Biocores: The Legendary Weapon Designer-Chapter 99: Hunting

Nioh adjusted his headset and strapped the modulator to his back. Althea slid her arms into two compression sleeves and let them absorb into her body, her limbs pulsing with metallic sheen. Akron rotated his neck and stretched his shoulders. He wore no armor, just his fists.

The drop timer clicked down.

5...4...3...2...1...

They jumped.

Freefall into heat and chaos.

The hunt had begun.

They dove into the crater like comets.

The heat clawed at them as they sliced through the thick, ash-choked air. The world below was a writhing canvas of molten rivers, rising geysers, and jagged obsidian cliffs. As they fell, Nioh activated their gliders, a soft ripple across his back armor as semi-organic wings unfurled like blades of dark crystal.

Althea flipped into a dive, rolling her body through the heat columns and curling her legs to spin through a plume of vapor. Her descent was less like falling and more like dancing, her limbs precise, her body limber and fluid. The wind caught her hair as her cryo tinted visor glowed faintly, adapting to the crater’s intense glare.

Akron came down like a meteor. No finesse. Just pure force. He activated his descent stabilizers late, slamming into a rocky ledge, his boots cracking the stone beneath with a boom that echoed across the scorched chamber. Ash swirled around him, smoke hissing from the heated edges of his gauntlets.

Nioh was the last to land, sweeping low across the molten floor and skidding into position near a broken ridge. He snapped the wings back into his armor, rolled once to his feet, and yanked the cryo binder from his back.

"Move forward and get into place," he ordered through their shared comms. "Althea, west ridge. Akron, center line. We trap it here."

They scattered, each taking their assigned role. Nioh crouched low, unhooking the tripod base of the binder and slamming it into the cracked ground. A deep, harmonic thrum resonated from the core as he calibrated its coils. Blue energy hissed from its vents like pressurized frost breath.

Then he did something unorthodox.

He dropped to one knee, pressed his palm to the ground, and activated his biocore. Lines of violet energy traced along his veins, snaking out of his wrist like lightning into the earth. A pulse traveled downward, rippling through the molten bedrock. It was like ringing a bell, only this bell summoned nightmares.

The ground rumbled.

A roar, low and ancient, bellowed from the depths.

The Larva Dragon was awake.

It didn’t rise so much as it emerged, bursting from a trench of magma like a beast breaking free from its own grave. Its body was a horror show of heat, plated in obsidian, glowing with liquid fire between its scales. Its wings weren’t wings, but jagged lava membranes that crackled and oozed in slow, violent movements. Its maw was wide, its fangs molten. Its eyes burned with predatory instinct.

The temperature surged. Alarms on Nioh’s visor flared red.

Pillars of larva exploded across the zone, spitting trails of fire and acid. The ground shook beneath their feet, cracks spiderwebbing in every direction.

"Status!" Nioh barked.

Magnus’s voice came sharp and clipped over the comms. "It’s suppressing biocores across the ridge, overriding ambient field resonance. I’m holding back the interference, but you’ve got a thirty-minute window max. After that, we all fry."

"Understood," Nioh responded.

He slammed the binder into full power. Blue rings spiraled out of the device, creating a dome like aura across the battlefield. The zone dropped in temperature rapidly, steam shot from the ground, and icy crystals began to form along the stone edges. The binder locked the battlefield into a temporary cryo field.

A cold arena in the heart of the Maw.

The Larva Dragon roared again, more furious than before, its massive claws slamming into the ground as it began to advance, drawn to the seismic pulse like a hound to blood.

Althea was waiting for it.

She stood at the far end of the field, one knee bent, arms extended as her cryo breaker blade assembled from her own body. It shimmered with frosted light, jagged and beautiful. The blade pulsed with frozen energy, her biocore enhancing its chill to deadly extremes. Steam hissed from her gauntlets as the sword absorbed and redirected the oppressive heat around her.

When the Larva Dragon charged forward, its footfalls breaking apart stone and sending molten splashes flying, Althea moved.

She was a blur, zigzagging across the cracked field like a streak of winter through hell.

She went low, sliding under the first sweeping claw, sparks trailing behind her boots. The moment she passed the beast’s front leg, she twisted and slashed upward, her cryo breaker slicing along its limb. A hiss of steam exploded from the contact point. Molten blood froze mid-air, hardening into dark crystal.

The dragon shrieked, more in rage than pain.

Althea grinned. "Yeah? You feel that?"

The beast turned and stomped, cracking the earth where she had stood. But Althea was already airborne, springing from a nearby outcropping and landing cleanly on its back. She drove the cryo breaker down, piercing into the plated hide just behind its shoulder ridge.

The dragon’s back arched, then it bucked, violently.

She was flung skyward, twisting in midair, landing in a crouch just as its tail came swinging like a flaming scythe. She rolled sideways, one hand on the ground to keep balance, and launched forward again with a war cry.

Nioh watched the data stream feed into his visor. The binder was stable. The temperature was dropping further inside the arena zone, giving them precious seconds. Akron was circling from the side, fists glowing with kinetic heat, waiting for the perfect opportunity.

But this moment, this precise slice of time, belonged to Althea.

She danced in and out of the dragon’s reach, every movement clean and calculated. Her sword would hum before each slash, releasing bursts of winter that slowed the dragon’s internal pressure system. The magma pulses under its hide began to dim ever so slightly with every successive blow.

It was working.

But it was also adapting.

Nioh could see it in the shifting colors along the dragon’s core. It was beginning to absorb the cold and repurpose the energy flow along its spine.

"Ice resistance increasing," he warned. "Althea, pull back in five."

"Negative," she grunted. "I’m going in for the lungs."

She spun beneath the dragon’s massive chest as it exhaled a stream of molten breath across the far ledge. The heat beam ignited an entire section of the rock face. She moved in that instant, sliding up the dragon’s front leg and flipping onto its shoulder.

With a final burst, she drove the cryo breaker between two scale ridges at the base of its neck, near the lower respiratory node.

There was a flash of white light and a blast of frozen mist. The dragon screamed.

For a moment, it staggered, knees bending, wings convulsing.

Althea dropped off its back and slid across the battlefield, landing hard beside Akron, panting.

"Tag in," she said, flicking blood and frost from her weapon.

Akron grinned, cracking his knuckles. "Gladly."

Behind them, the Larva Dragon rose again, slower now, frost clinging to its joints, its steps heavier. Its fire dimmed. For the first time since the hunt began, it looked... vulnerable.

But it was far from beaten.

The real fight was just beginning.

Althea kept moving.

Her body was a blur of silver and steam, cutting across the battlefield with an uncanny rhythm, grace sharpened into violence. The Cryo Breaker blade hummed in her hand, each strike trailing white frost that hissed against the dragon’s smoldering hide. She didn’t need to win the fight alone, just hold it. Pressure it. Open something big enough for the others to end it.

The Larva Dragon lunged, maw wide, molten breath gathering in its throat like a storm. Althea ducked beneath the swing of a lava soaked tail, her boots skidding across the fractured rock.

"Little busy, boss!" she snapped over comms.

"Hold position," Nioh replied calmly. "I’m lowering the heat now."

From his station on the eastern flank, Nioh twisted the control ring on the Cryo Binder. Pulses of deep blue energy rolled out, pushing back the wave of ambient heat. It wouldn’t extinguish the magma entirely, but it slowed the dragon’s recharge, forcing its internal core to flicker.

Steam blasted from its wounds, Althea’s earlier hits now pressing into critical thresholds.

Then Nioh dropped to a knee again, slamming his palm into the cooled obsidian and activating a secondary module from his biocore.

Sonic Resonance Mode.

Vibrations spiked through the air, barely audible to the untrained ear, but lethal to monsters with heightened sensory input. The Larva Dragon reeled, its molten pupils contracting as the low frequency wave carved through its skull like a bell tolling the end.

The beast screamed, more instinct than intent, and turned violently toward Nioh’s ridge.

That was the cue.

Althea launched forward.

"Now!"

She sprinted low, blade trailing behind her, biocore flaring as the Cryo Breaker surged with pure concentrated chill. Nioh’s sonic strike had thrown the dragon off balance, its guard dropped, its focus fractured.