Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 26: Battle For The Ring! (2)

Chapter 26: Battle For The Ring! (2)
His hands moved in complex patterns, and the blue crystalline insects responded with terrifying coordination. They didn’t swarm this time—they organized into formations.
Geometric patterns that pulsed with structured mana. Combat formations that enhanced their offensive capabilities beyond simple numbers.
Bang!
The first formation launched itself at Zeph like a living spear, hundreds of insects compressed into a single armor-piercing projectile that moved faster than sound.
Rumble!
Zeph’s axe intercepted it, and the collision created a shockwave that shook the entire chamber. The formation shattered, but the force behind it actually pushed him back a step.
Three more formations followed immediately, attacking from different angles with the precision of trained soldiers.
’They’re not just summoners,’ Zeph assessed grimly. ’They’re tacticians. Using the bugs as components in larger battle strategies.’
He destroyed two formations with brutal efficiency, but the third slipped past his guard and detonated against his chest. The explosion was powerful enough to actually damage his Force-enhanced body, leaving a minor burn across his ribs.
First real injury of the fight.
The gaunt summoner’s smile widened. "There it is. Proof that you’re not invincible."
"Just incredibly annoying to kill," the chitinous summoner added, pulling himself from the crater in the wall. Black beetles had sealed the wound in his chest, though his movements were noticeably slower. "But we have time. And you... you’re on a deadline, aren’t you?"
He was right. Zeph couldn’t afford to stay in one place for long. He had to either abandon the storage ring that he had worked hard to unseal or end the fight as quickly as possible.
’Can’t afford a prolonged engagement.’
Zeph changed tactics. Instead of trying to reach the summoners through their defenses, he targeted the chamber itself.
BAM! BAM!
His Force-enhanced strength drove his fists into the floor with enough power to shatter reinforced concrete. Cracks radiated outward, destabilizing the unsealing formation beneath their feet. The geometric patterns carved into the stone began to fracture, their carefully structured mana flows disrupting.
Both summoners’ expressions shifted from confident to alarmed.
"He’s trying to collapse the chamber!" the gaunt one shouted.
"Stop him!"
Every bug in the room converged on Zeph simultaneously. Thousands of black beetles, hundreds of explosive blue crystals, dozens of formation-organized strike patterns—all focused on preventing him from destroying their footing.
Zeph welcomed the concentrated assault.
His axe became a blur of motion, creating a storm of destruction that turned the air itself into a meat grinder. Bugs died by the thousands, their bodies creating a carpet of chitin and ichor that covered the cracking floor.
But for every bug he killed, both summoners generated two more. Their mana reserves seemed bottomless, their ability to create reinforcements apparently unlimited.
’Not unlimited,’ Zeph corrected himself, watching both men carefully. ’They’re sweating. Breathing hard. This is costing them!’
The chitinous summoner’s skin had developed a gray pallor, and several of his chitinous plates were cracking from overuse. The gaunt summoner’s compound eyes had lost some of their earlier luster, the facets dulling with exhaustion.
They were burning through their resources to match his overwhelming offense.
’Battle of attrition. And I have maybe eight minutes before I have to go.’
Zeph abandoned defense entirely.
Rumble!
He charged through the swarm, accepting dozens of explosive impacts and thousands of climbing beetles as the price for closing distance. His enhanced Vitality absorbed punishment that would have killed baseline humans a hundred times over.
The gaunt summoner tried to dissolve again, but Zeph had been watching for the telltale shimmer that preceded the transformation. His free hand shot out mid-charge and grabbed a cluster of blue insects before they could fully scatter.
His grip crushed them to powder, and the summoner’s reformation stuttered—missing components meant incomplete reconstruction.
The man materialized with his left arm ending in a stump of half-formed insect matter, his compound eyes wide with genuine fear.
"How did you—"
Whoosh!
Zeph’s axe took him in the chest before he could finish the question.
Puchi!
The blade bit deep, shattering the summoner’s hastily formed crystalline armor and opening a massive wound that sprayed blue ichor across the chamber. The man screamed, his body trying desperately to dissolve and escape, but Zeph’s purple flames were already spreading through the wound.
The flames consumed the insects trying to reform him, burning them at the soul level where physical regeneration meant nothing.
The gaunt summoner collapsed, his body flickering between solid and swarm states as he lost control of his transformation.
One down.
The chitinous summoner roared, and his remaining beetles condensed into a massive construct—a golem made of compressed insect matter that stood twelve feet tall and radiated genuine threat.
"You injured my brother!"
Bam!
The golem’s fist came down like a falling building. Zeph dodged, but the impact cratered the floor and sent shockwaves through the chamber that actually staggered him.
’Desperation move. Putting everything into one final attack.’
The golem was slow but devastating. Each strike had enough power behind it to actually threaten Zeph’s enhanced durability. And unlike the scattered swarms, this concentrated form couldn’t be dispersed by his flames—there was simply too much mass, too much compressed chitin for the fire to burn through quickly.
Zeph circled the construct, looking for weaknesses. The chitinous summoner was inside the golem somewhere, controlling it from within. If he could just—
Swish!
The golem’s arm extended suddenly, the compressed beetles unlocking into a whip of segmented chitin that lashed out faster than he could track.
Crack!
The strike caught him across the chest, and Zeph felt ribs crack despite his 999 Vitality. The impact launched him backward into the chamber wall hard enough to create another crater.
Pain flared through his chest—real, significant damage that would take time to heal even with his enhanced capabilities.
The golem advanced, its movements gaining coordination as the summoner inside found his rhythm. "I’m going to crush you into paste, anomaly. And then I’m taking that ring and—"
Zeph activated Phantom Step.
Swoosh!
The technique carried him not away from the golem, but directly toward it. Through the gap between its trunk-like legs, positioning him directly beneath the construct’s center of mass.
He dropped his axe, planted both hands against the golem’s underside, and pushed with every ounce of his Force-enhanced strength!
The construct weighed tons. Thousands of compressed beetles formed into a dense, coherent structure that should have been immovable.
Zeph lifted it anyway!
His muscles screamed in protest. His cracked ribs ground together agonizingly. But his 999 Strength, doubled by Force, was more than sufficient for the task.
The golem left the ground, rising into the air as Zeph’s legs drove upward with earth-shattering force.
Then he threw it.
BOOOOOM!
The construct crashed into the ceiling with catastrophic impact. Stone and chitin shattered together, raining debris across the chamber as the golem’s compressed form broke apart from sheer kinetic trauma.
The chitinous summoner tumbled from the wreckage, his control severed, his body broken and bleeding from a dozen impacts.
He hit the floor hard and didn’t get up.
Zeph stood in the center of the devastated chamber, breathing hard, his enhanced body healing the cracked ribs with supernatural speed. Both summoners were down—one suffering from soul fire, the other wounded from massive trauma.
Even though they weren’t dead and still posed a threat, that was for regular awakened. They were no different from D-Rank awakened in their current state. That was just too low for the current Zeph.
The storage ring lay on the floor where it had fallen, finally uncontested.
Zeph took a step toward it—
Pain exploded through his forehead.
The Soul Mark, which had been pulsing weakly for the past hour, suddenly flared with agonizing intensity. Not the soothing warmth he’d grown accustomed to, but sharp, violent rejection.
Then it shattered.
Crack!
Zeph felt the transformation break like a dam giving way. His eight-foot frame began to shrink, purple hair fading to black with silver streaks, claws retracting into normal nails. The overwhelming power that had made him a walking natural disaster drained away like water through a sieve.
His stats plummeted.
999 Strength → 18
999 Agility → 10
999 Vitality → 114
999 Intelligence → 3
999 Wisdom → 3
999 Charisma → 5
Force deactivated involuntarily. The purple flames wreathing his body sputtered and died.
The storage ring, which had been feet from his grasp, suddenly felt impossibly distant.
And in that moment of sudden, catastrophic weakness, Zeph’s enhanced hearing—still functional, though diminished—picked up a new presence entering the Underground Bazaar.
Heat flooded the tunnels. The temperature spiked noticeably even from hundreds of feet away.
Marcus had arrived.
Zeph stood in the unsealing chamber, now 6’9 feet tall, stripped of the godlike power he’d possessed moments ago, facing two wounded but still dangerous B-rank summoners and an incoming S-rank awakened who’d been chasing him for hours.
The storage ring lay on the floor between them, tantalizingly close and impossibly far.
’Well,’ Zeph thought with the calm clarity of someone whose survival instincts had carried him through three years of hell, ’this is bad.’​​​​​​​​​​​​​​