Chapter 113: Completely Dazed (Patreon)

Alex reflected that the goofy commenters online were unreliable most of the time, all jokes and nonsense.

But every so often, their breakdowns of where a Mysterious Being's stats fell short were dead accurate and made real sense.

In the space between one thought and the next, his attack came crashing down.

The calm, clear water was ripped apart by raw force, and towering waves rose until they seemed to swallow sky and sea alike.

Wave stacked on wave and swept outward in every direction, and the whole stretch of ocean churned and boiled.

The Deep Sea King had fully unlocked his base form. At full combat strength, he held nothing back and poured every ounce of power he had into the blow.

His clenched fist carried enough weight to tear the water open as it slammed into Alex's attack.

He had already made his prediction.

Even at full strength, he most likely still wasn't Alex's match.

But with his home ground boosting him, with his power surging, there was no way he'd crumble at a touch and be crushed at will the way he had been before.

Then his fist actually met Alex's power, and reality finally caught up with him.

He understood exactly how absurdly wrong his estimate had been.

Alex had merely pushed out a palm across the air, the motion lazy and casual, without a trace of effort.

The palm hadn't even touched his body yet, and already the water around him was being churned by that terrifying force.

It was like a tsunami erupting on the seafloor, endless violent undercurrents sweeping in and scouring everything before them.

Teeth clenched, the Deep Sea King held on, dragging up every scrap of strength inside him, forcing his way through layer after layer of that pressure.

And in the instant his fist met Alex's palm, a vast, unstoppable, monstrous power came pouring down on him.

It wrapped around him in a heartbeat, pressing him down until his blood roared and his whole body shook.

His stomach dropped, and cold dread flooded him.

If he hadn't absorbed the strange substance and sent his power skyrocketing, if he'd had only his original foundation to rely on, this single clash alone would have shattered the bones in both arms and crippled him for good.

"Still not enough!"

He howled it inside himself, drowning in despair and refusal.

His cold vertical pupils contracted hard, shrinking to pinpricks, fixed on Alex.

At last he saw the situation for what it was.

The gulf between them was a difference in kind, not in degree, and nothing he had on hand could close it.

To truly stand against this human, to keep his life and break free of that pressure, only one desperate option remained.

Something vicious and final flashed in his eyes as he settled on a course that might kill him.

Watching the expressions flicker across the Deep Sea King's face, Alex shook his head and murmured, "He's only just scraped the edge of Dragon Level. The gap is still far too wide."

He knew perfectly well that not long ago this wouldn't have gone so easily. His laser eyes, his core trump card, were heavily blunted underwater and couldn't be brought anywhere near full power. Fighting the Deep Sea King on his own turf back then would have cost him plenty of effort and time to finish.

But that was then.

His own baseline strength had long since settled firmly into the Dragon Level tier.

On top of that came the extreme amplification of the Biceps Brachii King, a buff that could shove an ordinary person straight into the ranks of Dragon Level fighters.

Two layers of overwhelming power stacked together, and the result went well past simple arithmetic.

By a conservative estimate, his true combat strength now sat at the middle of the Dragon Level range.

Handling a Deep Sea King who had only just stepped over that line was effortless, no pressure at all.

If he hadn't wanted to draw out every card the Deep Sea King held and pin down the ceiling of his strength, this fight would have ended the moment his opponent came ashore.

By now every method the Deep Sea King had was on display, and his limit was plain to see.

That strength had left Alex thoroughly disappointed. There wasn't a shred of entertainment left in it.

He had run out of patience for stringing this out any further.

Time to put an end to the farce.

The thought had barely settled when, down in the water, the Deep Sea King went rigid all over.

A bone-deep chill unlike anything he'd felt before wrapped around his limbs, his organs, every inch of him.

It was the pure pressure of death: cold, heavy, suffocating.

As if in the next second his body would be crushed to pulp and buried in The Deep for good.

With his life balanced on a knife edge, the Deep Sea King didn't dare hesitate.

He threw his head back and let loose a furious roar into the dark water, a sound that shook the whole stretch of ocean.

The sound rolled outward through the water layer by layer, stirring up rings of fine, scattering ripples.

Then, under Alex's calm gaze, the Deep Sea King's massive body began to swell at a rate the eye could follow. Muscle that had been tight and dense stretched and ballooned, and his silhouette grew broader and more monstrous by the second.

Alex, on the verge of ending the fight with one strike, paused.

A flicker of genuine interest crossed his eyes, and he settled in to watch.

He wanted to see what card a cornered Deep Sea King still had tucked away.

But as the transformation went on and that aura kept climbing, Alex's expression turned strange.

He studied the shape of the change, and the longer he looked, the more familiar it felt.

This way of forcing power upward, this bizarre state of a swelling body and a spiking aura.

It looked far too much like what he'd seen from Translucent and the others.

Translucent's crew had ended up bloated and warped like that because they'd taken the budget knockoff of the Biceps Brachii King.

Could it be that the Deep Sea King had also stumbled onto something connected to the Biceps Brachii King?

Curiosity nagged at Alex. He kept his eyes locked on his opponent and waited for the change to finish.

In the space of a few breaths, the second transformation was complete.

The roughly ten-meter frame had swollen to a full fifty meters, a giant mountain standing in the middle of the deep sea. The aura coiling around him grew more brutal and overbearing, the power inside him surging without end.

Alex could feel it clearly. The Deep Sea King's strength had now locked solidly into the Dragon Level tier.

It was still the bottom rung of that tier, but he'd shed the frail, barely-over-the-line state from before. His presence was several times more substantial.

Transformation finished, the Deep Sea King looked down at his own enormous hands and felt the boundless power roaring through him.

The confidence and arrogance he'd been forced to swallow came flooding back into his chest, and a wildly exhilarated grin spread across his face.

Every bit of the frustration, the resentment, the humiliation came pouring out at once.

He drove himself upward, and his huge body tore through the surface in a burst of white spray.

He stood atop the water, wind tearing across the hard scales that armored him.

He lifted his head and swept a savage look around him, then locked onto Alex beneath the surface.

To make sure the human heard every word, to vent the rage he'd been hoarding, he deliberately raised his voice and bellowed.

"Damned human! Your time is up! I'm going to teach you what real, bone-deep agony feels like!"

He'd been humiliated too badly to let it go.

From the moment he came ashore and ran into Alex, he'd been crushed and mocked the entire way, without a shred of the dignity a ruler should have.

Stomped down into the deep, played with at will, every scrap of pride and self-regard ground to powder.

Now that he'd unlocked all of his power and pushed himself to his absolute limit, he was certain the tables had turned.

He would crush this human into the ground and pay back every humiliation twice over.

But his threat was only half out when his gaze swept across the sky overhead, and the rest of the words jammed in his throat.

High above, several figures hung motionless in the air. Tornado, Maeve, and the rest of them.

They stood on nothing at all, looking down at him, and their eyes were very strange indeed.

There was no fear in them, no tension. Only a faint contempt, and something uncomfortably close to pity.

Under that bizarre gaze, the Deep Sea King, who a moment ago had been riding high on his own momentum, felt his skin crawl.

He couldn't work it out. Why would these humans look at him like that?

His power had exploded upward. He had the strength to crush everything in front of him.

So why wasn't there a trace of panic on them? Why that mocking, sympathetic look instead?

While his thoughts were still tangled and drifting, a low churning of water rose from the sea below him.

Splash!

The sound cut clean through the brief calm of the surface.

He snapped back to himself, certain Alex had come chasing up from the depths, and a vicious light kindled in his eyes.

He wrenched his massive body around, muscles drawing tight, both fists loaded, ready to strike.

He'd do exactly what Alex had done to him: pin the human underfoot and wash away every humiliation!

It was a beautiful thought. Reality turned out to be crueler.

His body had only just begun to drop with its own momentum when his eyes, cutting through the churning spray, saw what lay beneath the surface.

A colossal arm blotting out the light tore up through the water and shot toward him, reaching to seize his body!

A hand?!

His pupils shrank to points, and for a moment his mind went utterly blank. His racing thoughts felt as though an invisible hand had clamped down on them, freezing everything.

He hung hundreds of meters up, the deep blue ocean surging below him, sea wind howling all around. Seawater still ran off his skin in streams, the air thick with mist.

In an environment where his guard should have been at its absolute peak, he was looking at something that overturned everything he thought he knew.

Below that calm, fathomless surface, where there should have been nothing but layered swells and dark undercurrents, a gigantic ripple had abruptly split open.

A single palm, larger than his own transformed body, was rising slowly out of the deep.

What was this?!

Enormous waves crashed through him. Every muscle locked, and the Mysterious Being blood under his skin stirred violently, but nothing could hold back the sheer terror rising in him.

This stretch of ocean was territory he'd ruled for years. He knew every current, every trench. He had never once heard of a thing this horrifying hiding in it.

How could a hand that size suddenly come up out of the sea?

The palm was an ordinary skin tone, its lines clear, its tendons and bones defined, and yet it was vast enough to blot out both sky and sea. Every inch of it radiated a crushing, indescribable weight. The simple act of lifting dropped the air pressure across the entire stretch of ocean, and the wind turned savage in an instant.

Before the Deep Sea King could shake off his shock, before he could sort through the chaos in his head, that sky-covering palm had already crossed hundreds of meters of open water and arrived in front of him.

He was suspended in midair with nothing beneath him, no purchase anywhere to push off from.

After the transformation his body was enormous and heavy, tens of meters of bulk carrying tremendous inertia. There was no way he could kick off empty air and change direction in an instant the way human powerhouses did.

Utter helplessness swallowed him whole.

All he could do was hang there, stiff, and watch that terrifying palm come down toward him with unstoppable, mountainous force.

"No!"

The low, frantic scream tore out of his throat, raw with terror he couldn't hide.

He had no idea who the palm belonged to, and no idea why its owner would launch a lethal strike at him without warning.

But the size of it alone was enough to tell him what kind of power he was facing.

That palm was nearly as large as his own body at its transformed peak. Anything with a frame and a strength like that had to be a top-tier existence capable of crushing him without effort.

In everything he'd ever known, only one thing in the whole world could match it in sheer scale: the mysterious giant he'd glimpsed from a distance the last time.

That was also the most terrifying, most inexplicable thing he'd seen in his life.

The shadow of death settled over him completely, and a cold, airless weight ran through his limbs into his heart until his whole body went numb with it.

Then, with the palm about to close around him and his life hanging by a thread, a realization flashed through the chaos in his mind.

A giant. A giant palm...

What else could possess a body that vast, a hand that could black out the sky, other than the mysterious giant he'd glimpsed far off in the depths?

In a single instant every clue linked together in his head.

'So the giant never went ashore at all. It's been hiding in The Deep the whole time, and it never left!'

'The fight I just had on the surface must have been too loud. The energy tearing the water open, the churning sea, the roaring, all of it woke him and dragged him here!'

His mind raced. On the edge of death, his thinking had never been sharper.

He didn't dare cling to luck, and he certainly didn't dare bet that this terrifying giant meant him no harm. The very first move had been a killing blow with nothing held back. Whatever it was, it wasn't friendly.

In the space of a breath, cornered with no way out, the Deep Sea King made up his mind and chose the safest option available.

He wrenched his huge body around, ignoring the risk of losing what little balance he had in midair, forcing himself to face the vast ocean below, and screamed with everything he had.

"We're not enemies! We're both Mysterious Beings! Our common enemy is the humans on land!"

The wind caught his shout and carried it between sky and sea, thick with desperate sincerity and the raw urgency of a creature fighting to live.

He understood perfectly well why he had been the one singled out, the first to be attacked.