Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee

The Goberingei comes.

Four hands on the stone, shoulders nearly horizontal, moving faster than something that big should be allowed to move.

I see immediately that the Battōjutsu won’t survive a frontal charge. The monster is too large, too brutal, too smart. A failed cut means I get pasted into the floor.

I have to break its line first.

"Oliver. The ground in front of him... Now!!"

Oliver doesn’t need it explained.

He already has Motorhead spun up. He shouts, leaps forward with the hammer raised, and triggers the propellant at the apex of his swing. A jet of superheated blue steam rams the head of the hammer downward with devastating force. The stone floor explodes in a ten-foot radius right in front of the Goberingei.

Cracks. Dust. Shards of rock kicking into the air.

The Goberingei is mid-charge. There’s no time to swerve. One of its forehands plunges into a fresh fissure. The other slides on a loose splinter of stone. The whole four-point gait collapses to a desperate two-point skid.

It keeps coming, but now it’s fighting for its own balance.

Not enough yet. I need one more fraction of a second.

"Lola. His face... Now!!"

Lola has a Scale in her hand. She doesn’t need to aim—the Goberingei is almost on top of us, the head wide and high. She steps forward, extends her arm, and throws the Scale straight at its face. Not in an arc. Flat and hard. A rock through a window.

The Scale catches him just above the brow ridge—the exact spot where the skull plate protects the eyes.

Lola’s aim is usually awful. This time it’s perfect.

The Goberingei reacts on pure instinct. Eyes squeezed shut. One forehand whipping up to cover its face. The Scale detonates an inch before contact.

BOOM.

At that range the flash blinds it through its closed eyelids. A pure concussion of light, sound, and heat. The Goberingei roars, head snapping back, the hand still pressed to its face.

Its momentum carries it forward on inertia alone.

Eyes shut. Head shaking. One forehand busy. Three unstable points of contact. Zero vision.

There’s the window.

I drop into the position. Left hand at the base of the hilt, right hand on the guard, the shadow blade tucked back along my ribs, weight on the rear foot.

The ghosts inside Eventide whisper against my palm.

I don’t think. The body decides on its own.

A pivot left. A step forward. Weight transferring from the rear foot to the front. The right arm draws Eventide in a low fast arc—not at the chest, not at the throat.

At the back tendon of the leg still planted firm.

The blade meets the tendon just above the joint.

No resistance.

The shadow-edge of the evolved Eventide passes through muscle, tendon, and most of the bone in a single clean stroke. I feel it the same way I felt it on the Stalker—no negotiation, no weight, no friction. The weapon agrees that this leg needs to stop existing.

Dark blood. A lot of it. Black against the cave floor in the torchlight. I pivot through and watch the line of the cut before the monster registers that it just lost a leg.

The Goberingei tries to plant the severed limb. There’s nothing to plant. Eight tons of moving weight start to fall sideways. The forehands try to compensate—the sand and the kinetic load have other plans. There’s no braking eight tons in mid-stumble.

It skids. It slews. The huge head clips a stalactite from the ceiling and stone rains down on the impact. The body keeps rolling, unsteered, toward the chasm.

In the last fractions of a second before it goes over, the Goberingei grabs at the broken stalagmites I used to save Lola. Anything. Any handhold.

It looks me in the eye.

There isn’t enough time left for anger or fear. Just enough to recognize me. To understand—king to king, on his own ground—who just took the crown from him.

Then the rock breaks under its grip and it falls.

We stand there. No one says anything. The torchlight on the ground is the only thing moving in the chamber.

The sound of the fall reaches us a beat at a time—claws scraping the wall of the chasm, a strangled grunt, a long stretch of nothing.

Then the impact. Right on schedule.

Eleven seconds...

Oliver finds his voice first. He starts to say something like "That was..." and doesn’t manage to get to the second word.

Lola is already pocketing her next Scale. Her hands are calm. Steady. "He was prettier before."

Rhayne unfastens the Void Link slowly. I feel the strange thing inside me drain back out—water leaving a chamber it never belonged in. The cold under my skin retreats with it. My own outline settling back into my own body.

I pull up the HUD.

[OXI: 1,380 / 1,600]

Cheap. A full fight would have cost me four times that. The ghosts know economy.

I look at Eventide for a moment longer than I need to. The black edge is dry. Not a drop of the Goberingei’s blood stuck to it. The shadow-blade never collects what it cuts. It just unmakes the resistance and keeps moving. I turn it off, and the blade shuts.

Then I turn and look down the tunnel that keeps going deeper into the cave. The chuffing of the other predators is gone. Silenced. The whole dark stretch ahead of us is holding its breath. The other monsters heard the Goberingei fall and felt his energy leave the world, and now they’re recalculating.

Couple of minutes of respect before the next group decides to test our squad.

I look at Oliver.

"You learned to use Motorhead fast."

He shrugs. "Hit a lot of walls back on the farm."

I almost smile. There it is again. The thing about Oliver that made me trust him in the first place—he takes a compliment and turns it into a joke at his own expense. Every time.

"Come on. The cave still has things to say."

We walk deeper into the dark, leaving the chasm and the dethroned king behind.