CHAPTER 199: CHAPTER 199 – ZOMBIE QUEEN VS ANCIENT TITAN

"Infectious Bite!"

The second bite right on the right side of the chest, over the etched venom pattern. She drove the poison in like an archer forcing the final arrow into a heart. A searing heat rebounded against her lips, like pressing her mouth to a stove’s surface.

The Titan thrashed. One massive hand closed on empty air and this time caught something.

Her collar jerked.

CRACK.

The world spun. Sylvia hit the floor, then the wall, then the floor again. The Shield groaned, hairline fractures spidering across the layered chains. She rose to a half-kneel unsteadiness flickering through her posture in a way almost never seen.

[HP: Full → Stable – impact absorbed by Shield]

[MP: 38% → 33%]

[Blood Instinct: +6] – All Stats +90%

The Shadow Veil still smothered sight. But the golden-white glow along the Titan’s axe blade speared through the fog like sunlight knifing the morning mist. Deadlock Field creaked louder the field resisting its fate, while fate already hefted the hammer.

"Then " Sylvia dusted her knee, crimson eyes reflecting the oncoming gold. " We fight beneath a fractured sky."

She spread both hands. Chains whirled around her, tightening into a smaller ring.

"Form 3: Death Spiral."

A vortex of chains radiated from her core, latching to the three wounds she’d made: the neck, the left armpit, and the right chest. The spiral didn’t look terrifying, no explosions, no lightning but its draw was ravenous. The Titan’s HP and energy siphoned away in microcurrents too small to kill, yet enough to deflate the power of the next strike.

The Titan advanced, dragging the roof-fall at its shins. It raised the glowing axe, the light along the edge wavered for a heartbeat, then steadied. Death Spiral’s drain was a thimble against an ocean.

Sylvia bit the tip of her tongue and scored another line along her arm. Blood fell, touching the chain circle.

[Blood Instinct: +7, +8] – All Stats +120%

"Void Steps."

Not a run. Not a leap. A relocation like a stroke of ink drawn from one point to another. She reappeared at the Titan’s right knee, driving Oblivion Roots as deep as she could until the tendrils slid into hairline fractures of bone.

"Entropic Grasp."

The hand of death clenched again, this time not on flesh but on the pulsing heat-axis behind the bone. Temperature plunged in a single zone; the yellow light at the knee dimmed almost to nothing.

The Titan buckled to one knee.

It raised the axe from that kneel and cut.

A golden-white line scythed through fog, pillar, and floor, carving a straight trench of fire for dozens of meters. Sylvia arched her spine back, forcing her bones into the wrong bow, and the swing passed a fingernail’s breadth from her face.

The footing beneath her vanished, the floor split, dropping her into a shallow void.

"Form 2: Shield!"

Chains became a bridge, suspending her above the chasm. Dust plunged past like gray rain.

She glanced up: the Titan was already standing again. The knee that had gone dim flared back to life, though weaker. Her wounds weren’t closing, but they weren’t spreading either. And that was the problem. She was only slowing a mountain, not cracking it.

[MP: 33% → 27%]

[MP Regeneration active, but not fast enough]

Along the chasm’s rim, scattered zombie bones quivered softly, answering the Soul Chain she still maintained. Not an army just pieces: a hand, a rib, a skullcap. Sylvia looked at them. One command whispered through an unseen current:

Lend me a hold.

The bones crawled, stacking into anchors, biting into the fractured floor. Sylvia’s chains coiled around those anchors, bracing the bridge. She sprang up from the bone-span, vaulted to the lip, then dove at the Titan again.

"Killing Stroke."

No new stacks, nothing had truly died to her hand in the last minutes except uncounted fragments. But the motion-patterns carved into her muscles by thousands of kills remained. She diverted the Titan’s attacks not with force, but with habit: cutting corners, breaking rhythm, filling invisible gaps.

She scored again, stabbed again, and bound again. Venom Reaper Claw multiplied the poison across the three wounds. Death Spiral kept draining. Entropic Grasp forced the heat-axis to judder out of tune.

Still, the Titan’s axe kept singing ruin.

KRAAANG!

BOOOOM!

CRAAASH!

Each impact wrote a new quake into the room. Deadlock Field finally shattered, its lines collapsing like black glass.

Shadow Veil clung on a reluctant false dawn but without Deadlock, the Titan moved like a storm newly unchained.

For the first time, Sylvia noticed her breath racing. Her mind was still sharp, but the edges were starting to bleed. Numbers hovered at the corner of her vision: Unification cooldown still in the teens. MP dropping. HP was stable, but she was tired.

"So this is what tired feels like," she said, because it had been so very long since she’d felt anything like it.

The Titan raised the axe for the third time and this time, Sylvia could sense the intent in the motion. Not a slash, but a vertical hammer meant to obliterate the room’s heart. If it landed, the bone-bridge, the pillars, the anchors everything would explode. No footholds left. No fog to hide in.

Sylvia looked at her own palm, the old cuts. She lifted her claw and scored a long line from the base of her hand to the elbow.

[Blood Instinct: +9, +10 (Max)] – All Stats +150%

The world paused, as if saluting someone reckless enough to stand at the lip of something too vast. Black-blue blood dripped, spattering the broken floor, and small circles bloomed where the drops fell wild sigils born not of pure magic, but of decision.

She pressed both palms together forcing everything left into a single thin line.

"Appraisal."

Not to read she knew this enemy. She lit the panel as a metronome. The flicker of numbers, the rhythm of information, became a countdown her fingers could follow.

Three... two... one

"Void Steps."

She didn’t move far. She stepped over a skin-thin sliver of time, landing on the Titan’s shoulder the instant it brought the axe down. Her chains pinned into the surviving ceiling bones, a fragile safety harness. Sylvia bent backward, releasing Form 3: Death Spiral into a single line through the neck linking the bite, the armpit gouge, and the chest tear into one pathway.

The spiral sang silent, merciless. For the first time, the yellow light across the Titan’s body wavered all at once. The axe swing slowed by a fraction longer than before. A second? No eight-tenths. In this field, that was an age.

Sylvia took it.

"Eclipse Piercing!"

The final thrust is not the killing blow, but the lock. She fired it at the junction of the three wounds. Armor cracked, flesh dimmed, heat-flow spat

and then blasted sideways. Not an explosion that destroyed the Titan, but a backwash that flung Sylvia like a dry leaf.

BAAAAM!

She slammed into the far wall. The Shield failed for the first time not shattered, but guttering out like a lamp out of oil. She felt stone bite into the skin of her back, then slid down to one knee.

[HP: dipped slightly → instantly restored by Queen Flesh]

[MP: 27% → 18%]

[Unification Cooldown: 14:27]

Shadow Veil finally drew back like parted curtains the room reappearing with all the scars they’d carved into it together. The Ancient Titan stood at center, half-kneeling. The yellow light across its body flickered, but did not die. Its breath sounded like a colossal pump moving lava.

It rose again slowly, heavy, inevitable. Its red eyes fixed on Sylvia not with hatred, but with cool acknowledgment: you are an opponent, not prey.

Sylvia pushed to her feet. Her knee buckled for a heartbeat. Her left hand trembled not from fear, but from skirting her limit. She felt her fingers go numb and return, like cables reconnected under duress.

Sylvia forced herself not to step back, even as her whole body trembled, a taut string drawn too tight. The hot air still clung to her skin, leaving a faint sting where small cuts went unheeded. Unification was still locked; the cooldown numbers in the corner of her vision ticked on slow, cruel, impartial. Her MP trickled away even as regeneration worked like drops at the lip of a deepening well.

She did the math with a reflex that had always given her control. Three wounds, three channels, one spiral. It should have been enough to crush the heat-flow. It should have been.

But the giant was still standing.

The light across the Titan’s body flickered, but not as a sign of collapse; more like embers deliberately kept alive. It shifted its wounded shoulder back, took a steadier stance, then raised its axe slowly, like a ritual as if granting its opponent time to recognize there was no exit.

Sylvia’s fingers tightened. She tried to lift a hand, to call Nether Branches just to stall, but the spell surfaced only as half-formed lines on the floor, guttering out before they bloomed. My MP isn’t gone... but my focus is leaking. The pulse in her temples thumped again, and a far-off rumble like a thousand stone wagons marched across her skull.

"Breathe," she told herself, then let out a small bitter laugh, gone in an instant. Breathing felt like inhaling ash.

She looked around. The bones that had served as anchors were shattered, scattered; the Soul Chain at the far edge sent only a weak echo, like the last backwash of a wave touching a night shore. No reinforcements. No shortcuts. No bargain with luck.

KREEEAK... The Titan’s axe shifted a little, grinding the air. The floor beneath its feet cracked to match the shape of its sole rings of fracture spreading like a stone flower. That tiny motion was enough to make the room feel smaller. Sylvia felt the world shrink, squeezing her into the center of an ever-tightening circle.

If I retreat, where? Her hand sagged for a heartbeat. Shield could still be summoned, but she knew the cost: a brief span before it guttered again. Death Spiral? Still linked, but its draw wasn’t shaking the pillar. Entropic Grasp? Possible, but every clench made her head pound harder.

"Why won’t you... fall?" she murmured, her own voice strange, hoarse, and... small.

Her eyes, usually like frozen embers, now wore a thin film of fatigue. She forced focus on the details: the cracks in the armor, the Titan’s breathing pattern, the pause between lift and swing. Details she used to weave into strategy now felt like sand slipping through her fingers: present, visible, but impossible to hold.

WHUUM. The giant’s shoulder moved again. Sylvia slid one foot forward, then stopped halfway. Void Steps could save a single moment, but a moment is only a moment. After that, emptiness.

Despair arrived without a drumroll cold, fine, honest. Not fear of death; she’d outgrown that long ago. It was the admission that all the keys she held didn’t fit this door, and the door refused to compromise.

"If that’s the case..." she whispered the sentence unfinished. Her head dipped a fraction, not in surrender, but because the weight had suddenly become too real to carry with a straight neck.

Silence. Even the hiss of dust seemed reluctant.

Then something changed.

So small at first only a fading sheen at the edge of a wound she’d left. The yellow glow there... wasn’t flickering; it was drying out. The Titan’s gray-blue skin around unseen coils paled. Like stone being forced into chalk.

Sylvia didn’t notice. She was too busy steadying the tremor at her fingertips, too busy counting beats she couldn’t use, too busy stitching the edges of her mind so they wouldn’t tear. To her, the Titan was the same: upright, vast, impossible.

The giant drew a breath deep, heavy and suddenly hitched. There was a wobble in the breathing engine, a rasp that shouldn’t be there. The hand on the axe twitched, then tensed again. The golden-white along the blade frayed, as if that sacred fire had abruptly run out of oxygen.

Sylvia still didn’t realize. She only saw the motion grow less clean and marked it as a rhythm variation. She took a half-step, hesitated, and stopped. Her legs felt poured full of lead.

GROOOOH! KHHH!! RAAAAH!!!

A bellow tore out of the Titan’s chest, breaking differently than before not pure rage, but pain forced through a stone throat. The sound slammed the walls, shook loose dust like a rain of needles. Color leached further from its skin, yellow vein-lines collapsing into pale ash.

Sylvia lifted her face, startled not because she understood, but because what happened didn’t match what she expected. Her heart or whatever served in its place beat slowly, hesitantly, delaying judgment.

She still didn’t know why. She hadn’t seen the poison web knitting in silence, hadn’t tallied the seconds bought by each bite and cut. All she saw was a giant paling and roaring a brief stutter in something that should never waver.

And in the space between those roars, for the first time since she entered the room, Sylvia didn’t think about her next move.

She simply stared surprised, and confused.