The crackle of the campfire driftwood and the waves were the only sound that broke the dark, suffocating quiet of the ink-black beach.

The savory aroma of the roasting avian meat still lingered in the air, but the appetite of the teenagers had completely vanished the moment the words left the Commander’s mouth.

James Maddox looked at Hide’s rigid, unblinking posture, and the sharp, dangerous smile on his youthful face expanded into a loud, boisterous laugh that echoed out over the dark, churning ocean waves.

He clapped his hands together once, the sonic vibration instantly drawing the attention of the remaining three students who were huddled around the flames.

"Alright, kids, look alive and pay attention!" Maddox called out cheerfully, his distinctive brown eyes flashing with an ageless, mocking light in the orange fireglow. He leaned back against the fallen log, completely relaxed, as if he hadn’t just dropped a metaphorical execution order onto their camp. "You all should have already noticed that this isn’t a three star loop gate. I mean it was clear the moment you landed here wasn’t it?"

"..."

No one spoke.

Maddox casually reached down, tore off a thick piece of the cooked bird meat, and took a large bite, chewing lazily before continuing. "To put it in terms your high-rise academies might actually understand: this is a raw, virgin Four-Star Gate. It first opened the rift just two nights ago and I haven’t let anybody in. Which means the ecosystem is entirely intact and a certified B-Rank Calamity Beast—or, for your better theological understanding, a Higher Calamity Lord—is actively roaming around somewhere on this island."

THUD.

A heavy, charred piece of avian leg meat fell directly from Gideon Vance’s fingers, landing uselessly into the grey ash at the edge of the fire. The dark-skinned giant sat completely frozen, his eyes widening into massive plates of unconditional terror as his chest heaved. Beside him, Ryan’s pale face drained of what little color it possessed, his hand trembling so violently that the spectacles on his nose slid down the bridge. Even Sora, despite her lineage and her prior combat composure, went entirely rigid, her dark eyes locking onto her grand-uncle with deep disbelief.

They were not elite, seasoned Exterminators. They were a group of upper-district children and raw prospects who had spent their short careers fighting controlled, predictable loops where safety extractors were always active.

To them, the greatest and most terrifying feat of their entire lives up to this exact microsecond was simply being granted the provisional guidance of James Maddox—one of the strongest S-Ranked monsters to ever walk the surface of the planet.

"A... a Higher Calamity Lord?" Gideon whispered, his loud, big-mouthed bravado completely evaporating into a dry, raspy wheeze.

Never in his entire life had Gideon Vance ever laid eyes on a Calamity Lord. He hadn’t even been deployed to a sector containing a Lesser C-Rank beast, let alone a towering, top-grade Higher Calamity Lord that sat at the absolute apex of the extra-dimensional food chain.

The text-logs he had memorized at the academy were explicitly clear: B-Rank beasts were not simple animals. They were regional tyrants, entities possessing highly concentrated pools of corrupted mana capable of mentally enslaving entire packs of lower-tier monsters and rewriting the geographic layout of a gate.

Gideon stared at the piece of meat sitting in the dirt, let out a long, heavy sigh of absolute, fatalistic surrender, and shook his head. He was a lower-block brawler at heart, and instead of crying or throwing a tantrum over his immediate circumstances, his street-honed survival instincts kicked back in.

He reached down, picked up another clean piece of skewered meat from the rack, and began chewing on it with a grim, mechanical determination, preparing his body for the worst. He opened his mouth, about to ask how long they had before the volcano erupted, when Maddox cut him off.

"I know most of you hatchlings haven’t seen a true Calamity Lord yet," Maddox said, his auburn hair catching the flickering sparks of the campfire as he let out another amused chuckle. "The corporate boards like to shield you behind glass walls until you’re too soft to bleed. But that little luxury ends tonight. I’m going to show you one in the flesh very soon."

He laughed, the sound entirely loud and joyous, but none of the four teenagers joined in his entertainment. A deep, paralyzing sense of psychological dread settled over the camp.

The horror of a Higher Calamity Lord wasn’t just a physical hurdle; it was an immense, invisible mental barrier. Because they had never faced an entity of that caliber, their minds had no baseline parameters to calculate how powerful a B-Rank beast actually was.

According to the standard academic frameworks they had studied, these monsters were practically glorified as god-like rulers of the this other terrain, nightmares that standard five-man vanguard units were explicitly banned from engaging unless an active contingent of at least three S-Rank Exterminators were there.

Yet, amidst the silent panic of his peers, Hide remained completely, chillingly calm. His cold blue eyes stared directly into the center of the roaring orange flames, his expression an unreadable mask of absolute stone.

To Hide, a B-Rank Calamity Beast wasn’t an abstract, mythological concept. He didn’t think of this situation as an insurmountable problem because he had already seen, fought, and helped slaughter a Higher Calamity Lord once before.

His mind briefly flashed back to the chaotic, blood-slicked ruins of the loop gate where he had encountered the Golden Calamity lord alongside Major Claire, Elara, and Evelyn. That victory could generously be described as a rather slim, razor-thin win.

By the strict laws of the National Exterminator Agency, their squad should have been instantly pulverized without three S-Ranks present. They had bypassed the codex purely because Claire’s individual power threshold was already hovering on the border of transcendence, and she had violently passed the S-Rank breakthrough parameters immediately after the final blow was struck.

Hide knew the terror of the upper tiers down to his bones.

Clack.

Maddox tossed his cleaned bone into the fire, wiped his fingers on his shorts, and turned his sharp, distinctive brown eyes directly onto Hide’s face.

"For any of you that have questions about what you’re up against, you don’t need to ask me," Maddox drawled smoothly, a mocking, razor-sharp smirk playing on his lips. "You can just ask our quiet friend Hide here. He’s already killed a few C-Rank lesser lords during his field runs, and he even helped kill out a B-Rank Higher Calamity Lord once."

Hide’s left cheek violently twitched, a sudden surge of profound irritation making his jaw lock tight. He stared at the old man, his lips curving into a sharp, internal grimace.

’I also killed a A-Rank beast by the way, you bureaucratic old fossil,’ Hide added dryly in his own mind, his fingers tightening inside his jacket pockets as he remembered the basement of Sihue clan.

Why the hell did this old man have to put the entire spotlight on his head in front of them? He had explicitly chosen an independent status to avoid public administrative tracking, yet Maddox was tossing him to the wolves for his own amusement.

Maddox stood up smoothly from the log, stretching his compact frame until a succession of loud, wet bone clicks popped along his spine and shoulders. He took a single, deliberate step out of the warm perimeter of the camp, his silhouette instantly getting swallowed by the thick, ink-black darkness of the tropical tree line.

"Don’t be afraid while I’m gone, children," Maddox smiled over his shoulder, his auburn hair catching the final glint of the fire.

"Wait! Uncle James, where are you going?" Sora called out frantically, her hand instinctively drifting toward the hilt of her daggers as the absolute vacuum of the night pressed against their circle.

"Just taking a quick walk into the jungle," Maddox’s casual voice floated back from the shadows. "I’m going to go catch that Calamity Lord to show you all what a real monster looks like."

Before any of them could form a coherent argument or demand he stay to act as their shield, the space at the edge of the camp violently ruptured.

BOOM!

James Maddox didn’t just run—his body transformed into a brilliant, high-velocity kinetic missile. Slicing through the space in a straight line, he launched himself directly toward the dark, smoking silhouette of the central volcano.

The sheer kinetic backblast of his launch created a localized hurricane that nearly snuffed out their campfire, sending a massive wall of black volcanic sand spraying across their boots.

Hide, Sora, Gideon, and Ryan sat in stunned silence, their eyes tracking the faint, distant sound of tearing trees and shattering bedrock echoing from the deep jungle.

Maddox’s operational velocity was entirely abnormal. Exactly two kilometers away, deep within the humid, sulfurous darkness of the mountain’s roots, a sudden, earth-shattering explosion illuminated the horizon in a brief flash of white light.

A split second later, a deafening, metallic shriek of primal agony tore through the night air, causing the leaves above their heads to violently shake.

Then, the jungle went entirely quiet again.

Less than sixty seconds had passed since his initial departure when the sand at the edge of the fire line shifted smoothly. James Maddox stepped back into the light of the campfire, his lightweight summer shirt completely spotless, his breathing entirely flat, and his hair unrumpled.

But his right hand wasn’t empty.

Clutched firmly within his bare grip, held ruthlessly by the dense fur at the back of its muscular neck, was a living nightmare.