my protective magic!" shouted Aria, her face hardening as she continuously adjusted the angle of her storm wall to withstand the barrage of double slash attacks bombarding them like a meteor shower of claws.
Alfia clicked her tongue roughly. She could not use rapid-fire magic at this close a range and at this speed, especially knowing that the creature's skull armor was instinctually designed to shatter Magic or magic chants before they could detonate to their maximum.
However, her arrogant smile did not fade. Instead, the smile grew wider, implying the true essence of an elite mage who never bowed her head to anyone, even to the incarnation of death itself.
"So, this labyrinth is angry because we killed its favorite toy, and now gives birth to these two brainless guard dogs?" hissed Alfia, letting her Silentium Eden crackle stronger over her skin to neutralize the reverberations of the physical impacts piercing through Aria's wind. "Magic-nullifying armor? Speed of light?"
Alfia shifted her stance forward, syncing her breathing with the dance of the spirit's wind. Her different-colored eyes now turned as cold as the deepest ice of the Glacier, filled with the long-dormant brutality of the Golden Era.
"Sylphie, change the shape of your storm into an accelerating thrust on my back," ordered Alfia, no longer intending to chant large-scale magic, but preparing for point-blank combat. "Let's teach this damn labyrinth... that no matter how many layers of magic-nullifying bone armor it makes, bones are still something that can be broken!"
In the middle of the ruined crater of Floor 60, under the blood-red light radiating from the labyrinth's wrath, a true battle against the incarnation of despair had just begun.
Against two absolute slaughterers born from nothingness, the mage and the Great Spirit prepared to pierce the absolute limits of their power.
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