"Gugugaga?" the baby said, tilting its head to the side with an expression of innocent curiosity. Its large eyes blinked at Vogue as drool dripped from its mouth.
With a serious expression on his face, Vogue didn’t fall for the act. His left arm, already transformed into a dragon claw, slashed directly at the creature’s head with lethal intent. The claws gleamed silver in the dim light as they descended.
"Gugugaga your ass!" Vogue snarled.
His dragon claw sunk toward the baby’s skull with enough force to crush concrete. But before the strike could connect, something impossible happened. The baby’s body rippled like water, and suddenly it split into two identical clones of itself. The division happened so fast that Vogue’s claw passed harmlessly through the space between them, hitting nothing but air.
The two baby copies landed smoothly on the ground on either side of Vogue, their small feet making no sound. They walked past him with unsteady toddler steps, one on his left and one on his right, completely bypassing his attack. Then, as they passed behind him, they merged back together seamlessly to form one single entity again.
The being was incredibly weird, and with such speed, agility, and the ability to split itself at will, Vogue knew he was definitely not dealing with an ordinary radiant. This thing was something else entirely, something far more dangerous.
He immediately sliced off all six of his fingers with his machete. Before the severed digits could land on the ground, they began growing rapidly. Within two seconds, they had transformed into six perfect clones of himself, each one identical down to the half-dragon transformation.
Without hesitation, the clones immediately activated Time Step. Their bodies blurred as they surged through the air like bullets fired from a gun, rushing at the weird radiant from different angles. They spread out to form a net pattern, attacking from front, back, left, right, above, and below so the creature wouldn’t be able to escape no matter which direction it tried to dodge.
Vogue watched his clones close in on the target, and then he activated his trump card without a moment’s hesitation.
"Explode!" Vogue roared with everything he had.
His voice echoed through the entire garage, filled with deadly intent.
If one could slow down time and watch frame by frame, one could see the six clones’ bodies beginning to expand rapidly. Their flesh turned bright crimson red, glowing from within as if their blood had turned to molten lava. Their skin stretched and bulged outward as enormous energy built up inside them.
But within that same split second, the baby’s small body also began expanding. Its form rippled and distorted, and suddenly multiple copies of itself split and popped out from the original like cells dividing. One became two, two became four, four became eight. In less than a heartbeat, there were dozens of identical baby copies spreading outward in all directions.
It was at that exact moment that Vogue’s clones reached critical mass and exploded.
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!"
Six massive explosions rang out in rapid succession, one right after another like a chain of bombs detonating. Each explosion released a burst of crimson mist and devastating force that expanded outward in a sphere of destruction.
The combined blasts were so powerful that a massive shockwave tore through the entire garage like a hurricane. The force of the explosions destroyed multiple concrete support pillars, reducing them to crumbling rubble. Cars within a hundred-meter radius were sent flying through the air like toys thrown by an angry child. They collided with other vehicles, creating secondary crashes and flipping end over end before slamming into walls or each other with the shriek of twisting metal.
The ceiling began to crack and groan, chunks of concrete falling as the structural integrity of the garage failed. Glass shattered, metal bent, and the air itself seemed to scream from the violence unleashed in the enclosed space.
[You killed a Radiant] x 614
A system notification suddenly popped up in Vogue’s line of sight, glowing bright gold against the chaos.
Vogue was genuinely stunned when he saw this message. His eyes widened in disbelief. Six hundred and fourteen radiants? That was an insane number! Was that creature actually the combination of over six hundred radiants somehow fused or merged together?
That would explain why it was so strange and powerful. It wasn’t a single evolved radiant but rather hundreds of them compressed into one horrifying entity. The baby form must have been either the original host or just a disguise the hive-mind had chosen to use.
No wonder it had such bizarre abilities like splitting itself and those paralytic tentacles. It was drawing on the combined powers of hundreds of infected creatures. Thankfully, he had used his trump card when he first saw how abnormal the beast was acting. If he had held back or tried to fight it normally, things could have gone very badly.
As the crimson mist from the explosions slowly died down and began to drift apart, Vogue could finally see the result of releasing his most powerful technique this early into the Osympic Trial.
The garage was completely destroyed. What had once been an organized parking structure was now a disaster zone that looked like it had been hit by a missile strike. Twisted metal, shattered concrete, and debris covered everything. Small fires burned on several of the destroyed vehicles, sending up columns of black smoke. The support pillars were either gone completely or reduced to broken stumps that could collapse at any moment.
Bodies lay scattered across the devastated space. Not human bodies, but the gray, withered corpses of radiants. Hundreds of them, all dead, their corrupted hearts destroyed by the force of the explosion. They had been hidden inside that baby creature, and when it split apart to try to escape the blast, each individual radiant had been caught in the explosions and killed.
Vogue’s kill count had jumped significantly.