Chapter 311: Fatal Reckoning
Coop firmly planted his left foot, generated torque through his hips, and braced his right arm as it supported his spear. His jaw was clenched tight as he incorporated every muscle in pushing his weapon forward, not wanting to leave any doubt about his own limits when compared to his target. The spear attack was aiming to sever the Icon of Mana’s right uppermost wing, just beyond the shoulder of the monster.
He kept the Icon of Mana at his absolute maximum range, just hoping to puncture its defenses by a few inches at most, so that he could call upon an apparition and decisively end the exposed monster. But it was constantly driving him backwards, causing him to draw circles in the sand while he struggled in what seemed like a one-sided fight. The monster kept seeking to embrace him, as if it barely recognized him as a threat, with a constant chatter of many voices demanding that he join them in the ultimate unity of death.
Meanwhile, Coop was taking tiny amounts of chip damage from the motes of energy that accompanied the monster. It was as if the Icon was designed to carefully lower his health until reaching a specific threshold that would weaken him just enough to fall into its embrace. It was a strategy that would never work on someone conditioned to fight without limits, like a Revenant, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t painful.
The tip of his ethereal weapon exploded with energy as the creature flicked an arm into its trajectory and halted the attack. Another circle of protection appeared with an electrical hum, originating from an oversized eyeball centered in the palm of its outstretched hand, as if it had intended to catch the spear with its pupil before it was obstructed.
A cloud of black and gray mists wafted across the Icon of Mana’s form after the spear and runed circle collided, a display of the momentum Coop had created with his effort. The backdraft was highlighted by a flash of electric pink light and the sound of raw energy that buzzed through the atmosphere.
Several of the floating rocks in the vicinity were sent flying by Coop’s expenditure of strength and a blastwave exploded from the crash of the spear ramming against the magical shield, physically impacting the battlefield. The wave chased the fleeing debris, but the shield was unmoved.
Coop was prepared for the result, and was already jabbing at a different angle with a hissing grunt. He flexed his abs and forced himself to twist down as he contracted his torso while preserving as much strength as possible, aiming for the creature’s withered left thigh, where its unused legs limply dragged through the air.
The spear moved so fast that the blastwave from the first strike was still building when the second blastwave began, sending a repeated pulse of black sand flying from where the combatants met. Coop didn’t manage to bypass the defense of the creature with his rapid attack, but he did succeed in forcing a new circle of protection to form behind a second palm eye, and he was already recoiling to stab again.
As the monster shifted forward, constantly muttering overlapping strings of barely coherent but vaguely threatening words from a thousand different voices, Coop edged backwards, thrusting his spear at the same time in an effort to preserve his aggression.
A shout exploded from his throat as he was forced to abandon his firmly planted stance by the encroachment of the monster and he strained his upper body in order to maintain the pressure and compensate for disengaging his lower body. He aimed for the largest eye embedded in the creature’s forehead with a backward leaping thrust, almost as far from his previous strike as possible. Sweat sprayed from his hair as he put everything he had into the attack, only for it to be blocked by yet another circle of protection, revealed by a third palm eye.
Each time he struck one of the defensive manifestations, the pure white mana flashed a bright neon pink and the runes twirled around the outer edges in rapid succession, like they were working hard to solidify the shield specifically against the composition of his spear. The only note that Coop made was that the monster used its hands to summon the runed circles, but it only had four arms.
Coop was a simple guy. His initial strategy was to try and overwhelm the defense of the Icon of Mana with his own Strength by destroying the first shield with a single blow. When that didn’t work, he tried the same thing, but faster, and when that didn’t work, he switched to his current tactic of racing to see if the boss could keep generating shields as fast as Coop could attack. He might just be smashing his head against a brick wall, but there was at least a little bit of tactical nuance in his instinctual battle tactics.