AUTHOR'S NOTE
Madness affinity → chaos affinity
Madness → chaos
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The one-armed Mo Ling crouched naked in the ruins of the vast dungeon. His once frail body had hardened—muscles drawn tight beneath pale skin, veins visible through the blood loss. The countless bruises and the missing arm gave him a ghostly look, more specter than man.
A piercing screech echoed from the tunnel he'd crawled out of.
"Not again…" he hissed, pushing himself to his feet. Not wasting time, he sprinted in the opposite direction, stealing glances over his shoulder with a flicker of desperate hope. If chaos erupted, maybe—just maybe—he could slip away.
But fate had other plans.
A horde of naked mole rats, each the size of a wolf, burst from the tunnel like a tide of flesh and teeth. Rank 4, some Rank 5—their power rolled through the air in choking waves. Mo Ling's heart sank. The chaos he'd hoped for would be one-sided.
As he kept running, he saw minotaurs running around in fear of the great Rank 6.
An insane idea came to Mo Ling's mind.
'Kill.'
It just came suddenly, and no matter how crazy it sounds, Mo Ling thought of it as the most logical and normal thing to do. He basically forgot the situation he was in, the state of his body; there was only a cruel and indomitable determination.
He lunged toward the nearest dark minotaur—a trembling Rank 1 beast already maddened by the scent of fear. His right hand twisted, bark erupting from his skin, curling into jagged claws. Before the creature could react, Mo Ling was on its back, driving his fingers deep into its eye sockets.
"Howl!!"
A grating howl came out of the minotaur; even the naked mole rats looked their way, but they didn't move from their original spot, as if they were waiting for something.
The minotaur screamed, thrashing wildly, but Mo Ling clung tighter, gouging deeper until the skull caved beneath his relentless stabbing. They kept struggling like that for a while. When the beast collapsed face-first into the stone, Mo Ling slid off, chest heaving, his legs bruised and shaking, but he felt satisfaction running through his veins.
A Rank 2 dark minotaur, slightly bigger than the Rank 1 version, bellowed nearby, enraged by the death of its kin. It charged.
Mo Ling only smiled.
A low, broken laugh escaped him as he sprinted forward, blood dripping from his bark-coated arm.
When they were some feet away from each other, Mo Ling jumped with all his force, aiming at the dark minotaur's head. The monster didn't slow either; its horns suddenly unleashed a dark energy with a red smoke slightly seeping out of its eyes and mouth.
The air crackled.
As the red smoke appeared, the minotaur's speed suddenly peaked, slamming its right horn into Mo Ling's arm.
The horn smashed into Mo Ling's right arm, shattering the bark, breaking bone, hurling him through the air. His body tumbled across the ground until he spun mid-air, forcing bark to sprout along his feet, using the weight to twist and land hard—but upright.
When his vision steadied, he saw them: a line of minotaurs charging, dust rising behind them.
'That wasn't completely out of my expectations...'
Mo Ling wasn't able to complete his thoughts when an earth-shattering roar resounded like an explosion. It was so powerful his heart stopped beating for a second; that roar seemed to freeze the whole world.
It wasn't a sound so much as a command. His heart froze in his chest. The dungeon's ceiling cracked and burst apart in a cascade of dust and blinding light. A huge shape slammed through the stone—a Rank 6 monster, the same that had once escaped the abyss, now crashing back down like divine retribution.
A red-and-black sea of energy swallowed it and sent it away.
Opposite it stood a titan—a Rank 6 dark minotaur, its horns wrapped in shadow and a red flame-like energy—chaos. It was looking down at the army of naked mole rats surrounding the hole, and more precisely it was looking at what was in the hole.
With the chaos and dark energies surrounding it, the giant minotaur roared once again as it jumped into the air, falling down like a burning meteor in the direction of the hole that was small compared to the titan.
It went through the ground, making the hole that was once created by the Rank 6 naked mole rat into a giant sinkhole, thereby killing the closest monsters to it. But it wasn't over; following their leader, the minotaurs stopped what they were doing and attacked the rest of the invaders.
The ground imploded. Beasts vanished beneath falling rock. The air filled with screams and dust as the minotaurs rallied to their king's side, turning the tide against the mole rats.
From the first roar to the end, only a few heartbeats had passed.
Mo Ling, forgotten amid the chaos, ran.
He didn't know where—only away. The dungeon stretched endlessly, an ocean of stone and fear. Then, a deep rumble—the sound of rocks shifting.
He turned and saw it: the Rank 6 mole rat, pinned beneath a mountain of debris, its body torn and broken.
For a long moment, Mo Ling only stared.
He understood.
It was dying—and in its death, perhaps, he might finally live.