Biocores: The Legendary Weapon Designer

Nioh's spine arched as the harmonic energy surged through him like a tidal wave. The flickering lightning that had danced across his skin suddenly collapsed inward—imploding into his body—before bursting outward in a radiant pulse.

His skin was shredded in an instant, disassembled by unseen magnetic force as panels of black alloy materialized around his limbs, forged from nanite-grade armor and willpower. The pieces rotated mid-air, locking into place with perfect mechanical precision.

A sleek, form-fitting black exosuit enveloped him, each segment humming with restrained violence. Gold filigree traced along the contours—subtle, divine, ceremonial.

His shoulders ignited with twin arcs of energy. His helmet sealed, and when the visor snapped into place, two vertical golden lines flared like eyes opening in the void.

It began with a whisper.

Nioh raised his left hand, palm open. Suspended above it, the strand of Gluttony quivered like a serpent tasting the storm. It radiated hunger in its purest form—not for food, but for power, for energy, for everything. Months ago, this strand had been carved from the biocore of Akron himself, harvested through an unspeakably delicate extraction only Nioh could orchestrate. It was not a weapon—it was a virus, a divine flaw in the system of power.

Now it hovered, coiling like smoke, as his right hand crackled with raw lightning—the accumulated energy of the five statis-cubes, built over weeks, synchronized and amplified during his descent. Each one held a distinct harmonic resonance, encoded with his genetic frequency, his rhythm, his will.

He stood at the eye of a hurricane of fog and sound, of spectral rot and divine resonance.

This was his design.

The screams of the crowd—the harmonic wave of unison awe and hope from the watching fiefdom—pulsed around him. The cheers were not just noise. They were collected through resonance, a living sound wave stored in his cosmic suppresing physique,. It was the sound of belief, of expectation, of fear being shattered.

This was the moment.

He moved.

The strand of Gluttony drifted down and sank into the storm held in his right hand.

And everything changed.

A deafening silence consumed the battlefield. The world froze as the fusion began.

The strand of Gluttony didn't just merge—it devoured.

First, it consumed the static lightning of the charged boxes—hundreds of kilowatts of stored kinetic energy. Then, it devoured the sound, the cheers, the hope of tens of thousands—converted into vibrational frequency, raw waveform energy. Layer by layer, it metabolized it all, converting it into a pulsating, unstable fusion within Nioh's body.

Then came the final component: Vitality.

Threaded into the fog he had been siphoning this whole time was the second sin—Greed. Barely perceptible, buried under a thousand curses of the Hellscape, it had been pulled to him drop by drop, filtered by his mutated physiology. Greed was not a burst of flame—it was a deep, gnawing furnace.

Now, with Gluttony as the lens and Greed as the fire, the fusion surged into his core.

Inside his body, pain bloomed like galaxies imploding.

His biocore, once cold and calculating, now screamed in ecstatic fury as it processed three incompatible energies. The golden filigree on his armor twisted, turned crimson, then flared into incandescent gold. Black metal bent under the strain, and his visor cracked and reformed.

From nearly the peak of Rank 6, he leapt.

A surge of metaphysical pressure slammed outward from him—like a pulse of divine law rewriting the battlefield.

From every corner of the observation ring, instruments shattered. Watchers dropped to their knees. Even the nobles—Lithaa, Aquila, and the others—stumbled, shielding their eyes from the blinding flare.

"He's… breaking the ceiling," Magnus Aquila said, stunned.

"No," Lithaa whispered, voice barely audible. "He's cheating fate. This isn't evolution… it's theft."

He had done it.

Artificial Warden.

He looked toward Akron then—just a glance through the chaos. It was not gratitude, nor arrogance. It was recognition. This is what we were building toward. This was the storm they dared to unleash.

Then the sound shifted.

The ground split beneath his boots as Nioh surged forward like a divine spear. His mecha form—a black, sleek shell of engineered perfection with glowing golden lines pulsing across its surface—crackled with barely contained energy. He was a silhouette of death against a backdrop of rotting flesh and ash. Behind him, the fading mist churned violently, funneled into his body with each breath.

The first collision was a sonic warhead.

Nioh's fist met the Lich's ribcage mid-charge, and the shockwave split the battlefield. Sound-charged lightning erupted from his knuckles, crackling like a symphony gone mad, distorting the air in a chorus of destruction. The Lich didn't flinch. Its grotesque body, a patchwork of calcified nerves and fossilized sinew, absorbed the hit with inhuman resilience. Bones that should have shattered twisted instead, flexing like rubber coated in iron.

Nioh rolled back, landing on all fours. His mecha form, sleek obsidian armor with golden veins glowing like pulsing arteries, hissed steam as heat vents snapped open. The air trembled. Cheers from the distant watchers still echoed, now converted to resonant harmonic waveforms, fueling the gluttonous storm inside him.

The Lich moved—no, charged—like a cannonball of flesh and rage. Its elongated arms flailed like weapons, pulverizing the stone as it bore down on him.

Nioh didn't dodge. He met it head-on.

Their second clash cracked the sky.

Electricity fused with bass-thick frequencies screamed from Nioh's body, blasting holes through the fog. His strikes weren't just physical—they sounded like explosions, felt like thunder, and tasted like static. Each punch carried decibels sharp enough to rupture eardrums, each kick embedded with volts hot enough to weld bone to armor.

But the Lich would not die.

Its body exploded in chunks under the impact—limbs mangled, skull split, spine shattered. And then it reformed, flesh pouring back in like molten wax. It was a being of undying vitality, a coreless monstrosity that recycled death itself. Every time it was torn apart, it came back stronger, nastier, louder.

Nioh twisted his heel, skidding sideways as a claw ripped through his side, sparks flying. Blood hissed off his armor. His left arm vibrated violently—the fused strand of Gluttony's sin, now corrupted with absorbed cheers and lightning, had spread through his entire nervous system.

A smile cracked across his face behind the visor.

It was working.

He screamed—not in pain, but command. The battlefield became a concert stage.

"SOUNDWALKER PROTOCOL: FULL DIVE."

Dozens of invisible speakers materialized around him, created from distorted space. The battlefield became a maelstrom of weaponized rhythm. Beats collapsed buildings. Treble cut through bone. Bassline blasts sent the horde flying.

The Lich threw itself forward again. This time, Nioh was faster.

He spun into the air like a conductor, umbrella-blades spinning around him like a black crown. They collided again, and this time Nioh plunged his foot directly into the Lich's face—point-blank—then channeled a full sound-charged electric burst through his heel.

The Lich's head detonated like a thunder drum.

Chunks rained. Flesh crawled to reassemble.

But Nioh didn't stop.

He drove his left hand into the center of the regenerating mass, fingers glowing with the hungry red of Gluttony. He didn't just strike—

He devoured.

The lightning screamed through him.

The cheers of the crowd surged louder.

The box-fed electric charge ignited once more.

And inside his core, the Sin of Greed, twisted from a previous battle, awakened. Both sins fused again, turning his body into an unholy generator of annihilation.

He twisted. Slammed the Lich into the ground.

Again. And again. And again.

Each blow devoured more of the Lich's existence—no longer destroying it, but undoing it, unmaking the rules that kept it alive. Sound and lightning, sin and greed, cheers and fury—all converging.

And then—finale.

He stood over the still-reforming Lich, one hand crackling with violet arcs, the other glowing with Gluttony's pulsing hunger.

"Let's end the remix."

He slammed both palms into the ground.

A sonic detonation wrapped in electric scream pulsed outward, folding the world inside itself.

Just a smoking crater—and Nioh, standing tall, aura burning at Seven Stars, mecha cracked but alive.

With the Original gone—its core undone by the fusion of lightning, sound, and sin—the entire battlefield paused, as if the Hellscape itself realized what had just occurred.

Then came the unraveling.

The undead horde, once an unstoppable tide of death, froze mid-charge, their soulless eyes flickering with confusion—before their bodies crumbled into ash, unbound by the anchor that had kept them tethered to this plane. One by one, in a haunting sequence of silence, they vanished into nothingness, like phantoms swept away by wind.

But that wind didn't scatter.

It converged.

The Hellenergy, freed and raw, suddenly lunged toward Nioh, like a desperate spirit searching for a host. The air howled as if the Hellscape itself had inverted, forming a vortex of cursed vitality. The sound—high-pitched, ancient, screaming with forgotten voices—was deafening.

Nioh didn't resist.

He spread his arms wide and stood at the heart of the maelstrom, allowing the energy to pour into him like a possession ritual. It entered his nose, his ears, his mouth, even his eyes, trailing black tears that hissed into steam as they touched his armor.

His body convulsed, twitching under the influx of pure, concentrated torment.

His hair whipped wildly, caught in a supernatural wind, flickering between ashen white and deep blood red. Each shift marked a battle between his dual selves—between restraint and hunger, between the disciplined strategist and the ravenous force that tore the Original Lich apart.

The golden lines of his mecha suit glowed brighter, almost cracking under the pressure. Each vein-like circuit pulsed with gluttonous heat, and yet, something else stirred underneath. A deeper color. A third hue, forming. A catalyst of everything he'd consumed.

He fell to his knees, growling as the last traces of the Hellenergy crashed into his chest, sending his aura spiraling out of control for a heartbeat.

And then—