100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 461 - Clash

Lucien sent a message to the ancient beasts at once.

[Brothers. Sisters. I need you in Sareth. You heard the shriek, right? The Devourer is here, and Lootwell does not have enough force to put it down cleanly.]

The reply came almost immediately.

It was Astraea.

Her voice carried across the Concord Pact link.

[Little brother, the timing cuts poorly. We are in battle.]

A pause.

[The node we entered was deeper than expected. The settlement was bait on the surface and fortress beneath. There are dozens of Eternals here, all under the miracle drugs and pushed beyond sane limits.]

Then Condoriano answered. Laughter rolled behind his words.

[Buy us time, little brother. Just a little. We have already broken their first line. We only need to kill a few more and I will come gladly. I have wanted to test my wings against that shrieking abomination for some time.]

Lucien’s expression darkened.

[Understood. I’ll wait.]

The connection dimmed.

He looked up at the sky again.

Too much was aligning.

The Devourer arriving now, of all times.

The ancient beasts already pinned down elsewhere by an unnaturally heavy concentration of drug-frenzied Eternals.

Is it just coincidence?

Lucien’s eyes narrowed.

This was not yet proof of Convergence.

But it was the kind of timing that made proof feel less necessary than it should have.

Eirene and the others arrived beside him just then.

Their eyes were fixed on the sky.

The Abyss-Eyed Devourer hung there like a wound torn open in the world. Its many eyes roamed with the hungry indecision of something searching for the nearest meaning it could devour.

Lucien nodded once to the group.

Three guardians remained in Lootwell.

Anvil-Horn and Aerolith stood at the "Eternal" realm. Morveth was close to Extinction-grade.

And still—

Against the Devourer, that was not enough to guarantee anything.

Lucien exhaled.

"Sister Eirene," he said, "let’s use the Eclipse Array."

Eirene nodded without hesitation.

"With my current control, I can awaken it and direct it," she said, already calculating, "but not hold its output alone for long enough to guarantee proper targeting. The others will have to stabilize the rings and feed the channels."

She turned at once.

"Lilith. Marie. Kaia. Sylra. Marina. With me."

No one hesitated.

They moved immediately, racing back toward the Stillness Palace.

The Eclipse Array was their only fast-response weapon capable of threatening something this large. The Devourer was too vast, too regenerative, and too alien in logic to trust to direct combat alone.

Their defenders could slow it.

The Array could punish it.

If both parts aligned—

they might survive the opening.

Lucien turned to the remaining three.

"Uncle Anvil-Horn," he said, "please guard Lootwell. If anything slips past us, hold the city together."

Anvil-Horn nodded once.

"Go," he said. "I’ll make sure the land remembers who it belongs to."

Then Lucien looked to Morveth and Aerolith.

"Come with me."

They agreed at once.

Above them, the Devourer finally descended.

Toward a nearby settlement.

It shrieked once.

The sound tore through the air and shattered the settlement’s barrier like thin ice under an avalanche.

Then one of its vast tentacles came down.

The land did not simply break.

It folded.

A whole portion of earth was erased into violence.

Lucien’s face hardened.

He couldn’t let it rampage any further. He felt responsible for releasing it. To Lucien, those killed in that attack were, in a way, casualties of his own doing.

And so, they moved.

The three of them shot out of Lootwell’s protected range at once.

Morveth and Aerolith abandoned their restrained forms and revealed themselves fully.

The sky changed.

Aerolith’s Sky Whale form unfolded across the upper air with impossible majesty. Beside her, Morveth’s Astral Testudon form manifested with crushing weight.

Lucien leapt onto Aerolith’s back and they surged forward together.

The Devourer paused.

Its countless eyes turned.

It saw the larger targets.

And the shriek it gave this time was different.

Delight.

It had found better prey.

The sound rattled the cloudline.

Aerolith’s voice rolled beneath Lucien’s feet.

"Brother, it likes us."

"These are the kinds of prey you need to learn to eat."

"Yuck. That doesn’t look appetizing," Aerolith replied.

Morveth answered more dryly.

"Since it treats us as food, let us teach it that preference has costs."

"We do not need to win," Lucien said quickly. "Only delay. If the Eclipse forms, we break away at once. Let’s survive until then."

Both of them agreed.

Then the clash began.

The Devourer struck first.

Its tentacles lashed outward with predatory hunger, choosing vectors with terrifying intelligence. The tentacles angled to coil around Aerolith’s body and lock onto Morveth’s shell with enough force to crush planets of lesser stability.

But despite their size, Morveth and Aerolith were fast.

Fast enough to make the sky seem late.

Aerolith folded her vast body in impossible arcs. The Law of Continuance flowed through her like a second ocean, carrying her from one moment of movement to the next.

Morveth met force differently.

He did not dodge as elegantly. He shaped resistance. His Astral shell thickened. Lines of old void-geometry crossed over one another as he used his own mass to turn impact into endured burden.

The first tentacle hit his shell.

The air exploded.

Lucien felt the force all the way through Aerolith’s back.

Morveth was pushed miles across the sky—

But not broken.

He bit down on the motion and swung back with a sweep of his front limbs that sent a crescent of spatially compressed force crashing into the Devourer’s lower mass.

At the same time, Aerolith dove.

She folded pressure.

Her body cut through the sky like a living law-line, and when she struck, her Continuance did what it always did at its highest level... It insisted that the motion of impact continue deeper than it should have been allowed to.

The Devourer reeled.

Lucien moved with the opening.

He covered one hand in divine energy and layered the Law of Stillness across the air directly in front of the Devourer’s foremost eyes, freezing perception for a fraction of a second.

Then the Law of Burden followed, dropping invisible mass onto the leading tentacles and dragging them just enough off rhythm for the next exchange to matter.

It was not enough to cripple the thing.

But it was enough to make it misalign.

And in battle against something this monstrous, misalignment was a gift.

"Now," Lucien said.

Aerolith’s mouth opened and released a compressed lance of continuity-force, while Morveth activated the heavy brilliance inside his shell and projected a crushing astral beam from beneath his layered carapace.

Both attacks hit.

The Devourer was injured.

Its flesh split. Its substance trembled. Several eyes burst.

And then—

It healed.

Too quickly.

Far too quickly.

Its Continuance was harsher than theirs.

Morveth and Aerolith used the Law to preserve themselves, extend survival, maintain motion, and reject interruption.

The Devourer used it to insist on predation.

Its law did not merely continue life. It continued hunger. Damage lost meaning beneath it. Wounds were not denied, they were simply not allowed to conclude.

The Devourer shrieked again, more excited than pained.

Morveth’s voice came through hard and grim.

"This abomination has eaten too much."

Lucien already knew.

Every part of it carried accumulation. Every eye. Every moving line of mass. Every tentacle felt like it had consumed power enough to become its own ecosystem of violence.

Still, they did not retreat.

They led it.

That was the real objective.

Every clash was angled. Every counterattack chosen with one eye on the settlements below. Every mile of air they won mattered more than injury.

They drove it away from the living.

Lucien struck again.

This time he took out flashbangs and hurled them in a layered spread toward the cluster of primary eyes along the Devourer’s frontal line.

They detonated.

Blinding white force and sensory rupture burst across its vision.

For one second—

It worked.

Only one.

Then the Devourer’s Law surged.

Its eyes forced themselves open again. Continuance insisted that sight remain sight, that perception not be denied by lesser interruption.

But one second was enough.

Aerolith plunged through the opening like a falling piece of sky. Her body twisted as she drove a continuity-wreathed strike directly into the Devourer’s side. Morveth followed from below, slamming upward with shell-first brutality and crushing a section of its lower mass inward.

Lucien moved simultaneously.

He layered the Law of Horizon along the gap Aerolith had opened, stretching the internal distance between the Devourer’s healing structures and the damaged zone so regeneration had to "travel farther" than it should have.

Then he added a Nihility-laced strike through Morphis, carving across the wound and leaving behind a wrongness that the beast’s Continuance visibly hated.

For a moment—

They truly hurt it.

The Devourer howled.

Not in fear.

In pleasure.

That was the bad part.

Pain only made it more interested.

Its tentacles erupted outward again, faster now, harsher, no longer treating Aerolith and Morveth as prey to catch cleanly but as rivals worth tearing apart properly.

One tentacle caught Aerolith across the side and sent her spinning through the sky. Another wrapped partly around Morveth’s rear shell and wrenched him downward hard enough to crack the air beneath them.

Lucien used Stillness again, this time not to stop the beast but to catch Aerolith’s broken momentum for the fraction needed to let her recover balance.

Morveth rotated his vast shell and released a radial astral crush-wave from its rim, smashing several tentacles off course and buying Aerolith the chance to climb higher.

The battle became uglier.

Morveth fought like a fortress taught to move. Aerolith fought like a storm that had learned to endure its own impact. Lucien fought like a knife trying to find logic inside a disaster.

And still—

the Devourer was stronger.

Its Continuance overruled theirs in the cruelest possible way.

Where they insisted on survival, it insisted on consumption. Where they extended motion, it extended annihilation. Where they resisted collapse, it taught collapse to continue.

Bit by bit, it pushed them back.

Lucien felt the truth of it clearly.

Even with all three of them together, the Devourer was not losing.

They were only surviving well enough to keep it moving.

That would have to be enough.

Then the sky changed...

At first, it was subtle.

A dimming.

A wrong shadow passing through daylight.

Lucien looked up and smiled.

The Eclipse Array had activated.

Far behind them, deep in the heart of the Stillness Palace, the machine had awakened fully.

Light thinned. Color bent. The sky darkened into an eclipse.

Even the Devourer paused for half a beat, enough to sense that a greater hostility had entered the field.

"Retreat!" Lucien ordered.

Morveth and Aerolith broke at once, pulling back several miles with enormous sweeps of force.

The Devourer followed instantly.

Of course it did.

Its hunger had already fixed on them too deeply to let go cleanly.

Lucien turned midair and raised both hands.

He used Procrastinate.

The skill delayed outcomes inside the charge. It forced the beast’s motion to arrive just slightly later than it intended.

Then he layered more laws into the delay.

Stillness to catch one vector. Burden to drag another. Horizon to lengthen the remaining distance deceptively. Creation to seed false obstacles in its nearest path. Nihility only at the edge, where he needed one line of pursuit to lose coherence.

It bought them moments.

But moments were enough.

Above the battlefield, the eclipse deepened.

Then the moon answered.

A beam erupted downward.

A column of annihilating eclipse-force fell from the moon straight toward the charging Devourer.

And the sky boomed.