Chapter 105: Constant Devouring
The sound of lightning roaring with the fury of the heavens echoed through the innards of the pit and cavern. It was a tremendously loud sound, one of crackles and screeching screams that sounded as if a third predator of merit had descended upon this battle between aspects of nature's evolutionary might.
The Collector stood at the center of a vortex of rapidly swirling arcs of white lightning. The orb of lightning rotated as it engulfed the Collector, drilling its sizable mass into the ground. Any stone its blinding white light came into, it pulverized into dust.
Any rock that the countless stray arcs of lightning from the orb struck, they turned into molten, smoking smears.
Within the center of this sheer destructive force of elemental fury, the Collector shunted out all the excessive sensory input, the intense crackling of the whirling lightning, the feeling of searing heat crashing against its carapace, and the intense light that lit up the entire cavern.
The heat from this attack, the Collector could resist with its Blessing of Mount Oe. Though the blessing specifically functioned only with flames, it still provided some direct heat resistance to sources of elevated temperature that did not come from fire.
The problem was the intense amount of condensed electrical energy raging throughout the Collector's body. Ordinarily, such an attack would have ravaged the Collector, blowing it apart from within in a fatal attack.
However, with inspiration from the four-star adventurer, the Collector adapted and evolved. It utilized the four-star adventurer's technique to disperse offensive energy throughout his body.
The lightning passed through unresisting flesh, circulating throughout the Collector in a continuous flow like a current bouncing within a closed loop.
The light of the enormous attack died down, and the Collector steadied its ocular systems while it felt its entire body slowly heat up. It stood in the middle of a smoking, molten, and sizable crater carved out with completely even precision by the ursine's attack.
The lightning from the attack might have died down around the Collector, but within it, the vast brunt of the attack's potency, approximately 70% of it, still circulated.
Arcs of white lightning crackled across the Collector's entire body, dancing around its four arms, broad chest, and tail.
Its whole body glowed a shade of bright white, continuing to circulate and contain the vast amount of power.
Yes, this was it. This was the proper flow of things.
Yet, energy as unstable as this could only flow within the Collector for so long without detrimental effect, even with the Collector's superb grasp of mana flow. Already, some parts of its internal musculature were beginning to overheat.
The Collector aimed its ocular systems, the shining yellow sockets in its skulls, to its arms. As it flexed the muscles of its four arms, arcs of lightning sparked from them.
It gazed up at the ursine.
The ursine was breathing heavily, steaming, sizzling air pooling out of its mouth. Its once glowing white horns had dimmed down now to a dull blue shade. It had lost a drastic amount of magical energy to fuel such an attack, and it seemed charging and unleashing the attack also caused some internal damage by superheating the insides.
That was to be expected. Unlike the Collector, the ursine did not possess the necessary fine tuning to circulate this energy through itself. The Collector had already theorized this, but in witnessing the four-star adventurer disperse the shock of tremors, it was almost certain it could apply with more efficiency th same to attacks that were more energy form such as this mass of lightning.
Now, its hypothesis had been proven.
The Collector thrust out its four arms towards the ursine and shunted out the vast stored amounts of electrical energy coursing through its body. Its four fists acted as venting points where four arcs of stored lightning thicker even than the Collector's sizably muscled arms ejected.
The four bolts fused into one enormous beam that thundered forwards, crashing into the ursine's chest. The Collector intentionally avoided its core for destroying it, the link to this dungeon, would permanently kill it, and more experimentation was further on the way.
The ursine roared in pain, but even its impressive vocal chords could not compare with the scream of lightning crackling around it. It blocked the bolt with its reflexes, using its two brawny arms to intercept it, but the bolt beam smashed through the limbs with utter ease, blasting apart the furred flesh into charred chunks.
The beam drilled a hole straight in the middle of the ursine's waist, completely severing its torso from its legs in one wide, circular wound, as if the flesh and bone and everything organic there had been erased clean.
The Collector leaped into the air with a push of its tail, fluttering its four insectoid wings in flashes of fiery flaps as it reached the ursine's falling body in one bound. It landed in front of the ursine and grabbed its disembodied torso with its two thin, stick-like shinchu arms.
The arms, like extended probes, grasped their three thin fingers on either of the ursine's shoulders and lifted the torso up for inspection. Smoke sizzled from the bottom of the torso; the wound cauterized fully from the lightning's heat.
The ursine's head dangled down, inactive in unconsciousness.
However, the Collector could still sense life within the ursine despite this grievously mortal wound. There was a heartbeat that grew fainter by the moment, but the magical energy from the dungeon began to flow into the ursine, strands of blue emanating from the many crystals dotting the pit all funneling to the ursine's chest, to its heart and core.
Soon enough, the regenerative properties of this magical energy would allow the ursine to recover even from a fully fatal wound like this. Already, the cauterized flesh at its torso was beginning to split and crack, revealing freshly growing pink mass underneath.
The Collector ejected a monomolecular blade from one of its lower set of arms and then thrust it into the ursine's chest. The Collector pushed in deep, past the thick fur now that it had lost its defensive ice layer, and surgically severed the ursine's spine such that its nerves would no longer register sensations to its processing center.
With this accomplished, the Collector bid its chest to split open down the middle. The carapace clicked before splitting apart, and then its detachable maw ejected forwards. The maw was like its own living creature, undulating forwards in snapping motions to tear off great chunks of the ursine's body to devour it.
The Collector, however, ate around the ursine's core and brain, leaving the spine, brain, and heart intact throughout the whole process. By the time it finished devouring all that was non-essential, the Collector left but a bare spine padded with thin ribbons of flesh and a small curtain of red muscle over the breast to shelter the heart.
The imposing wide bulk of the ursine's body was now reduced to nothing but the barest of bones and skeletal and circulatory system components.
>>>
*Biomass Gained (+10)*
Biomass Level: 11/100 > 21/100
*Genetic material gained*
Stored Genetic Material:
==
-Frostborn Hobgoblin Thrall [Core]
-Vineswinger Goblin Champion [Core]
-Windcutter Wildcat
-Shockstripe Eel
-Lurker
-Goblin Lord [Core]
-Frostborn Goblin Champion
-Sabretooth Lion
-Grizzled Stormbear
*Spirit Roots Gained (+15%)*
Root Consumption Level : 10/100 > 25/100%
>>>
Yet, like this, the Collector left the ursine 'alive' by the dungeon's standards, and the flesh continued to regenerate. Muscle, nerves, and connective tissue began to flower out again from the ursine's bare spine.
The Collector waited, then, when it sensed that the ursine's spinal section that had been severed by the monomolecular blade had recovered enough, severed it again.
The ursine had proved to be of no significant challenge to the Collector, but it had still been an apt specimen of strength, a recognized predator that relied only upon its pure evolutionary edges and instincts.
This, the Collector could respect, and it showed as much by preventing the specimen from ever being conscious or, even if it was, feeling the pain of being continually devoured.
When the ursine regenerated enough, the Collector once again devoured around its non-essential components, gaining additional biomass and spirit roots continuously. A continual cycle of consumption and regeneration.
The Collector noted that the dungeon seemed to be capable of indefinitely sustaining this regeneration and made no real note of whether the ursine was combat capable or even conscious or not.
So long as the ursine was alive by the metrics of the dungeon, metrics that seemed to value only the intact presence of the core and potentially continued neural activity, then it would continue to support the specimen's life.
Agreeable. The Collector would continue to devour and devour until it reached its next metamorphosis level and until its goblin swarm was to come within the next ten minutes.
Eight minutes and fifty seconds later, the Collector sensed that the goblin swarm made their way to the entrance of the dungeon and now were approaching the Collector at rapid speeds.
The Collector clicked the mandibles of its main skull, ready again to further additional experimentation.