Blood Awakening: The Strongest Hybrid and His Vampire Bride - Chapter 357

Chapter 357: The Flesh Architect
The floor shifted beneath his feet.

The light dimmed to a pulsing red hue, as if the walls had veins and something inside them was stirring awake. Nikolai didn’t wait. The moment the Architect snapped his fingers, he moved.

He launched forward with a burst of speed, his black claws dragging sparks off the steel tiles as he spun low and went for the ribs.

The Architect twisted just enough to evade — one motion, practised and clean. His white coat snapped behind him like a surgeon’s cape, long tails following his pivot as he retaliated with a smooth, open-handed strike aimed directly at Nikolai’s exposed neck.

Nikolai barely slipped under it.

It wasn’t power he felt.

It was precision.

The Architect’s fingers sliced the air like scalpels, every motion deliberate. He didn’t waste energy. He didn’t posture. Each strike came with the cold efficiency of a man who had taken apart a thousand bodies and stopped counting after the first hundred.

Nikolai gritted his teeth as the second exchange came.

Claws met claws.

Sinew tore.

A streak of red bloomed across his side as the Architect’s tendon-whip lashed out from his sleeve, wrapping around his torso and digging in before Nikolai ripped it off with a snarl.

The Architect didn’t smile.

But his eyes glittered behind that mask.

“Good. Your pain response is healthy.”

Three malformed horrors tore themselves free from the walls behind him — one on all fours, another dragging a tail made of spine, and a third half-built, crawling on hands that bent backwards.

They rushed Nikolai together.

He ducked under the first and kicked it mid-charge — the crunch of ribs meeting his heel as it flew across the arena.

The second one lunged high. He caught it mid-air and spun, using its body to batter the third. Flesh splattered. Limbs tore.

He dropped what was left.

“You want data?” Nikolai growled, black mist rolling from his body like a second skin. “Take this.”

He exploded forward again — not with elegance, but with raw speed. The Architect blocked with a flat palm, but stumbled back two steps.

Nikolai followed.

He twisted and drove his elbow into the masked man’s side. Something cracked. The Architect didn’t cry out. He just adjusted his stance and slashed across Nikolai’s chest with a burst of aura so sharp it seared the skin beneath his obsidian fur.

Both of them jumped back, breathing harder now.

Blood dripped freely from Nikolai’s wounds.

But the Architect’s coat was no longer perfect.

They circled.

The malformed bodies twitched on the ground, still breathing. Still moving. Their heads tilted, blind but not dead.

“You can’t sustain this,” the Architect said finally. His tone was flat, but underneath it, something shifted. Not arrogance.

Eagerness.

“Your body’s at its edge. That shell won’t last another five floors. Not without breaking apart. So let’s hurry.”

Then he did something unexpected.

He unzipped his chest.

From collarbone to navel, the white coat peeled open — but there was no blood. No muscle. No organs.

Just a pulsing cavity lined with twitching nerves, and a sound like breath caught in a jar.

The malformed horrors twitched — then scrambled forward.

One by one, they threw themselves into him.

Into the open hollow.

And the Architect began to change.

The chamber dimmed.

The pulsing glow from the floor sigils flickered like a dying heartbeat as the malformed horrors vanished, devoured whole into the open cavity of the Architect’s chest.

He didn’t scream.

He absorbed.

Tendons closed like stitched mouths, ribs folding inward with an obscene wet crunch. The sound was muffled and deep, like bones rearranging in the dark. His silhouette twisted. Grew. Limbs lengthened and cracked, his posture warping as he hobbled forward, each step dragging skin that no longer belonged to one body.

A long, guttural breath escaped what remained of his throat — warbling, layered with voices that echoed too many mouths at once.

Nikolai took a step back.

Not out of fear.

But because he didn’t know what it was anymore.

Where the man once stood, now loomed something built. The coat had fused to the muscle. The mask had melted into his face. Exposed ribs jutted from beneath stretched skin like a cage around a heart that no longer beat, just pulsed with a white, syrupy glow.

Eyes.

There were too many of them now. Peeking from beneath flaps of skin, blinking independently. Some were golden. Others black. One held a crimson slit too familiar.

It had taken part of him.

Nikolai’s claws flexed as his eyes flickered with a blue and red light.

The creature twitched once, then lunged.

It didn’t move like the surgeon.

It charged like a hungry beast.

Nikolai braced, throwing his shoulder forward to block the first slam. The impact rattled his bones. His back skidded against the floor, claws gouging trenches into the stone to stop himself.

The Flesh God came again — this time leaping high, all weight and mass descending with a roar like a tearing throat. Nikolai rolled beneath it, came up behind, and drove his claw into its spine.

It didn’t bleed.

The flesh pulsed around the wound, then swallowed his arm.

“What the—!”

He ripped himself free just before the tendons could trap him. His hand came back coated in clear pus, steaming and clinging like silk.

The thing turned slowly.

Then smiled.

Its mouth ran from cheek to cheek, split all the way into its neck. Teeth shifted like broken glass behind wet gums.

It charged again.

This time, it mimicked him — a low sweep, exactly like the move he used on the Mirror a few floors below.

But it was wrong.

Off-balance. Too late.

Nikolai dodged cleanly, spinning behind it and raking his claws across its shoulder.

Chunks of mismatched flesh flew into the air.

They didn’t fall.

They crawled.

The pieces landed, formed into twitching mockeries of limbs, then exploded into a mist of nerve gas.

Nikolai covered his mouth, aura flaring as he backstepped and snarled.

“You’re not even a body,” he growled. “You’re a graveyard.”

The creature tilted its head and spoke again. “…Then… let’s… add… yours…”

The lights pulsed violently.

The arena itself morphed, tendrils slithering from the walls and reshaping the battlefield. Bone spikes jutted from the floor, forming a shifting cage of impalement — every movement now a gamble.

Nikolai’s blood rushed.

He inhaled through his teeth, letting the pain roll down his spine.

He couldn’t stall this.

He had to end it.

He dashed forward again — this time faster, lower, his claws igniting with aura-black flame.

The Flesh God welcomed him with open arms.

And they collided in a spray of bone, blood, and heat.

The Flesh God bellowed, its body swelling again — massive and erratic, its limbs bending at wrong angles as it launched another series of crushing blows, each one turning the stone floor into splinters of bone and gore.

Nikolai ducked the first, sidestepped the second, and leapt over the third — barely. The tendrils caught his ankle mid-air and whipped him sideways, slamming him hard into one of the rising bone pillars. A crunch followed — shoulder or ribs, he didn’t know which — but pain flared bright, white-hot, and sharp.

He didn’t stop moving.

He dropped low, rolled, and kicked off the wall again, closing the distance before the thing could realign its patchwork limbs. Its body twitched and folded to counter, but Nikolai didn’t aim for its chest this time.

He aimed for the eyes.

His claws raked upward in a vicious, full-body motion — black aura flaring from his fingertips like an executioner’s edge. Four of the creature’s eyes burst in a spray of pale fluid, and its head snapped backwards in a screeching, unholy wail.

That sound wasn’t one voice.

It was dozens.

Hundreds.

Every horror it had ever absorbed.

Nikolai dropped to all fours, panting hard, blood dripping down his jaw.

His left arm hung loose now. Dislocated. Probably broken.

Didn’t matter.

He pushed off the floor again, every movement drawn from a reservoir deeper than fury, pulled from that part of him that refused to give the world the satisfaction of seeing him fall.

The monster turned in time to meet him.

Nikolai grabbed the thing by its exposed neck and drove it back, step by step, until its malformed spine bent beneath the weight of his force.

Its claws tore at his chest.

Its fangs sank into his shoulder.

But he didn’t stop.

Not this time.

With a growl that tore his throat raw, he pushed harder, aura flooding through him in black, crackling waves.

Obsidian Tide wrapped around his arm like liquid glass, jagged and humming with his will.

He jammed it forward.

Once.

Twice.

And on the third strike—

His hand punched through its chest.

Bone shattered. Nerves screamed. The entire room shook.

Nikolai’s claws closed around something soft.

Something pulsing.

And without a word, he ripped the Architect’s heart out, dragging a trail of tendon and silver filament with it.

The thing froze.

Twitched.

Then collapsed inward, its body folding in on itself like wet fabric being eaten by fire.

Its voice didn’t scream.

It whispered as it died.

“Perfect… sample…”

Then silence.

No music.

No victory fanfare.

Just the echo of Nikolai’s breath.

Heavy.

Uneven.

Before he could adjust, the thick life force of the monstrous flesh architect flooded into his body, the massive aura nothing compared to when he killed or drank the elixirs from lesser monsters… this essence overwhelmed him like a raging ocean.

“Ngh…!”

His flesh swelled, veins bulged, and muscles convulsed as he felt himself devouring the blood of a high-grade monster.

A raw feeling of power echoed in his ears as Nikolai’s bare feet slapped the ground, heading towards the portal for the 70th floor.