Biocores: The Legendary Weapon Designer-Chapter 101: Conquest

The Molten Maw was quiet now.

Cracked obsidian ridges still glowed with residual heat, but the dragon’s breath no longer churned the air. The ash hung like mist, thick and cloying, clinging to the folds of armor and the slits in their visors. The team stood in the wake of destruction, blinking against the rising steam and the first signs of dawnlight creeping in from the crevice roof above.

Akron lowered Althea gently to the ground. Her body, still recovering from the mecha state, was flushed and trembling, eyes unfocused but steady.

"Stay with me," Akron said softly.

Althea smirked faintly. "Don’t worry. I’m not dying in this hole."

A shadow fell across them.

Magnus had arrived.

No fanfare. No roar. Just boots crunching across fractured obsidian as the Conqueror made his way toward the kill site. His armor was heavier than the rest, forged with veinlike tubes that pulsed with filtered plasma. His cloak trailed behind him like molten silk, its edges kept aloft by static fields. freeweɓnovel.cøm

He stopped by the corpse.

Silent.

Studied it for several long seconds.

Then spoke.

"You’re five minutes over schedule," he said.

Nioh groaned from where he sat against a jagged boulder. "Tell the dragon that."

Magnus tilted his head slightly. "No need. You already made the point for us."

He tapped the heel of his boot against the dragon’s chest, where the cryo blade had ended its reign.

"Biocore extraction begins now. Full excavation follows."

He turned, facing the black maw leading deeper underground—further than even the dragon had dared claim.

"From this moment forward, the Molten Maw is ours."

Twelve Hours Later

Excavation teams arrived by the dozens.

Mechanical spiders skittered down from the support elevators, unfolding legs and drilling appendages to set up camp. Drones zipped overhead, mapping the terrain in real time, creating digital overlays of mineral veins, lava routes, and potential danger zones. Magnus moved among them like a commander on a battlefield, issuing orders in curt, efficient bursts.

The dragon’s biocore had been secured and sealed inside a magnetic prism chamber. It pulsed violently, even in death—raw heat and evolutionary data trapped in a crystalline orb the size of a man’s head. Nioh handled it with care, suspending it within a stasis drone.

"Second evolution traces," he muttered, scanning the biocore’s interior. "This thing was trying to overwrite its own body, even while dying."

"Like it was responding to something deeper," Akron added, standing beside him. "Or something calling it forward."

Nioh nodded. "Something we haven’t reached yet."

They stared at the dark tunnels beyond the main chamber. Faint vibrations echoed up from below—unclaimed territory. Still alive. Still moving.

It was not just a kill site anymore.

It was a frontier.

Day 3 – Forward Operations

By the third day, the initial perimeter had been locked down.

Magnus had established a forward operating base named Obsidian Gate. Built into the natural curvature of the lavaflow, it housed four main divisions: Biocore Analysis, Material Processing, Combat Recovery, and Deep Exploration.

"Move fast, dig smart, mine quiet," Magnus told every new arrival.

Althea had recovered enough to walk again. Though still stiff, she kept her blade close. "You sure about the quiet part?" she asked him during their briefing.

"Quiet doesn’t mean soft. It means surgical."

"Cute," she smirked.

Magnus didn’t laugh. He rarely did.

"Tell your squad: new rules from the top. Any shard-bearing material belongs to the Guild first. No hoarding, no pocketing. We’re not here for trophies. We’re here to occupy."

Akron raised an eyebrow. "Which means?"

"We aren’t passing through. We’re staying."

Day 5 – Riches Unearthed

They struck crystal on the fifth day.

It wasn’t normal shard crystal. Not even a variant of known mythic strains. This one bled when cut—metallic red, like coagulated ore mixed with memory. Nioh nicknamed it Sangrine.

"Self-healing lattice," he whispered, examining the shard under high-magnification lenses. "It adapts. Learns. It’s storing trauma data from past impacts."

Magnus loomed behind him.

"Can we integrate it?"

Nioh hesitated. "Maybe. But it’s volatile. No one’s ever mapped a resonance signature like this. Might not even sync with traditional cores."

Magnus was silent for a long time. Then: "Put it under lock and key. No one uses it until I say so."

But word spread fast. Whispers of the red crystal filtered through every level of the camp. Prospectors began volunteering for deeper routes. Veterans sharpened their weapons with restless anticipation.

Even wounded soldiers refused evacuation.

The Maw had become legend overnight.

Day 9 – The Heart

On the ninth day, one of the deep tunnels collapsed.

A scout unit—four strong—was buried beneath the cave-in. Only one crawled back up.

Bleeding. Burned. His eyes gone white.

"There’s... a second dragon," he muttered before collapsing into Nioh’s arms. "Or what’s left of it. Not dead. Not alive. Feeding off something buried... pulsing..."

Magnus called for a lockdown.

Everyone within Obsidian Gate froze as crimson alerts blared through the base. Mechs reassembled. Drills halted. Defensive batteries swiveled toward the tunnel mouth.

Akron and Althea stood at Magnus’s side.

"You think it’s another evolution?" Althea asked.

"No," Nioh said from behind her. He held the Sangrine crystal up to the dim camp lights. "I think this one made the others."

Day 10 – Descent

The descent into the deep corridor took nearly four hours.

The heat down here was unreal—dry, scalding, and oppressive. Even through reinforced suits, the temperature gnawed at their bones. Althea’s blade hummed quietly in its sheath, reacting to the latent shard radiation. Nioh’s custom respirator clicked with every breath. Magnus led the way like a storm given flesh, visor locked forward, eyes hidden behind a glare-resistant shade.

Then they saw it.

The Heart.

It rose out of the lava bed like a tumor of molten crystal—veins of red Sangrine snaked up and down its surface, some hard, some still fluid, writhing with heat. And within it, the fossil.

They thought it was a carcass at first.

Until it moved.

Not a full twitch. Just a slow ripple of muscle under calcified skin—like something dreaming in slow motion.

Everyone stopped. No orders needed. Just awe.

The thing was easily 80 meters long. Its body fused with the Heart. Bone and crystal had merged, forming something neither dead nor fully alive. Multiple wings were cocooned behind hardened mineral, but the faint outline of them pressed against the surface every few minutes like shifting tectonic plates.

Magnus didn’t blink.

"This," he said quietly, "is a war god waiting to be reborn."

Nioh approached carefully, scanning. "Its tissue is still regenerating. Barely. But it’s... breathing. And it’s linked directly to the Sangrine lattice. There’s no known precedent for this."

"Good," Magnus said. "Means we get to make one."

Akron, still in partial mecha-state, stared. "What are you thinking?"

Magnus didn’t look away. "We’re not harvesting this. We’re not studying it from a lab in some Node-core bunker."

He turned. Eyes hidden. Voice serious.

"We’re going to tame it."

Silence.

"You want to ride it?" Althea asked flatly.

"Control it," Magnus corrected. "Command it. It’s tied to this place, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be unbound. We just need the right trigger."

Nioh whistled low. "You’re talking about reactivating a fossilized mythic biocore, construct bonded to a self-evolving biocore embedded in a living mineral we don’t understand."

"Exactly, I want a mount-type weapon" Magnus said.

He tapped his wristpad. A string of encrypted signals left his rig.

Within seconds, dozens of new signatures registered on their HUDs—heavy-lift drones, biologists, shard engineers, resonance theorists, and tech priests were on their way.

"I’m assembling a team," Magnus continued. "From your unit, Nioh. You’ll have access to the best. Rations, clearance, everything. Your price is twenty million credits."

Nioh turned slowly.

"Forty... million?"

"Upfront."

Nioh was quiet for a second. Then: "What’s the catch?"

"You tell me everything," Magnus said. "No secrets. No black-box data. If you find out how it thinks—how it breathes—I get a report before you finish writing it. And when we figure out how to wake it..."

He pointed toward the Heart.

"I ride it first."

--

The Heart’s red glow stretched across the entire camp, casting long shadows through the metal framework of the command towers. Even the lava rivers seemed to quiet, as if recognizing something greater now claimed the Maw.

In the central dome of Obsidian Gate, Nioh’s team had set up a live-feed chamber—three holoscreens streamed data from the Heart, including internal temperature flux, mineral cohesion analysis, and something new:

Bioelectric Pulse Drift.

Slow pulses of neuroelectric data filtered through the Sangrine veins into the surrounding rock. The entire cave was an echo chamber. The dragon’s biocore was spilling into the terrain like a signal—dormant, yes, but searching.

"All this time..." Nioh murmured, running gloved fingers across the display. "It wasn’t guarding the Maw. It was the Maw."

Althea sat nearby, running diagnostics on a fragment of fused Sangrine crystal.

"Imagine if it wakes up and decides we’re parasites."

"Then we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it," Akron said, rejoining them from patrol.

From the command tower above, Magnus stood alone.

He watched his camp operate like clockwork. Power coils hummed. Engineers assembled neural interfaces. Tech-priests from the Lattice Church anointed resonance ports with copper dust and coded hymns.

To most, it looked like preparation for a siege.

To Magnus, it looked like birth.

He opened a private channel.

"Nioh. Update."

"Still stabilizing the resonance signatures. We’re prepping a nanite membrane to breach the outer crust of the fossil tomorrow. The heat alone might melt half the drones, but with the new resistive coating... we might hold long enough to reach the cranial link point."

"Good."

"Still think this can be tamed?"

"It will be," Magnus said. "And once it is, we won’t just control the Maw—we’ll own the Deepline routes to every shard vault beneath Node 45."

"Profits will be insane," Nioh said, trying to sound casual.

"You’ll get your share."

He cut the comms and closed his eyes briefly.

Somewhere below, the dragon biocore stirred again. Faint. Restless.

Nioh could feel itm like standing beside an ancient engine about to awaken. Not just power. Not just heat.

A will.

He whispered into the dark.

"Come now, old god. Open your eyes."