Chapter 202 — What He Couldn’t Match

Chapter 202: Chapter 202 — What He Couldn’t Match

The creature caught him twenty minutes into the chase, and Arlen understood, in the single terrible instant before it happened, that he’d made a mistake somewhere in his desperate calculations — misjudged a turn, cut too close to open water where its speed mattered more than his agility.

Its jaws closed on his trailing leg.

He screamed, the sound swallowed strange and flat by the water around him, and drove Edgeline Strike backward without properly aiming, more reflex than strategy, the blade catching something soft enough that the grip loosened a fraction. He tore free, Bonebark Resilience the only reason his leg was still attached rather than simply gone, and felt hot, urgent pain flood up through his whole body even as Vitalflow Endurance scrambled to keep pace with damage that outstripped anything it had ever needed to manage before.

Move. Move now, before it decides to try again.

He kicked away, the wounded leg screaming with every motion, and the creature circled rather than immediately pressing its advantage — unhurried, still, even now, as though a single successful strike had only confirmed something it already knew rather than earned it any particular urgency.

It’s playing with me.

The thought arrived cold and absolute, and beneath the pain and the adrenaline, Arlen felt something in him settle into the same grim, focused clarity that had once carried him through Millbrook’s terrible night — not calm, exactly, but a kind of narrowed, desperate purpose that had no room left in it for panic.

Then I stop giving it something to play with.

He called Duskveil again, deeper this time than he’d ever tested it, pouring everything he had left into thinning his presence at the water’s edges, and felt the creature’s pursuit hesitate, just barely, its confident, unhurried tracking losing him for one precious half-second.

He used it. Storm Step carried him through a gap in the kelp too narrow for the creature’s bulk to follow directly, and he heard, more than saw, the massive body forced to route around rather than through, buying him distance he desperately needed. ℯ

It didn’t stay lost long. It surged around the obstruction with a burst of speed that closed the gap almost as fast as he’d bought it, and Arlen, glancing back through blood-fogged water, understood that outrunning it in a straight line was never going to work.

Terrain. Use the terrain. It’s bigger than me — that has to cost it something.

He drove for the densest stretch of kelp he could find, the tangled growth pulling at his own limbs but pulling harder still at the creature’s considerable bulk, and felt, for the first time since the chase began, a genuine gap opening between them.

It didn’t last. The creature tore through the kelp with brute, indifferent force, shredding a path rather than navigating one, and Arlen understood, with grim, exhausted clarity, that even his best idea had only bought him seconds rather than any real escape.

He turned to fight, because running had stopped being a plan and started being simply what his body did while his mind searched for one.

He called Cinderburst and Blazing Shot together, everything he had gathered into two strikes rather than one, and watched both detonate against the creature’s flank with a force that would have ended almost anything else he’d faced solo down here.

It barely flinched.

That’s not working. Nothing’s working.

The creature struck again, faster than its earlier patience had suggested it could manage, and Arlen threw Water Sovereignty into a desperate, redirecting current that turned what should have been a fatal strike into a glancing, brutal impact along his ribs instead. He felt something crack, the pain arriving a half-second behind the impact itself, and Bonebark Resilience strained against damage that would have ended the fight outright without it.

He gasped, water flooding briefly past Gillbreath’s steady support before it reasserted itself, and found himself, through the haze of pain and exhaustion, still moving, still fighting, some old, stubborn part of him simply refusing to stop even as every practical part of him understood how badly this was actually going.

Not dying here. Not like this. Not in water this far from anyone who’d even know to look for me.

He called Stonespike from the riverbed beneath them, a desperate, unaimed strike that caught the creature’s flank as it turned for another pass, and this time it actually recoiled, a genuine hiss of pain rather than mere irritation, and Arlen understood, seizing on the small, hard-won information, that whatever this creature was, it hadn’t expected the ground itself to turn against it.

Something. Finally, something.

He didn’t have the strength left to properly press the advantage. His ribs screamed with every motion, his leg burned where the bite had torn through muscle Bonebark Resilience hadn’t fully protected, and his reserves — every ability he could feel himself straining to reach — were running dangerously, frighteningly thin.

The creature came again, wounded now and considerably less patient for it, and Arlen met the charge with everything he had left simply gathered into staying alive rather than winning — Aura Ward absorbing what it could, Storm Step carrying him clear of what it couldn’t, Duskveil thinning him at the edges just enough that its jaws found water instead of flesh on a strike that should have ended him outright.

He surfaced somewhere in the chaos of it, gasping despite Gillbreath’s support, some instinct driving him toward air even though he didn’t need it, and caught, in the brief clarity of that broken rhythm, a fractured, honest thought.

I can’t beat this. I can only survive it, if I’m fast enough and lucky enough and it gets tired of chasing before I run out of anything left to run with.

He dove back under, blood trailing thin and dark behind him, ribs grinding with every stroke, and pushed everything he had into putting distance between himself and the wounded, furious creature still closing behind him — not fighting anymore, not really, simply refusing, with the same stubborn, exhausted determination that had carried him through every genuine crisis in two separate lives, to let this be the place it finally caught him for good.

The kelp blurred past in dark, tearing streaks. His body screamed at him from a dozen different directions at once. And somewhere behind him, wounded but still relentless, the creature came on, patient no longer, simply furious now, and closing.