Outworld Liberators-Chapter 143: A Pyric Victory for the Goldkeep Crownmarkets

Chapter 143: A Pyric Victory for the Goldkeep Crownmarkets

Petrus had lost his mind. He thought making himself bigger would make him safer.

He swelled until he stood over five hundred meters, a thing that was barely body at all, more like a vast floating brain trailed by tentacles.

Mantle and lobe and slick growths pulsed around him. The sickly rainbow sheen slid over his hide like oil on water, shifting with every breath.

Psychic waves lashed outward.

Men on the ground staggered as if struck. Silent Severance and civilians alike went down in ugly heaps, hands to skulls, teeth clenched, vision tearing.

There had been no time to prepare for an attack that did not need claws.

Petrus drove himself toward the other peaks. His large body became an afterimage, and he arrived right beside Highroost District.

His plan was to absorb the rest of the hybrids, along with the ones in Ironcrest Forges, Shopcap Ventures, and Sunkissed Bazaar.

But a desperate animal’s move was easy to see through.

From the summit of Craftsworth of Guilds Peak, a pill the size of a fortress shot out, burning red and furious.

It struck Petrus’s Aberrant body square and the sky bloomed into a mushroom cloud.

The blast rolled across ridges. Stone shattered. Snow turned to steam.

Then the torn flesh began to crawl back together.

Not metaphor, not hope. The meat itself crept and wriggled, reknitting as heaven and earth energy poured into the wound like a tide rushing to fill a hole.

A hard silence took its place. The remaining thirty-nine major cities pitched in.

Artillery and qi work hammered every moving scrap, every crawling smear of mucus on the ground.

They did not do it for profit. They did it because they understood, all at once, that greed was a luxury for days of peace.

The regeneration slowed. It did not stop.

Petrus formed again, and the shape of him rose, and fear showed in the way he moved. He tried to run, turning his bulk away from the firing lines.

A harpoon punched through him, then another. Hooks bit and held.

Petrus split his body in half to slip the clutching points, desperate and clever in the ugliest way.

He did not notice the shells that followed.

They carried sealing and hardening runes. They screwed into his flesh like barbed bolts.

When he tried to split again, the body refused. The runes held him in one piece, a single target that could not shed its own mass.

Then Silent Severance closed in.

Physical body cultivators dragged chains to the barbed bolts and locked them on. The first chain went taut.

The creature lunged and snapped back, yanked like a ball on a string.

Men did not pause to admire their work. They only ran more steel.

Help came from all abled cultivators. Kilometers of chain were hauled across broken ground, faster and faster, hands blistering, boots slipping in ash and slush.

A second chain was fitted. Then a third. Then more, each link a promise that the thing would not be allowed to drift away into the sky.

Jekyll watched it and did not hope for death. He hoped for restraint. He knew better than to bargain with miracles.

At the pulleys, body cultivators started turning. Muscles bunched. Breath steamed. The chains screamed as they tightened.

Petrus’s guttural growls and high pitching curses rolled across the Goldkeep Crownmarkets.

People watched from rooftops and shattered windows.

No one cheered. Grief sat on every street.

Many had already lost loved ones. Many more were still infected, still missing, still turning in cellars with the doors nailed shut. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Families screamed at the sky because there was nothing else to strike.

When the ninth chain was attached, Petrus lost his voice. Only the heave of his bulk remained, the tremor of a trapped thing burning through air it could not escape.

Around that, the crowd’s rage found a new target.

Men shouted about cages. About auction houses. About slavery hidden under stone and paper and polite words.

Accusations flew like stones, and the guilty had nowhere to stand.

As Jekyll oversaw the chained monster being dragged toward the steel gate, a white light flashed in the distance.

Radeon had foreseen this. He had fired a net of over a hundred shots, staggered in different intervals, a pattern meant to catch a fleeing god. The bullets cut the air fast.

The beam lanced through the Aberrant’s bulk and punched a fist sized hole clean through.

The chained body still did not understand what was happening. It only shuddered at the loss.

Inside, buried deep where flesh had been thickest, the Vision Crystal core waited.

Not a gem. Not a rock. A small brain, still alive.

The light touched it. And the core vanished.

The beam exited and met the waiting projectiles. Metal sparked. Impacts rang.

For a breath, the fleeing thing used the bullets as springboards, ricocheting through the net the way an insect skipped across water.

Radeon watched and did not curse. He was satisfied.

In his eyes, that was something alive. Something that could be tracked, because his misfortune was not random. It was a unique blend of its own, and it clung to living targets the way rot clung to meat.

The Aberrant shuddered. Tentacles slackened for an imperceptible degree.

Jekyll felt the change. He put his hands in the beast and saw the hole.

"Fuck," he couldn’t help cursing.

For a heartbeat he almost tore the mask from his face, threw it to the ground, and stepped on it until it cracked.

He did not. Discipline held. The heat stayed anyway.

His eyes strained as he followed the white flash retreating into distance. There was no blood. No soul residue. No drifting flesh.

Only absence. Absence did not calm him. It made him suspicious.

He had been investigating these phenomena for too long, coincidences that lined up too neatly, timely interventions that felt purchased rather than earned.

He had even turned his attention inward, prodding at Silent Severance itself, hunting for rot behind the masks.

He had discovered nothing. That made him more certain, not less.

His gaze shifted toward Cairnlight Barterhold. He did not have proof. He only had instinct, and the sick certainty that instinct sometimes carried.

Eldric knew more than he was letting on. Eldric’s voice had commanded the wind.

Eldric’s hands had taken the dust. Eldric had stepped into the center of calamity and made the world obey.

If Eldric was one of the secretive higher ups of Silent Severance, then this day had not been chaos alone.

It had been a test. Jekyll’s jaw tightened under the mask. If so, he needed answers.