NABC Chapter 1062 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 8
Chapter 1062 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 8
This wasn't working…Liora's fire reached the overlap zone and found the Hydra's ice there, and when fire and ice met without precise control they cancelled each other, which meant the regeneration improved by exactly the margin the two effects had been suppressing.
Ren changed elements without alternatives.
The Hydra dropped the ice from the second head and moved to something that wouldn't interfere with the fire; so pure light on the first head, lightning on the second even at higher cost, because light and lightning didn't counter fire and the ice was doing more harm than good now.
The lightning landed with real force.
The beast that received it staggered, only for a moment, but a moment was enough for the carapace rotation to fall fractionally behind and the light to reach something softer underneath. Real damage, the kind the beast registered, adjusting its rotation pattern so the next cycle came slightly faster.
But the pattern had changed…
The partial paralysis from the lightning made both beasts clumsy, not useless but clumsy, and clumsy in something of three hundred tons was still a constant threat, still something that could end a person without particular effort, but it was the difference between gaining no ground and gaining ground very slowly.
Ren started calculating how much mana the group would have left for the tenth chamber if the fight continued at this pace. Lin reached the same conclusion a few seconds after he finished the calculation.
"At this rate we arrive downstairs tired," she said.
There was nothing to respond, because it was correct.
"I fuse here, you come later to carry me out." Not a request for input. "I finish this quickly and you save what you can for whatever comes next."
Lin had made her decision.
"Go ahead to the tenth," she said, with the smile she had when something struck her as an interesting problem rather than a serious one, the smile of someone who had spent their whole life looking for challenges to push against and come out of better.
"But..." Ren started to hold his position not wanting to leave her alone.
Lin lowered her guard for a second to touch the top of his head, the way she had when he was still the boy she had been supporting since the beginning of first year.
She was relaxed, not because there was no threat but because she had decided something, and when Lin decided something the body knew before the conscious instruction arrived, the same way it knew during daily practice, and didn't resist.
She looked at the two beasts spiraling toward them, then looked at Ren, and in that look was all the evaluation she needed: how much mana the group had left, how much they would spend if this continued for another ten minutes, what they would find in the tenth chamber without reserves.
"Go down now."
Ren opened his mouth.
"Go down," Lin repeated, and this time there was no suggestion in the voice, only someone closing a conversation that wasn't having a second round.
Then she smiled, and it was the smile she had when the problem in front of her was exactly the right size, not so small she would be bored and not so large she would be worried, just right. Something genuinely amusing in it, as if the two masses of three hundred tons each rotating in her direction were a puzzle she found interesting rather than a danger she needed to respect.
Nobody argued anymore.
Ren looked at the beasts once more, then at Lin, and made the decision as someone who knew how to tell the difference between a situation where their presence added something and one where it got in the way.
The guards followed.
Liora was the last to move, because Liora was Ashenway as well, and when Mayo held her gaze she turned and went with the others.
The group began making their way around the edges of the chamber while Lin created the open path to the staircase they needed.
♢♢♢♢
Lin's fusion had had the benefit of being among the first of its kind to exist, but it had never been the one that drew attention in a city full of double tamers activated with the same capacity thanks to Ren.
She had one of the weaker fusion combinations among the doubles with that capability, and the problem had always been the same simple one: her crane and her panther weren't at the same rank, and fusions extracted the best from what was available when both beasts were matched, so the result landed somewhere between what it would have been with only the panther and what it would have been if both were level, something smaller than what one expected from someone in her position, closer in size to an advanced Silver than a complete Gold 3.
Even physically it showed, the fusion form smaller than the panther's base form at high Gold rank.
People tended to underestimate that size.
Only once.
Lin invoked the first copy, the second instance the fusion produced as a secondary effect when it completed correctly, and let it stabilize with the mana finding its shape, then fused with the other in the movement she had performed enough times that the body completed it without instruction.
The marks appeared on her arms first, the heat she radiated shifted temperature, and she directed the mana downward toward the legs, which were already long and defined and dense from decades of practice, and with the additional flow they became something different, something the two beasts in front of her would have recognized as threat if they had the vocabulary for it; denser, more alive, carrying the particular tension of a spring loaded before release.
The mutant beasts kept spiraling forward.
The formation they had developed between them in this chamber was simple and effective: one covered the other's weak points and then they exchanged, advancing in the process, and the combined size meant that attacking from outside was always attacking the part they wanted attacked. Not intelligence in the complex sense, but the specific instinct that things which survived long enough in selection systems developed for exactly what they needed to keep surviving.
Lin calculated the angle with her extra beast copy.
Then her already big and powerful legs turned even bigger and scarier and she jumped.
The copy jumped a heartbeat behind to rotate with her, enough that the two arcs of trajectory weren't identical but convergent, the precise kind of offset that when executed correctly produced something arriving from two angles at the same point at the same time, and when executed incorrectly produced two masses colliding with each other instead of the target.
Lin had executed it correctly enough times that the margin of error wasn't something she thought about while she was in the air.
The rotation reached maximum force at the highest point of the arc.
Graceful wasn't the word anyone watching from the floor would have chosen first for the powerful attack, but there was something in the movement that had that quality anyway, the same thing the mutant beasts had in their spiral but inverted, the body turning in the opposite direction of everything coming toward it with enough speed for physics to work in favor rather than against.
In the last moment before impact, Lin released the copy she was combined with.
The 2 blows stopped the spiral.
Not gracefully… Six hundred tons of rotational inertia didn't stop gracefully; they stopped with the sound of mass against mass amplified by the echo of the chamber walls, the two beasts absorbing an impact from the specific angle that turned their own rotational movement into part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
The massive bodies that had been advancing found themselves without a clear direction to continue because the direction they'd been carrying no longer existed the same way.
Lin landed between them.
She fused again with the copy before she touched the floor.
The resulting tamer and her beast, small by the standards of what was on either side of her but large enough by any other measure, was small enough to fit in the gap, and when she entered the space between the two masses still processing what had happened to their momentum, the size difference stopped mattering in the way it stopped mattering when you knew exactly where to apply the force.
The first kick came off the left side of the nearest beast and landed against the right side of the other, and the rebound that produced in the physics of Lin's body was exactly the impulse she needed for the second kick to come out faster than the first from the angle the first had created.
The two mutant beasts were side by side, which meant their flanks were parallel walls, and between two parallel walls with enough space to move but not to escape, every strike fed the next with the accumulated power that the rebound transferred.
Lin and her beast were moving through it at high speed covered in flames, the wind and the fire working together in the enclosed space between the two bodies.