"So the corrupted fae are working with the Dark Faction?"
Tsuna ran the timeline in his head. The "Nightmare of the 27th Floor" had erupted six years before the story began—meaning the Dark Faction's catastrophe was four years ago. Around then, the corrupted fae started pushing their tendrils into the mid–upper Deep.
The "fae fetus" cinched it. If that thing had targeted him, then there was at least a working line between the corrupted fae and the Dark Faction. No one else in Orario would be this hungry for his file.
"Heh."
He hadn't rushed to pick a fight with them—yet they'd knocked on his door first. Still, there was no point bagging Dionysus now. If he yanked that thread without crushing the other nest under the Dungeon, the whole lot would scatter.
When he moved, he had to move on both fronts. No exits. No air.
"Hey! Tsuna—you good?"
Bete's voice snapped in from the flank. Tsuna glanced over and offered a small smile to the wolf-man's tight face.
"I'm fine. Just got singled out."
"What? Singled out—"
Bete's eyes flicked to the puddle of green blood and the wrecked ground nearby. Fury and questions both surged—who dared target this one?
"Not here," Tsuna said. "We'll talk on a safe floor. I've already stored the evidence. I'll head back first—no telling how many eyes are still around."
"Yeah. Leave this to me."
With Bete's nod, space folded and whisked Tsuna into his extradimensional vault.
Inside, he studied the tree-bound stone giant corpse—the reinforced strain he'd trussed up with living roots—and the wafer-thin magic stone at its core. Nearby lay the headless, green-blooded remains of the fae fetus.
"Time to work. Under what conditions do a reinforced strain and a fae fetus end up in 'symbiosis'?"
Curiosity pricked. He sparked Beast Creation, conjuring both templates at once and nudging them toward fusion—this time with the fetus's erosive trait fully modeled.
The result came fast.
In seconds, the fetus ate the reinforced strain alive.
"One-way erosion. Zero chance of coexisting."
Its bite was even nastier than he'd expected. Standard Dungeon monsters didn't resist at all; they were converted in a blink, their forms warping toward the corrupted fae's template—exactly as he'd imagined.
Which proved the obvious: left alone, a fetus would never "share" a host like a reinforced strain. It just devoured it.
"What if I wrap the fetus in a membrane, keep it dormant, and let the Dungeon monster treat that membrane as an energy source?"
He waved, and a new fetus—sheathed in an outer film and asleep inside—floated before him, alongside a reinforced stone giant with the self-feeding trait.
As creator, Tsuna didn't guide a thing. He let instinct run.
Starved for energy, the strain focused on the fetus. Reinforced strains possessed a scrap of low cunning. It watched a moment, then picked the fetus up—not to chew and swallow, but to hold in its mouth.
Tsuna watched the strain siphon the membrane's energy.
After a while, the strain hadn't drunk the core dry, but the fetus inside looked visibly wan.
Then the strain tilted its head back and swallowed the whole thing.
"Freeze."
Everything stopped mid-act. The strain split open down the middle—and what he saw inside actually surprised him.
The fetus's eyes were open inside the sac. It spread its tiny hands… and pressed them against the strain's magic stone.
"Of course," Tsuna murmured. "Reinforced strains evolve by gorging energy. A fetus is concentrated energy. If the fetus isn't triggered, the strain can misread it as a special kind of magic stone."
"But after ingestion, the fetus didn't immediately wake and erode—it chose to merge in. Which means someone set it up to behave this way."
He thought it through. The more he mapped it, the clearer the picture became.
He'd been targeted.
"Looks like the fae and the Dark Faction have me as public enemy number one."
Space manipulation on record; humiliating Valletta; too many signals that he was the problem they wanted solved sooner rather than later.
"In that case, I can't let them have their clean result."
He couldn't let the fae feel their fetus had twitched… and he couldn't let the Dark Faction conclude that he could handle reinforced Deep threats head-on.
How to do both? Simpler than it sounded: rewind the local clock.
If he could craft beasts that touched space, then building a constrained, area-limited time-rewind beast was within his wheelhouse. And used only on a Dungeon strain and a fae fetus, in a sealed section? Even the gods wouldn't notice.
After all, none of these pieces lived under divine jurisdiction.
(End of Chapter)
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