SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything-Chapter 10: The Crowned Beast

The remaining eleven calamity beasts leaped as one, violet claws tearing furrows in the air, their howls folding over each other until the sound became a single, ragged wall.

Hide moved into them.

He met the first body with his shoulder. The impact shuddered through his armor, but he barely felt it. The beast bounced off, more surprised than hurt, claws skittering across the black plates that had turned his chest into a cuirass.

Three more were already on him.

One came from below, its teeth snapping for his calves. Another went high, aiming to hook its claws into the gap between scales and eye. A third tried to circle for his back.

He stopped thinking in words.

His body simply... went ahead and let itself flow with what was happening around him.

His right leg shot out, catching the beast that came from below in the throat. There was a crunch, a spray of hot wetness across his shin.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

At the same time, his left forearm snapped up, letting the high claws rake along hardened metal rather than soft skin.

The third wolf like beast reached his flank and sank its teeth into his side.

Or tried to.

The plates there flexed once, like a ripple moving across their surface — and locked.

The teeth slid in the smallest fraction and then stopped dead, meeting resistance that belonged more on a tank than on a boy in a torn white shirt.

[Abyssal Scale Carapace — Active]

Damage absorbed: 31%

Pain suppression: 60%

The text flickered at the edge of his vision and was gone.

Hide’s hand found the back of the biting beast’s neck and squeezed, with all the strength he could muster.

He felt plates, muscle, vertebrae under his palm. The animal thrashed, hind legs scrabbling for purchase, claws scraping uselessly at his hip. Hide tightened his grip until his knuckles ached under the armor.

Something snapped.

The creature went limp, jaw still locked to his side until he pried it loose and let the carcass drop.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

Hide barely had time to look at the notification, when they hit him again.

His mind had gone blank... until now he was wondering where he got so much strength to kill Calamity beasts to kill with his bare hands, but he had long since stopped wondering and simply accepted the strength.

From the left, then from the right, then in a wave from the front. Claws clanged against his scales, leaving pale streaks. Teeth ground and sparked. One found his forearm where the plates had not yet fully thickened and tore a shallow line.

Blood beaded along the cut.

The scales reacted at once, surging to cover the opening. The line vanished beneath a sliding segment of black.

"More," he thought vaguely. "Go ahead. Give me more."

His hands moved like he had been born wearing this armor.

One fist drove into the side of a beast’s skull, the impact cratering the glassy plates and caving in the bone underneath. Another hammer blow followed before the creature could even fall, purely because some part of him wanted to feel it break a second time.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

He was feeling happy right now, and truly satisfied.

Another lunged past his guard and raked at his back. He let it. The claws screeched across his spine, the force throwing him a half-step forward.

He used that momentum and seized the beast’s foreleg mid-swing with his right hand, his left clamping down near the shoulder, and twisted in opposite directions.

The limb tore free with a dull ripping sound.

The wolf went down shrieking, violet blood pumping from the ruined joint. Hide brought his heel down on its exposed neck and kicked it again and again and again until the beast jerked once and stilled.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

The numbers stacked up, detached and meaningless.

He was not counting anymore.

The black scales kept climbing.

They had fully claimed his neck now, rising in thick, interlocked bands that left no trace of skin. They crawled up behind his ears, across the back of his head, around his cheeks.

His world was a narrow slit, two sharp lines of blue framed by steel.

Across his forehead, the last bare strip of pale skin vanished under small, hard plates. They converged at the center, building on one another, stacking and pushing outward.

A jagged protrusion formed.

Then another, slightly to the side.

Then a third, followed by more on both sides.

Eight points in total, each one a short, brutal spike of dark metal curving back just enough that they didn’t loom in his vision, but anyone looking at him would have seen it clearly.

It looked like a crown.

But Hide didn’t see it, nor did he care. All he saw were beasts.

All he heard was snarling and the wet sounds of bone breaking and the beasts shrieking in pain, they were satisfying to listen.

Time became a sequence of impacts.

His fist driving into a beast’s skull and ripping out its brain matter.

His elbow burying itself in the soft, neck of the germlings. The way the pavement felt when he slammed a creature onto it hard enough that its ribs broke through its own chest.

He had always been on the outside, watching exterminators fight on distant feeds. Watching beasts tear through neighborhoods he was not allowed near. Watching news reports about losses and victories while his own hands sat useless in his lap.

Not anymore.

Not here.

He was in it now — ankle-deep in violet blood.

One of the beasts tried to run.

Instinct, perhaps... some animal part of it recognizing that whatever stood in front of the gate was not the prey it had expected.

Hide saw it and was on it before it had taken two steps.

He hit it from the side, full force, both arms wrapping around its midsection. They tumbled together, a flailing knot of limbs and glassy plates.

It snapped at him over its own shoulder. Teeth scraped his helm, leaving bright lines that faded as the scales thickened.

He got his legs under him first.

He rolled, came up straddling its back, both hands on either side of its head.

Then he simply... pulled.

There was a point where resistance became failure. It always did. You just had to be willing to push until that point and a little beyond.

The beast’s spine protested in a long, drawn-out crack. Its front paws scrabbled weakly at the pavement. Then the vertebrae parted company.

Felt the shudder run through its body, the way everything went loose under him.

He stayed there a moment longer, breathing hard, hands still clamped to the now limp skull.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

By the time the last one rushed him, there were only pieces left.

Broken jaws. Severed limbs. A ribcage turned inside out and hanging in the warped remains of a shopfront. The street looked less like an urban road and more like some crude altar dedicated to blood and metal.

His scales were no longer a clean, uniform black. Some plates were chipped at the edges, hairline fractures running through them like veins of silver. Violet blood had dried in uneven patterns across his chest and arms, giving the armor a mottled sheen.

He was breathing hard now, each inhale rasping faintly inside his helm. Heat pulsed from deep under the carapace — his own body reminding him that it was, in fact, still made of meat.

The System windows finally caught up.

They bloomed into his vision one after another, pale blue over the field of butchered bodies.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

[Level Up]

Level: 1 → 2

Exp: 0 / 700

Level Up reward has been added to inventory.

Another line appeared just beneath.

[Abyssal Scale Carapace — Stability: 69%]

Warning: Host fatigue levels critical.

He exhaled, a shaky sound that scraped his throat on the way out.

For the first time since the scales had erupted, a sliver of awareness slipped back in.

The overturned car was still behind him.

A crushed metal shell, wheels in the air, front half caved in where it had hit the building. One of its doors hung open at an impossible angle. Glass glittered in a wide radius.

"I need to..." he muttered. "Get them out!"

His voice sounded distant, distorted by the helm.

It was only then that he heard the sound of multiple vehicles, that bounced off the buildings. Then lights followed: harsh white, flashing red, flickers of blue from the status overlays of incoming vehicles.

A hover-van swung into the street from the far side of the gate, engines whining as it braked hard. The vehicle’s side door was already sliding open before it had fully stopped.

Figures in dark combat gear hit the ground in a practiced cascade, boots splashing in the blood that covered the road.

Rifles hummed to life, thin lines of light tracing from barrel to target as targeting arrays locked.

"Seventeen-South, on-site," a woman’s voice snapped over an external speaker. "Gate confirmed, multiple F-class beast’s down, repeat, multiple F-class—"

She cut herself off as soon as her gaze had landed on hide.

From their angle, the overturned car and the carcasses framed his silhouette perfectly. A single figure standing in front of the wreck, encased head to toe in black, his head crowned with jagged metal, the street a ring of dead beasts around him.

Her hand twitched toward her comm.

"Command," she said slowly, eyes never leaving him. "Visual on... unknown entity. Suspected humanoid Calamity Beast. It’s protecting a crashed civilian vehicle but—"

Hide lifted his head and blue of his eyes flashed between the plates.

For a second, there was nothing in them but the afterimage of slaughter.

[Warning: Host fatigue limit Reached.]

[Abyssal Scale Carapace — Forced Deactivation]

The steel around his ribs tightened once, like a final breath in.

Then the plates began to break.

It started at his fingers, the dark scales that had attached to each other broke and flesh reappeared beneath, raw and pale.

His helm followed, cracking along invisible seams. Plates broke and fell off his skin, leaving sweat and smeared blood in their wake. The crown above his brow dissolved last.

The world suddenly widened around him and cold air hit his face. He was standing naked now as his cloths had been torn apart.

His knees gave out with the sudden rush of sensation — every cut, every bruise, every impact arriving all at once now that the suppression had dropped. His vision swam.

To the incoming team, it must have looked like the monster was... shedding its skin. The beast in armor collapsing inward and leaving a boy in its place — drenched in violet and red, white hair plastered to his forehead, blue eyes unfocused.

The woman with the comm took one involuntary step back.

"Command," she breathed, the word barely making it through a throat that had gone dry. "Revision... That’s not a beast. Repeat, unknown entity is— it’s human. Human in full-body manifestation. Im...Impossible..."

She never finished the sentence because of the gate, which had hummed quietly through all of this, finally spilling out the second wave of monsters.

The tear in space convulsed.

The once-smooth circle rippled inward, as if something enormous had pressed a hand against the other side. The edges distorted, waves of warped light running along its circumference. The low hum deepened into a bone-vibrating growl.

Every rifle on the street snapped toward it at once.

"Barrier up!" the leader barked, voice sharp again. "Now!"

That was the last thing Hide saw before his body fully gave away and he fell on the ground, unconscious.