Mio

The web was gone. The purple light was gone. Blue hair lay in the water and Mio was already moving.

Jii’s gauntlet hit the Queen’s torso at the sternum. The impact knocked Amori loose from the Queen’s arm and the girl splashed into the shallows behind them.

The pearl surface cracked chitin and the force traveled through Mio’s shoulder and spine into the concrete under her feet.

The Queen’s second mouth opened. Adhesive spit. Mio was past it before the glob left the black gums. Zero Hesitation.

[Reverse Lotus Dance]

Sixteen strikes. Four seconds.

The first four hit clean. Pearl gauntlet into the junction where human torso met crab shell, twice, then obsidian fist through the right pincer’s joint. The one still wet with Chi-chi. The first of the Queen’s two remaining legs crumpled on the fourth strike and the crab body listed sideways.

The last leg swept and caught the fifth strike. Deflected the sixth. Mio adjusted at the seventh, drove the obsidian arm through a gap in the carapace where threads had already weakened the shell, and the Queen screamed from both mouths at once.

Eight through twelve opened what Chi-chi had already broken. The shell split along the wounds her threads had carved and organs spilled into the water. Bloom poured off the dying crab, warm and heavy.

Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

The last leg gave. The Queen dropped, human torso dragging the ruined crab across the chamber floor.

Sixteen landed on the exposed spine where woman met crustacean. The pearl gauntlet shattered what was underneath and the Queen’s torso lurched forward, arms catching herself on the concrete. Fingers spread. Nails cracked.

The crab body was dying but the woman’s eyes were open and focused and looking past Mio.

Looking at what was left of Chi-chi.

The Queen’s arm shot out—not at Mio. Past her. Fingers closed around Chi-chi’s shoulder where the upper half of her body lay in the shallows, blue hair dark with water, and pulled.

Mio lunged. Too slow.

Chi-chi’s body hit the Queen’s torso and sank into it. Skin parted along the ribcage and the human torso opened and took what was left. Compression shirt and blue hair and all of it, drawn in until the water where she’d been was empty.

The crab body convulsed once and went still.

The woman stood up.

Taller than Mio by a head, naked and gray-skinned with carapace plating in patches across her ribs and collarbone. Smooth and fitted where it sat on skin, tapering at the edges. Silk residue from Chi-chi’s threads clung to her shoulders. Purple veins pulsed once beneath the gray and went dark.

[Awakened Crab Queen — B-grade Elite]

[HP: 89,000/89,000]

“Mio-chan.”

Chi-chi’s voice, exact down to the cadence and the lilt at the end.

“Won’t you save me?”

Mio fired.

[Final Vigil]

The beam carved a line through the chamber. Water vaporized in its path. Concrete dust fell from the ceiling and the Queen raised her left arm.

A slab of chitin she’d torn from her own dead crab body. The beam hit it dead center and the chitin turned white at the point of contact. Fractures spread from the center in a web. Chunks flaked off in the backwash.

The Queen’s feet slid backward through the water. Two inches, four, six. Her free hand braced against her own wrist. The chitin buckled inward.

Held.

The beam cut out. Smoke poured off the surface in sheets. The slab was half the size it had been and the Queen’s arm was shaking from shoulder to fingertip.

She lowered it. Rolled her wrist once. The shaking stopped.

Not a mark on the arm behind it.

[Reservoir: 240,811 → 215,811]

“You watched me die,” the Queen said, but what came out was Chi-chi’s voice. The Queen’s mouth shaped each syllable with care. “You stood right there and watched.”

Mio closed the distance. Obsidian arm leading, Jii trailing. The Dance wouldn’t work again. The Queen had felt all sixteen, knew the timing and the intervals. This was fists and the gauntlet’s passive keeping her upright.

The Queen met her at the halfway point.

Three hits given, four taken. Mio’s obsidian arm caught a knee aimed at her liver and the impact sent her sliding backward through the water. The Queen pressed forward. No windup between strikes, no reset, each attack starting from wherever the last one ended.

Jii’s gauntlet caught a palm strike aimed at her throat. Debuff negation pulsed. The Queen’s touch carried a charge that died on the pearl surface, but the force behind it was real. Mio’s wrist bent and she ate the pain and swung the obsidian arm in a tight arc that the Queen leaned away from with centimeters to spare.

“Stop fighting back.”

Every exchange cost Mio more than the last. Chi-chi’s A-grade reflexes were running behind the Queen’s eyes now, on stamina that didn’t deplete. Mio’s feet churned the water. She couldn’t plant. Couldn’t set.

Vitalize was there. She could heal and keep trading. But trading was the problem. Every reset just bought another thirty seconds of losing.

Her heel caught Amori underwater.

Small body face-down in the shallows.

Mio stumbled. The Queen’s fist connected with her jaw and she hit the water on her back, rolled, came up spitting pink.

The Queen walked toward Amori.

“Don’t you remember?”

Mio threw herself between them. The aegis hit her across the ribs—the flat of it, used as a bludgeon—and bone cracked and she grabbed the Queen’s wrist with the obsidian hand and held on.

The Queen drove her knee into Mio’s stomach once, twice, and Mio’s grip stayed because Zero Hesitation meant her body couldn’t lock even when it wanted to.

“Monsters stick together.”

The Queen’s free hand came down. Her fingers had narrowed, carapace plating compressed to a tapering edge. It entered below Mio’s ribs on the left side and opened her from hip to sternum.

The heat left first.

Then the weight.

Mio looked down. The water around her feet was dark and the things inside her were outside her.

Her knees didn’t buckle. Zero Hesitation. She stayed standing on legs that should have folded.

The Queen pulled her hand free and tilted her head—Chi-chi’s tilt.

[HP: 314/4,200]

Mio’s back hit the wall. She slid two inches before the obsidian arm locked against the concrete and stopped her. Her guts were warm in the water. She was still standing. Technically.

Heal, Vitalize. Buy another minute of getting taken apart by a dead girl’s speed. Where’s the logic in that?

No.

She pulled it from Inventory. Black, the size of an apple, beating in time with the obsidian arm. Can’s arm. Can’s core.

[Would you like to consume Putrid Core?]

I don’t give a shit.

She shoved it into her mouth and bit through it.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep