Dodging the killing blow, Sawada Tsunayoshi looked up at the reinforced Stone Giant.
"That kind of destructive force would paste me—but its speed is still lacking."
He started breaking the enemy down in his head. In tight tunnels, overwhelming power can paper over slow feet; a body this massive also squeezes everyone's movement options. Keep that force confined and it's a walking bomb that can go off at any time.
"The rock plating needs first-rate weapons to breach from the outside… but what if I start from the inside?"
From without, granite was a headache. From within?
Sun and Cloud ignited together. The "seeds" Tsuna had snapped into the creature's seams sprouted all at once, racing along the Stone Giant's body. The hard plates began to split from interior pressure.
Sun accelerated growth. Cloud multiplied it—and Cloud could devour external energies to swell even faster.
Crack, crack, crack!
Root and vine burst outward, cinching the reinforced strain to the center. Plate after plate popped as the living lattice tightened.
"Wood overcomes earth, idiot," Tsuna said dryly.
Rock had few answers to a forest blooming under its skin.
"Let's see your build—and whether coming for me was just a fluke."
He watched the captive closely. Purple flame—Cloud—kindled along the vines, which cinched even harder. The more they strained, the more violet fire blossomed. In moments the whole mass had swollen into a great tree, its every branch tufted with purple fire like strange leaves.
At the core, the special strain had been crushed to rubble. Its oversized magic stone had grown thin and brittle, like a candy dissolved by licking.
Tsuna stepped in for a look.
"Magic stone's normal. Not a special variant. Was I just being jumpy?"
He glanced around. A micro-barrier—sightless to the naked eye—already fenced the area, and not a flicker suggested any signal in or out since the fight began.
"Looks like I really was imagining things."
If every test said "nothing to see," he'd drop the suspicion. Reinforced strains existed in the Dungeon. It wasn't news.
He turned away—
Splat.
Three tendrils punched through his torso. A grotesque fetal creature, hidden inside the fractured magic stone, sprang for his back—only to smack flat onto the floor with a wet thud.
"…?"
The warped "fetus" froze, stunned senseless.
Tsuna walked in from the side. As expected.
"To block outside interference, they tucked a fetus inside the host stone. The reinforced strain really was steered at me. And their craft isn't bad—embedding a 'fetus' as the control core inside a strain is no small trick."
"But how did they lock onto me? My face has never been public. If they actually knew what I look like, the whole city would already be wallpapered with my portrait, not sneaking strains after me."
A spark clicked.
"Right. Since they don't know my face, they inverted the rule. Just program the strain to ignore anyone it's already seen. Then even without my portrait, it can still 'pick me out.'"
Which raised a bigger question.
"How are they manufacturing and piloting reinforced strains in the first place?"
The corrupted fae fetus had a strong erosive effect on monsters. Once it took root, it amplified the host—call it a 'low-grade corrupted-faeification,' pushing the form toward that foul sprite template.
Reinforced strains, meanwhile, were Dungeon oddities that fed on their own kind's magic stones. Only with a rich enough diet did a monster have a shot at "reinforcement." Such self-eaters would chew anything—including their allies. To raise one deliberately—and then have a corrupted fae fetus living inside its magic stone—was… perverse.
Two parasitic, mutually eroding things somehow making a functional combo?
Tsuna's curiosity flared. A memory worm slipped into the fetus's brain, fishing for origin notes—and for the corrupted fae's operating methods.
Pop!
The head ballooned and burst, collapsing into paste.
Tsuna blinked, then nodded to himself.
"So that's why my barrier never caught a signal. It was on a dead-man's switch from the start. The instant I probed its core memory, a remote kill tripped."
"Tsk. To be 'worth' this level of paranoia from the fae—should I feel honored?"
Flattering or not, it cost him his clean read on how this "two wrongs make a right" pairing had been built. Even so, if two invasive systems meshed, chance had to be part of it.
He flicked a hand.
Space rippled. He fixed the tree and the fetus remains in place with a spatial pin, then shelved both into extradimensional storage.
Even with the fetus reduced to soup, reverse-engineering the state was still viable. Messier, sure—but doable.
(End of Chapter)
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