The enormous hand tightened around the edge of the pit, crushing stone between fingers thick enough to wrap around a man's torso.
Rayleigh felt the floor shift beneath his boots as the creature hauled itself upward, while behind him Asfi and Anakitty moved Lulune and Welf farther from the opening.
Neither rescued adventurer was in any condition to fight, Lulune could barely keep her eyes open unless Asfi held her upright, and although Welf was stubbornly trying to remain upright, one glance at his shaking legs made the effort almost painful to watch.
The thing emerging from the pit gave them no time to retreat.
Its second hand slammed onto the cavern floor, scattering loose weapons as a massive grey-black body rose behind it.
The creature stood nearly five meters tall once it dragged itself completely free, although its hunched spine kept its head from scraping the ceiling.
Fragments of adventurer equipment were embedded throughout its flesh as if the monster had swallowed an armory and grown around whatever it could not digest.
Broken swords protruded from its shoulders, spearheads disappeared between the ribs, and entire sections of armor had fused across its chest and thighs.
The magic stones were worse.
Hundreds of them pulsed beneath translucent patches of flesh, gathered into dense clusters around the chest, abdomen, shoulders, and upper legs.
Some were clearly from ordinary Dungeon monsters, while others had partially fused together into irregular masses that glowed with several different colors at once.
Rayleigh could also feel the spiritual pressure of the Enhanced Species that had jumped into the pit moments earlier.
They were still there: their bodies had disappeared into the giant, but traces of the power they had absorbed remained inside it.
Lulune saw the creature clearly for the first time and tightened her fingers around Asfi's sleeve.
"It wasn't that big before. I could only see part of it from the ledge, but every few hours the other monsters dumped magic stones into that hole. Sometimes the ones that had been practicing with weapons climbed down afterward too. A few came back later, but most never did."
Her voice was hoarse, yet the intelligence operative in her pushed through the pain and continued before Asfi could stop her.
"The ones that returned were always better fighters."
Rayleigh understood.
The pit had never been a simple feeding ground.
The smaller Enhanced Species had been learning individually, then carrying whatever they acquired down here, and whether the giant inherited those lessons deliberately or merely absorbed them alongside their bodies hardly mattered.
They were facing the result.
The giant lifted its head. Three mouths opened across its upper body, one where its face should have been and another two running diagonally beneath its collarbones.
The pull against the Zanpakutō struck immediately.
Tobiume vibrated in Tsubaki's grip, Gonryōmaru crackled against Ais's hand, and Rayleigh felt the pressure tug against every sword he carried, even though all five were currently sealed.
The giant wanted them.
More accurately, it wanted what their Zanpakutō contained.
Rayleigh drew Benihime.
"Asfi, take Lulune and Welf toward the passage. Anakitty, stay with them and stop anything smaller from getting close. Don't worry about helping us unless the fight reaches you."
Anakitty nodded and shifted at once to take more of Welf's weight.
Welf looked ready to object until his knees nearly folded beneath him, and he swallowed whatever protest had been coming, probably the smartest decision he'd made all day.
The giant noticed the movement toward the exit, its attention shifting from Rayleigh to the wounded before it stepped toward them.
Tsubaki intercepted, keeping Tobiume sealed as she drove the blade into the outside of its knee with enough force to move the entire leg sideways.
Stone cracked beneath the creature's foot, and before the mouths across its chest could turn toward the Zanpakutō, she ripped Tobiume free and struck the same joint again from a different angle.
The giant answered with one enormous fist.
Tsubaki didn't try to block it head-on, twisting away as the blow came down and letting the knuckles crash into the floor where she had been standing.
The impact blasted a crater into the stone and threw debris high enough to strike the ceiling.
Ais entered through the dust with Gonryōmaru still sealed.
Rather than attempting to wound the reinforced torso, she attacked three different points in quick succession: the wrist, elbow, and shoulder, then retreated before the giant could close its hand around her.
The wounds reacted differently.
The cut across the wrist sealed almost immediately, the shoulder followed several seconds later, and the elbow barely regenerated.
Ais looked toward Rayleigh.
"The stones aren't spread evenly."
He had seen it too: the creature had concentrated most of its stolen magic stones around the areas where sheer durability mattered most, leaving the spaces between those clusters comparatively vulnerable.
"Then we stop fighting the body and start breaking the structure holding it together. Hit the joints between the clusters and don't maintain any released ability long enough for those mouths to establish a connection."
Tsubaki rolled Tobiume once in her hand.
"That sounds a lot better than trying to carve through five meters of monster."
The giant abruptly reached toward its own forearm, fingers closing around a sword hilt protruding from the flesh.
With a violent pull, it tore the weapon free, black blood splashing across the floor, and raised the longsword.
Anakitty stopped near the passage.
"That guard…"
Rayleigh recognized it a heartbeat later. Raul's.
The same stance had been used by the humanoid Enhanced Species at the barricade and carried into the training chamber by the monsters that followed; now the giant knew it too.
It lunged toward Ais, the stolen sword ridiculously small in its hand, yet the thrust came with disturbing control.
Ais shifted outside the point and tried to counter across the wrist, only for the creature to rotate the blade and guide Gonryōmaru away with the same deflection Anakitty had encountered earlier.
Ais broke contact at once.
The creature didn't chase blindly; it repositioned, kept the sword between them, and waited.
Tsubaki came from its left, and the giant withdrew exactly far enough to leave Tobiume short. Her visible eye narrowed.
"So the little ones really handed everything over."
"Assume anything they learned survived inside it."
Rayleigh watched the monster move again.
"That includes the mistakes."
The giant might have inherited Raul's guard, Anakitty's counters, the copied principles of Tobiume's fire and Gonryōmaru's lightning, and everything else the smaller monsters had consumed, but none of those pieces belonged together.
Raul's defensive stance had been developed for a human-sized adventurer carrying equipment appropriate to his body.
Anakitty's movements depended on her balance and speed.
Ais fought with an economy of motion that only worked because she understood exactly how far Gonryōmaru could reach.
Tsubaki relied on physical power most swordsmen simply did not possess.
The giant had collected the techniques. It had not lived the lives behind them.
"Ais, stop giving it proper sword exchanges. Tsubaki, keep forcing it to turn. Make it choose between things it learned from different people."
Neither woman asked for clarification. Tsubaki changed first.
She stopped targeting the creature directly and began using the room against it.
A broken spear was kicked beneath one foot, loose stone sent skidding beneath another, and Tobiume repeatedly struck only when the giant had already committed its weight somewhere else.
Ais abandoned the clean rhythm the monsters had studied from her earlier battles.
One attack was a sword thrust, the next a low kick, and when the giant prepared to meet her blade again, she simply changed direction and struck the elbow with Gonryōmaru's hilt instead.
The creature tried Raul's defensive movement against Tsubaki, nearly costing itself the knee.
The technique expected an opponent who respected the angle of the guard; Tsubaki simply smashed through it, her sealed Zanpakutō crashing into the joint with enough raw force to make the giant stumble.
Ais struck the weakened elbow again at once, and this time Gonryōmaru entered the wound.
"Pierce them, Gonryōmaru!"
Lightning flashed for less than a second, and Ais withdrew before the mouths could properly react.
The giant still tried to absorb the discharge. Something unexpected happened first.
The lightning touched one of the broken blades buried beneath its flesh, then jumped to another piece of metal, then another.
White-blue current raced beneath the translucent skin and travelled straight between several clusters of magic stones.
Three stones burst almost simultaneously, and the giant's arm convulsed.
Ais stared at the damage while Rayleigh's attention shifted to the network of weapons inside the creature.
Before either of them spoke, Welf did.
"The metal is connecting them!"
Everyone near the passage looked toward him. Welf had stopped trying to walk.
He was leaning heavily against Anakitty now, but his eyes were fixed on the giant with the concentration of a smith examining an unfamiliar weapon.
"The flesh grew around the swords and spearheads instead of dissolving them. Look at the upper arm. The big clusters all have pieces of metal running between them."
Rayleigh followed his direction and saw it: thin sections of steel disappeared from one magic-stone cluster and reappeared near another.
The monster had strengthened itself by consuming weapons, and in the process had accidentally created conductive paths through its own body.
Welf continued, breathing harder as he spoke.
"Don't waste time trying to cut through all that armor. Break the places where the weapons cross the joints. If the metal is carrying force between the clusters, damaging those connections should make whole sections fail together."
Tsubaki gave him a quick look, and for all the blood and exhaustion covering the boy, there was unmistakable pride in her expression.
"Good eye."
Welf managed a weak grin.
"I am a smith."
The giant apparently understood enough of the conversation to realize something dangerous had been discovered.
It ripped the longsword out of its own hand and threw it toward Ais.
She moved aside.
The sword was only a distraction: one of the mouths beneath the creature's collarbone opened wide, and crimson spiritual pressure gathered inside.
Tsubaki's amusement vanished.
"Oh, come on."
The copied Tobiume fireball erupted across the cavern.
Rayleigh stepped between it and the wounded, Benihime sweeping through the unstable center of the attack.
He did not try to stop the entire blast.
Instead, he split its weakest point, forcing the copied fireball into two uneven halves that exploded against opposite sides of the cavern.
Heat rolled over the chamber.
Tsubaki stared at the burning walls with an increasingly offended expression.
"I know that thing only copied the energy it swallowed, but watching it fire Little Ume's attack out of its chest is getting personal."
"Then give it something useless."
Tsubaki smiled.
"Now that sounds fun."
"Snap, Tobiume!"
The Zanpakutō transformed in her hands, its modified blade taking on the familiar shape of a long tongue of flame, crimson liquid flowing through the groove down its center as heat spread around her.
The giant raised both arms.
It remembered what Tobiume's fireball did and expected the attack to come directly at its body.
Tsubaki fired past it.
The projectile struck the ground behind the left heel, and the explosion tore away a section of floor, dropping the creature's foot into the sudden depression.
Before it could pull free, Tsubaki fired again at the opposite side.
A second blast destroyed its footing, and the giant lurched forward, instinctively reaching down with the already damaged arm to catch itself.
Exactly where they wanted it.
Ais drove Gonryōmaru into the weakened elbow, and lightning entered the embedded metal.
The creature's mouths opened at once, drawing at the spiritual pressure around the wound, but Ais had already learned the correct timing, allowing only a short pulse to travel through the blade before withdrawing.
The mouths consumed almost nothing; the buried weapons carried the electricity farther. Several magic stones around the upper arm shattered, and the limb went numb.
Tsubaki came in before regeneration could begin, and instead of wasting another fireball, she used Tobiume physically, smashing through the joint Ais had weakened.
Bone, flesh, and embedded steel failed together, and the entire forearm tore away, crashing to the floor hard enough to shake the cavern.
The giant screamed through all three mouths.
Then the severed arm began dissolving, though the magic stones inside it did not; they slid across the floor toward the main body.
Rayleigh saw them move.
"Asfi!"
She had already reached into one of her pouches.
Three small cylinders flew from her hand, landing among the crawling stones and detonating one after another, scattering the cluster across the cavern before the giant could absorb them again.
Asfi remained beside Lulune afterward, making no attempt to join the frontline.
"Apparently, despite all of its progress, it still hasn't discovered a sophisticated countermeasure to being blown apart by ordinary explosives."
Tsubaki laughed once while repositioning.
"I respect how committed you are to proving that point."
The giant slammed its remaining hand against the floor, and the shockwave interrupted anything further.
Stone surged outward, and broken weapons lifted from the ground and became shrapnel.
Rayleigh threw up a barrier with Benihime across the passage at once, protecting Asfi, Anakitty, Lulune, and Welf from the worst of the debris, while Ais and Tsubaki moved with the blast rather than wasting strength trying to hold their ground.
The giant rose from its damaged knee.
Its body was already beginning to fail in sections, but the magic stones packed around the chest and abdomen still burned brightly.
Then several clusters beneath the ribs changed color, and blue-white light spread between them.
Gonryōmaru reacted in Ais's hand as the giant released lightning.
The copied discharge didn't behave anything like Ais's controlled attacks.
Electricity raced through the embedded weapons before exploding outward in branching arcs, striking floor, wall, and ceiling indiscriminately.
Tsubaki caught one on Tobiume's blade and was forced backward several steps.
Another pursued Asfi into the passage before Rayleigh's barrier diverted it into the wall, and a third struck one of the crude furnaces, detonating the remaining magic-stone fuel and tearing open the rear of the training chamber.
Ais didn't try to meet the lightning.
She watched.
When the giant released another burst, this time she moved through the gaps.
The electricity jumped according to the metal inside its body rather than any real understanding of Gonryōmaru.
The creature could reproduce the power it had consumed, but it could not make the current obey the way Ais could.
She slipped between two arcs and reached the weakened side.
The giant tried to reposition using one of Raul's copied movements, but its missing arm ruined the balance the technique required, and the adjustment came late.
Ais cut across the knee as Tsubaki struck the opposite leg at the same moment, and the giant collapsed onto one side.
Rayleigh saw Welf staring at the chest, the boy's expression changing.
"There!"
He pointed toward the fused breastplate.
"Left edge! There's a spearhead under the armor!"
Rayleigh followed the direction.
A broken piece of metal protruded barely a finger's width from beneath the fused plate.
Benihime cut across the flesh surrounding it, and the spearhead became exposed.
Ais understood what Welf wanted: Gonryōmaru touched the metal, and one short pulse of lightning entered.
This time the effect was immediate.
The current travelled through the buried network toward the center of the chest, and several stones ruptured beneath the armor as a long crack opened across the fused breastplate.
The giant roared and swung wildly at Ais.
She had already left.
Tsubaki arrived in front of the opening, and Tobiume's fireball hit the cracked armor at close range.
The mouths tried to absorb the spiritual pressure, but too many connections inside the body had already failed.
The creature managed to consume part of the attack before the rest detonated against its chest.
The fused armor tore open. Dozens of magic stones became visible beneath it, the largest cluster sitting deeper inside.
Rayleigh could have reached it with Benihime, but he remained where he was.
"Tsubaki!"
She was already moving.
Tobiume entered the exposed cluster physically, the blade driving between the fused stones and forcing them apart.
The giant tried to bring its remaining hand down on her, but Ais passed beneath the arm, and Gonryōmaru pierced the center of the cluster.
She didn't release a massive lightning attack. She used exactly enough.
A concentrated discharge entered the fractures Tsubaki had opened and jumped between the damaged magic stones.
The first shattered, then the next, and a chain of cracks spread through the chest.
The giant's three mouths opened at once, but whatever copied technique it tried to produce never formed before its central cluster burst apart.
For several seconds, the monster remained upright, as if the embedded weapons alone were holding its body together.
Then its legs failed, and the enormous corpse toppled backward into the pit.
The impact shook the entire training chamber.
Everyone waited as the spiritual pressure inside the giant weakened, then vanished.
Only then did Rayleigh lower Benihime.