System Breaker: Surviving Apocalypse with Nine-Tailed Kitsune

The first person to arrive was Elias. He looked the worst of them all, covered in significant injuries, but the middle-aged man grinned through the pain, mentioning how it was a "one hell of a battle".

No more than a minute later, one of the twins materialised in the chamber, with his brother following shortly after. Both looked injured, but surprisingly, nothing life-threatening.

The person who surprised Damon the most was Amber. She appeared without a scratch, no injuries, no ragged breathing. She looked as if she hadn’t fought at all, which would’ve been impossible considering the nature of the maze.

Then the arrivals stopped.

The group stood in silence, eyes drifting toward the empty space, somewhat expecting the last person to appear.

But as minutes passed, nothing happened.

’Axel’s missing,’ Damon realised, his gaze sweeping across the gathered faces.

The others were also quick to catch on.

"What about Axel?" one of the twins finally voiced what everyone was thinking.

The question hung in the air for a while, but nobody answered.

Nyla, who had dismissed her furnace the moment Elias arrived, stepped closer to the group. While Kitsune watched from Damon’s shoulder in her fox form, her tails flicked with what might have been unease or maybe intrigue.

A five-minute wait quickly became ten, and ten turned to twenty.

But no matter how long they waited, the last person was still missing.

After an hour of restless waiting, during which the group tended their wounds and cast anxious glances at the surrounding tunnels, the truth became impossible to ignore.

Axel wasn’t coming.

Damon’s jaw tightened. ’We can’t waste any more time. We still don’t know where the rift core is.’

He couldn’t bring himself to say it, at least not at first, but as he soon realised everyone’s gaze looked to him for an answer, he stepped forward with the confidence of a leader.

"Get ready to leave, we wasted enough time as it is."

A wave of dread washed over everyone’s expressions, but nobody protested, each well aware of the truth behind those words. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

The group didn’t take long to get ready. After everyone picked up their scattered weapons, they were good to go.

Now the question was, where?

There were seven tunnels in total leading away from the chamber, and at a single glance, each looked identical.

"So, which way are we going, boss?" Nyla asked, realising no one else felt comfortable speaking.

Damon didn’t reply immediately and instead studied the tunnels for a little longer.

The chamber had four walls, and three of them had two tunnels each. One of the walls had only a single tunnel, and for no other reason than simply standing out against the rest, Damon felt like it was the right way to go.

"There," he said before moving toward the singular tunnel.

***

The tunnel leading out of the chamber they were in stretched far shorter than Damon had expected.

He thought they would need to walk again for hours, maybe deal with shifting corridors, but the walk was rather short before the small corridor opened up to something vastly different.

Damon paused at the threshold, his hand in the air, telling the others to halt as he took a good look inside.

The space was unlike anything they’d seen so far.

Where the previous chambers had been carved from stone, this one looked almost organic. The walls curved inward like the inside of a ribcage, and at the centre of the room, suspended in midair, pulsed a massive shard of darkness with countless cracks-like, jagged lines leading away from it.

As if that weren’t enough, hanging from the ceiling were cocoon-like objects that pulsed gently with mana.

"What are those things?" Amber murmured, her voice trailing off.

"Stay focused," Damon warned the group as he cautiously took a step inside.

Every rift core drew the strongest monsters toward it, and so Damon knew better than to simply rush in, especially considering how eerie this place was.

Right underneath the suspended in the air rift core was a treasure chest, calling toward each of them and almost making some of them rush forward, only to stop themselves at the last second.

’Something’s here,’ Kitsune’s voice suddenly cut through Damon’s head.

And no more than a moment after her warning, a shadow moved near the centre of the chamber.

It stood nearly three meters tall, hunched and twisted in the wrong directions. The body structure shifted as Damon watched, muscular arms that rippled with Elias’s build, a torso that carried Nyla’s defined physique, and four legs that carried it astonishingly fast.

But what made Damon’s blood run cold was its head.

It looked like a fusion of three faces at once, six eyes, three sets of lips and hair that made it look like a nightmare.

The creature’s skin was a patchwork of shadow and flesh, constantly shifting, but what made Damon’s unease even worse was the weapon it was carrying.

A massive golden hammer identical to Nyla’s.

And just as his eyes landed on its weapon, the chimaera-like monster vanished and reappeared right in front of him in the blink of an eye.

Damon’s eyes barely had time to widen before the hammer crashed against his side and sent him hurtling into a nearby wall.

BANG!

The impact knocked air out of his lungs, and before he could draw a single breath to ease the burning feeling inside his chest, the monster was already upon him.

’That was shadow step,’ Damon realised as he avoided the next attack. The hammer fell where he stood just a second again with a deafening bang.

Using that opening to strike, Damon sent four shards of black ice straight at the monster.

But instead of evading, the creature simply raised its free hand and, in an instant, created a massive barrier blocking each of the shards coming its way.

’Nyla’s hammer, my shadow step and now the twins’ barrier...’ The realisation washed over Damon like a cold wave. ’This thing has each of our abilities.’