FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 249: Chapter 249: Catastrophic Miscalculation

The vibrations in the floor were no longer just a dull, ambient hum easily ignored amid the chaos. They were strong, frantic, and rapidly approaching, transmitting directly through the soles of Sol’s boots and rattling his aching bones.

The high-frequency clicks of thousands of enraged, panicking ants echoed down the labyrinthine tunnels like a rising mechanical tide. And It wasn’t just the light footfalls of the rusted-red soldiers, beneath that chaotic static was the heavy, rhythmic thudding of massive Layer 2 Commanders tearing through the earth.

They were coming. And they were coming fast.

Sol ripped his gaze away from the dark, gaping maw of the tunnel entrance and turned his focus entirely to the center of the room.

The massive, bloated Queen still rested atop her dais of hardened earth. Her physical body was too weak and comatose to move, but the sudden, violent death of her elite Royal Guards had finally triggered an undeniable reaction. Her massive, tree-trunk-sized antennae, previously drooping against the petrified wood, twitched lazily in the humid air, testing the pheromones of the blood-soaked chamber.

A slow, terrifyingly oppressive mental pressure began to leak from her form, pressing heavily against Sol’s skull like the atmosphere of a dying, hyper-dense planet.

She was definitely waking up.

Sol didn’t hesitate. He wiped a smeared mixture of cold sweat and monster blood from his eyes, aggressively ignoring the agonizing, fiery protests of his cracked ribs and his seared, melted shoulder. He used his heavy Void-Oak spear as a makeshift walking stick, dragging his battered, exhausted body toward the raised dais.

Every single step felt like wading through deep, invisible mud. The ambient Primal Essence radiating from the Layer 3 Sovereign was so profoundly dense that it actively resisted him, creating a localized gravity well that tried to crush the foreign intruder under the sheer metaphysical weight of its territory.

“Not today,” Sol grunted, his boots squelching loudly against the soft, webbed floor.

Pop. Squelch. He ruthlessly crushed the glowing red royal eggs beneath his heavy heels, leaving a trail of glowing, viscous fluid in his wake. “You’ve been AFK for the whole raid while I cleared your trash mobs. You don’t get to wake up and wipe the party now.”

He reached the base of the massive dais and began to climb the hardened earth. Up close, the Queen was truly a portrait of grotesque, alien majesty. Her pale, translucent abdomen throbbed with a sickly, arrhythmic pulse, illuminating the dark veins beneath her skin.

Her serrated, obsidian-black armor was marred by deep, ancient scars… gaping wounds that looked like they had been left by the claws of a primordial beast… that seeped a continuous, pale-grey mist of corrupted spiritual energy.

He finally reached the summit, standing just a few feet away from her massive, slitted, multifaceted eyes. She didn’t open them. She didn’t move her terrifying, jagged mandibles to snap him in half. She just lay there, a monolithic mountain of flesh and essence, exuding a suffocating, almost radioactive aura of slumbering malice.

Sol planted his boots firmly into the crust of the dais. He took a deep, ragged breath that sent a sharp spike of white-hot pain shooting through his bruised chest, and closed his eyes.

He didn’t raise his spear. A physical attack against a Layer 3 Lord, even a dying one, was a fool’s errand. Striking that obsidian carapace would likely just shatter his Void-Oak weapon and awaken her fully, triggering a physical retaliation he had zero stamina left to dodge. He needed to bypass the physical realm entirely.

He needed to strike at the soul.

He reached deep into the center of his chest, completely bypassing the heavy, exhausted furnace of his Golden Liquid core, and tapped directly into the cool, bottomless, ethereal reservoir of his Silver Liquid. This was the evolved form of his ’Free Use’ Domination power… his otherworldly cheat, his absolute, tyrannical authority.

He didn’t project it outward as an indiscriminate, blunt-force shockwave like he had against the Royal Guards. He gathered every single remaining drop of the silver essence within his mind, compressing it, refining it, folding the metaphysical weight over and over until it was a single, razor-sharp needle of pure, unadulterated will.

With a silent, spiritual roar, he drove that mental needle directly into the Queen’s massive, slumbering consciousness.

SUBMIT.

The exact millisecond his consciousness breached her spiritual defenses, Sol realized he had made a miscalculation.

And not just any miscalculation… a catastrophic, potentially fatal one.

She wasn’t waking up.

She had been fucking awake the entire time.

The comatose, flickering essence? The sluggish, broken spiritual energy leaking into the air? It wasn’t a sign of defenselessness. It was bait. It was a perfectly laid, terrifyingly ancient trap spun by a predator that had hunted souls for centuries.

Her physical body was indeed ruined, recovering from some unknown, catastrophic battle in the deep past, rendering her physically immobile.

But her mind… her mind was a pristine, impregnable fortress of dark majesty.

She was a Layer D3 Lord-Blood Sovereign specializing in mental powers. And she had felt his unique, undeniably foreign soul the very moment he entered her subterranean tunnels.

She had purposefully sacrificed her Layer 2 Royal Guards without a second thought, waiting patiently for the arrogant little biped to exhaust himself and step directly into her absolute domain to offer up his mind on a silver platter.

Sol didn’t just hit a mental wall, he was violently sucked into a metaphysical black hole.

His physical surroundings… the red-lit cavern, the blistering heat, the choking smell of acid and blood… vanished instantly. Sensory deprivation hit him like a physical blow.

When his spiritual vision finally adjusted, Sol found himself standing in a vast, sprawling, infinitely bleak mindscape that looked like a barren, obsidian desert stretching out beneath a bruised, blood-red sky.

And rising from the center of that desolate desert was the true, unfettered projection of the Queen.

She wasn’t weak here. She wasn’t a bloated, crippled grub resting on a mound of dirt. She was a towering, multi-headed leviathan of swirling dark essence and pure, unadulterated psychic malice.