Novel Full Chapter 1066 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 10th Chamber - 4
Chapter 1066: Chapter 1066 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 10th Chamber - 4
Selthia waited... Then she exhaled in that particular way she exhaled when she had calculated that an attempt was necessary even knowing the result.
They held.
The beast pushed forward and they pushed back, and the purple in the crystal moved a fraction of a millimeter and then stopped moving while Ren’s attention held it.
That was the conversation now. No words required.
"Disrespectful!"
The beast started rotating.
The same movement the two Platinum 3 beasts upstairs had used, the vortex of carapace and mass spiraling toward them while Selthia, from her position at the head, began tapping the corruption network to boost the regeneration and launch shots of corrupt mana with the aim of someone who hadn’t had time to practice but had enough raw energy available for aim to be a secondary concern.
Each shot was wide enough that precision didn’t strictly matter, which was its own kind of problem.
Between shots she complained, in the voice of someone constitutionally incapable of staying quiet even when talking was clearly working against her:
"Do you know how many mutants I went through for this beast to reach this size and the capacity to generate crystal cores? How many runes I wrote? The walls up there took years. Years!"
A massive area shot; they cleared it with a spatial jump, both of them moving together in the practiced way of people who had been in enough situations to know not to split without a reason.
"And you boy, who is handsome, who has every right to be handsome, you still have no right whatsoever to destroy my work... I’ll have to punish you when I catch you!" Another shot, this one closer, the trajectory better than the last. "On top of everything this beast is special, I wanted to reach her egg at the end of this ruin, and you’re going to stop me from doing that by being this greedy and disrespectful... I deserve better after all this effort!"
Mayo, from the retreat, clearly hearing the echo of the powerful mana-charged screams, said something that Ren couldn’t quite make out, but from the tone it was the kind of ’entitlement princess’ comment Mayo made when the material was too good to pass up.
"The copies," Ren said to Liora, between one push of the ray and the next. "We invoke both outside our bodies, we’re wasting too long trying to break through that boosted regeneration with half our attacks... I’ve learned the attack pattern. The Mantis carries us outside the spiral range, it’s fast enough to avoid them and we dodge the shots from above while hitting with full combined power. Double input on every used second of fusion."
Liora understood it in one second and executed without asking for elaboration, which was one of the things that made operating with her not much different or harder from operating alone.
The Mantis lifted them... The two copies that Ren and Liora had been maintaining inside their own bodies for defense and speed came out simultaneously, producing four attackers where there had been two, and the shift in combined output from both fusions operating in parallel changed the numbers in a way that the earlier configuration made seem impossible. Four sources, all of them above Platinum level, concentrated on a target whose regeneration was formidable but not infinite.
The beast absorbed the first combined strikes with considerably less ease than before.
Selthia noticed it and decided that she had to try something else or she would soon lose.
The first image was Ren’s mother, rendered with enough accuracy that Ren processed it physically before he processed it mentally, that particular second where the body reacts before the mind finishes identifying what it’s reacting to.
But his beast didn’t lose focus and the moment passed.
The second image was Liora’s mother, and Liora’s jaw tightened in a way Ren recognized without knowing the woman whose face Selthia was wearing.
Then Selphira, easy to generate and familiar in a way that cut differently from the others. Then Luna, with the exterior composure Ren knew too well being used as something it wasn’t designed to be.
Then even Larissa...
But none worked against them.
"Stop, you idiots," Selthia said, and for the first time the tone wasn’t feigned exasperation but something closer to urgency, the register of someone running out of options and shifting to the one they had been saving. "Stop resisting... Everything I do is for your benefit, for everyone’s benefit. There are things you need to understand that nobody else is going to explain to you, and I..."
The Hydra’s ray hit her mutant in the forehead and shut her.
Watching her use the images of the people who mattered to him and to Liora had been one thing. Watching her use them as leverage in the middle of a fight had been another thing entirely, and the second thing was what had produced the specific aim.
The ray from Ren’s fused beast reached the small protrusion on the beast’s own head where Selthia had been positioned, where the armor thinned to accommodate the shape she was taking, and the effectiveness of it was considerable precisely because of that thinning.
The massive mutant stumbled, which was what happened when a beast at that level, already damaged and losing controlled hold of the process that had pushed her this far, started responding to the external mana sources she perceived moving inside her own body, responding to them on her own terms and without the guidance of someone who could not feel the pain of what was happening and adjust for it.
Selthia had not explained that particular dynamic to the beast.
The protrusion had disappeared.
Without the coordination Selthia had been providing from that position, the rotation continued but differently: clumsier, the trajectory adjustments that a beast in severe pain made when the system guiding those adjustments was no longer active and the pain itself had taken over the decision-making.
The spiraling continued but it had lost the intelligence behind it, the timing that had been making the gaps close before they could be exploited.
The four copies from Ren and Liora’s beasts found those gaps, open now by fractions of a second longer than they had been before, and fractions of a second longer than necessary was sufficient when the available power was what it was.
Ten minutes.
Not easy ones... But ten minutes, and when the beast hit the floor of the tenth chamber, the stone absorbed the weight of something that had stopped being a threat at the moment its coordinator had chosen to make herself the focus of Ren’s aim.
The room went quiet except for the settling of the mass and the slow release of the mana that had been holding the beast together at this rank, dissipating into the air the way forced things dissipated when the force behind them was removed.
Ren looked at the core of Sirius in the door.
The purple had stopped advancing, still short of the halfway point.
He had time.
He breathed.