The Extra is a Genius!?-Chapter 597: The Last Percent [I]
Shadow took Noel and released him lower along the mountain in a chain of measured jumps, each "Shadow Step" carrying him from one patch of darkness to the next until the ridge above vanished behind black stone. Noir stayed close, silent and alert, her paws barely making a sound whenever the terrain allowed her to run beside him before she slipped back into his shadow again. The farther they descended, the stranger the valley became.
The pressure in the air changed first. It grew heavier, but not in the same way as the rest of the mountains. Up above, the mana of the range always felt wild, restless, alive in an unstable way. Here, it felt settled. Old. The silence deepened with every step until even the wind seemed to lose interest in the basin below.
When Noel finally reached the valley floor, pale mist was already drifting low across the ground, dragging itself around the rock like it belonged there. The basin stretched out in a dead sweep of black stone and broken formations that looked almost arranged, as if something had once stood there and been shattered long ago.
Several of the rocks rose at slanted angles that resembled ruined altars. Bones lay between them, some half-buried beneath gravel, others cleanly exposed under the thin white fog.
A cracked ribcage longer than Noel’s height rested near one of the stone outcroppings. A skull with three broken horns lay farther in. There were old remains everywhere, enough to tell him this place had been feeding something for a very long time.
He had chosen it for exactly that reason.
It was isolated enough that nothing from the upper ridges would interfere, and narrow enough that the others above would only have to watch the approaches. More importantly, he had already cleared everything else in the surrounding area before bringing them here. No second predator would wander into the fight. No hidden threat would force him to split his focus. Only one creature remained in the basin.
One last percent.
Noel’s eyes moved once across the valley, measuring distance, blind spots, escape angles, lines of approach. Then he stopped.
’It’s here,’ Noir said quietly.
He saw it a second later.
At first it looked like part of the valley itself, a shape resting between two broken black formations where the mist thickened. Then its outline separated from the stone. The creature had the lean body of a lion, but its proportions were wrong in a way that made the eye hesitate. Its hide was dark and dense, closer to polished rock than fur, stretched over a frame built for sudden violence. Its face looked stripped down to pale bone, skull-like and bare, with no softness around the mouth at all. Deep inside that white structure, two dim golden eyes watched him without blinking.
Its antlers rose above its head in a wide branching spread, pale and cracked, large enough to resemble a white crown shattered and grown back crooked. A serpent tail moved slowly behind it, long and muscular, ending in a narrow jaw lined with small teeth. Around its neck drifted a pale mane that did not fall like hair. It floated in slow strands around the creature’s shoulders like torn funeral silk suspended in water.
Noel felt the wrongness of it settle in his chest.
The dragon had announced itself with noise and force. This thing didn’t need either. It sat in the basin like it had already accepted the mountain around it as its own graveyard.
Slowly, Noel drew Revenant Fang. The blade came free with a low metallic whisper that carried across the dead stone. Beside him, Noir lowered herself slightly, every muscle in her small body tightening as her focus sharpened completely.
Noel kept his eyes on the creature.
"This is the last one."
The Palecrown Chimera opened its eyes fully.
The gold inside them sharpened, and the mist around its body began to move.
The chimera moved first.
It did not roar or lower its body like a beast preparing to spring. One moment it was still between the broken stones, and the next it was already crossing the basin in a blur of dark muscle and pale mist, its body cutting through the fog so fast that the eye only caught fragments of the motion.
Noel vanished.
"Shadow Step."
His body sank into the nearest patch of darkness and emerged several meters to the side just as the Palecrown Chimera tore through the space where he had been standing. Stone exploded beneath its claws. The serpent tail whipped around immediately after the missed lunge, its narrow jaws snapping through the mist at head level before Noel had even finished turning.
Noir was already moving wide instead of engaging directly, circling through the basin in a low silent run while keeping to the edges of the fog. Her purple eyes never left the creature, but she did not commit. Not yet.
The chimera’s antlers tilted.
A low sound spread from them.
It was not a roar, not a hum, not anything clean enough to name. It was closer to a vibration forced through bone, a thin oppressive note that made the mana in the basin ripple wrong for half a second. The mist thickened immediately after, and the chimera’s shape split.
Two.
Then three.
Blurred forms moved through the white fog from different angles at once.
Noel did not hesitate.
"Chain Flash." A sharp bolt of lightning leapt from his hand and struck the nearest body, the impact splitting instantly into branching arcs that tore through the other two forms as well. Two collapsed into shredded mist. One kept coming.
The real one. It crossed the distance in another violent burst, antlers sweeping sideways as pale crescent-shaped blades of mana flew from the motion and sliced through the air with enough force to split the black rock in their path.
"Frost Wall." A thick barrier of ice surged upward between Noel and the slash. The first crescent carved deep through the frozen surface before the second shattered the wall apart in a blast of fragments. Noel came out of the breaking frost with his hand already lowered to the ground. "Ice Spike." Jagged pillars of ice erupted upward across the basin floor in a broken line aimed at the chimera’s path.
The creature twisted between them with unnatural precision, its body slipping through openings that should not have existed, but the spell still forced it off its clean angle. One spike scraped along its flank. Another struck the serpent tail and deflected it upward.
That was enough to test again. "Voltage Needle." A thin lance of lightning flashed from his fingers, precise and narrow, aimed straight at the chimera’s left eye. The creature jerked its head just enough for the needle to miss the socket and strike one of the pale antlers instead, sparks bursting across the white surface.
The mist around the chimera pulsed outward for a moment after the antler was hit, and one of the blurred afterimages collapsed late instead of instantly.
’Not just illusion.’ The antlers were feeding it.
The chimera lunged again, lower this time. Noel used "Shadow Step" and emerged behind a slanted black rock, but the serpent tail had already anticipated the angle, shooting through the mist from the blind side with its jaws snapping toward his ribs. He twisted just enough to keep it from biting cleanly, but the teeth still grazed across his side and tore through cloth. A thin line of pain followed.
Noir reacted immediately. Her body dissolved into darkness and expanded as she surged back into the basin in her larger form, black fur stretching into an eight-meter shadow wolf streaked with faint purple light.
She took the creature’s right side and pressed forward hard enough to force its attention to split. The Palecrown Chimera turned its skull-like face toward her and its antlers sang again, the mist thickening around both bodies at once and dragging false outlines behind every movement.
Noir stopped herself from committing fully and shifted back a half-step instead of leaping. If she had gone in on the wrong body, she would have hit fog.
Noel wiped the blood from his side with the back of his hand, eyes fixed on the pale crown above the beast’s head. The mist was not creating the battlefield by itself. The antlers were amplifying the distortion, feeding the false positions and bending mana flow around the basin until every angle became uncertain. As long as the crown remained intact, the chimera controlled the fight.
