Chapter 164: You’re not a human being!

This was one thing he learned he could do with Aegis ever since it was fully unlocked, which was ’store’ the damage of attacks before reflecting it whenever he wanted.

The second arm, the third, and the fourth detonated one after another in a chain of white flashes.

The fifth tried to pull back, but it was too late, and the blast tore it off at the elbow and sent the claw spinning across the street like a thrown knife.

The sixth and the seventh struck the shield at the same time, and the shockwave that rolled back through them split both arms from wrist to shoulder.

Batnac was thrown backward through the air. He crashed into the roof of a low building, tore through it, and skidded across a small yard in a long line of sparks before he came to a stop against a stone wall. The wall caved in around him.

"Seven," Leon said quietly.

He walked into the yard. The wings at his ankles flickered once and went still.

In the rubble, the giant pushed himself up on his last arm. It was the one that had no hand, only a ragged stump with a cable trailing from it.

Smoke poured from his chest, and the blue glow behind his ribs flickered like a candle in a draft. His face was streaked with blood from a gash across the brow. His thin black hair had burned away on one side.

He looked up at the boy walking toward him, and he did not see a boy.

Batnac had spent his whole life measuring things.

He measured the strength of a wall before he leaned on it and the speed of a car before he crossed the road.

He had measured every S-rank player in the west, one by one, and he knew exactly where each of them stood.

Teon Allistar had been the highest of them in his eyes, a mountain of a man, and Batnac had spent many nights sitting in the dark, working out how he would fight him.

None of those measurements came close to the figure in front of him.

The boy had not used a single skill that could be named. He had not shouted, or roared, or shaken the ground.

He had stood still, and moved, and the world had broken around him. Whatever he was, he was not the top of the S-rank. He was not near it. He stood somewhere so far above it that Batnac could not even see the edge.

It was not a mountain. It was the sky above a mountain.

The old stories had a name for beings like that, and the name was god. Batnac had never believed in them.

"What are you?" he whispered.

"I am the one you were looking for," Leon said.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one you are getting."

"You are not a human being!"

"I am quite sure that I am."

The giant bared his teeth. Something wild and hopeless flared in his eyes, and he threw himself at the boy with the last of his strength.

His eighth arm shot forward, and a long blade slid out of the open socket where the hand should have been, glowing red with heat. The thrusters on his back screamed, and the ground behind him cracked.

Leon watched it come.

He did not raise the shield. He did not step aside. When the point of the blade was a hand’s width from his face, he lifted two fingers and caught it between them.

The giant stopped.

It was as if he had run into a wall. The thrusters roared and the pistons screamed, and every plate in his body shuddered, and the blade did not move another inch.

A crack spread across the metal. Another followed it. The red glow dimmed and died.

"You told me not to underestimate you," Leon said.

He closed his fingers.

The blade snapped, and the crack ran up the arm like lightning. The forearm split open, and then the elbow, and then the shoulder. The entire arm came apart in a cascade of rattling steel, and it fell around his boots in a heap of scrap.

"Eight," Leon said.

Batnac stood in the yard with no arms at all, and his chest plates hanging open, and the blue light behind his ribs sputtering badly.

A new sound had begun inside him, a low, grinding whine like a machine about to tear itself apart. One of the thrusters on his back coughed out a gout of black smoke and went dark.

"No," he said.

Hairline cracks ran across his torso. They spread from the edges of his chest plates down to his waist and out along his hips, thin silver lines that glowed faintly from inside. The plates on his legs began to flake away, one after another, and drop to the ground.

"No, no, no. This is my body. This is my frame. I built it for ten years!"

"I know."

"It cannot break! It cannot!"

"It is breaking."

He tried to take a step, and his knee gave way. He pitched forward into the dust, and his chin hit the ground.

A long, shuddering sound came out of his throat. It might have been a laugh, or it might have been the beginning of a sob.

Leon stood over him in the settling smoke, and the wind lifted the edge of his jacket.

"Is that everything?" he asked.

"Not," Batnac rasped into the dust, "yet."

The plates on his chest snapped open with a metallic shriek.

The dozen half-melted barrels inside twisted together into one wide muzzle, and white light began to pour into it, so bright that it threw Leon’s shadow across the yard.

The air shimmered, and the grass beneath the giant started to smoke.

"Chest cannon!" Batnac screamed. "Full charge! Everything I have left!"

"Master, the core cannot sustain a discharge of—"

"Fire!"

The beam left his chest with a sound like the sky being torn in half. It was wider than a man and brighter than the sun, and it flew straight at Leon’s face from a distance of one meter.