Chapter 38: Anchor
Fuu took two steps back, trying his best to maintain a safe distance or something closer to it.
"You need to break them and then keep moving," Hide instructed, observing the skeletons carefully. "Don’t let them reassemble."
"ALREADY TRIED THAT—" Fuu’s voice came high and strained, the voice of someone dealing with several things simultaneously.
Hide narrowed his eyes and slowly moved closer, while hiding and observing the skeletons. If you have a certain amount of knowledge, dealing with such threats becomes a lot easier as compared to when you fight them without anything.
And it was Hide’s first time seeing what kind of talent Fuu had, he only knew the fact that it was highly aggressive and high damage type.
Fuu evaded two attacks from the skeletons without anything, not finding any chance to land an attack of his own. The third came at him from the right with a longsword and he turned and took it on the forearm — the gauntlet taking the blade, the impact staggering him one step, and then he drove his left fist into its sternum.
The blast came from the point of contact. It was not the result of the punch, but more like a detonation, the mana releasing on impact and pushing outward in a tight sphere, the skeleton’s body fragmenting from the center outward, bones scattering in a five-metre radius. Several of them clattered against the wall and fell.
’His skill has an high output,’ Hide noted. ’Those focused bursts take up a lot of his mana at a time, he can deal a lot of damage, but damage is useless against these. He will be out of fight soon.’
Because they were already coming back. The fragments from the first two had mostly reassembled. The third was beginning to collect itself from the wall.
Fuu was breathing hard already, which was the problem. The output from each gauntlet strike was enormous and the mana expenditure matched. He had punched five skeletons, and the toll was already beginning to show.
More closed in from both sides. And they had stopped running too, actually... they didn’t need to run, because Fuu was being pushed backward with each exchange. Every time he punched one apart, two more stepped into the space where the first one had been. The mathematics of it were simple and bad.
He punched another and the blue blast followed scattering it apart, but it assembled back and by then more had already taken its place.
He hit two more in quick succession, the mana bursts tight and precise, the technique clearly trained. He had been taught to use this skill correctly. He just hadn’t been taught to use it on things that didn’t stay dead.
The mana density around his gauntlets had visibly reduced.
Fuu was being overwhelmed.
Slowly, without malice — the skeletons didn’t have malice after all, they had no emotions. It was simply by numbers and endurance.
Three of them had gotten through his guard in the last exchange. Fuu’s instincts were good by any means, by now he only had three gashes across his left side, shallow but present, the fabric of his jacket dark with it.
Another across his right forearm where the gauntlet ended and the sleeve began.
He hissed but didn’t stop moving. That was something.
’He won’t last another two minutes,’ Hide thought. ’Five at the absolute most if he goes fully defensive and stops trying to kill them.’
He was still watching and learning... when his eyes caught a specific type of pattern when they arranged back.
The spine assembled from the base. Every time a skeleton reconstructed, regardless of how it had been scattered, the pieces moved inward toward the same location — the center of the ribcage.
On something.
’There.’
He let the Carapace come up fully, covering both of his arms, the scales rising from knuckles to elbow, the black material hardening into the dense armor. And then the Abyssal Flame, called from the palm and flowing outward along his arm, wrapping the scales in the black-orange fire.
He moved towards the skeletons, there was no way these things could not be killed, he was fairly certain that there was some trick and he had just now found what it was.
His eyes gleamed with fury, narrowed like that of a predator.
Fuu had stopped retreating, because he was being he was being pushed towards the wall, and the skeletons closing the semicircle in front. He was in the specific situation of someone who had run out of backward.
One of the sword-carriers had gotten to his left, working around the edge of the group, and it raised its longsword in the two-handed grip, the blade coming down in a vertical arc aimed at Fuu’s shoulder.
Hide’s punch arrived at the same moment the sword reached the apex of its swing.
The fist connected with the skeleton’s forearm at full extension with the carapace amplifying the impact, the Abyssal Flame burning at the point of contact.
The skeletons arm broke cleanly at the joint and the longsword clattered to the flagstones still held in the detached hand. The skeleton’s body staggered sideways, unbalanced by the sudden absence of its arm, its sword-swing momentum completing without the sword.
It was disoriented.
Not for long. They weren’t capable of more than a few seconds of disorientation. But a few seconds was what Hide needed.
He stepped into it and drove his right hand directly into its ribcage.
Through the ribs. The Carapace protected his hand from the bones, the scales shattering them, and his fingers closed around the interior space where the ribs had been hiding something.
He felt it immediately.
There was something small where a human heart should be. It was smaller than a screw, a mana density concentrated to a point, acting like something that could be called an anchor.
It was the thing, that the rest of the structure was organized around. Hide smiled and let the Abyssal Flame run from his palm.
The flames burst for a second and then went back to normal...but they had already burned the anchor within the ribcage of the beast.
The bones of the ribcage under his fingers released. The spine lost its orientation. The arm bones, the leg bones, the skull... everything dropped in a pile of bones at his feet.
Still and not moving.
The notification arrived in the corner of his vision.
[Calamity Beast (OssianThrall) — Eliminated]
Experience points gained: 100
Hide licked his lips and looked at the other skeletons, his eyes gleaming with madness.