Time seemed to snap to a complete halt inside the bubbling crater, trapping the twenty-five Adventurers in a single, suffocating fraction of a second.
The twenty-meter mountain of twisted wood and black sludge sat just fifty meters away, dominating the center of the depression. A sudden, violent drop in air pressure swept over the gap, carrying a foul, dense Aura that felt like liquid lead pouring directly into their lungs.
Every seasoned fighter stood perfectly still, but their hands shook violently against their weapons. It was not a conscious fear.
They had marched into this swamp fully prepared to die, yet they could not stop their bodies from trembling. Their hardened muscles simply recognized the crushing, unnatural pressure filling the atmosphere, so their biological instincts involuntarily screamed at them to run away.
That is the true, terrifying weight of a Calamity.
Monster threat levels follow strict, unforgiving rules in this world. A Fodder-class beast easily erases a small village, while a Hazard-class threat crushes multiple towns before it ever gets tired. A Disaster-class monster forces a king to declare a national emergency.
However, a 'Calamity' is an entirely different reality. It is a walking nightmare capable of destroying multiple countries, and its mere presence sounds a continental alarm.
Kaelen and Thorne stood near the front of the broken line, fully understanding that brutal scale. They had fought Calamity-class monsters before, so they knew the grim statistics of these raids.
Whenever the two of them faced a threat of this magnitude in the past, comrades from their raid team always died in the battlefield. The two of them had been pushed directly to death's door on those specific occasions, and they only survived and made it back home alive because they got incredibly lucky.
The rest of the veteran team trembled out of pure biological reflex, but the two leaders shook for an entirely different reason. They clearly saw the horrifying consequences of a failure today.
If their luck ran out right now and the raid team died in this mud, the Miasma-Titan would reach Voragale and erase the entire country within a few hours.
The top brass of the Adventurer's Association would eventually hear about the wipeout, so they would be forced to send a second raid team. Headquarters would become extremely cautious to avoid another failure, taking months of meticulous and profound planning.
The monster would just keep marching across the borders while the Association wasted time preparing. One-tenth of the entire continent would turn into a toxic wasteland, and millions of lives would be lost.
That heavy burden sat directly on Kaelen's shoulders.
GRRR-GROAAAN.
A deafening, structural groan of bending wood and grinding bedrock ripped through the swamp, and the terrifying moment of frozen time shattered as the beast finally moved.
KRRR-CRACK.
The top half of the cathedral-like mass twisted toward the Adventurers, revealing two glowing yellow lights in the dark timber. They were huge, open vents leaking pure, concentrated miasma.
"Shields!" Kaelen shouted. He slammed his heavy iron boots into the muck to brace himself. A wooden arm the size of a watchtower swept across the crater, aiming to crush the entire frontline into the mud.
Kaelen flared his Aura. The thick light coated his iron shield. Four other Tankers stepped up beside him, and they locked their heavy shoulders together to form a solid barricade.
KRAAANG.
The huge wooden log slammed directly into their wall of steel with a deafening, metallic crash that echoed across the swamp. The ground violently shook from the heavy impact.
The sheer physical weight of the heavy blow pushed all five men backward, dragging them three feet through the wet soil while thick black mud piled up high behind their boots. Their steel shields groaned under the crushing pressure, sounding exactly like screaming iron and twisting metal about to snap completely in half.
"Hold it!" a Tanker yelled while blood dripped from his nose.
With a heavy groan, the Titan pulled its arm back, and the yellow vents flared again. A fountain of boiling black sludge erupted from the mud right in front of the Tankers, so toxic rain fell over the shields. It hissed and smoked against the glowing Auras.
"Flush!" Thorne yelled.
Nia raised her staff. The green pulse washed over them. The burning in their lungs vanished but the Titan was fully active now. The autonomous mud-crawlers poured out of the crater in a huge wave.
The real fight started.
A Calamity-class monster possesses enough raw physical power to trample entire countries into ash. Tactically, the most efficient way to annihilate the raid team would be to simply step forward and crush them under thousands of tons of wood and bedrock.
Yet, as the veterans braced their shields, the towering beast kept its massive root-legs buried deep within the bubbling sludge. It did not take a single step.
At first glance, the monster simply looked stuck in the mud. The reality, however, completely defied standard combat logic. It was a matter of pure, absolute instinct.
To uproot itself and charge would require the Miasma-Titan to actively register the humans as a legitimate threat. But within this specific monster's ancient, rudimentary consciousness, these twenty-five elite Adventurers were not enemies. They were fundamentally insignificant. They were perceived as no different than drops of rain or annoying dust particles settling on its bark.
Driven by a terrifying, biological arrogance, the Miasma-Titan chose not to shift its posture. It would not exert the physical effort of walking just to swat away an insect.
Instead, it casually commanded the environment around it, weaponizing the very swamp to digest the intruders while treating a desperate war of survival as nothing more than an involuntary, subconscious twitch.
The autonomous Mud-crawlers poured out of the crater in a huge wave, hissing as they rushed the frontline.
Kaelen instantly read the battlefield geometry. A lesser commander might panic and order a full defensive barrage against the sudden swarm of smaller beasts.
However, Kaelen knew that Hazard-class minions were just a cheap distraction meant to drain the backline's precious Mana. He delegated the incoming threats with brutal, calculated efficiency, trusting his heavy fighters to handle the trash so the Mages could focus on the actual Calamity.
"Vanguard, hold the swarm!" Kaelen roared over the deafening cracks of splintering wood. "Mages, ignore the crawlers! Target the Titan's right arm and strip that bark!"
Thorne planted his staff in the wet soil. Deep inside his chest, he cranked open the heavy iron doors of his internal furnace—his Mana Core. It took two seconds for the dense, raw Mana to travel up through his Etheric Veins and spill out from his arm into the empty air above his staff.
Another second passed as the raw Mana compressed into a violently swirling Ball of Fire. In the final half-second, Thorne wove two spells simultaneously: an Aura Tail to act as the engine, and an invisible Aura Thread to lay the tracks.
The blue exhaust flared brightly behind the flame. The Tail pushed the fireball forward, while the invisible thread forced it to perfectly curve around a swinging root to strike the Titan's right arm directly. The entire casting sequence took about three and a half seconds.
Thorne did not actually need an Aura Thread—the monster was huge and completely visible in a straight line—but Thorne was a veteran. He was cautious. He never left a strike to chance, even against a big target.
The flames did not instantly incinerate the monster, but the eight-hundred-degree heat violently baked the thick layer of calcified sludge that protected the big right arm.
This intense temperature spike caused the trapped moisture inside the mud armor to turn into steam, so microscopic fractures spiderwebbed across the hardened shell. It was only superficial chip damage, yet creating that severe thermal stress was exactly the tactical goal.
"Hit the burn! Now!" Thorne yelled.
The rest of the Mages immediately followed his command. Two other Mages fired solid blocks of compressed ice directly at the superheated impact zone.
The freezing ice collided violently with the boiling mud, and the extreme temperature drop triggered a rapid crystal lattice collapse.
The outer shell simply could not handle the sudden contraction, so a large chunk of the petrified sludge shattered like brittle glass and fell heavily into the swamp.
The Miasma-Titan stopped moving.
A sudden wave of relief washed over the frontline, so a few Adventurers opened their mouths to cheer. To breach a Calamity's defense felt like a hard-earned victory, and they instinctively raised their weapons in triumph.
But then...
SHLLLRK-SQUELCH.
The hopeful smiles on their dirt-stained faces vanished instantly. The Miasma-Titan did not even recoil from the damage, and it simply pulled a large amount of thick sludge from the swamp. The beast packed the fresh mud tightly over its open wound, effortlessly erasing their progress in a single second.
"It regenerates too fast!" a Swordsman yelled. He hacked a mud-crawler in half. "We are just chipping the paint!"
"That is the job!" Kaelen shouted back. "We chip until it breaks. Keep hitting the same spot!"