Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power

The instant this message comes through, flashes of white light appear in the teleportation hub on the main moon base.

The first to arrive are Raven, Arie, and Abby.
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All three of them have fully saturated True Cores and stare up through the clear dome down at the Demonic World below.

To their left, four large moons can be seen in orbit.

Three of these they have been cultivating on over the past few months, while one—the furthest away—is where Maria sent out a message.

All of the moons vary in size by 10-30%, and their speeds in orbit around this dark world are not the same.

At times during their cultivation, the generals were on opposite sides of the world, at varying distances away in seemingly random orbital patterns.

However, right now, all four of Kelfar's other moons are within view from the main moon base.

Alveron makes his way to the moon's surface under the dome next and activates some system commands to bring up the surveillance systems from below for the generals to see.

The visuals of a bright blue aura cracking through the 41st wall are displayed via a holographic model, highlighting the highest stress fracture points alongside a live surveillance feed of Maria in the center of the base.

The knight does as requested, triggering all of the divine fragment restock commands to saturate every single wall in the base with a full new load to its max capacity.

However, six of the inner walls are broken beyond repair, so only forty-six restocks are triggered.

The ones closest to Maria immediately begin to swirl around her and disappear into her body, while others remain trapped behind layers of block walls that haven't fully come down.

–

Fisher and Lydia arrive on the surface next, greeting the generals who look upward.

After looting the entire world and helping sort the corpses and soul weapons over the last few days, the two commanders have been using some of the smaller cultivation rooms on this base to gather more yellow threads.

While they are far from compressing their True Cores, watching the surveillance footage of the Battle of the Kings with the generals has really put into perspective the possibilities of their potential in the future.

Bri arrives behind these two commanders shortly after but does not greet anyone present.

Her mind is mostly occupied within her system, as it's only been half a day since a massive number of worlds and new system users were added to the World Wide Connectivity system.

While it's begun to self-regulate, the amount of potential at her fingertips is overflowing again.

Everyone knows she will be glued to her system like this for a few days—and for good reason.

–

Lastly, Monk and Luna arrive at the surface dome.

Monk has borrowed the item storage skill and opened up a large portal to temporarily hold all of the sorted artifacts taken from the world below.

This includes the message on the stone tablet beneath the Wyvern's Inheritance skeleton, along with all of the corpses and soul weapons of the Demonic Beasts.

The only things he does not have on him are the corpses of the two Kings. As requested, they were handed over to Alveron in exchange for the generals keeping their Relic-Class Soul Weapons to rebond with and make their own.

With a distress message that sudden, directly from Maria herself, Monk doesn't want to lose the chance to continue studying these pieces if they have to evacuate.

–

Luna looks quite frail at first glance, but looking closer, she has a faint light-purple aura, made from demonic soul energy absorbed by a 1st Class Beholder down on Kelfar.

Arie is the first to turn his head and scan her with his own Soul Energy, as the frequency she gives off is just like his: that of a demonic beast.

He wonders why bonding with this beast took so long and what merging with it did to her ranked-up buff of Eyes in the Sky. However, there is a more important spectacle playing out in front of them all.

–

Alveron sends a telepathic message straight to Maria, notifying her that no one is near her moon or on any of the nearby neighboring moons that could be affected if her moon base breaks, releasing her aura on the surroundings.

There's no reply back, but the breaking of the 7th, 8th, and 9th inner walls with a pulse of blue light is more than enough of a response.

As a result, three restocks of divine fragments flood toward her all at once, and this only increases the speed and potency of the output.

Cracks spread through even more of the outer walls as the pressure builds, moving out to the 45th outer wall, leaving only seven between her and the space outside.

All of the visuals being sent back to the generals and commanders don't even look real.

The further out the walls are from the center, the thicker and more difficult to break they become.

While the inner walls that Maria has been shattering are only a few hundred meters thick—with the 9th one she just shattered about two kilometers in density—the outer walls she's cracking eclipse this.

These moon base structures were built tens of thousands of years ago and have withstood spars between the strongest 1st Class Lords of many races that lasted years at a time.

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There have even been competitions for system users to try and break through the walls with all their might, using any soul weapon, buffed artifact, or external force allowed.

It is the peak culmination of a 1st Class Lord's civilization that ruled over hundreds of worlds and allied with many advanced civilizations in neighboring star sectors.

The outer seven walls remaining are over 100 kilometers thick each, creating a fortress that has never been broken before.

However, the pressure of this Ice Mage's aura cracks through even more, shattering five more of the inner walls and breaking through another outer wall, leaving only six remaining.

–

That leads another five full restocks' worth of divine threads to be sucked in toward the Ice Mage, who sits peacefully in the center of the Region–sized cultivation chamber.

The shock alone from this rapid increase, just seconds after the last large break, leads to a chain reaction of more walls breaking beyond repair and more long cracks forming in the last line of defense in the outer walls.

Subconsciously, Maria has been counting and knows that the base is reaching its critical limit. She has only a matter of seconds left before her aura is released into the vacuum of space outside.

So, she activates her third ranked-up buff to finish what she's started and compress her True Core.

–

With 4% of the stats from 157 trillion links of Loyalty fueling her next actions, and enough yellow divine threads to compress and saturate hundreds of True Cores already absorbed and tethering to reality to enhance her every move, the reaction to this release of power is instantaneous...

The chain reaction that should have taken about ten seconds is sped up to happen in less than a hundredth of one.

It is so fast that only the generals and Alveron truly see what happens.

This is not through any surveillance system either—this is with their naked eyes, staring at the moon far off in space.

Maria's entire body pulses Royal Blue, and her dense aura spreads outward with far too much intensity for the sensors or surveillance systems to grasp before they're destroyed...

The center of her aura is dark black, and around its outside, there's a shimmering white glow.

It is not that the energy itself is black; it's just that trying to look inside her Soul Energy Core does not compute to a sane mind's senses, and the only way to rationalize what is there is by accepting that there is nothing at all.

Every single black slab of advanced technology in this 52-walled structure becomes enveloped in this blue glow instantaneously, and they all shatter like frail glass the instant they're hit.

–

From the main moon base's perspective, a dark blue crater forms on the side of Maria's moon, spreading thousands of kilometers in every direction, sinking deep into its surface, and almost instantly deleting a solid quarter of the moon's mass with it...

The shockwave's center reveals a humanoid form stretching its arms outward, with two glowing blue eyes.

They look enormous and dangerous, like a god of destruction; yet delicate, like a princess creating art.

In the same movement, the entire face of Maria's energy form is revealed, and behind it, spreading from her back, are what look like majestic wings—like an angel.

Though the 30-kilometer-tall angelic form does not flap these wings to fly out from the crater in the side of the moon. They fold toward her, like she is hugging herself, and her arms make a similar motion, moving toward her chest where the eerie dark core rests.

The angelic wings cover her body and face from view, while her hands reach into her Soul Energy Core to pull out a dense ball of yellow divine threads.

It appears to be at least a kilometer wide, with the density all the way through of a normal yellow divine core.

The moon shudders, and large frozen region sized rocks break off, altering its orbit from the last blast, but Maria completely ignores her surroundings.

She takes her divine core and compresses it with her energy form's hands, shielding the stray threads that erupt from the violent display with her wings and using the gravity from her black core to pull the threads that escape back into the compressing core to continue the cycle.

–

This all happens so fast, as she has planned out this procedure in her mind many times over the last three months, that the core compresses down to less than 500 meters before the shockwave of her activation of the 3rd Ranked Up Buff even hits the closest moon.

Its surface is shaken up, like a massive dust storm has hit it, and some large rock structures and mountain ranges crumble. Large portions of the moon's surface frost over like a snowstorm has hit it, but no massive damage is done like the moon it originated from.

Maria compresses her Divine Core down to 100 meters in diameter by the time the shockwave hits the next moon, and it hardly even shows any structural change. Its surface is coated in frost, like a cold morning dew freezing on the grass.

The moon after that is very close by, and it shows similar results, merely kicking up some dust on its surface, but no icy residue is left over.

By the time Maria has forcefully crushed her Divine Core down to less than 20 meters wide, the shockwave of her activation blast reaches the moon base furthest away where all the generals and commanders watch.

The prebuilt radiation shielding and strong infrastructure from Alveron is sturdy enough to withstand it.

The dome and teleport platform they're on only rattle slightly, but an eerie cold aura washes through everyone that watches in awe...

–

It is impossible for anyone to see what is truly happening, as the dense Royal Blue angelic wings are protecting the outsiders from witnessing the true process.

However, Maria's Soul Energy and Divine Cores are overlapping to keep the structural integrity of her divine core intact.

As the core is compressed below 10 meters wide, it becomes far denser than a normal fully saturated True Core should be.

Threads begin to press together so densely that they start to turn green.

However, Maria knows that she should not ascend to the next rank before completing her True Core progression, as that will greatly limit her potential, so she uses her Soul Energy Core to bend the laws of nature once again.

The Divine Core rests inside her Soul Energy Core, which acts like a supercooled sea to freeze her core in time.

Instead of pressing down on her Divine Core, her hands begin to press in on the outer edges of her Soul Energy Core, compressing its diameter by ten times over instead.

Space inside the dark anomaly that is Maria's Soul Energy core compresses, yet its lack of quantifiable density stays constant.

This results in the impossible happening. Maria's Yellow Divine Core compresses further than it physically should be able to in the outside environment, making it simultaneously more compact in a smaller area of space, yet maintaining its Yellow State in which it entered, creating the exact conditions of triggering a normal True Core collapse.

The True Core falls below a meter wide within Maria's body, yet it is still within her Soul Energy Core.

A bright yellow and white light pulses from the darkness, and her True Core's ability awakens while her entire energy form becomes mutated by this unique and bizarre True Core compression within her Soul Energy Core.

As a result, another shockwave comes bursting outward, so powerful that her wings cannot contain it.

Just as the commanders and generals on the furthest moon base finish shivering from the first blast, a bright light fills their vision from many moons away.

–

The entire moon Maria stands on turns to blue ice, fractures, then shatters to unrecognizable dust.

The silhouette of a dark blue angel is left behind in the icy dust cloud, but the shockwave that continues to blast outward doesn't slow one bit.

The closest moon faces an identical fate, freezing over instantaneously, then disintegrating into sparkling ice the moment the bulk of the blast hits it.

Then... the next moon ices over and explodes into dust the same exact way...

The closest moon to the main moon base starts to turn a dense shade of blue, and the overwhelming icy cold aura covers all of the commanders' and generals' vision as all four moons before them are obliterated, and they watch the wave that hasn't slowed down continue surging their way.

–

Not only does it come forward toward them, but also down toward Kelfar as well.

A massive portion of the world below starts to turn to ice, and the overwhelming strength of the shockwave begins to dig an enormous ravine into the world's surface...

–

The only one truly fast enough to comprehend the events playing out before them is Alveron.

The yellow slug's home planet is lighting up with the brightest yellow glow of excitement it has seen in tens of thousands of years.

Its first reaction is pure joy and awe as it gets to record so much unique data, but another portion of its mind begins to calculate the best way to get everyone off this moon in time to survive the incoming blast.