Chapter 48: Dungeon Dive [4]
"Get ready for battle!" Gareth roared in his usual way, snapping everyone out of their hesitation like he always did.
Silas was already moving, positioning himself from where the mana signature was approaching in order to intercept it from going for the healer. This was the problem with powerful beasts, they knew the difference between a healer and a regular awakened, and understood which of them was the bigger threat.
The world blurred around him as he took of towards Yura.
A quiet rustle from the foliage.
It took him a moment to process the view when he finally saw it.
"What the hell!?" The words left his mouth in a hurry, his body already to dodge the strike coming for his neck.
The beast, if it could even be called that, was one large snake.
The largest he had ever seen in his life.
Maybe too large.
No, the damned thing was definitely too damn large!
The thing was as thick as a truck, a proper one, the kind they used to move large amounts of earth for construction projects. It was entirely green in colour, almost indistinguishable from the greenery if you didn’t know where to look. The surface of its skin was covered by what looked to be thick scales, each of it large enough to be the size of one whole Aris.
Worst part? Its tail was already snapping towards him, which he barely managed to block with his sword. The crystalline blade shattering into a thousand pieces once more as it saved his life.
"Cover Yura!" He screamed as he was flung back at a ridiculous speed.
Gareth was already by the side of the Healer as the snake blitzed towards her, raising his broad-sword as a shield to cover her from the strike of the beast.
For Silas, the impact hit like a wall arriving rather than him arriving at a wall, the wood exploding outward around him in a burst of splinters and old bark, his body leaving another impression in another ancient tree that had not asked to be involved in this.
He was getting tired of trees.
He dropped from the impression, landed, assessed while he moved.
His sword was gone. Again.
The crystal blade had shattered cleaner this time—less resistance in the construct, which meant it had hit the snake’s scales and found a surface it couldn’t match and given up structurally. Good information. Painful information. Information he was going to use in approximately four seconds.
The snake had already redirected from him toward Yura with the single-minded efficiency of something that had identified the softest target and was committed to the decision.
Gareth was covering her, broad-sword raised, taking the hit across the flat of the blade and being driven back by it—not breaking, not yielding, just absorbing with the particular solidity of a man who had made a decision about how much ground he was willing to give and it was none.
The mages were scrambling for positioning, the two of them moving in opposite directions to flank, which was the correct instinct. But unfortunately they needed thirty seconds to set up and thirty seconds was not something the current situation was offering.
Antonio had appeared from somewhere in the canopy, arrows already flying, finding the non-existent gaps in the scale pattern with the precision of someone who had been doing this long enough to read armor on the move.
The arrows were slowing it. Not... stopping it.
The scales were too thick for anything he had to penetrate, but the disruption was buying him precious seconds.
Silas looked at the snake.
Watched it move. The speed was extraordinary for the size—the musculature underneath those scales working in a pattern he was already mapping, the way the power distributed through its body before a strike, the weight transfer that preceded each lunge. He could see it now, the tell that lived two movements ahead of the actual attack, the subtle shift in how it carried its bulk before committing.
He could also see the scales.
Each one the size of one whole Aris—that had been his measure, involuntary, and he was choosing not to examine why his brain had used that specific unit of measurement.
Aris himself, was too busy standing guard for the mages who was preparing a spell.
The scales on its body weren’t uniform. Close up they looked uniform. In motion, under the strain of the snake’s speed, they shifted slightly, the edges lifting fractionally at the points of maximum flex. Not gaps. Not weaknesses in the conventional sense. But points of differential pressure, places where the armor was briefly less armor and more flesh to slice.
He needed a blade that could find that gap.
Not cut through the scale. Cut between them, at the moment of maximum flex, when the edge lifted and the underlayer was exposed.
Timing. It was entirely a timing problem.
The familiar warmth arrived in him once he realized that the puzzle had been solved.
He conjured the mana blade again, this time building it differently—thinner, the edge geometry changed, the construct optimized not for impact but for precision, for finding a line rather than forcing one. It felt different in his hand. Lighter. More like an idea than a weapon.
Which was good.
"Silas!" Antonio’s voice from above, tight with urgency.
He was already moving.
The snake had turned from Gareth, something in its processing having identified Silas as the mobile threat that needed addressing before it could deal with the stationary one.
It came for him with the speed of something that had decided him worthy of its attention, which was a significant amount speed.
The answer was simple.
He ran towards it.
This was, he was aware, not the conventional response.
The strike came—tail again this time, the same movement pattern he’d clocked two seconds ago, weight transferring left before the sweep came right. He read it at the point of commitment, ducked under it with the clearance of someone who had calculated the margin and found it sufficient, and came up inside the arc.
The snake’s body curved around him as it completed the sweep, the scales close enough to touch, and he found the flex point he’d been looking for.
A joint in the scale pattern at the lateral midpoint, the edge lifting two millimeters under the strain of the curve.
Two millimeters.
More than enough for him.
He put the blade in.
Not through. Between. The thin construct finding the line with the precision of something built for exactly this, sliding past the scale edge and into the underlayer with the specific resistance of something that hadn’t expected to be reached.
The snake made a sound. The sound of something that had not been hurt in a long time encountering the concept of being hurt and revising its understanding of the situation.
It recoiled.
Silas came out of the movement and landed in a crouch, blade still intact.
The healer said something behind him. He didn’t catch the words but caught the tone—relief, tight and genuine.
He looked at the snake.
It was regarding him now with the particular quality of attention that things gave you when you’d changed their assessment of what you were. The head was enormous up close, the eyes a cold amber, intelligent in the way that high ranking beasts were intelligent—not human intelligent, but tactical, the intelligence of something that had survived long enough in a dungeon to develop opinions about threats.
It was reconsidering its opinion about him.
Good, he thought. He was reconsidering his opinion about it too.
His opinion was that the damned thing was too hard to kill!
"Carter." Gareth, from his right, reforming after covering Yura. "What was that, how did you manage to hurt it?"
"Found the gap," Silas said.
"There is no gap in that armor."
"There’s a gap in every armor," Silas said. "Just depends on when you look."
The snake moved again, faster this time.