86: Chapter 86 Corpse-Pile Boss Battle

Before dawn, the maintenance shaft of the Pump Station's underground pipes was flagged as a "Level 1 Anomaly Zone" by Hephaestus.

The alarm was triggered by real-time feedback equipment installed deep within the pipes by Iron Stomach. At four in the morning, the device sent back a set of anomalous data: the information-state readings suddenly spiked at a location marked as the "Niche Concentration Area" at the bottom of the pipes, with peaks exceeding thirty times the previous records, accompanied by a large amount of residual Warp particles. Hephaestus's automated analysis system completed a spectrum comparison within seconds, and the conclusion was brief and clear—multiple active signal sources consistent with the residual spectrum on Grail's Ritual Dagger were detected at the bottom of the pipes. Those contaminated fragments, which Grail had spent years burying in the pipe niches, suddenly began to synchronously release energy after several days of silence.

"They are resonating," Hephaestus told Lin Qiming. "A correlation reaction has occurred between the fragments, similar to the precursors of the chaotic form-switching Grail exhibited during his lifetime. It is speculated that the trigger was a preset delayed activation condition being met after the Pump Station control room was captured—it could be a time threshold, or the number of fragments reaching a critical resonance count. An unstable but steadily strengthening collection of chaotic energy is forming at the bottom of the pipes."

Lin Qiming sat up from his makeshift bed, issuing his first command while pulling on his boots: "Notify Grey Mist Walker, Iron Wall Rebirth, and Rookie One. Tell them—there is a matrix of chaos fragments buried by Grail before his death at the bottom of the pipes, and it's activating. I need them to lead teams down for a clearing operation. Tell them this is not a drill."

"Do I need to specify the combat method?"

"No need. They know what to do."

Grey Mist Walker was counting last night's ammunition consumption when she received the mission push. After reading the briefing, she asked no questions, simply saying into the channel: "Full-level corpse-stacking. Three-layer rotation: Decoy Group, Delay Group, and Annihilation Group. Iron Stomach—you're in charge of triggering the minefield. Rookie One—Firepower Group, bring every usable automatic rifle and those two Concentrated Smoke Canisters Nightsong just made. Rat Speaker—take the probes up to the platform; I need you monitoring the energy fluctuations of those fragments the whole time, report any anomalies immediately."

The assault team assembled within ten minutes. Iron Stomach was the first to arrive at the shaft entrance, having already tied a safety rope around his waist—not because Lin Qiming demanded it, but because he had learned to do so himself. Nightsong squatted by the shaft, performing a final check on his rope buckle. "Don't go without the rope this time," Nightsong said without looking up. "It's not just a pit down there. It's Grail's grave."

Iron Stomach looked at him, went silent for a second, and then said: "I know."

The pipe shaft was about forty meters deep. Iron Wall Rebirth was the first to fast-rope to the bottom, his combat boots hitting the standing water at the base of the pipe with a short metallic echo. He held up a glow stick to look around, then spoke into the communicator: "The space at the bottom is wider than marked on the blueprints—there's a whole area of erosion on the right rock wall, likely carved out by repeated flushing from the underground water veins after the pipes were laid. There are quite a few fragments embedded among the rubble inside, larger than the ones Iron Stomach found in the niches before, with dark red patterns on their surfaces. They're arranged in some repeating pattern—it's not random. It's an enlarged version of some ritual symbol."

Iron Stomach landed behind him and took one look before saying: "This is a replica of the things Grail drew on the ground of the observation fort. He carved them here too."

Something moved deep in the darkness. Those dark red patterns suddenly lit up—not all at once, but in sequence, like a string of ignited gunpowder fuses burning from the end of the pipe all the way to the feet of the probe team. The hair on the back of Iron Stomach's neck stood up. On the stone wall at the end of the passage, a face was emerging from the shadows—first the brow bone, then the eye sockets—there were no eyeballs inside, only dark red light. That face was exactly as Bone Crusher had described, but more twisted, looking even less like something that used to be human.

"Everyone back away!" Iron Wall Rebirth roared, drawing his short sword.

As the thing peeled away from the stone wall, it made a sickening, wet tearing sound. It didn't walk out—it surged out first, like a mass of compressed rotten meat suddenly released from its bonds, spreading into a dark red swamp at the bottom of the pipe before a massive, humanoid silhouette slowly rose from the mire. Its left arm had completely mutated into a thick, chitinous claw, identical to Bone Crusher's description of Grail's first "awakening" over a decade ago, but the blue glow of ancient one fragments was embedded between the chitin—those fragments were supposed to be unusable by chaos energy directly, but some ancient necromantic pollution acted as a conversion medium between them, weaving a third type of resonance within this creature that belonged to no known belief system. Several glowing green crystal shards were stuck in its shoulder blades, and the surrounding air emitted a thin, high-pitched piercing whistle due to the dual energy repulsion. In the center of its chest was a hollow, and embedded in that hollow was a fist-sized master control crystal—it was the hilt of the dagger Grail used in life, the brass already melted into a semi-liquid conductor, sending a dark red pulse throughout the body.

Lin Qiming watched the real-time data from Hephaestus in the backend and suddenly understood something he hadn't been able to figure out. Grail's death hadn't caused any subsequent pollution—not because he had been cleaned up thoroughly enough, but because long ago, he had already sealed most of the contaminated energy into these fragments beneath the Pump Station. Every time he went to the ritual point in Sector B-9, he would pass through here, carving a small niche in the inner pipe wall and inserting a fresh fragment activated with his blood. After his death, these fragments lost their master's control, but the activation program was still running. They just needed time. And now, the time had come.

"So the Deep Rock Workshop's defense system only purged his physical body," Lin Qiming said to Hephaestus. "His backup has always been here. From the moment he buried the first fragment in the pipes, he was preparing for this day."

He pressed the communication key and said to all the players at the bottom of the pipe a sentence just as brief as the one Grey Mist Walker had ordered: "Full-level corpse-stacking. Fight until he is reduced to Ashes."

The battle officially commenced seconds later. The Vanguard Group was the first to advance into the mouth of the erosion passage. Two decoys lunged straight for the stone wall where the runes were most dense, striking the fragments with short clubs to draw the first surge of the aggregate's wrath toward themselves. The decoy on the left was sent flying by a horizontal claw swipe, his entire body torn apart at the waist in mid-air; his limbs began to dissipate into pale gold light particles before even hitting the ground—the white light at the respawn point followed immediately. The decoy on the right lasted a moment longer, rolling on the ground to dodge the first sweep, but the aggregate followed up immediately, crushing his spine with a foot. His last communication before death was: "The fragments are drinking my blood—not a metaphor, the patterns on the pipe walls are glowing—" followed by piercing white noise.

Grey Mist Walker gave no pause. The second group of decoys charged into the passage the moment the first team fell, with Iron Stomach leading the charge. His safety rope was still swinging wildly at his waist. He slid down the edge of the erosion passage, clutching two smoke canisters borrowed from Nightsong; he bit off the fuses with his teeth and hurled the canisters one after another at the aggregate's chest. Thick grey-white smoke exploded between the aggregate and the pipe wall, temporarily obscuring its vision. He took advantage of the moment to scoop up a handful of small, scattered fragments from the ground, stuffing them into his waist bag before turning to run. "Its joints! Behind the shoulder blades—there's a crack in the chitin there, I saw it, guns should be able to pierce it—there's a fragment embedded especially deep there, looks like it was hammered in by Grail himself with a dagger, it's covered in blood—those fragments are alive!"

Rookie One's Firepower Group concentrated their fire from the bottom of the shaft upwards. Automatic rifles and captured imitation hunting rifles fired in unison, sparks flying as bullets hit the aggregate's chitin, but all fire was directed at a single point—the crack in the right arm joint marked by Iron Stomach. The aggregate let out a low roar and twisted its body back, its massive left claw sweeping across the pipe wall and tearing away a protruding rock above. Rubble rained down on the Firepower Group's line, burying several front-row shooters; the replacements in the back row continued to aim through the dust with squinted eyes. The white light of the respawn point flashed incessantly. Rookie One bent down to avoid a flying stone shard, yelling into the communicator with his head turned: "Keep firing—ignore the fallen! They'll be back right away!"

Dark Blade waited for his moment in the left branch passage. He had been moving slowly and alone along the stone wall in the darkness, slipping into the mouth of the erosion passage from the flank as soon as the aggregate appeared, always waiting in a blind spot behind a pile of rubble. Others needed light; he did not. Others relied on scanners to identify targets; he used only his eyes. He lunged from the side the moment the aggregate turned to smash the rocks, climbing up its torso from behind—his ascent was incredibly fast and strangely light—and promptly jammed two special smoke canisters into the deepest part of the crack behind the shoulder blade. Thick smoke billowed from the gap, and the aggregate threw its head back in a pained howl, its right arm's movement stalling for half a heartbeat.

That half-heartbeat was all it took. Grey Mist Walker issued the command: "Annihilation Group, go!"

Iron Wall Rebirth led his team in a frontal charge, pouring all remaining ammunition into that cracked joint chitin. Bullets, buckshot, and laser energy beams crossed and penetrated the same point until the chitin was finally shattered, and the cracked green crystals and blue ancient one fragments inside burst out together. The aggregate's right arm detached and fell to the ground, smashing into several burning remnants. Its body tilted violently, its massive left claw still swinging wildly, smashing the last few close-quarters players into the pipe wall. The battle continued until dawn, with neither side thinking of any retreat. The brass dagger hilt on the aggregate's chest was still pulsing, but that dark red pulse was weakening; the white light of the respawn point, by then, almost never went out.

Lin Qiming watched everything in the backend through Hephaestus. He did not intervene. He simply pushed the real-time combat data line by line to the tactical panels of Iron Wall Rebirth and Grey Mist Walker. The corruption value accumulation entries piled up like a rolling snowball—his eyes lingered on that row of numbers several times, but he did not call for a stop. He only attached a sentence to the final push: "Wipe it all out, leave nothing."

The aggregate finally collapsed the moment all the fragment energy was exhausted. The faded brass dagger hilt fell from the center of its chest into the standing water, kicking up a small cloud of mist. The massive husk dried up and peeled away piece by piece from the inside out, turning into grey-white stone chips that piled into a small mound of ash on the ground. Silence returned to the bottom of the pipe, with only the low hum of distant water pumps and the crackle of a few remaining flames on the pipe walls. Grey Mist Walker pushed the last cooled-down laser gun energy cell into the chamber, walked a few steps, and squatted before the pile of Ashes, testing the temperature with the back of her hand—it was cold. She pressed the muzzle against the thickest part of the ash pile and used the last beam to melt the remaining brass dagger hilt into several unrecognizable lumps of metal slag. Then she stood up and said into the communicator: "Battle over."

Nightsong had been guarding the safety rope buckle without speaking. He pulled the rope back. Iron Stomach came back alive, covered in blood, but alive. Using the spare rope remaining at his waist, he bundled up the shoulder blade fragment that Rookie One had shot off and handed it to Nightsong. "This might be the last thing related to him at the bottom of the pipes. Do you want to take it to your little dark room and scan it to see what's left inside?"

Nightsong took the fragment, flipped it over, and examined it against the remaining flames on the rock wall. Three deep scratches gouged by a sharp tool were carved onto the fragment—they weren't runes, but marks left by Grail long ago as he repeatedly cut his own palm with that dagger. He took it from Nightsong's hand and locked it into the guild database's encrypted folder marked "Grail Remnants," with maximum clearance.