Novel Full Chapter 1065 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 10th Chamber - 3
Chapter 1065: Chapter 1065 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 10th Chamber - 3
The group barely had time to respond.
Selthia, visible now from where she had settled at the base of the beast’s head, watched them with the attention of someone who had said everything they came to say and was now observing whether what they left behind was going to function the way they planned.
A thousand tons didn’t need to be fast to be urgent, and these were fast enough on top of it.
Ren’s spatial jump carried two people. Liora’s jump carried two more.
Hikari took the last of them, and when she landed she was visibly shaking with the effort of a triple jump across a distance equal to the full thickness of the attacking beast, a triple jump for someone whose mana was what it was without the multi-beast architecture that Ren and Liora had behind their own jumps.
She needed a moment to stand straight without support, one hand finding someone to lean on while the rest of her caught up with what she had just asked of herself.
"Retreat!" Ren shouted, and the group didn’t need it explained.
Mayo grabbed Hikari and the ones still not riding the Royal Goat onto the Celestial Cloud Bird, clearing the path with the fast efficiency of people who understood their function right now was to be out of range not being a hindrance and were executing that function without being told twice.
The fusions activated simultaneously, Ren and Liora engaging theirs while the group was still moving, and what the two combinations produced together was enough power to test what they were actually up against.
The combined ray from Ren’s Hydra-Wolverine fusion reached the beast with enough force that the results were unambiguous.
It damaged her...
Considerably, in fact; the impact was real and the mark it left was real. But it didn’t stop her, and the massive mutant beast absorbed the hit and kept coming with the indifference that emerged when something large received an impact smaller than the sum of its momentum and resistance. The losing math was visible in the continued forward motion.
Diamond, or something that resembled it closely enough to function almost the same way in combat even if it wasn’t the same thing in origin.
Because when the spirit-flame breath of Liora’s fused Bashe connected, that one almost stopped her, the damage substantial and clearly outpacing the regeneration rate in a way the Hydra-Wolverine combination alone hadn’t managed. Between the two outputs together, they could hold her.
The defense was lower than the Diamond dragon they had needed ten people to bring down, because the aura wasn’t real Diamond in the stable sense, not the Diamond of a beast that had arrived there through its own natural growth cycle.
This was something that had been pushed to that energy range through an accelerated accumulation process that hadn’t yet become dense, which meant Platinum-level attacks left marks where attacks against a true Diamond simply dissipated faster from the mana level and density difference.
Approximately Platinum 10 was the working number, that imaginary point between categories where the beast was stronger than any Platinum but weaker than any stable Diamond.
And the two fusions, Ren and Liora’s combined, put them somewhere between Platinum 5 and 7.
Still below... Yet not so far below as to be irrelevant, and their combined energy still exceeded what the enemy was producing, which was the threshold that mattered.
Ren looked at Liora while they held the beast’s advance. Liora was looking backward, toward the guards and Mayo and Hikari pulling away with the purposeful movement of people who still understood their job was to be outside the radius and were executing it cleanly.
Then Ren directed her gaze forward with his own.
The core of Sirius in the door was still moving from grey to purple, slowly, in real time. Nothing fast, but visible to someone with the sensitivity to read it, and Ren had the sensitivity.
He could feel it progressing, and he could feel what it meant if it crossed the halfway point: the corruption reaching more than half the crystal’s mass would give Selthia the opening she needed. Her beast would place a corrupted core on the door’s other side, and the door that required two active crystal cores would receive what it was waiting for, enough to open it in the particular way Selthia intended it to open.
He kept the Hydra’s ray aimed at the beast and pushed, not just to bring her down but to hold her in place, and let Liora see what he meant so that she kept pressing forward instead of retreating.
The core behind the mutant beast was holding for now, the decision whether to hold or fall back was gone.
Liora looked at him and saw the expression of someone who had made up their mind completely and had no interest in adjusting... He was certain of their victory.
She nodded.
From the beast’s carapace, in a small protrusion that had barely the outline of a humanoid form, Selthia watched them with the worry of a girl who had shifted tactical positions but still believed she could resolve this without further combat, or wanted them to believe she did.
"That was a joke," she said. "It doesn’t have to be like this... Truce: I give you information on how to correct the corruption in the crystal, and we both leave on our own terms."
The Hydra’s ray didn’t move.
The massive fused Bashe, still the size it had grown to across the chambers above, kept firing its enormous breath from that height, the blue spirit flames feeding off the mass the beast had accumulated from what they had eliminated on the way down, the fire at a scale that made Selthia’s beast look less overwhelming from the right angle.
Ren and Liora weren’t going to waste the fusion, which was temporary, by listening to Selthia offer information that might be incorrect, through an exchange that had a good chance of being its own trap.
They had the information they needed. They had each other, and the fusions active, and the core still holding with enough structure left to work with.