Flesh and Steel: Confrontation in the Abyss
"You don't have a sister."
"I’ve eaten so many people's sisters that I must have gotten them mixed up." Long Qianqian’s lips stretched all the way to her ears, forming a thick, viscous smile. Her tone was as breezy as if she were commenting on the daily weather.
Before her words even faded, Long Qianqian's frame dropped low—and she lunged!
The underground passage was far too narrow for her to spread her massive wings. She kept her membranous bone-wings tightly folded until she closed in to a mere two paces away, then snapped them open with explosive violence! The wing membranes whipped up a hurricane-like tempest of sheer oppressive force, completely sealing off any escape routes to either side.
Corvus couldn't retreat—Leyla was right behind him.
He lowered his center of gravity, crossing his dark-gold mechanical arm in front of his chest to intercept the onslaught of claws and fangs!
CRACK—SCRAPE! Her fangs clamped down ruthlessly on the metallic gauntlet, sending harsh screeching sounds and blinding sparks bursting into the air. The terrifying biting force vibrated through his bones, numbing his entire left arm.
As the overwhelming impact surged over him, Corvus didn't try to force a standstill. Instead, he yielded to the fierce momentum, snapping his back and waist to execute a fluid, momentum-borrowing roll mid-air.
"Down you go, monster."
In the split-second of their descent, Corvus’s left hand clamped down on Long Qianqian’s head. Fusing his full strength with the downward pull of gravity, he slammed her face viciously into the ground!
BOOM—!
The hard concrete floor shattered and caved in, sending debris flying everywhere. The heavy impact left Long Qianqian seeing stars. Taking advantage of the momentum, Corvus landed solidly on his feet. Without a moment's pause, he drove his boots like iron spikes into her dragon claws, pinning her upper body firmly to the floor.
The gears inside his mechanical left arm groaned under the heavy load, and the intricate alchemy runes etched onto its surface lit up once more with a dangerous, blinding red glow.
"Game over, Miss Monster."
Corvus looked down coldly at the thrashing beast beneath him, jamming his left palm like an iron vise straight into her wide-open maw—
"Demon-Slayer Cannon—Charging!"
Scalding mana frantically converged into the prosthetic arm, severely distorting the surrounding air from the intense heat. The destructive white light compressed to its absolute limit within his palm, emitting a sharp, ear-splitting whine.
Sensing the threat of imminent death, a flash of madness flickered in Long Qianqian’s eyes. Her thick, barbed dragon tail—resembling an iron whip—swung up violently. Accompanied by a piercing whistle of rending air, it lashed out like a venomous pit viper from his blind spot, targeting the back of Corvus's head!
However, under Claude’s high-altitude shared perspective, this blind-spot ambush was crystal clear in Corvus’s crystal eye.
Unfazed, his right hand flashed like lightning, drawing the heavy steel sword at his side. The instant before the tail pierced the air, he reversed his grip, channeled his full mana into his right arm, and thrust backward with lethal force!
SPLAT!
The sharp steel blade impaled the dragon tail with terrifying precision, pinning it securely into the concrete ground!
"AAAAAAHHH—!" Long Qianqian shrieked in agony.
"Demon-Slayer Cannon—FIRE!"
A streak of ruthless resolve flashed through Corvus’s crystal eye; he had no intention of holding back. With a low growl, the compressed white light of destruction in his dark-gold palm detonated violently inside Long Qianqian’s gaping, bloodthirsty maw!
BOOOOM————!!
It was no ordinary explosion, but a torrent of holy and destructive mana unleashing wildly in an extremely confined space.
"WU-OHHHHH—!"
Long Qianqian’s scream was cut halfway short as the horrific light poured straight down her esophagus, instantly vaporizing her internal organs and tissues. The intense glare even refracted through the crimson scales on her neck, casting a horrifying blood-red halo.
The destructive shockwave, accompanied by the scorched, blackened energy generated by the "Mana-Ember," completely shattered the fragile foundation of the tunnel.
The earth trembled as concrete and rebar dissolved into powder within the white light. Corvus, along with the heavily bleeding, fatally wounded Long Qianqian and the collapsing debris, plummeted weightlessly into the pitch-black abyss blasted open beneath them.
THUD! BANG!
After an indeterminate fall, Corvus slammed heavily onto a mound of soft dirt and rubble.
The immense impact brought a metallic taste to his throat, making him cough up a mouthful of fresh blood. His black trench coat was tattered beyond repair. Worse yet, dense, scorched electrical arcs were wildly sparking at the junction between his left shoulder and the mechanical prosthetic arm.
CLACK... ZZZT...
That last strike had caused the Mana-Ember corrosion to go completely out of control. Ash-black crystals spread like venomous snakes toward his collarbone and neck, bringing a agonizing sensation like being burned alive. Panting heavily, his right hand trembled as he fished the mana-suppressant potion Leyla had given him out of his coat. He bit off the cap along with the glass tip and gulped down the scalding, bitter liquid.
"HAH... HAH..."
As the hot potion spread through his system, the expanding crystals finally came to a creeping halt.
Corvus struggled to his feet, gripping the steel sword he had re-drawn with his right hand. He raised his head, attempting to scan his surroundings with his right crystal eye. But they were far too deep; daylight from above couldn't penetrate this depth, leaving only deathly silence and a thick stench of blood.
'Claude...?'
He called out in his mind, only for a piercing headache to rack his brain. The deep rock layers and subterranean leyline barriers had completely severed his neural link with the Demon Crow—for the first time in ten years, he was entirely, utterly alone.
Deprived of his aerial vision, he had to rely on the faint night-vision capabilities of his crystal eye to grope his way forward. The crunching sound of his boots stepping on loose gravel sounded unnaturally harsh in the dead silence.
After taking a dozen steps, the horrifying sight ahead made even this monster detective—a man accustomed to hellscapes—gasp in cold shock.
It was a colossal subterranean natural cavern.
The air was thick with the nauseating stench of Mana-Embers, dense enough to form a tangible, purplish-black haze that tasted like rust with every breath.
Right in the center of this massive cavern lay a terrifying mineral vein formed entirely of "Mana-Ember Crystals." Countless mindless, rotting male residents worked mechanically like the walking dead, digging around the vein. The meat on their fingers had long been worn down to bare white bone, yet they tirelessly transported the raw crystals toward a massive fissure at the top of an altar, their movements as synchronized as puppets pulled by the same thread.
"Handsome detective, you've got quite some skill..."
A raspy, broken voice echoed softly across the cavern. Corvus turned sharply, his gaze piercing like a torch.
In the shadows of the ruins, Long Qianqian slowly stood up. Her current appearance was gruesome beyond words: her lower jaw was nearly blasted to pieces, exposing shattered jawbones, and her body was covered in charred, rotten flesh. Yet horrifically, those burnt tissues were squirming and reconstructing themselves at an unnatural speed. Meanwhile, the massive wings that once spread behind her and the barbed dragon tail dissolved and shrank like melting wax, eventually retracting fully into her spine and hips.
That previous blast had drained too much of her mana, forcing her to abandon her high-tier beast form and revert to a fragile human shape. Even so, a bloodthirsty red glare still flickered inside her turbid pupils.
"Look at what you've done to my body... This is... so... dynamic!" Long Qianqian forced a cruel smile with the remaining half of her mouth. "But now that you've found this place, I can't let you leave alive."
She dropped into a low, firm stance, her aura as a high-tier monster undiminished in its lethality.
Looking at the completely derailed woman before him and the mindless thralls behind her, the mechanical joints in Corvus's left arm clicked uneasily. The soothing effect of the potion was wearing off, and the Mana-Ember inside his body was churning wildly in response to the crystal vein in the cave—as if something in his bloodstream was whispering to its kin.
Without wasting words, he reversed his grip on the steel sword in his right hand while the dark-gold mechanical arm on his left glowed again with a faint red light.
"This isn't the end of my revenge," Corvus said, his voice as cold as ice as his crystal eye locked onto every flux of mana around Long Qianqian. "This is yours."
With a sharp, unnatural shriek, Long Qianqian caved in the ground beneath her feet, launching herself at Corvus like a cannonball freshly fired from its barrel!
A desperate gambit of flesh and steel officially commenced in the dark abyss of the underworld.
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