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But Kai hadn't arrived at the carpenter ant colony's tunnels as a planned hero or some gallant prince from the skies. He literally crash landed into a random corner of the southern forest. Pure chaos. And yet, fate had its own design… leading him straight to Akayoroi.
A few hours ago…
Inside the Rift Gate
Beneath a thunder-glass sky and above a lake that hummed like a live wire, the system whispered its final warning:
[Alert: Hostile Entity Detected
Classification: Storm Myriad Beast – "Tesseral Seraphim" (Rank 5★, Aberrant)
Location: Underwater cave mouth at 2 o'clock.]
The mirrored lake bulged outward like a membrane stretched from below. A serpentine skeletal head surfaced. It has teeth of raw ore, and twin globes of swirling plasma eyes. Lightning flickered inside its translucent neck, illuminating a segmented body that shifted between solid metal and liquid quicksilver.
The creature hissed with a sound like solid hitting water. Kai's spear slid to his hand.
