Chapter 113: The Corrupted Wyrm
Nathan’s [Hunter’s Insight] screamed as it scanned the mana signature of the pyre wyrm . It was entirely unstable. Chaotic. The two heads possessed separate cores—two violently blazing hearts where there should have been one. This wasn’t a natural evolution. It was a forced, agonizing mutation.
"That’s... not the Pyre Wyrm," Nathan said, the cold returning to his veins. "Not anymore."
"What the hell did they do to it?" Dillon stared in horror, his katana still sparking with residual static. "How does it have two heads?"
"Some kind of Forced evolution?" Elise stated, her analytical tone failing to mask her revulsion. "They collapsed the Tower’s structure to funnel all the destabilized mana directly into the boss room. They warped it and Made it into a bomb."
"It’s moving on the village," Garrett warned. He brought Volcan up, the mace flaring with heat. Red’s wool instantly locked into its heaviest armor plating. "If that thing reaches the square, there won’t be anything left to save."
"It won’t." Nathan drew Moonlight. The Tyrant’s Eye flared, bleeding silver mist into the suffocating, ash-choked air. "We put it down once. We’ll put it down again."
Mirko leveled her blade. "Hmph! Two heads simply means I have twice as many targets! This Knight is not intimidated by a lizard that cannot decide which way to look!"
The mutated Wyrm threw both heads back and let out a dual-toned, agonizing scream that shook the very foundations of Ashwick. Then it charged, and the earth crumbled beneath its weight.
Its two heads wove through the smoke-choked sky like twin serpents of living magma, their thick necks violently braided together in a grotesque knot of fused scale and sinew. Four massive, tattered wings beat the air with the deafening crack of heavy canvas, bleeding a sickly, chaotic light that mirrored the shattered Tower above. The creature’s obsidian scales were shot through with pulsing veins of dark purple—the unmistakable, toxic signature of the Court’s forced evolution. Its four eyes burned with an unfocused, rabid fire.
When both heads roared, the discordant, overlapping frequencies rattled the marrow in Nathan’s bones.
[Hunter’s Insight] flooded his vision, peeling back the monster’s physical form to reveal the volatile magic beneath. Two cores. One in the center of each skull, blazing with unstable, corrupted energy. This wasn’t a natural mutation. It was a bomb built out of flesh and magic.
"Two cores!" Nathan shouted over the deafening roar. "One in each head! Kuro, give me a read!"
Confirmed, Kuro’s voice echoed in his mind as she materialized beside him, her dark eyes tracking the thrashing heads. They are independent, but linked. If one survives, the ambient chaotic mana will allow it to regenerate the other. We must sever them simultaneously. A staggered kill means we start over.
"Then we split our focus. Mirko—with me, on the left head! Elise—take the right! Garrett, Red—support Elise’s flank! Dillon, Cloudy—take the sky and harass whichever head lunges! Kuro—mark them both and keep our timing locked!"
"Hmph! This Knight shall carve the left head into submission!" Mirko drew her sword, [Impenetrable Fortress] exploding into a brilliant emerald aura around her.
The Wyrm’s left head struck first. Its jaws, lined with double rows of jagged, superheated fangs, snapped down toward Mirko with the concussive force of a falling meteor. She met it head-on. CRACK. The kinetic impact spider-webbed the scorched earth beneath her boots, carving deep furrows into the soil as she was pushed back, but the green barrier held firm.
On the opposite flank, the right head swept low toward Elise, a swelling glow of corrupted, dark-purple fire gathering deep in its throat.
Garrett and Red intercepted. Volcan’s thermal pulse smashed against the creature’s lower jaw, knocking its aim upward, just as Red’s hardened horns slammed violently into the side of its neck. The Wyrm recoiled, its breath attack misfiring into a harmless geyser of dark flame aimed at the clouds.
Above them, Dillon launched off his Storm Striders, Cloudy spiraling in his slipstream. "Keep the right one busy! Cloudy, blind it!"
Cloudy’s static discharge whipped across the Wyrm’s right face—CRACKLE-BOOM—forcing its chaotic orange eye to snap shut in a shower of sparks. As the beast blindly snapped at the Cloud Serpent, Dillon used [Flash Step] to bypass its guard, materializing directly beside its temple. [Thunder Edge] fell like a guillotine of pure ozone. KRAK-BOOOOOM. The right head violently reeled from the electrical discharge.
But the left head was recovering. It opened its maw and unleashed a devastating cone of corrupted fire—a swirling vortex of orange and toxic purple that washed over the battlefield toward Nathan. He threw himself behind a collapsed stone wall just as the flames hit. The ambient heat was suffocating, far worse than the original Wyrm’s, laced with a dark magic that made his skin crawl and his teeth ache.
Elise raised Aurora’s Heart. Then her Frost Golem materialized to meet the onslaught, but the moment it fully formed, it began to sublimate. The sheer, radiating heat of the corrupted Wyrm was violently melting the construct. Normally a towering nine feet of crystalline ice, the Golem immediately shrank to seven, its movements growing heavy and sluggish as it hissed plumes of steam.
"The ambient heat is too high!" Elise yelled over the roar of the flames. "The Golem can’t sustain its physical form! It’s the Tower of Ash all over again!"
From the evacuation line, Helena’s voice cracked urgently through the comm link. "Elise! The Golem—I can enchant it! A gigantification buff! It will scale the construct to match the Wyrm, but it will burn through mana exponentially! You’ll have maybe two minutes before the enchantment devours itself!"
Elise didn’t hesitate. "Do it!"
Helena stepped forward, raising both hands. Her Enchanter class wasn’t built for direct combat, but it allowed her to manipulate the fundamental properties of the battlefield. Pale, blindingly blue light gathered around her fingers, swirling into a dense, concentrated stream that she violently forced into the Frost Golem.
The enchantment struck the melting construct like a thunderbolt.
The Golem shuddered, and then it exploded upward. Seven feet. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. In seconds, it became a towering colossus of living permafrost, its dense, crystalline body gleaming with borrowed, desperate power. The heat was already gnawing at its edges, massive clouds of steam rolling off its shoulders, but for the next one hundred and twenty seconds, the Frost Golem was a god of winter.
"Go!" Helena screamed, dropping to one knee as the mana drain hit her. "Make it count!"
The colossus charged.
The Golem’s massive, ice-boulder fist slammed into the Wyrm’s right head with the unstoppable momentum of a glacier. CRUNCH. The concussive impact shattered the corrupted scales across its snout. The right head whipped backward, utterly dazed.
Furious, the left head pivoted, a blinding mass of corrupted flame gathering in its throat, aimed directly at the Golem’s exposed flank—
Mirko was there. [Impenetrable Fortress] flared to its absolute maximum, the towering emerald shield catching the torrent of dark fire and splitting it cleanly around her like a river breaking against a stone. "Hmph! You will not interrupt our giant! He is on a strict schedule, and I am his wall!"
Seizing the opening, the Frost Golem lunged, wrapping its massive arms around the Wyrm’s right neck in a brutal, freezing headlock. The temperature plummeted. CRRRRACK. Absolute zero spread outward from the Golem’s grip, violently freezing the Wyrm’s superheated scales solid. The right head let out a muffled shriek, its fangs desperately chipping away at the Golem’s icy shoulder.
Steam exploded in blinding white clouds where frozen crystal met volcanic heat. The Golem was visibly shrinking, its mass sublimating into the air as the gigantification burned through its timer.
"Keep it locked down!" Nathan ordered, drawing his bow. "Dillon! Cloudy! Break the left head while the right is pinned!"
Dillon blurred into a streak of blue light. "Cloudy! Thunder run!"
The Cloud Serpent dove, unleashing a continuous stream of voltage that caught the left head directly across the jaw. The paralyzing shock forced the Wyrm’s mouth open. Dillon chained [Flash Step] off the serpent’s tail, materializing directly above the exposed maw.
[Thunder Edge] plunged downward. KRAK-BOOOOOM. The katana carved through the Wyrm’s tongue and buried itself into the soft, unprotected tissue at the back of its throat, electrocuting the dark veins pulsing beneath the surface. The left head violently convulsed, gagging on the raw lightning.
"Red! Hit the throat! I’m right behind you!" Garrett roared.
Red slammed its hardened fleece into the underside of the Wyrm’s jaw, forcing the massive head to jerk upward and exposing the softer, paler scales of its underbelly. Garrett planted his feet and swung Volcan in a devastating upward arc. KRAK-BOOM. The thermal pulse detonated point-blank against the vulnerable flesh, staggering the left head completely