Chapter 93: Time
“Run?” Tulland looked up. “We could run.”
“No point. We’d just be making me face the dive in a non-optimal way.”
“Got it.” Tulland held up his pitchfork. “I’ll harry it. If I can. Even if it’s just distraction, it should help.”
“Tulland…”
“No. No more. If I don’t help, I’m going to go crazy. You can’t hold up the entire load by yourself.”
“I can. I will.” Necia flexed her arm. “But if you really need to, you can throw him off balance where you can. Just be safe about it.”
Tulland never got the chance. As the sphinx dove, Necia planted her feet and got ready to block-counter the attack. She activated the ability with the same timing she had for every sphinx yet, perfectly intercepting the force of the attack and reflecting it back onto the animal. But where previous attacks had at worst sent her spinning to the ground, this one blew her back as the disturbed earth around Tulland’s makeshift cave turned out to be just unsettled enough to give way.
Every single hit Necia took should have created a big furrow in the ground as the stat-enhanced combined strength of her and various monsters clashing searched for an outlet. The reason it didn’t was wrapped up in the weirdness of a system class, which massaged reality to make things that shouldn’t have made sense work anyway.
All that went out the window when the earth those skills expected to interface with crumbled. Freed of the bounds of the dirt she was standing in, all that power sent Necia shooting backwards into the cave like a barrel out of a catapult.