SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything-Chapter 9: Abyssal Scale Carapace

Its maw opened wide enough that he could see all the way down its throat — rows upon rows of blade-like teeth. Hot breath washed over him, smelling of rusted metal and rotten meat.

The plates along its neck flared with light as it committed its full weight to the lunge.

Hide didn’t move out of the way.

He took one step forward.

His legs almost buckled from the pain already sitting there, but he forced them straight. Blood slid down into his shoe, warm and sticky. His forearm throbbed in time with his heartbeat, the skin around the wound tight and slick.

He ignored all of it.

’Come on,’ he thought. ’Show me.’

The beast’s jaws came down. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

At the exact moment those blade-teeth should have closed around his chest and torn him into two clean pieces, something under his skin moved.

A cold shiver ran along his spine, then exploded outward.

It felt like someone had poured molten iron under his skin.

Not just heat, but weight as well. A heavy, dragging sensation spreading from his sternum to his shoulders, down his arms, up his neck. The skin there tightened, then split with a sound like stone cracking.

Black rose to meet white.

Dark-steel scales punched out through his flesh in overlapping plates, each one the size of a coin, wet with his blood for a heartbeat before the red slid off and fell.

They spread in a rush.

His chest was wrapped first, the skin disappearing under interlocking armor that settled with a faint grinding noise. The flow ran up along his collarbones, sheathing his shoulders, racing down his biceps and forearms.

The wounds on his leg and arm were swallowed whole, buried under the new surface as if they had never existed.

The beast bit down and instead of flesh, its teeth met metal.

The impact rang up his bones with a deep, reverberating clang. Sparks jumped from the contact point, tiny violet arcs that skittered along the plates and vanished.

The force still hit him — his heels scraped back, digging shallow furrows in the broken road — but his flesh did not tear.

For the first time since it had crawled out of the gate, the beast froze.

Its eyes, all six of them, widened by a fraction.

Hide felt the tremor in its jaw and looked down at the row of teeth trying to saw through his new armor.

"Yeah," he whispered, voice low, almost fond. "That’s more like it."

He drew in a breath.

[Abyssal Scale Carapace — Active]

Damage absorbed: 17%

Pain suppression: 50%

The text flickered at the corner of his vision.

Hide lifted both arms, now entirely black to the fingertips, and clamped his hands down on the upper and lower halves of the beast’s jaw.

The scales responded to his intent.

Plates along his forearms thickened, ridges along the knuckles sharpening like the edges of a hammer. His fingers dug in between glassy armor and wet flesh, finding purchase.

Ge gritted his teeth and pulled them apart.

The world narrowed to strain.

Muscles screamed. The beast thrashed, claws gouging trenches in the asphalt, trying to wrench free. Its breath roared hot across his face, thick with that sick metallic stink. Saliva, slick and violet, splattered his scales and slid off in lazy drops.

He kept pulling.

Then one of the jaw joints popped.

The sound was wet and sharp, hidden under the beast’s howl. Its tongue lolled sideways, suddenly unsupported.

The scales along his arms tightened, locking into a single, continuous band of dark steel. He poured everything he had left into his grip — every sleepless night, every humiliating class, every second of those years he had lived.

The second joint snapped and this time, the jaw didn’t stop.

With a tearing noise that made his teeth ache, the whole lower section of the beast’s mouth ripped free, tendons and muscle stretching in pale ropes before they snapped.

The jaw came away in his hands.

It was heavy.

He staggered a step forward with the sudden lack of resistance, then flung the bloody mass aside. It hit the ground with a wet thud.

The rest of the beast’s body fell on the ground in a heap of meat, violet blood poured from the ruin of its face, splashing over the road.

Hide looked at the beast that he had killed himself and he could not help but feel something close to joy bubbling down his whole being.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

The notification hovered in his vision.

He stared at it, chest heaving slowly behind the armor.

"fifty," he repeated under his breath. The number felt almost absurdly small compared to the reality in front of him — a monster at his feet, its jaw lying six meters away, the road painted in its blood.

His gaze dropped to his own hands.

They were not hands anymore. Rather, they looked like black gauntlets with each finger ending in a ridged, blunt claw that gleamed where beast blood had run over them.

When he flexed, the plates slid over each other with a faint, dry rasp.

The sight should have horrified him. Instead, a slow, cold satisfaction uncoiled in his chest.

"So this is it," he thought. "This is how I get there."

The scales had reached his neck now.

They climbed over the underside of his jaw, across his cheeks, up toward his temples. The world shrank to a narrower, darker frame as plates slid in around the sides of his eyes, leaving only two thin slits for him to see through.

The gate hummed behind the circle of beasts.

The rest of the pack snarled, shifting on their claws, watching the first of them lie broken in front of the human that was no longer entirely human-shaped.

Hide lifted his head.

The scales had begun to creep across his forehead now, small plates converging at the center, pushing upward into something pointed.

He didn’t notice.

He only bared his teeth or what little of them could still be seen between the black plates — at the eleven remaining shapes.

"Next," he said softly.

The word came out distorted, carrying further than it should have in the heavy air.

The wolves answered with another chorus of snarls.

And, as if agitated by his words, they began to move.

The eleven survivors fanned out around him with the rough discipline of predators that had done this many times before. They paced in a crescent between the gate and the overturned car, claws scraping the road, plates along their spines pulsing with that same sick violet light.

Hide stood alone in the middle.

His lungs burned. Blood slid down his calf from the first slash, still warm where it snuck between the scales. His shirt was torn open, white fabric hanging in strips from a chest now wrapped in dark-steel plates.

He barely noticed those things, all he could smell was them.

That reek, of rot and something old reached into him like a hand. It found the place where a Calamity Beast’s arm had once passed through his stomach, where a scar still sat under his fingers on sleepless nights. It found the image of his mother on a blood-slick floor.

His lips twitched upward without his permission.

"Die," he whispered, eyes moving from one beast to the next. "All of you."

The nearest wolf-creature lowered its head, muscles bunching along its shoulders and leaped with its claws outstretched, aiming for his throat.

Hide stepped in to meet it.

His right arm moved almost lazily, a black blur against the violet glow, and the back of his scaled hand connected with the beast’s jaw.

The impact sounded like stone shattering.

The creature’s head snapped sideways at an impossible angle. Its body spun mid-air, crashing into the ground and sliding several meters before coming to a stop.

For a second, its limbs twitched; then the pulsing plates along its spine went dark.

[Calamity Beast (Lupine) — Eliminated]

Experience points gained: 50

Silence dropped like a stone for a second, then the pack howled and swarmed him