100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 341 - Fucked

It was then that Kharzun realized too late.

His eyes widened by a fraction as he saw the dead gargoyles, the reshaped battlefield, and the covered allies.

His full attention fell onto Lucien like a mountain shifting its shadow.

An Emperor’s attention was not something a lesser being could afford.

It was pressure that made the spirit want to kneel.

Kharzun moved.

His vast body did not need to swing. It needed only to trample.

Lucien fled sideways, leading him away from the frozen allies, buying time by bleeding distance.

Half a minute.

That was all he had to survive.

And in those seconds, a lifetime happened.

Lucien was caught in petrified geometry.

He ripped himself free by shedding slime mass, leaving chunks of himself behind like torn skin.

Blood magic speared his side.

Grave magic followed like a decree, trying to turn the wound into a permanent clause.

Lucien was bloody all over.

Then Kharzun’s body surged forward.

A final blow.

A strike that was not meant to injure.

But a strike meant to end.

Kharzun’s claw hit Lucien.

Lucien felt his spine implode.

He felt his heart fail.

He felt the world accept that he had ended.

But just then...

The Aegis of Rebirth lit.

Light enveloped him.

The shield can reverse destruction once per day.

It dragged his shattered state backward and rebuilt him from the moment before death claimed him.

Lucien gasped, a harsh, raw sound in a world that had no echo.

The shield had saved him.

But it had not removed the cost.

His methods were running out.

Scam the System had already been used.

The Aegis had spent its one refusal.

Worse, he felt it.

The seals in his mind were unraveling.

The restraints Vaelcar had placed earlier were loosening under strain.

Lucien’s consciousness frayed like cloth.

He was still alive.

But his mind was hazy, slipping toward a cliff.

Kharzun watched him with genuine surprise now.

Interest.

"You persist," Kharzun said. "Even after being corrected."

Lucien’s hand moved on instinct.

He pulled a crystal from his inventory.

Tear of the Departed.

He consumed it.

The crystal dissolved like cold water in his skull.

The drop anchored his fading consciousness.

Lucien’s eyes steadied.

Barely.

Then the madness came.

Not as a whisper now.

As a tide.

Lucien did not resist it.

He chose to revel in it.

He chose to turn it into propulsion.

He pulled another drop, a mythical one, and crushed it between his teeth as if it were nothing.

Essence of Unyielding Savagery.

It burned down his throat like wildfire.

His body stopped registering injury as meaning.

Pain remained, but it was filed away as irrelevant.

Lucien’s posture changed.

His breathing changed.

His gaze stopped being human.

Kharzun’s lips curved.

"A dying star shines brightest before its death," Kharzun murmured, and the words sounded like something carved into tomb walls.

Lucien moved.

He fought like a beast, but not a simple one.

He fought like a museum of wars opening its doors.

His lives in the Mural World resurfaced.

One second he struck like a Goliath, weight and technique stacking into a single decisive cut.

The next he moved like a Beastman in berserk state, closing distance with feral precision.

Then he flowed like an elf archer for a heartbeat, forming a bow from mana and releasing a shot that carried Collapse in its string.

Then he was something else again.

He summoned clones that split off and attacked from angles that should not have existed in a petrified world. He layered magic attributes with Laws.

He used Corrosion to eat the surface of petrification, then Collapse to make the eaten parts count as structural failure. He used Decay to mislead blood script. He used Reflection to step through mirrors that Kharzun’s claws tried to seal shut.

Lucien moved like a veteran in war.

Still...

Kharzun held.

Not with effort.

With reality.

Lucien’s strikes landed and did nothing meaningful.

Lucien’s body accumulated wounds anyway because each time he moved, Kharzun’s answer arrived like a sentence already composed.

And all of it took seconds.

Not even a minute had passed since the world froze.

The speed was obscene.

But then...

Kharzun’s impatience grew.

Because what he had thought would be an insect had become an insect that would not die when crushed.

Finally, Kharzun’s body lit.

A portion of his own basalt hide shed.

It peeled away like a plate being removed from a monument and beneath it... were scripts.

Blood scripts.

Cruel characters written in a hand that hated mercy.

The letters glowed.

They were not spells. They were manufacturing instructions.

Kharzun’s gaze fixed on Lucien.

"I recognize your stench," Kharzun said softly. "Not your name. Your direction."

The scripts flared.

And from them came bodies.

Miniature Kharzuns. Ten of them.

Each was formed from blood-scripted stone and each was carrying a fraction of imperial grammar.

They were not true clones. They were apostrophes of Kharzun’s will, created to occupy space with authority.

They landed around Lucien like punctuation marks.

Lucien did not care.

Madness didn’t respect strategy.

Madness respected motion.

He tried something he would never have dared while sane.

Forceful transformation.

"Storm Roc Beast Mode."

[Warning!]

Warnings flashed in his system like thunder.

But Lucien ignored them.

His instincts told him it was possible. Astraea had confirmed as much before and in his current state he stopped thinking and let instinct take the reins.

Inside his core, the Monsterdex flared and a new line etched itself into existence beneath the Concord Pact.

Outside, Lucien’s body lit up.

He did not become a Storm Roc.

Not fully.

He became a humanoid Storm Roc, a sky-born predator made into a man-shape. Feathers and wind and lightning fused into a form that felt like the owner of storms rather than their rider.

His speed spiked so sharply that even petrification lagged behind him.

The ten mini Kharzuns moved to intercept.

Lucien slipped between them like wind slipping through a cracked door.

His head was splitting.

His spirit fractures multiplied.

But the Essence of Unyielding Savagery refused to let the pain matter.

Lucien fought anyway.

Kharzun watched with narrowed eyes, no longer amused.

The ten minis were not stopping Lucien.

They were forcing his path.

Kharzun’s trap formed with the patience of someone who had lived lifetimes.

He did not chase speed.

He penned it.

The ten minis moved into a rotating pattern, not a circle but a shifting polyhedron, their positions forming a three-dimensional cage that tightened with each rotation. Each one petrified a thin plane of reality as it moved, leaving behind invisible walls that Lucien could not see until he struck them.

Blood magic threaded between them.

Not as ropes.

As coordinates.

Fine blood lines stitched the air, connecting planes into a net, turning the cage from geometry into a script.

Grave magic sealed the edges of that net.

Declaring each plane "final."

Lucien’s Storm Roc form shrieked in defiance.

Deep inside, Lucien knew there was no escape.

There was no path that ended with him standing.

But this form was the only thing that still bent time in his favor.

Every second he remained in motion and every breath stolen at impossible speed was a second taken away from Kharzun.

And every second he burned mattered.

Wind exploded outward as instinct took over.

Lightning curved with Lucien. Storm pressure folded around his limbs, letting him pivot in midair without momentum loss and letting him break angles that should not have existed.

He moved too fast for thought. Too fast for petrification.

But not too fast for experience.

Lucien blurred into motion, tearing through space like a storm given flesh. He twisted, inverted, and forced the sky itself to move with him. The air screamed as pressure obeyed his will.

For a moment—

He broke free.

Then the cage shifted.

Lucien tried to step into a mirrored seam.

But it was already occupied.

A blood line had been written through the reflection layer itself, marking that doorway as a grave before he arrived.

He slammed into an unseen wall.

The storm detonated.

Wind howled. Lightning scattered. The sky fractured with noise.

Lucien reeled.

He flinched in realization.

This form could challenge the sky.

But it had not yet learned how to escape a cage written by an Emperor.

Then... the trap closed.

The ten replicas moved first.

They struck in sequence. Each blow timed to deny Lucien recovery rather than end him outright. Petrified planes snapped shut around his flight path.

Lucien slammed into one invisible wall and rebounded hard.

A claw of stone caught his shoulder mid-spin and crushed downward. His bones screamed. Storm-light bled out of his form in broken arcs.

Another clone followed. Grave magic bloomed like a decree. The space around Lucien grew heavy as if declaring that this was where motion was meant to stop.

He tore free only to be struck again.

A blood lance punched through his side and pinned him briefly to a petrified layer of air. His Storm Roc form shrieked as wind lost obedience. Storms stuttered as if the sky itself had been shackled.

Kharzun moved last.

A single step forward collapsed three planes at once. Lucien felt the weight of an Emperor’s attention settle fully upon him, and it was suffocating.

His instincts screamed.

His body lagged.

And for the first time since the madness took him, his body hesitated.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three.

The anchor in his mind began to slip.

The Tear of the Departed strained.

The madness receded for a heartbeat.

And in that heartbeat, Lucien felt his life cling to him like a drowning man clinging to a plank.

He felt the world tilt.

He thought, for a moment, that everything was about to end.

That he was dying.

’It has been a long time since I last cursed. But fuck... Fuck this world.’

Just then...

A sound echoed.

A click.

A seal bloomed at the far edge of the battlefield.

Vaelcar, The Oath-Buried.

He had escaped the frozen self.

Pale scripture flared from his body like a door being unlatched.

Lucien saw it as the last clear image.

"Ah, brother. Fuck you too. Took you long enough."

Then his consciousness finally gave way like a rope snapping after holding too much weight for too long.