I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 865: [Ash-Behemoth]

Jack stood at the edge of the emerald knoll, his heterochromic eyes fixed on the ragged tear behind the cascading water.

The distant, rhythmic rumble beneath the basalt vibrated through the soles of his boots, steady as a death march.

Ren shifted his weight, his fingers brushing the hilt of his katana. “I can sever its space from three miles out. It won’t even feel the edge before it drops.”

“No,” Jack said, his voice flat, cutting through the pleasant burble of the subterranean river. “Stay here.”

Ren glanced at him, eyebrows raising slightly. “You want to fight the Behemoth alone?”

“Baelok didn’t challenge you,” Jack replied, stepping off the grass. “He challenged me. If you cut it down, all I’ve proven is that I have a lethal dog on a leash. I need him to see what happens when I take the field.”

Ren shrugged, letting his thumb fall away from the guard.

Jack didn’t answer. He walked past the granite table where Baelok still leaned, crimson-stained arms crossed over his chest.

The exile didn’t mock him this time; his wild amber eyes tracked Jack’s every movement, searching for the telltale tremor of mortal dread. He found only an empty, cold focus.

“Don’t lose your nerve when the heat melts your eyelashes, boy,” Baelok growled softly as Jack passed.

Jack ignored him, breaching the veil of the waterfall.

The moment he passed behind the falling sheet of crystal water, the oasis died.

The air turned into an oven of choking, dry heat. The tunnel sloped downward at an agonizing forty-five-degree angle, its walls not made of basalt, but of raw obsidian baked into brittle, glassy sheets by millennia of volcanic backdraft. The scent of brimstone and incinerated bone coated the back of Jack’s throat.

He descended two hundred paces before the tunnel opened into a subterranean caldera.

A vaulted hell three times larger than the Great Hall of Krogar-Zun.

Rivers of white-hot magma carved glowing canyons across the floor, illuminating an expanse of jagged basalt pillars and drifting banks of coarse gray soot.

The heat was immense, enough to incinerate mortal lungs in a single inhalation.

In the center of the cavern, the ash was moving.

It was not drifting on the draft; it was spiraling upward in a localized cyclone. Millions of tons of volcanic soot, black slag, and pulverized cinder rose from the fissures, knitting together.

Veins of molten orange fire ignited within the silhouette, hardening the soot into thick plates of burning, obsidian-crusted armor.

Two massive, pillar-like legs slammed into the magma, followed by four colossal arms crowned with jagged claws of compressed slag. From its broad, faceless mantle of burning soot, two hollow sockets flared with blinding, white-hot elemental wrath.

[Name: Ash-Behemoth]

[Level 77]

[Class: Sovereign]

The titan stood forty spans tall. It did not roar with a throat; it exhaled a concussive shockwave of superheated particulate that swept across the cavern, stripping the surface rock from the pillars and melting the stone in its path.

Jack stood fifty paces away on a narrow obsidian ridge, his empty left sleeve fluttering in the volcanic draft, his right hand hanging loose at his side.

“Let’s see what you’re made of,” Jack murmured.

The Behemoth moved with horrifying speed for its mass. It lunged forward, two colossal arms rising overhead before coming down in a double-fisted hammer strike meant to pulverize the ridge and submerge Jack in the magma lake below.

Jack didn’t flinch.

[Abyssal Steps]

Space folded. Jack vanished from the ridge an instant before the fists struck. The basalt ridge shattered into a shower of molten shrapnel, but Jack had already materialized ten meters above the Behemoth’s broad shoulder.

Dark mana flared violently along his right arm, black lightning crackling across his skin as he reached toward the creature’s nape.

[Judgment Bolt]

He didn’t summon the purple divine spark; he corrupted the storm. A jagged, blinding spear of pitch-black lightning materialized in his grip, screaming with the deafening shriek of a tearing sky. Jack drove the black bolt straight down into the Behemoth’s neck.

CRACK!

The concussive detonation blew a crater five spans wide through the beast’s upper torso. The impact was absolute, the black lightning coursing through the molten veins and rupturing the hardened ash armor into a fountain of black powder.

The Behemoth shuddered, its massive frame tilting forward toward the magma.

Jack landed lightly on a floating slab of obsidian fifty paces back, watching the damage with cold detachment.

The wound was massive. Any living beast would have been decapitated.

Then the ash began to whistle.

Instead of bleeding or collapsing, the shattered plates of armor disintegrated entirely. The Behemoth’s entire torso dissolved into a massive, blinding storm of superheated soot, drifting upward into the thermal currents before violently snapping back together behind Jack.

The creature didn’t just heal; it reformed instantly, entirely devoid of momentum or injury.

A sweeping backhand of molten slag tore through the air toward Jack’s skull.

[Gloom Shroud]

Jack dissolved into pure, intangible shadow. The colossal hand swept cleanly through the space he had occupied, displacing nothing but empty air.

Reappearing twenty paces to the left, Jack’s heterochromic eyes narrowed.

‘No internal organs. There is also no blood. Physical destruction yields nothing from the system.’

The Behemoth pivoted, its four arms slamming into the bedrock in unison.

A ring of fire erupted from the impact, hurling thousands of jagged, molten ash-boulders into the air. With a deafening hiss, the titan channeled its mana, launching the fiery barrage straight at Jack in a carpet of localized extinction.

Jack raised his right hand, his fingers spreading wide.

[Singularity Well]

A sphere of impossibly dense, pitch-black void mana dropped directly between Jack and the incoming barrage.

The gravitational pull warped the cavern’s light, bending the thermal currents into a violent vortex.

The hundreds of incoming boulders were violently wrenched off trajectory, dragged into the gravitational nexus, and pulverized against one another into fine, glowing sand.

“If you don’t take damage from the outside,” Jack said, his voice dropping with pure malice, “we compress the space.”

[Gravity Flux: Magnify]

Jack snapped his focus onto the Behemoth’s colossal frame. The localized gravity beneath the titan multiplied ten-fold.

The sheer, crushing pressure forced the towering beast down onto its knees, the basalt beneath its weight cracking and groaning as its limbs sank deep into the molten stone.

Before the creature could disperse into ash to escape the pull, Jack closed his fist.

[Singularity Shatter]

The Singularity Well collapsed in on itself. The high-density void detonated in an implosion of destructive dark energy, multiplying its concussive force against the restricted behemoth.

The shockwave sheared through the cavern. The Behemoth’s chest, arms, and mantle were torn to ribbons, reduced to a swirling tempest of atomized gray cinder that was sucked into the collapsing vacuum before blowing outward in an apocalyptic cloud of soot.

The titan was gone. Nothing remained on the stone but glowing embers.

Jack didn’t drop his guard. He stood completely still, his mana senses extended to their absolute limit.

Within three seconds, the air pressure spiked.

From the ceiling, the floor, and the magma gutters, ash swirled in violent, magnetic cohesion.

The Behemoth reassembled itself in less than two seconds, its twin white-hot eye sockets flaring with unrestrained elemental fury.