Chapter 39: The Apex Predator & The Shadow

Chapter 39: Chapter 39: The Apex Predator & The Shadow

"Strike while the iron is hot." — old proverb

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The gargoyle hung from its own outstretched arm.

Joel gave it three seconds to understand what had happened.

Reading the label before the dosage was simply policy.

It looked like a statue built for war. It stood two and a half meters tall, covered in fused grey plates. Its body was shaped like a man, but built like a battering ram. Layered stone wings snapped and ground against each other with a sound like grinding millstones.

KRRK, KRRK.

And a face that was mostly brow.

Violet light pulsed between its plates, matching the glow from the tear in the sky.

The light grew brighter as the gargoyle pressed its full weight against the claw resting on Joel’s chest.

’Everything it does is kinetic,’ Joel thought, standing under the pressure of it without moving.

He placed his palm against the stone wrist holding him, as calmly as a man steadying a door.

Then he released the stored force.

The 6,800 units surged through the halberd in a short, sharp swing. The blade struck the pulsing seam in the gargoyle’s throat and tore through the back of its skull.

KRA-KOOM.

The gargoyle broke apart along the cracks between its plates, collapsing into a heap of cooling stone. The violet light flickered, then went out like a dying lamp.

[Ding!]

[Abyssal Gargoyle (Lv. 31) eliminated.]

[Massive EXP gained.]

[Level Up! You are now Level 25.]

[Lethal encounter survived against a statistically superior entity (level gap: 6). The Wheel acknowledges your gamble.]

[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 5.]

[Anomaly clause active: Survival Accumulation fills at premium rate. The Wheel loves a crisis.]

’Of course it does,’ Joel thought.

He looked up at the swarm circling the distant hub, then down the slope. A group of candidates in teal sashes came crashing through the trees, screaming as the grey creatures banked toward them.

The house always took its share of a disaster. And tonight, the whole stratum was one big opportunity.

Joel tightened his grip on the halberd.

"Let’s go open the branch."

•••

The Bellamy column had twelve students and a chaperone, and they were losing.

Odette Bellamy, Chloe’s cousin, led the group. She was tall and had the same sharp jaw as the rest of her family. She had raised a wall of frost behind them to slow the gargoyles, but it was melting fast. She was Level 18. The gargoyle walking through it was Level 32.

Behind her, the merchant heirs and garrison brats ran with their class plates pressed to their chests. One of them, a heavy boy with a garrison captain’s face, took a wing strike and was thrown off his feet.

Joel reached the falling boy and caught him.

The impact carved two deep tracks in the mud beneath his boots. He set the boy down behind him and stepped in front of the column.

Alone, he faced the shadow of the descending monster.

"Behind me," he said, "and keep them behind me."

The gargoyle landed on him with both talons.

DOOM.

The ground shook beneath them. The students screamed.

The monster rose from the crater, its claws buried deep in the mud where Joel had stood.

But Joel was already gone. He had dropped flat before the blow landed and rolled between its legs.

The talons had caught nothing but mud and the torn front of his coat.

The thing turned, and he was already inside its reach, and it bit him.

The gargoyle clamped its stone jaws onto Joel’s shoulder.

TCHK.

Its teeth struck his Epic hide all at once. They cracked and snapped, and the jaw split along its seam.

Joel stood inside the statue’s crushing grip, unharmed and with both hands free.

Before it could react, he drove the halberd up through the pulsing light in its open throat.

The gargoyle was still trying to understand why its prey was winning when the blade reached its core.

[Ding!]

[Aegis Frame: 4,100 units absorbed. Host damage: 0.]

[Abyssal Gargoyle (Lv. 30) eliminated.]

[Survival Accumulation: 34% (premium rate).]

The second and third gargoyles arrived together, diving from the tear in the sky like thrown anvils.

Joel planted himself between them and the column. He stood his ground and took the hits head-on.

The fight was brutal, but there was something wonderful about it.

Talons struck his chest.

TANG. TANG.

A sharpened stone wing swept across his back and stopped dead. Its force disappeared into his body.

Joel answered with the halberd. Each swing found a gap between the plates.

Once. Twice.

One by one, the violet lights went out, like windows closing for the night.

[Ding!]

[Aegis Frame: 5,600 units absorbed. Host damage: 0.]

[Abyssal Gargoyle (Lv. 33) eliminated.]

[Survival Accumulation: 100%.]

[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 6.]

Odette Bellamy stood behind her melting wall of frost, her hands lowered.

She stared at the F-rank she had heard so much about from her cousin—the boy who had dodged a pig.

Now he stood in front of her group, taking blows from monsters falling out of the sky.

"Who," she began.

"Overtired," Joel said, without turning around.

•••

Then the elite gargoyle arrived, and it only just got worst,

It was Level 34, and it was different from the others. Its seams didn’t pulse with violet light. They burned, as if a furnace sat behind its stone plates.

It landed just beyond the fleeing students with a heavy sound.

DOOM

Then it turned toward Joel, who had been tearing through its kind. The creature studied him with the calm of something that had been alive since the Spire was young.

Its mouth split open along its brow, and drowned violet light began to gather inside.

VMMMMMMM.

Joel studied the gathering light and understood the danger deep in his bones.

This wasn’t kinetic force. It wasn’t spatial energy.

It was the tear itself, a force that ate away at everything in its path.

The Aegis Frame could absorb impacts, but it had no answer for something that didn’t strike or push.

It simply erased whatever it touched.

Joel moved, but he wasn’t fast enough.

The violet beam crossed the clearing and struck his left side at an angle.

The world turned white and cold.

For the first time since his Evolution, Joel Carrow felt his body lose a fight it couldn’t win.

Joel dropped to one knee. The beam had erased the flesh along his left side down to the ribs. There was no blood. The wound had cauterized as it formed.

Juggernaut Vitality rushed into the damage, trying to repair it. His body worked to close the wound while the creature that caused it stood ahead, recharging.

Two lesser gargoyles seized the chance and crashed down on him. One pinned his halberd arm beneath its talon while their combined weight drove him into the mud.

Behind him, the students’ screams grew faint beneath the grinding of stone wings as the gargoyles pressed him into the ground.

[Ding!]

[Host damaged: erosion trauma (anomaly-class). Aegis Frame: inapplicable.]

[Regeneration: active. Rate: insufficient while exposed.]

[Lethal engagement: CRITICAL.]

[Survival Accumulation: 88%... 91%...]

"Oh," Joel thought.

He lay in the mud beneath a ton of stone. Above him, the elite gargoyle’s mouth began to hum as it charged another beam. His left side was still a ruined mess.

But his mind was clear. Almost painfully clear.

’There you are,’ he thought. ’I was starting to worry this world had nothing left to charge me for.’

The accumulation crossed its ceiling while the beam charged.

[Gauge converting...]

[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 7.]

’Good,’ he thought. ’Then I can afford the labor.’

Joel Carrow spoke one word inside his mind, quiet and calm, like a man calling for his coat while the house burned around him.

’Nyx. Hammer.’

•••

The dusk came apart.

The gargoyle pinning Joel’s right side lost its head in an instant.

SHNK.

The strike came from the deep shade of the canopy, fast and silent.

The second gargoyle lost its talon, then its skull, all within a quarter of a second.

The ton of stone holding Joel down became dead weight. It rolled off him and crashed into the mud.

Joel rose from the crater, halberd in hand.

Beside him, his general emerged from the darkness, unfolding like a held breath finally released.

The students behind him never saw her.

They only saw gargoyles dying in the shadows. Heads parted from bodies in the violet dusk with a sound like tearing silk.

SHNK. SHNK.

And through it all, the grey boy walked with his ribs exposed and his face calm.

In twelve young minds, a legend began to form. Joel didn’t need to say a word.

The hammer and the anvil worked the clearing in perfect rhythm. They had planned the method in a garret and practiced it in the jungle for a week.

Joel walked into every charge, absorbing the blows and drawing the gargoyles toward him. He stood his ground, daring them to knock him down.

The moment a gargoyle committed its full weight to the grey boy who would not fall, the darkness beside it moved.

Then the violet seams went dark.

Joel created the openings. His general struck the killing blows. The system recorded every kill as they worked, its notifications ringing through the battle.

[Ding!]

[Shadow Vanguard: x4 eliminations. Kills credited to host (Legion clause).]

[Massive EXP gained.]

[You are now Level 26.]

[Lethal encounter survived (sustained, multiple superior entities).]

[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 8.]

The elite watched its kin fall around it.

With no other choice, it turned its maw toward the shadows and began charging its beam, ready to burn everything in its path.

VMMMMMMM.

"Down," Joel said, to the students, and he walked into the second beam.

The beam struck the same side again. This time, Joel had chosen to take the hit.

Pain tore through him, white and cold. He kept walking.

The beam erased his shoulder down to the bone, while his Vitality fought to repair the damage with every step.

All the force he had absorbed from the gargoyles surged through the halberd’s crescent.

Joel reached the elite and drove the Meteor Piercer up through its burning maw, straight into the furnace inside.

KRA-KOOOOM.

The elite exploded from within. Its stone plates burst outward in every direction, and its violet light shot into the sky before fading away.

The damage to Joel’s side finally began to heal. His regeneration worked through the wound, slowly closing it. The pain lingered, but the flesh grew back until he was whole again.

[Ding!]

[Abyssal Gargoyle (Lv. 34, Elite) eliminated.]

[Lethal encounter survived against a statistically superior entity (anomaly-class, host critically damaged). The Wheel acknowledges your gamble.]

[+2 Fate Points Earned. Current Balance: 9.]

[Lethal engagements survived this engagement: 11. Entities eliminated: 13.]

[Survival Accumulation: reset. The Wheel suggests a lie-down.]

•••

The tear in the sky was already closing as the dust settled. Its violet light faded, shrinking from a wide opening to a thin seam, then to a scar.

The surviving gargoyles flew north as the anomaly collapsed.

The clearing fell quiet in the fading dusk. The air smelled of broken stone.

Twelve students stood behind Odette Bellamy, frozen in silence.

Joel knelt and picked up the torn front of his coat. He looked at it for a moment, then dropped it.

It seemed his wardrobe needed another update.

Odette found her voice first.

"You’re the Flesh-Guide," she said. "The boy who dodged the pig."

"I am," Joel agreed.

He rolled his newly regrown shoulder and looked around the clearing at the twelve students standing there. Bellamy money. Garrison names. Merchant heirs.

They would spend the next sixty years telling this story in rooms he had never been invited into.

Joel filed the thought away.

Sterling’s power now depended on the goodwill of a city that was about to hear how a boy everyone thought was dead had carried its children out of a falling sky.

Joel almost smiled.

For once, the truth was going to work in his favor.

"Nyx," he said inwardly, "go home. The dark is about to get crowded."

The shadows beneath the trees closed, hiding the blades one by one.

Joel turned his back on the witnesses and walked north through the broken jungle. Ahead stood a tree surrounded by weeper-traps.

His last two problems were waiting there, one asleep and the other splinted, both under guard.

The hero business could wait until morning.