"Damn it! No more holding back!"
Scar strained against the Echo legion's relentless assault, and that was before accounting for the two Rovers on top of it all, terrifyingly strong, seamlessly coordinated, and utterly merciless. He was starting to think this might be the end.
This has gone sideways. Completely, catastrophically sideways.
His trump card couldn't stay hidden any longer. This wasn't a question of whether he could escape anymore. If he didn't act, he was going to die here.
Every time he attempted a spatial teleport, both Rovers reacted instantly, freezing time to shatter the transfer before it could complete. The spatial Forte that had made him untouchable for years, the power that let him fight as recklessly as he pleased, had met its perfect counter in the Temporal Mandate. He was learning a brutal lesson: when time stops, space bows.
But the thing that made him want to scream more than anything else...
"Where's my teammate?! A little help would be nice! Phrolova, you absolute... where the hell did you go?!"
He'd initiated the engagement, gone all-in, and was getting beaten half to death, yet his partner was nowhere in sight.
They'd agreed this morning. One Overseer per Rover. Simple plan.
Phrolova, where ARE you?!
Godlike opponents, pig-brained teammate. Story of my life!
When he'd first seen the male Rover summon that Echo legion, Scar had felt a surge of confidence. His partner's Forte could forcibly seize control of Echoes and Tacet Discords, even drive them berserk. It was beyond broken.
Fractsidus hadn't kept the entire world on edge for this long without reason. Every Overseer wielded a Forte more absurd than the last, each one capable of warping the rules of engagement.
Scar's spatial abilities spoke for themselves. And on Solaris-3, a world where the most visible disasters came in the form of monsters called Tacet Discords, Phrolova's power to control those very monsters would send shockwaves across every nation if it ever went public.
The strategic implications alone were staggering.
So yes, she might look like a perpetually sulking woman, and in the male Rover's past life she'd been a punching bag for the internet right alongside a certain potato-shaped character, endlessly memed and mocked.
The "Phrolova TV" compilations had been endless.
But her value in a team fight was beyond question.
And yet, when the team fight actually started...
"Phrolova, you're throwing!"
"The woman who's been tailing me?" Rover laughed. "I shook her off hours ago. Face it, Scar. You're out of options."
"Don't be so sure." Scar's voice dropped, something darker bleeding through. "Let me show you both what Fractsidus is truly capable of. From scorched earth... comes rebirth!"
A massive card materialized before him, black and white, bearing the image of a ram's skull. His body vanished behind it. Before anyone could process where he'd gone, a wave of suffocating pressure crashed down from above.
"Now the real fun begins!"
The giant card tore open from the inside.
A pair of razor-sharp black claws ripped through it, and from within, a colossal Tacet Discord stepped free, like a demon breaking its seal to walk the earth once more.
Four burning eyes set in a black ram's skull. Clawed hands dark as pitch. Hooves where feet should be. Pale hair that bled into ghostly violet at its tips. The monstrous thing clutched a curved blade forged from two ram's horns twisted together, and draped across its shoulders hung a crimson coat, identical to the one Scar had worn.
"He turned into a Tacet Discord?!"
"A complete transformation, and he's still rational?!"
"That pressure... it's above Overlord Class!"
Yangyang, Jinzhou's own and the most well-read among them, took the hardest hit. No one had imagined Fractsidus possessed human-Tacet Discord fusion technology refined to this degree.
"Humans are limited creatures. Fractsidus removes those limits!" Twin voices, human and bestial, roared in unison. "This is what it means to fully merge with a Tacet Discord. I've shed my human form. Calamity Class! Scar, Aberrant Nightmare!"
Calamity Class Tacet Discord. Scar, Aberrant Nightmare.
His voice layered over the monster's shriek in a dissonant chorus. In a sense, this had always been his true face. The human shape before had been nothing more than a black sheep wearing a white sheep's skin.
Yangyang, Danjin, and Jianxin all went pale.
Calamity Class. Above Overlord, below Threnodian. A threat capable of ending an entire Civilization.
If this was real, how could they possibly win?
The female Rover's grip tightened around her sword.
Her mind flashed to the Dreamless she'd encountered in that virtual space not long ago. That thing's power hadn't been a fight. It had been a natural disaster given form. Without the other Rover, without Abby, without the safety net of a virtual environment... she might not have survived.
"Rover, don't let him fool you. This goat-headed freak, Calamity Class? Yeah, no shot." The male Rover rolled his eyes, fixing Scar with a look of pure contempt.
Calamity Class? Yeah, right.
In the game, the female Rover had soloed this guy without breaking a sweat. He wasn't within a hundred miles of the Dreamless. The gap between him and a true Calamity was wider than the gap between Elite Class small fry like the Hoochief and the Lightcrusher.
The in-game bestiary did technically classify Scar's Aberrant Nightmare form as Calamity Class, sure. But anyone with half a brain knew that rating existed solely because of his spatial Forte, not his raw combat stats.
"Honestly? Overlord Class at best."
"Well then." She relaxed. "Nothing to worry about."
So he was a paper Calamity, an Overlord wearing a bigger label. His numbers fell laughably short of the real thing, and the one mechanic that made him dangerous, his spatial ability, was already hard-countered by their Temporal Mandate.
No more discussion needed. Time to finish this.
And then a bold idea sparked behind her golden eyes.
"Hey. He said he's completely fused with a Tacet Discord now, right?"
"Hm? Yeah, so?"
"Can he drop an Echo?"
"...Oh!"
His eyes lit up like searchlights.
Scar was a Tacet Discord now. If they killed him, could he drop an Echo? A space-manipulating, admittedly ugly but undeniably imposing demon ram Echo? The in-game Scar had never dropped any Echoes, but reality didn't have to follow the same loot tables.
"Wait... that might actually work!"
"Looks like we've got even more reasons to put him down."
"Oh, and let's have Abby take a bite out of him afterward. See if it can devour his spatial Forte."
"Great idea! Abby, wake up! Roast lamb's on the menu!"
The two Rovers fed off each other's excitement, building momentum with every word.
And Scar, watching those golden eyes blaze with hunger, seeing zero fear at his second-phase transformation and nothing but sharpening bloodlust as both Rovers turned toward him like wolves sizing up a particularly interesting piece of meat...
He panicked.
This... this isn't right. Run. RUN!
Because if he didn't, he was about to become roast lamb and loot drops.
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