Reincarnated With The Degenerate System-Chapter 252: Ruined City 2
The nearest creatures dissolved mid-lunge from the discharge. Bone, sinew, and whatever Darkness had stitched into them collapsed into ash before they could fall.
But there were more.
There were always more.
They came from the pods, from the vein-wrapped windows, from gaps in the flesh-carpet below that split open like mouths.
Hundreds of them, each one wrong in a different way — too many joints, too few eyes, movement that violated basic physics.
I didn’t land. Landing here would be a bad idea.
Instead, I climbed, fast and steep, until the air thinned and the stench of the city became something I could process rather than something that pressed against my scales like a living thing.
Below me, the ruined city pulsed. Once. Twice.
I had seen monster hordes before. Chaotic things, driven by hunger or territory. This was different. The creatures weren’t swarming randomly — they were forming a perimeter.
The ones with wings fanned outward. The larger ones, the ones that moved like siege weapons, pulled inward toward the center.
They were herding me toward something.
Or away from something.
I folded one wing and dropped into a controlled dive, cutting parallel to the street level rather than toward it, and let my vision sweep the city center.
There I found it — a giant heart. It was beating faster, and just looking at it made me feel danger.
Not in the way that a strong opponent’s pressure would push back — this was more like the feeling of touching something that had no business existing.
I stopped thinking about it.
"Come!"
My hand closed around my spear. Dark metal drank in the ambient lightning until arcs of violet-black energy coiled up from the tip in slow, hungry spirals.
Something in my chest settled.
Good.
I was done being careful.
The creatures came in waves. The winged ones first.
They didn’t reach me. The field of dark lightning radiating from the spear’s tip caught the first wave at roughly ten meters out. Not a targeted strike — I wasn’t even aiming.
The energy simply disagreed with their existence and expressed that disagreement violently. They came apart in the air.
The second wave was larger. Heavier things, built like battering rams, their bodies armored in something that looked like bone plating grown too fast and too dense.
I dropped the tip of the spear and rolled my wrist once.
The lightning along the shaft compressed, coiled tight, and then released in a single directional pulse that hit the formation like a thrown mountain.
The impact cleared a two-hundred-meter area directly to the heart.
I flew through it without slowing.
The heart was enormous up close. Larger than it had appeared from altitude — the size of a small building, embedded into what had once been the intersection of two major roads.
Surrounding flesh-carpet fed into it through veins thick as drainage pipes, delivering a constant dark current of energy.
It saw me coming.
"Too late!"
Fifty meters out, I pulled the spear back, every muscle in my shoulder and back loading like a spring.
My dark lightning compressed along the full length of my spear until the weapon was more energy than metal.
"PIERCE THE HEAVEN!"
The spear crossed the distance in less time than it takes to blink.
BOOOOM!
It struck the heart dead center.
For one full second, nothing happened. The heart continued to beat. The eye-slits continued to stare. The thrum continued to vibrate in my bones.
Then dark lightning exploded outward from the impact point in every direction. It crawled across everything in its path. Even the monsters trying to defend it were shredded in the blast.
EEEEEEEEEK!
The sound that came out of the heart wasn’t a sound any organic thing should have been capable of making. It started below the range of hearing and climbed until it shattered the remaining glass in every building within a block.
However, my dark lightning wasn’t something that could be stopped by mere shouts. I had developed it to the point where it could kill even that monkey god.
A creature that couldn’t even move stood no chance from the very beginning.
Soon, the veins feeding it went rigid, then black, then began to dissolve from the point of contact outward like ink bleeding into water.
My spear returned to my hand.
I hovered above the dying mass and watched the collapse propagate outward through the network, the corrupted energy draining out of organs like water from a broken vessel.
Around me, the creatures that had been coordinated thirty seconds ago were now behaving exactly like every other monster horde I faced.
I rolled my shoulders, let the lightning build along my scales, and went to work.
But before I could even turn, a cold spike of instinct ran up my spine.
I looked up.
The figure stood in the sky the way mountains stand on the earth — like it had always been there and the air around it had simply learned to accommodate.
Ten feet tall. Maybe more. It was difficult to scale properly against the open sky, and something about looking directly at it made my depth perception want to give up.
The wings were the first thing wrong. Not feathered, not membranous — raw.
Sheets of exposed muscle and stretched dermis that shouldn’t have been able to generate lift and yet somehow did. They looked less like wings and more like wounds that had decided to become functional.
The body beneath them was dense and grey, the texture of weathered granite.
Then I looked at the face, and something primitive in the back of my mind went very quiet.
The jaw was too wide. The eyes were oversized, pale, and glowing red.
And above them, centered on the forehead like a wound that had scarred over and been left deliberately unhealed — an empty eye socket.
"We meet again," it said, its voice echoing like a call inside a hollow cave.
My grip tightened around the spear.
"Oh, let me guess. It’s my fault your third eye is missing?"
Its expression turned ugly. Not that it looked much better before.
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Authors Note:
Sorry if my updates have slowed down lately. I’ve been busy trying to finish one of my older novel series first so I can fully focus on this.
