I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!

Combat itself was one big puzzle.

Silas didn’t exactly know when he had come to such a conclusion, but he had.

It was a simple thing, the essence of combat was literally to uncover what the enemy had in store for you, and act accordingly to that. In this case, the fact that the centipedes used vibrations as a defense mechanism was the puzzle.

So how had he solved it?

It was simple, all he had to do was match the frequency with his blade.

Once that was done, it was like cutting through butter using a serrated meat knife.

So here he was, with a couple of dead centipedes on the ground and the concerned glances of the support part of his team.

He understood the concern. The first centipede had thrown him through a tree hard enough to leave a person-shaped impression in the wood, which was not the kind of thing that happened to people who were fine. Yura, their healer, specifically was looking at him with the expression of someone running a damage assessment and not fully believing the results.

"I’m good," he said, preemptively.

"You went through a tree," she said.

"Not exactly through, please stop making things up."

"There’s a you-shaped hole in it!"

"Trees are soft on the inside." He rolled his shoulder, which protested mildly and then settled.

The impact had been significant, true. The damage was already less significant than it should have been, his body having apparently filed the experience under noted, adjusting, and moved on without consulting him. This was something he’d stopped questioning around the time he was fourteen and had started accepting as the particular way his existence worked.

Gareth appeared at his side, surveying the bodies with the expression of a man updating his threat assessment in real time. His eyes went from the centipede corpses to Silas’s sword to Silas.

"The blade," Gareth said.

"They used vibration as defense, very high frequency. I didn’t catch it in time on the first pass."

He held up the mana blade, a clean construct, functional even if it was less satisfying in the hand than a real one.

"Caught it on the second."

Gareth looked at the clean bisected halves of three centipedes. Then at Silas.

"You adjusted mid-combat?"

"That’s the job."

"Most people don’t adjust mid-combat. Most people adjust between combats, some people adjust between dungeons."

He looked at the corpses again with the expression of someone filing information away.

"You’re saying you adjusted between the first centipede and the second one?"

Silas said nothing.

"Where was this when we were in that Aberrant..." He let out a sigh. "Scratch that."

Gareth made the sound he made when he had decided to table a conversation for later, a low noncommittal noise that communicated both I noticed and we’ll discuss

without specifying when, and moved back toward the front of the formation. Silas looked at his mana blade.

The frequency matching had been instinctive, not a decision so much as an arrival, the solution presenting itself to his hands before his mind had finished formulating the problem.

The way he’d calibrated the construct blade was almost as if he’d been building it, not to cut hard but to resonate against what was being cut, finding the harmony that turned the chitin’s own defense into the mechanism of its failure.

It was, he thought, a genuinely elegant system the centipede had evolved.

He couldn’t say the same about the creature itself.

Anyhow, he appreciated it in the way you appreciated a puzzle that had briefly had you before you had it.

"You’re smiling again," Aris said, appearing at his left with the noiseless quality that he had when he wasn’t performing being present and was just being himself.

"Is there something wrong with that?"

Aris looked at the tree with the person-shaped hole in it. Something in his expression had a quality that Silas had learned to identify as the version of concern that Aris was willing to deploy when he’d calculated that deploying it wouldn’t be noted and filed as data by the person receiving it.

He was going to note and file it as data.

"The impact," Aris said.

"I’m fine."

"You hit the tree at a speed that should have ki—"

"I’m fine," Silas said again, with the easy certainty of someone who wasn’t saying it to reassure, just saying it because it was accurate. "I landed correctly."

"Nobody lands that correctly."

"I’m a very correct person." He smiled.

Aris looked at him with the evaluating quality, the one Silas had identified and named three weeks ago and had been tracking since. It had a specific texture when it was directed at him versus when it was directed at a dungeon creature or a political situation—slightly less clinical, slightly more something else that he was choosing not to name with too much precision.

"Your sword is gone," Aris said.

"I’m aware."

"Lyra will have very strong opinions about that."

"Lyra has opinions about everything. I find it charming."

"You find everything charming."

"Most things." Silas glanced at him sidelong. "Not everything."

Aris held his gaze for a moment in the way he did when something had arrived and he was deciding what to do with it. Then he looked back at the formation, where Gareth was calling them to move.

"Can you fight without a real blade, i can lend you mine." Aris said.

"No thanks."

"The mana construct is less stable than a physical—"

"Aris."

He looked back.

"I’ve got it," Silas said. Simple. Certain. The way he said things when he meant them completely.

Something in Aris’s expression softened by a degree that was small and visible. Silas noted it, filed it, did not examine it with too much attention, because he understood that this one was genuine.

"Formation," Gareth called.

They moved.

Silas fell into his position with the mana blade loose in his hand, his body already running its quiet background process—cataloguing the centipede data, finding its shape in his understanding of the dungeon’s logic, asking the question that combat always eventually became: what else is in here, and what does it think is going to stop me. He also quietly refined his hold on the solidifying of the mana blade, optimizing it to spend the least amount of mana on it.

The forest closed around them.

Silas was finally going to get rid of the pent up frustration he had been accumulating throughout the weeks.