Claire had built her entire reputation on absolute, overwhelming control of the battlefield. But right now, she was being pushed to the absolute breaking point.

Her red aura flickered like a dying candle. Blood dripped steadily from a jagged gash above her left eye, blinding her on one side.

She swung her massive greatsword after reaching the Calamity lord, a horizontal arc that sheared through the air with a deafening boom.

The blade struck Vora directly in the waist. But there was no resistance.

The golden-haired Calamity Lord simply smiled. The moment the black steel made contact, her flawless pale skin and internal structure instantly dissolved into a thick, shimmering golden liquid.

The greatsword passed completely through her, splashing droplets of gold onto the cracked earth, before her body seamlessly reformed a millisecond later.

"You are so painfully persistent," Vora laughed, her voice like melodic chimes echoing across the ruined valley. "But brute force is the weapon of the primitive. And you are out of breath."

Vora raised a single, pale finger.

The gravitational pressure in a hundred-yard radius instantly doubled. Claire’s knees buckled under the sheer weight, the cracked asphalt beneath her boots pulverizing into dust.

Hide stepped into the perimeter. At first, he felt a blinding force on his body that forced him to rasp, but he instantly activated the new Weightless skill he had got and halved his own weight.

His blue eyes, ringed with faint violet, locked onto the floating Calamity Lord. He straightened and cracked his shoulders, a show that he was not effected anymore.

Vora’s mismatched eyes snapped toward him and her smile vanished, replaced by a cold, arrogant sneer.

"The roach who burned my favorite servant," she whispered.

She simply focused her mind entirely on the boy in the blue jacket.

The overwhelming, crushing gravity encompassing the valley instantly vanished. The sudden absence of pressure caused the dust and shattered rocks in the air to hang suspended in zero gravity for a fraction of a second. Claire gasped, falling forward onto her hands as the weight lifted off her shoulders.

Vora had removed her area-of-effect influence entirely. She was funneling every single ounce of her gravitational manipulation into a five-foot radius directly beneath Hide’s boots.

Hide’s newly evolved perception screamed a warning, but the attack was instantaneous.

CRACK!

The massive, ten-ton slab of bedrock Hide was standing on was violently ripped from the earth. It shot upward into the pitch-black sky with the speed of an artillery shell, carrying Hide with it.

"Hide!" Claire screamed.

The acceleration was horrific. The air pressure pinned Hide to the rock. He couldn’t jump. He couldn’t move, locked entirely to the surface of the ascending boulder.

Vora flicked her wrist sideways.

The ten-ton slab of earth abruptly changed its trajectory in mid-air, hurtling horizontally across the valley directly toward the jagged, vertical cliff face of the flattened hill.

Hide ground his teeth, bracing himself.

BOOM!

The collision was catastrophic. The massive slab of bedrock slammed into the side of the hill, instantly pulverizing into thousands of jagged fragments. A massive cloud of dust and debris exploded outward from the impact zone.

If Hide had been wearing normal armor, or even his rigid Abyssal Scale Carapace, the shockwave would have shattered every bone in his body. The human skeleton simply wasn’t designed to survive being sandwiched between two colliding mountains.

But as the impact hit, the SSS-Rank Abyssal Slime Cells reacted. The sentient liquid armor beneath his clothes violently expanded and hyper-hardened, creating a flawless, elastic cushion also, Hide activated the Damage Inversion skill in time and redirected all the force into the ground.

The force moved through the entire hill and made it shudder, soon a massive crack appeared moving across the hill from bottom to the top.

Hide fell from the cloud of debris, crashing into the tall grass below. He coughed a little from the dust going in his mouth, but apart from that he was totally fine, not even a scratch on his body.

Vora narrowed her yellow eye, preparing to crush the grass where Hide had fallen.

But her hyper-focus on Hide had left a massive, glaring opening.

"Don’t look away from me!"

Claire’s feral scream tore through the valley. The A-Rank warrior didn’t hold anything back. She forcefully tapped into the very dregs of her mana core, her red aura flaring to a blinding intensity.

She launched herself off the ground, ascending like a crimson rocket. Her greatsword dismantled in mid-air, the fifty jagged pieces of black shrapnel swarming Vora from every conceivable angle.

Vora clicked her tongue in annoyance. She was forced to divert her attention from the fallen boy, rapidly liquefying her limbs and torso in a chaotic dance to allow the storm of shrapnel to pass through her body harmlessly.

It was the exact distraction Hide needed.

His boots dug into the dirt, with his agility fully unleashed, he dashed up the incline, completely silent, closing the distance while Vora was entirely preoccupied with the relentless swarm of Claire’s blades.

Hide leaped from the edge of the hill, hurtling directly toward Vora’s suspended form.

He didn’t draw Night Singer. A blade was too thin. He pulled his right arm back, his muscles coiling like a spring, and drove a devastating, full-force punch directly into Vora’s gut.

His fist connected.

But there was no impact.

Hide’s arm punched completely through her stomach, sinking deep into her torso up to his elbow. The flesh around his arm instantly turned into that thick, shimmering golden liquid, parting effortlessly to accommodate his limb.

Vora looked down at him, her lips curling into a mocking smirk.

"You hit hard, little boy," she whispered. "But you can’t break what isn’t solid."

Hide hung in the air, his arm buried inside her liquid torso. He was completely vulnerable.

But his blue eyes, enhanced with true sight, were wide, staring intensely into the golden fluid surrounding his forearm.

The golden liquid wasn’t just magic water. It was incredibly dense, refracting the ambient light in strange ways. And deep inside that fluid, moving rapidly to avoid his fist, was something else.

It was a sphere! Her Core!