"Huff, huff."
Heavy panting came from beneath Fraser's helmet. His sorry state perfectly reflected the immense pressure and indescribable exhaustion weighing on the brigadier at that moment.
Just moments ago, he had faced a glimpse of the Chaos Shadow in his mortal body, and even unlocked the glorious achievement "Gazed into the Abyss" in the process.
Fraser hadn't been forcibly corrupted into a Chaos abomination. That was partly because Lord Murphy had arrived just in time to save him, but more importantly, the symbiote crystal inside him had proven powerful enough to grant him strong resistance to Chaos. Still, to be honest, Murphy—currently moonlighting as a "god of the plot"—didn't think just anyone could have escaped the wrath of the Chaos Shadow in those circumstances, even if they'd been given the symbiote crystal.
The thing the brigadier had just faced was, on a symbolic level, a being above this world's "gods." Though they couldn't run rampant in the material world, their power was beyond anything a mortal could imagine.
Murphy still had his hand on Fraser's shoulder. The purifying power of the Omega Program continued to pour into Fraser's body, suppressing the symbiote's rampage under stress in a crude, effective, and really damn painful way.
It wasn't an exaggeration to say that if Murphy had arrived a few minutes later, Fraser—having withstood the Abyss's gaze—would already have turned into a "monster."
What a classic tokusatsu setup: the enemies and heroes sharing the same source of power!
Thinking about it, why did that actually sound kind of cool?
The good news was that it was all over.
The Black Grail, the culprit behind all the chaos, had been cut down. With the Chaos Shadow's power dissipating, this deadwood tower and the entire nightmare realm began to sway and collapse.
The players