Re: From Elf Mage to Overlord Slayer-Chapter 36: Perfect Failure

Chapter 36: Perfect Failure
The Blade teams fanned out, moving like they actually knew what they were doing.
Seraphina was doing her whole crisp, quiet hand signal thing.
Gandalf was just grunting at his team.
Our Hilt team leader, some nervous Rank 4 guy whose name I didn’t even bother to learn, told us to... uh... hang back and try not to get in the way.
Solid leadership right there.
So we found some rocks to hide behind, feeling exactly like the useless escort quest NPCs we were.
And then we heard it.
It wasn’t a roar.
It wasn’t a growl.
It was a sound that had absolutely no business existing.
A high-pitched, chittering static that was coming from everywhere at once.
It felt like a thousand insects were crawling around inside my skull.
The sound scraped at my nerves and made my teeth ache.
Well, I guess the Culling had started.
The chittering sound got louder.
It wasn’t just noise anymore; it was a pressure.
A physical weight pressed in on us, making the air feel thick and soupy. (And not the good kind.)
It was a sound that felt like it was trying to un-write the laws of physics.
Then, from the middle of the skeletal forest, it emerged.
It wasn’t a beast.
It was a nightmare someone had coded into reality.
The Chittering Maw was a walking, multi-limbed contradiction.
A total mess of shiny insect-like legs, rubbery tentacles, and jagged crystal bits, all shifting and rearranging themselves at impossible angles.
It didn’t have a head.
Its center was just a swirling vortex of fractured light, and from that vortex came the maddening, chittering sound.
It was a living, breathing glitch in reality.
My gamer brain immediately kicked in and slapped a tag on it.
<Classification: Aberration. Damage Type: Psychic/Spatial.>
This thing wasn’t going to try and bite us.
It was going to try and break our brains.
Seraphina, of course, was the first to act. What a try-hard.
"Formation Delta!" she commanded, her voice ringing with absolute confidence. "Mages, target the central vortex! Focus fire! Overwhelm its core!"
Three Slayers from her team stepped forward.
They raised their hands, palms open, and the air in front of them began to hum with gathering power. Shimmering lances of pure, golden light materialized, crackling audibly as they strained against the fabric of reality.
Textbook divine energy attacks.
The kind that should have vaporized any normal monster.
"Fire!"
"Rtatatatatataataa"
The lances of light shot forward, releasing a harmonic screech that tore through the air. They left incandescent trails in their wake, superheating the atmosphere around them.
And then they just... stopped.
They didn’t hit a barrier.
They didn’t fizzle out.
About ten feet from the Maw, their forward momentum simply ceased to exist. The searing light dimmed, the powerful hum died, and the lances just seemed to lose their purpose.
They broke apart, not into an explosion, but into a shower of confused, harmless geometric shapes that drifted to the ground like confetti, tinkling softly as they hit the ashen soil.
The monster had literally rewritten the code of their spells mid-flight.
Seraphina’s jaw hit the floor.
Her perfect, by-the-book strategy had just been deleted.
"Impossible..." she whispered.
The Chittering Maw seemed to laugh, the static in our heads getting higher in pitch.
It took a skittering step forward on its mismatched legs, the sharp crystal limbs digging into the earth with a grating crunch.
Now it was Gandalf’s turn.
"Forget spells!" he roared, his voice a raw sound of pure, physical power. "Charge! We break it with steel and fury!"
He exploded forward. The ashy ground cracked under his boots as he launched himself like a human cannonball, a shockwave of displaced air blasting past us.
His fists glowed with a faint, white energy, a crackling aura of his own will made solid.
He was a freight train of righteous vengeance, trying to punch a hole straight through reality itself.
He got within five feet of the creature.
And then he just froze, his fist stopping an inch from its shifting, chaotic form. All that kinetic energy, all that force, just... vanished.
His face went totally slack.
His eyes went wide and unfocused, the light in them instantly extinguished.
The Chittering Maw didn’t put up a shield.
It launched a different kind of attack.
A wave of pure, psychic noise, aimed right at his soul.
It was showing him something.
Something from his own memory.
From his own Echo Chamber.
I saw his body tremble, a low, guttural sound of agony escaping his lips as his knuckles went white.
"Father..." he choked out, the word thick with a fresh, raw grief.
The monster was using his own grief as a weapon against him.
It was forcing him to relive his father’s death, over and over, in the space of a single second.
He staggered back, his arms dropping to his sides as he clutched his head, his raw power totally useless against an enemy that fought on a different battlefield entirely.
The other members of Blade Two charged in to support him, their blades and hammers held high. But the same thing happened to them.
"CRACK!"
One by one, they were hit by that silent, invisible wave.
They stopped dead in their tracks, their weapons clattering to the ground as their faces twisted in agony, their bodies seizing up as they got trapped in their own personal hells.
The two elite Blade teams, the best the Corps had to offer, were being systematically dismantled without a single punch being thrown.
They were getting wiped by a psychic AOE debuff.
From our hiding spot, I watched the whole thing go down.
My internal monologue was a cold, detached stream of tactical analysis.
Bad pull.
They didn’t spec for psychic resistance.
He’s aggro-ing with a taunt that only works on himself.
She’s trying to DPS a mob that’s immune to magic damage.
This whole raid is a total mess.
The Chittering Maw, having neutralized the main threats, turned its attention.
Its chaotic, shifting form swiveled with a sound like grinding rocks and tearing meat.
Dozens of small, insect-like eyes, scattered randomly across its crystal bits, all focused in one direction.
They focused on the Hilt team.
On the bait.
And more specifically, they focused on the weakest, most terrified person in our group.
Elara.
She let out a small, terrified squeak as the monster’s full, horrifying attention landed on her.
She was frozen solid, a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming nightmare.
The Chittering Maw lowered its body, its many legs digging into the ashy dirt, coiling like some impossible spring.
It was getting ready to pounce.
Our useless team leader just stammered, "H-hold your ground!"
It was the last thing he ever said.
The monster moved.
It didn’t run.
It didn’t leap.
It just... folded the space between it and us.
The world went all wonky for a split second, a nauseating lurch as the skeletal trees bent like rubber. Then, with a sound like reality tearing, the Chittering Maw was right in the middle of our formation, its chittering static now a deafening roar in our heads.
The Rank 4 leader was just... gone.
One moment he was there, sword half-raised; the next, the space he occupied was pinched, twisted into an impossible knot of flesh and armor, and then popped out of existence with a faint, wet thwump.
Erased.
The monster’s swirling vortex was now inches from Elara’s face.
She screamed, a thin, hopeless sound.
This was it.
The moment the raid leader has to make a choice.
Let the squishy DPS die to save the rest of the party.
Or change the whole damn plan.