Chapter 82: Demon in the Darkness of the Dungeon

The unnatural static in his mental link was maddening. Adam could feel Alice’s alarm and Ignis’s pained frustration as faint, broken whispers, but clear coordination was impossible. The green-haired woman’s scroll had severed their tactical unity.

Resmond pressed the advantage, his golden form a blur of relentless strikes. “It can’t communicate! Now’s our chance! Force it apart from the others!”

Adam, cornered and irritated, abandoned finesse. With a roar that shook the cavern, he stopped trying to dodge. He took a grazing blow from Resmond’s sword across his shoulder, letting Monarch’s Aegis reflect a burst of fire back into the knight’s face, forcing him to flinch. In that moment, Adam swung his massive tail in a brutal, wide arc, not aiming to constrict, but to bludgeon.

Resmond crossed his arms, bracing with a golden shield of light. The impact sent him skidding back, his boots digging trenches in the earth, but he held.

“Adel, now!” Resmond grunted.

From Adam’s blind spot, Adel lunged. Her lightning-wreathed swords didn’t aim for scales; she targeted the crack Resmond had made earlier. With a piercing cry, she drove both blades deep into the fissure in Adam’s flank.

Searing, agonizing pain lanced through Adam—a pain far sharper and more debilitating than any he’d felt since his evolution. He roared, not in anger, but in shock.

’They hurt me. These humans… my current form… they can truly injure me.’

The thought was a cold splash of reality. His Legendary evolution wasn’t invincibility. Against coordinated, intelligent foes, he was still vulnerable.

A wave of furious, instinctual greed rose in him not for treasure, but for power, for the safety of absolute dominance. The Crown of the Hollow Glutton on his brow pulsed in response, the dull iron drinking in his raging desire, feeling heavier, more present. It fed on his ambition to never feel this pain again.

Blooming Vitality activated almost on instinct. A wave of soothing, regenerative energy burst from within him, pushing against the damage, forcing the swords out with a sickening squelch as flesh knitted rapidly around the retreating blades. Adel yanked her weapons free, staring in shock at the rapidly closing wound.

“It’s regenerating! Incredibly fast!” she yelled.

“Then we hit it harder and faster than it can heal!” Resmond countered, charging back in.

But Adam was done playing defense. Pain had honed his focus. He used Abyssal Glide, not to flee, but to create a zigzagging, unpredictable approach. He spat a volley of Ember Shard Shots at Resmond to force him to guard, then drew a deep, mana-charged breath.

“Stormrend!”

The vortex of cutting wind and lightning erupted not at Resmond, but at the clustered support team behind him—Pix, Derek, and the still-disoriented Ignis’s position. The humans scattered, but the chaotic, area-denying attack did its job. In the confusion, Adam lunged.

Resmond saw the feint too late. He parried the first Ember Shard, but the Stormrend forced him to shield his face. Adam was upon him in the next instant, not with fangs, but with a devastating body slam from his coiled midsection. The air left Resmond’s lungs as he was thrown back into a fungal tree with a sickening crunch.

Before Adam could finish him, Adel was there again, a screaming storm of lightning. Adam whirled, his tail lashing out in a powerful Constrict, aiming to crush the agile swordswoman. She was fast, dancing between his coils, but the sheer size of his attack grazed her, snagging her leg.

“ADEL!” Max boomed, charging from the side. He didn’t attack Adam; he slammed his tower shield into the side of the constricting coil with all his might, a Shield Bash amplified by holy power. The impact was monstrous, not cutting, but concussive. It jolted Adam’s grip just enough for Adel to tear herself free, her leg bleeding but intact.

On the other flank, Alice was a shadow of rage. A Void Bolt had shattered the knee guard of the brawler Zen, dropping him with a curse. But her arrogance cost her. As she poised for a finishing strike, Jeff the rogue, having circled unseen, threw not a knife, but a glass orb filled with shimmering dust.

“Motes of the Revealing Light!”

The orb shattered at Alice’s paws, and the dust clung to her void-energy, making her form flicker and solidify erratically, breaking her phasing. Derek, seizing the opportunity, fired three rapid shots. One pierced her shoulder, and she cried out in pain and shock, a tangible, physical wound staining her dark fur.

The sight of Alice wounded—his first friend, his constant shadow—ignited a cold, silent fury in Adam that dwarfed his own pain.

He stopped.

The Crown on his head glowed with a deep, hungry light. He didn’t roar. He simply… exerted.

[ Abyssal Majesty ].

It wasn’t a skill he activated consciously; it was his presence, his will, amplified by the Crown’s hunger and his own boiling rage, made manifest. A wave of psychic pressure, thick with the terror of the void and the weight of a nascent dragon’s dominance, crashed over the entire clearing. The fungal trees seemed to wilt. The air grew heavy and cold.

Leo the porter vomited, collapsing to his knees. Pix’s spell fizzled in her hands. Jeff stumbled, his knives feeling like lead. Adel and Max froze for a crucial second, their combat instincts screaming of a predator far beyond their league.

Resmond, struggling to his feet, felt it like a physical weight, a demand to kneel, to despair.

Not all were fully affected. Ken, Silas, and Glock, farther back and of sterner mental fortitude, resisted the worst of it, but they were still shaken, their coordination broken.

That second of universal hesitation was all Adam needed.

He focused on Ken, the heavy infantryman who had cast the earthen chains. The man was shaking off the psychic dread, raising his warhammer.

Adam’s form blurred. Not Phantom Onslaught, but something more direct, more brutal. He channeled power into his horned head and the leading edge of his scales, aiming himself like a living battering ram.

Monarch’s Pierce.

He crossed the distance in an instant. Ken had time only to widen his eyes before Adam was upon him. The legendary piercing attack, designed to break the hardest armor and cripple regeneration, did not merely strike. It erased. Adam’s massive form didn’t just hit Ken; it passed through the space he occupied. There was a sound like a mountain cracking, a brief spray of red mist and shattered metal, and then silence.

Where Ken had stood, there was only a deep, scorched gouge in the cavern floor, and the mangled remains of a magical warhammer.

The psychic pressure lifted as suddenly as it had come.

The battlefield was silent, save for the ragged breaths of the combatants and Leo’s retching. The first kill had been made.

A seasoned, armored warrior, obliterated in the blink of an eye.

Adam hovered over the gouge, his galactic eyes cold, his Crown gleaming. The message was clear.

The harvest was over. This was now an extermination.

Resmond stared at the spot where Ken had been, his face pale with horror and a fury that mirrored Adam’s own. “You… you demon…” he whispered.

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