Chapter 166: Checkmate
The glittering fog of ice crystal and shrapnel from the Fragmentation Pebble barrage was still settling across the basin when the roaring stopped, and for one long second, the only things I could hear were the distant shrieks of Outsiders and my own breathing and the soft, continuous crunch of my strongest knight working through the horde on the far side of the basin.
The damn thing, despite having no eyes, turned its head at me, letting out a snarl deep enough to send tremors into my chest.
And then it stepped out of the fog, one foot at a time.
-THOOM-!
-THOOM-!
-THOOM-!
Each footfall sent a quake through the ground that I felt through both my boot and the ice leg.
It simply walked as though it knew I wasn’t going anywhere, and that felt worse than if it had charged, all the while the bone-white plating covering its body caught the moonlight with every step, and that massive red-shimmering claw for a hand.
And the pressure rolling off it hit my brain before it hit anything else, pressing down on something deep in my psyche that was screaming at me to be anywhere else but here.
[Okay... need to-]
-CRACK-!
It crossed the distance in a single sonic burst, claw raised to stab, and I threw myself into Temporal Step before my conscious mind had even finished issuing the instruction.
The world dropped into the monochrome slow-motion while the exit point bloomed at my line of sight and I locked it and triggered it and-
-Kzzzt-!
-materialized ten meters to the left just as the claw drove into the ground where I had been standing, sending a shockwave rolling outward in a visible ring.
I didn’t bother looking back as I already locked a second exit point and triggered again.
-Kzzzt-!
Ten more meters, and I came out of the second blink with the Fragmentation Pebble stream already firing, sixteen rounds in the air before my foot had fully settled.
Boulder-sized payloads of unstable ice were screaming across the basin before detonating in a continuous chain directly against the monster’s chest while it straightened up from the crater it had made.
-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!
The explosions lit the basin in strobing white as the shrapnel tore through the air in every direction, and the concussive force of sixteen consecutive detonations against a single target should have at a minimum made it take a step backward.
Instead, it turned toward me.
That’s right, it just turned toward me, while the Fragmentation Pebbles detonated against its plating and its chest and the meat of its massive arms, and it turned toward me with no urgency at all, like I was a minor inconvenience it was getting around to addressing.
My pupils went very small very fast.
[Switch!] I thought, instantly cutting the Fragmentation stream and slamming AP Pebbles back online, pouring the full 60 MP stream at a single point on its chest, every round hitting the same spot in rapid succession while it started walking toward me again.
It raised the claw, and the reinforced ice boulders shattered against it and the bone-white plating of its forearm while it kept walking without breaking stride before dashing again.
-CRACK-!
-Kzzzt-!
I blinked and came out ten meters to its left, and it was already there, claw already descending, with three more phantom claws following close behind, and I got just a fraction of a second staring up at that massive curved red-shimmering blade before-
-Kzzzt-!
I blinked again on pure instinct and appeared ten meters behind it, firing two AP Pebbles at its back the second I materialized, both of them hitting dead center between the shoulder blades and shattering against the plating while the monster ignored them entirely and turned to face me in a single pivot.
Inside the three-second bullet-time of my next Temporal Step, with the world crawling in slow monochrome around me and the exit point hovering at my line of sight, I couldn’t help but think-
[This thing can see my exit point.]
I triggered the teleport and came out, and the claw was already swinging at my new position, and I blinked again before it connected, reappearing seven meters away while my heart leat at my throat.
[No, can’t be...] I corrected myself, watching it pivot toward me again with that same agility, [It’s not seeing the exit point... It’s just that fast! Fuck!]
-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!
I spent the next thirty seconds adjusting to that reality.
Blinking in rapid succession while it chased me across the basin, closing the distance every single time within a second of me materializing, and my AP Pebble stream was doing functionally nothing to it, producing zero stumble, zero recoil, zero acknowledgment that it was being hit at all.
[Okay...] I thought, panting while I blinked again, and the monster wheeled and dashed and wheeled again. [AP Pebbles are useless. Fragmentation Pebbles are useless. My knights won’t last even a second against it. My shotgun probably won’t do much either. So what does that leave?]
During one of the blinks, with the world in slow monochrome around me and three seconds to think, I looked at the ice leg.
[Do I actually need this right now?]
The ice leg was pulling 20 MP/s just to maintain its structure, and 30 MP/s was going into my brain, which left only 10 MP/s for the rest of my body. Against something treating supersonic ice boulders like a mild annoyance, 10 MP/s of physical enhancement was not a meaningful difference in any direction.
I triggered the teleport, materialized, and immediately redirected the 20 MP/s from the ice leg into an even spread across my body, bringing the total physical enhancement to 40 MP/s, and within a few seconds the ice leg began to drip away as I stopped feeding it, the structure losing cohesion and dissolving downward until I was standing on one leg again with a thin layer of frost crackling across my right hand and my remaining leg and running in a faint current across my chest.
The difference was immediate and real, my weight shifting and compensating with a sharpness that hadn’t been there before, and when the monster dashed at me again, I blinked out, and this time, I felt my body pivot and snap faster than it had before.
[Those knights...,] I thought, working it through while I teleported again, and the monster’s claw carved through empty air. [I can only conjure them within my Domain... And I can choose exactly where in those ten meters they appear. I can use that...]
Which meant I needed it inside my Domain, and I needed to stop running away from it and start moving around it instead, keeping it close enough to stay within my ten-meter radius while I circled it through Temporal Step at angles it couldn’t instantly reach.
The plan was simple... to spawn knights at precise points on its body, each one dumping its full 60 MP charge into a single concentrated slash the moment it materialized.
-Kzzzt-!
I appeared directly behind it, 5 meters away, and spawned a knight at point-blank range on its throat, and the moment it materialized, it poured every single MP it had into one wide slash at its throat that connected with a sound that rang across the basin.
Simultaneously, a second was spawning at the groin, and a third stabbing up into the underside of the jaw, and a fourth bracing the sword with both arms against the massive claw with the single objective to spend its entire capacity absorbing force, while the remaining twelve bloomed at distributed points across the monster’s body, each one spending its full 60 MP in a single coordinated strike in the same half-second window.
And the collective impact... stumbled it.
Yes, it wasn’t much, just a slight shift in its stance, and a very shallow cut at the throat where the first knight had connected, barely a scratch, but it was real damage, and it was the first real damage anything I had done to it had managed to produce. And that was something at least.
I exhaled and kept moving, repositioning and circling again as I blinked around it, spawning another wave that stumbled it again.
And so it continued, me circling in tight Temporal Step arcs that kept the monster inside my Domain radius while I spawned knights around its body at every possible angle, each one spending its entire capacity in a single strike the moment it appeared, while the monster dashed and wheeled and killed the ones it could reach before they connected.
I could see the cuts accumulating, shallow and slow but real.
But I was panting hard, and the pain from the arm stump and the gut wound and the eye was pressing in through the adrenaline in steady waves, and every Temporal Step felt like a slap to an open wound.
[This isn’t ideal...] I thought, but it was working, and working meant time, and time meant...
And then I did the math I had been avoiding.
My strongest knight, the one with more than 9000 MP behind it, the one that had been holding back the entire Outsider horde while some sort of intelligence on the battlefield focused on keeping it occupied, had been burning through its finite reserves against a never-ending army.
I could see the glow dimming with every minute that passed, and the attrition I was entangled in with the monster in front of me was slow.
Those shallow cuts were going to need considerably more time to mean anything than the knight had left in its pool.
And when that pool ran dry, and the knight collapsed, every single Outsider it had been holding would bash itself into me, and I would be mid-teleport circling a monster that was already ignoring supersonic ice boulders while thousands of Tier 3 Eldritch entities hit me from every direction.
I needed no thorough analysis to know I was not surviving that.
I blinked again, spawned another wave, watched them hit and stumble the monster, then dissolve, and did the math again, hoping I had made a mistake.
But nope...
My strongest knight was going to run out before I could finish this, and when it did, the horde would come, and I’m not doing enough damage fast enough to change that timeline.
Worse... that thing was adapting to my attack and teleportation patterns. It was countering faster and with greater precision, and greater success.
I kept circling and spawning and accumulating those shallow cuts at a rate that was decreasing with each passing second, while the strongest knight’s glow kept dimming across the basin.
All the while, I kept coming up empty every time I looked for the move that solved it.
[Checkmate...] the thought sat there in my head with a flat certainty that felt worse than panic. [This is checkmate...]