Beast Gacha System: All Mine

Chapter 432: Titanomachy

It was actually ugly.

A fight between two titans with millennia behind their identity, truly was not majestic, or breathtaking like you would see in movies.

There was no grace here. No choreography or sweeping orchestral score to lend dignity to the slaughter.

It was the wet, sucking sound of claws ripping through gelatinous flesh and the splintering crack of a beak against scale, muffled by the density of the water.

The stench of ruptured organs spilling their contents into water already thick with corruption, a black, viscous soup of ancient blood, half-digested matter and the cloying sweetness of decay that had been marinating in the deep for eons.

It was tentacles, barbed and hooked, lashing blindly and tearing away chunks of dragonhide, exposing the glistening white of subcutaneous tissue beneath.

It was Oathran’s fangs sinking into an eye the size of a carriage and that eye bursting, jelly and ichor and something that might have been a pupil collapsing in on itself.

It was like witnessing a cat tear open the belly of a screaming rat, the fur matted with blood, the entrails spilling in looping coils, the high, terrible shriek of the dying thing as it clawed at the air with feet that no longer touched the ground.

It was like a rat digging into the eyes of a corpse of a cat, gnawing, the pop of vitreous fluid, the pink-grey sludge of brain matter oozing from the socket.

It was gore. Flesh, no matter how ancient, could still be opened. Blood, no matter how divine, could still be spilled.

A dragon could be reduced to a screaming, thrashing animal with scales hanging in tatters and the white gleam of bone visible through the ruin of his flank.

A Kraken could be reduced to a pulped mass of tentacles and ruptured eyes, dragging itself back into the dark with half its body trailing behind it in ribbons.

It was ugly.

The white dragon descended through the black water like a falling star, and the abyss rose to meet him.

In that lightless trench where the corrupted ocean pressed its crushing weight against the skin of reality, they collided once more.

The monster’s flesh was the color of drowned sailors’ dreams, mottled. It had always been a creature that had never needed a reason to kill.

BOOM—BOOM—BOOM—

Blue flashes erupted in the darkness, sound muffled inside that viscous realm.

Oathran met it with fire. The older fire, the dragon-fire that burned in the marrow of his bones and the core of his soul. It erupted from his jaws in a torrent of grey and blue, boiling the black water around him, turning corruption to steam.

The Kraken screamed and lunged.

A tentacle thicker than a thousand-year-old oak lashed toward him. Oathran twisted, his body coiling through the water, and the barbed tip missed him by inches.

He seized the limb with his foreclaws, his talons sinking deep into the rubbery, corrupted flesh, and tore. Black blood bloomed into the water like ink once more, and the Kraken’s scream redoubled.

But the abyss was not empty. It had never been empty.

From the darkness beyond the rift, drawn by the blood and the screaming and the scent of dragon-magic bleeding into their domain, they came.

Sleek shapes with too many fins. Serpentine forms with jaws that unhinged like doorways to nothing. Translucent horrors that pulsed with their own inner light, luring, beckoning, promising the peace of oblivion. The lesser children of the corrupted ocean, spawned in its depths over eons of slow, patient rot.

Oathran saw them.

But he did not slow. His claws found the Kraken’s beak and wrenched, forcing the terrible mouth away from his throat, away from his wings, away from the rift that still gaped behind him like an open wound.

His tail lashed, catching one of the sleek shapes across what might have been its face, and the creature dissolved into a cloud of black ichor. Another lunged. He breathed fire. It died screaming.

The battle churned upward, toward the surface. The Kraken wrapped its tentacles around Oathran’s torso, the suckers clamping onto his scales with the wet, grinding sound of teeth on bone.

The pressure was immense, enough to crush steel, enough to make the dragon’s vision swim with stars that were not stars. He bit down on the nearest tentacle, his fangs shearing through corrupted flesh, and the Kraken released him with another psychic shriek that sent the lesser creatures scattering into the dark.

They broke the surface together, dragon and monster, locked in a spiraling, thrashing embrace, and the light of the grey sky fell upon them both.

The Kraken was even more terrible in the dim sunlight, a mountain of pustulent flesh, its eyes rolling madly, its tentacles churning the black water into a froth of corruption. Oathran’s white scales were streaked with filth, his wings beating against the pull of the deep, his breath coming in ragged, burning gasps.

A serpentine horror launched itself from the water toward his throat. He caught it in his jaws and flung it back into the sea. A school of translucent terrors swarmed his flanks, their bodies pulsing with that sickly inner light, and he incinerated them with a sweeping arc of dragon-fire that turned the air to steam and the water to glass.

He needed to find the power source of the rift. The heart of the corruption that kept the tear in reality open and bleeding.

He had done this before, a hundred times, a thousand times, descending into rifts and hunting for the dark core that pulsed at their center like a diseased organ.

Find it. Destroy it. Close the wound. It was the only way.

But the creatures of the abyss had other plans.

They came from every direction at once. A serpentine horror with too many jaws latched onto his left wing and pulled, the barbs along its spine digging into the membrane, ripping him like tearing sailcloth.

A crustacean thing, all chitin and clicking mandibles, clamped onto his hindleg with a grip that shattered scales and ground against the bone beneath.

A third beast, something that might once have been a shark, before the corruption had twisted it into a thing of spiraling teeth and blind, milky eyes, rammed into his side with the force of a freight train, and he felt ribs crack.

A fourth, a fifth, a sixth—they piled onto him like carrion feeders on a dying whale, their combined weight dragging apart on thet surface.

And Oathran felt that it was over. He had fought past every limit and was now simply out of body to fight with. He would face it. He would face all of it. He would die here, in the dark, sinking into the depth, and he would make sure the creatures remembered him.

Then he saw the shadow.

It fell across the grey sky like an eclipse. A shape that was too large to be a bird, too wrong to be a cloud. Wings spread across the horizon like a crack in the firmament. And from that crack, that sky-devouring maw of a silhouette—

BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAST!!!

Black fire vomited from the heavens.