Chapter 381: The Stitched Corpse
The Atlantic’s damp, cold sea wind tore at the heavy rust-stink. This wind brutally ripped open the blood-colored mist above the Great Lakes basin. Across two kilometers of dried death-ground, the cruise ship’s defense line sent back the intermittent roar of heavy machine-gun fire. Every dull report of a large-caliber round blowing something apart carried the urgency of a doomsday countdown.
The outer line was under fatal pressure. Chloe leaned against Victor’s broad chest, crusted with dried black blood. Her breathing was no longer the faint,broken gasp that might cut off at any second minutes before. The marrow the high-dimensional rules and the embryo had forcibly drained was now flooding with violent energy woven of dark-gold and purple-black.
Those shriveled, torn muscle fibersanew filled and reconnected at a savage pace under this brutal force. Fine, grating recombined sounds came from between her bones. She slowly raised both arms. Her palms, caked in mud and dark-red blood, pressed steady against Victor’s hard chest. Without a word, her finger bones struck with brutal force and tore away the embrace that had meant to grind them into each other’s bone and blood.
Victor’s broad left hand still instinctively curved at her waist. Just moments ago his callused palm had felt the violent fetal kick from her lower abdomen, that pulse strong enough to suppress a pureblood tyrant. The Godfather’s bloodshot eyes had not fully shed the nest-guard killing frenzy. Hiseyes was monstrous with red veins. But he felt the firm push from his mate’s palm.
Even as his remnant reason still wrestled his destructive instinct, this broken shell instinctively submitted to the Costa Queen’s force. His taut jawline twitched violently and released its last intact left arm. His tactical boots, caked in high-dimensional radiation and stinking mud, stepped back onto the vitrified hard lakebed, crunching fine crystal shards. Chloe did not look back at the stacked corpse-things trying to flatten the cruise ship line. She turned cleanly.
Her dark-gold vertical pupils were already edged with theeerie purple-black halo of the abyss. Her mutated gaze, with substantive edge, pierced the boiling toxic mist ahead and locked dead onto the suspended sutured shell two kilometers off. She gripped the heavy Progenitor longsword at the altar base in one hand. The instant her fingers tightened, she drew the blade inch by inch from its slot.
Ancient metal screeched a long, harsh protest against the base. The mutant code, expanded by high-dimensional energy in her brain, flooded wildly into the hilt along the blue veins bulging on her hand’s back. The once-plain, dim ancient totems lit up one by one along the blade’s spine with a dim data-glow. This holy relic once used to execute the sacrifice closed-loop had, in Chloe’s hand, become a conductor carrying an entirely new rule.
The mutant code savagely deconstructed the Wolf King Codex band caught in the air. Sheblocked all external physical interference. Without mercy she stripped away the high-dimensional black-qi disguise covering Luke’s shell and laid the container’s deepest internal structure bare under her terrifying compute. The Progenitor’s descent into the real world had been far too rushed.
To seize this ready physical container before the Star Gate closed, it had no time to thoroughly erase the werewolf instinct still buried in Luke’s genes. The high-dimensional will had chosen a crude, sickening physicalretooling. It had hollowed out Luke’s heart and retooled it into a giant energy conversion pump. Those rough green-glowing sutures on his chest flared outward hideously.
This was the output valve where high-dimensional toxin turned into the real-world plague. High-concentration black qi was compressed at high speed inside that flesh-pump, hissing and twitching, then forced through the ruined blood vessels to every corner of the shell. A three-dimensional coordinate precise to the micron took shape in Chloe’s brain in an instant.
She did not even waste breath speaking. The mutated dark-gold code, carrying the Costa Queen’s highest tactical order, drove straight through the mate bond into Victor’s near-collapsing neural center. This absolute, cold tactical reason stripped the terror of losing his mate from the tyrant’s mind the instant it touched. Victor’s cracked new heart in his broken chest gave a deafening, dull pump.
The moment he received the coordinate, theuncontrolled madness in the Godfather’s eyes, the kind that would drag the whole real world to the grave, was forcibly suppressed. His boiling blood cooled. The mad dog was leashed again. He was no longer the fool who knew only mutual destruction. He had become, once more, the deadliest, sharpest blade in Chloe’s hand.
His right arm, most of its flesh scraped away by high-dimensional rays, rose in reverse. White bone and a few strands of charred muscle hung from the stump. The pureblood tyrant’s origin was overdrawn again without stinginess. The broken finger bones gave a scalp-numbing bone-crack friction underextreme force. Fresh blood dripped continuously from the pallid joints. A black gravity spear re-condensed in his blood-filled palm.
This time he abandoned entirely the wide-area gravity-crush field that burned stamina. All ultimate mass was self-destructively compressed onto the spear-tip, less than an inch of point. The void around the spear could not bear this terrible mass. The whole space showed a visible physical collapse. Light passing through this region twisted into bizarre spirals.
Chloe’s tactical intent was clear. Avoid a fullattrition war with the blood-canopy above. Execute the coldest, deadliest single-point physical breakthrough. Chloe quietly suppressed the harsh dark-gold light in her eyes. She voluntarily suppressed the energy pulse in her blood vessels. Even her heartbeat dropped to its lowest. Every vital sign was deliberately disguised as the false appearance of a guttered lamp.
The active, violent high-dimensional law was perfectly hidden under her broken shell. The suspended high-dimensional ghost still believed she was at the moment her dark-gold blood was depleted and she hovered at death. The Progenitor had no idea the embryo it had marked as fuel had completed its reverse-devouring. It had utterly misjudged the cards the real-world creature held.
In midair, the sutured shell opened its broken wolf maw. The high-intensity energy conversion pump ran wildly in its left chest. The sound of splitting flesh was clear. The green suture spewed foul black qi outward madly. The Progenitor was mobilizing its highest-concentration plague. It tried to condense, deep in that wolf maw, a toxin pillar able to destroy the cruise ship line in an instant.
The pillar took shape in the maw’s depths. The surrounding air corroded into large irregular black voids. White smoke hissed in midair. One instantly before the destructive energy was to fire, the physical pump showed a microsecond’s faint delay. This was the fatal fracture born of the high-dimensional will and the remnant werewolf instinct repelling each other.
Victor would never miss this fucking tactical window. The gravity spear left his hand. The black line of death pierced kilometers of blood-colored mist in an instant. The air carried the harsh sonic boom of dimensions being brutally crushed. The blast-wave flipped rubble along the way. The spear avoided the frontal high-dimensional barrier defense and, with a whistle, drove through the bone-seam half an inch below the sutured shell’s left ribs.
That was the pump’s weakest physical connection point. Gravity collapse detonated the instant it pierced. A mass of extremely compressed black gravity storm ravaged wildly inside Luke’s chest cavity. The high-dimensional blood-vessel network the Progenitor used to transmit plague was brutally severed. The toxin pillar already surging up his throat lost its bottom-layer thrust and could not even disperse outward.
The high-concentration plague fluid underwent a destructive backflow inside Luke’s chest. Great mouthfuls of thick black, acid-stinking corrosive liquid burst from the broken wolf maw. This fluid was fiercely caustic. Where it landed on the vitrified lakebed below, it melted abyss-pits instantly. Caustic poison-smoke rose from the pit bottoms. Luke’s left lung was internally corroded by the backflow toxin into charred mud.
Several snapped ribs broke pale through the chest skin. Dense high-dimensional black qi dissipated without restraint from the hideous wound. The Progenitor’s strike to destroy the cruise line was forced to abort. The sutured container let out a shriek not of this world, sharp enough to pierce eardrums. It had no choice but to yank back the outer high-dimensional energy and frantically patch and repair this near-collapsing physical container.
As the energy withdrew, the blood-canopy’s pressure above the Great Lakes dropped off a cliff. The corpse-things charging the cruise line instantly lost their energy supply. The monsters’ movements slowed and stiffened visibly. Some shells collapsed directly on the deck into pus and blood. Leon’s heavy machine gun finally tore a wide firing gap in the sea of corpses.
The severely overdrawn hybrid royal pup, standing on the blast-proof lead-box wreckage, finally got precious breathing room at the edge of his spiderwebbed black-ice barrier’s collapse. At the distant altar, Chloe’s fingers on the longsword tightened in the gunpowder smoke. The instant the Progenitor’s chest was ripped by gravity and the toxin back-flowed, she caught, through the mutant code scanning the bands, a frame in the bloody flesh-mist.
Luke’s werewolf right eye showed a rare clarity for a fraction of a second. It was no longer the dull stupor of high-dimensional control. It was a violent struggle from the depths of the wolf bloodline. That was the dignity of an Alpha who had once been. Even fallen to a discarded husk, he would not be swallowed whole by the alien.
The werewolf instinct, at the moment its flesh faced destruction, launched its most savage rejection and revolt against the parasitic high-dimensional will. --- The floor was slick with what they had spilled, and not one of them intended to apologize for a goddamn fucking thing.
