Chapter 49: Dungeon Dive [5]
The boon in having someone like Gareth by your side was that you didn’t need to feel guilty about using them as a shield for your own gain.
Silas wasted no time in putting himself behind the giant as the strike game, Gareth let out a roar of struggle as he tackled the tail with the flat of his sword again and Silas capitalized on the brief moment of re-balancing to strike.
This time however, he had a new and improved plan.
He was already plunging his sword down into the lift between the scales by the time the snake knew what was happening, it reacting too late as he swung the blade in the widest arc he could muster, completely flaying away the targeted piece of scale in the process.
The Snake let out another one of the horrible wails, making Silas wince from the sheer volume.
He was already standing next to Gareth the next moment, repairing his snapped blade as he relayed the plan.
"I’ll distract it, strike on the wound." He took a deep breath, readying himself to play decoy. "It should die if you manage to pierce it."
Gareth looked at him for exactly one second with the expression of a man assessing a plan that was going to put Silas directly between the snake and its patience.
"Go," he said.
Silas went.
The distraction strategy was simple in theory and required a specific kind of commitment in practice. The kind where you stopped thinking about whether it was going to work and just made it work, because hesitation at this stage was the same as failing at the start.
He went in fast and loud, not trying to hide the approach, making himself the most obvious thing in the snake’s immediate awareness and staying that way.
The snake took the offer.
It turned on him with the full weight of its attention, the amber eyes fixing on the one thing in the clearing that was moving directly toward it rather than away, which was apparently unusual enough to warrant priority. The head dropped low, the body coiling with the specific motion he’d come to familiarize himself with, weight distributing for a direct strike rather than a sweep.
He had approximately two seconds, he realized.
He used them to be somewhere else, not far, not retreating. Moving horizontally, keeping the head tracking, keeping himself between the snake’s focus and the exposed wound on its flank.
The thing about being a distraction was you had to be genuinely distracting.
A threat that moved away wasn’t interesting.
A threat that moved across the face of your injury, that kept appearing in your eyeline no matter how you tracked it, that was the kind of thing you couldn’t ignore.
The snake couldn’t ignore him.
The head swung. He moved. The head swung again, faster, the snake beginning to understand that the small mobile thing was not going to cooperate with being hit, and the frustration of that beginning to override the tactical assessment. Which was exactly the state he needed it in.
Frustrated things made mistakes.
"Gareth!" he called. "Now."
He heard it before he saw it.
The specific sound of the great sword being committed to a strike with everything behind it, the kind of sound that had mass and intention in it, the kind Gareth produced when he had identified a problem and was solving it permanently.
Silas could feel the literal atmosphere shift around him from the sheer momentum the blade was carrying.
He was genuinely so glad that he was not on the receiving end of it.
The blade came down on the exposed wound with the full weight of a man who was, underneath the field work and the desk job and the careful politics of running a cohort, the kind of awakened who had earned his rank in the most direct way available.
The most direct way being absolute brute force.
The sound the metal piercing flesh, and crunching through the bones was the sweetest thing Silas had heard since entering this dungeon.
The snake went rigid.
Then it made a sound was structural rather than vocal, a deep internal complaint from something that had been reached where it hadn’t been reached before.
Silas regretted thinking about sounds all together.
The body convulsed once, the tail sweeping wide—Silas dropped flat, felt it pass over him at a distance he was going to remember later when he had time to feel things about it—and then the convulsion became a collapse, the enormous weight of the thing settling into the undergrowth with the finality of something that had stopped making decisions.
It twitched for a long moment, trying to right itself through the blade that was still going through it.
Then it went completely still.
The forest was quiet when it was over.
Silas took in a long breath, staying where he was.
He could hear the drip from the canopy above. The distant settling of the dungeon. The specific quality of silence that followed something large ceasing to be a problem.
Silas got up from the ground.
Looked at the snake.
Looked at the wound where Gareth’s blade had gone in clean, finding the exposed underlayer and going deeper than the scales would have allowed, the damage catastrophic in the way damage needed to be to stop something this size.
He exhaled.
Behind him he could hear the party reassembling.
The mages checked each other, Antonio dropped down from the canopy and gave him a slap on the back, saying something that he didn’t quite register through the pounding of his head. The healer was already moving toward Gareth and Silas, and the minor injuries that had been accumulated across the fight.
Gareth pulled his blade free, straightened, and looked at Silas with the expression he’d been wearing at intervals since the centipede encounter, the one that was still working through something.
"The plan worked," Gareth said, giving him the best version of his smile.
"The plan worked," Silas confirmed, letting out a weak chuckle.