Chapter 658: Four Horn
The four horn had not moved from the back of the water creature.
It stood there while the one horns and two horns came ashore and the knights around Noah were still processing what they were looking at, and it stood there with the patience of something that had done this before on other shores in other places and had no particular urgency about this one.
Noah looked at it and felt something cold settle behind his sternum that had nothing to do with the night air.
’Four horns,’ he thought. ’In my timeline, a four horn killed three million people in a single day. Not over a week, not across a campaign. One day. And that was against awakened humans with beast gear and system abilities and decades of accumulated knowledge about what Harbingers were and how they operated.’
He looked at the knights around him. At the dragon knights with their blessed items and their abilities. At the regular knights with their steel and their training. At Pip and Nami still on Shade above him, their blessed weapons in their hands, neither of them understanding what they were looking at.
’These people have never seen one before. They have no framework for it. They do not know it heals. They do not know conventional damage is furniture rearrangement to something like that. They do not know that the one horn who just stepped off that water creature’s mouth could kill every regular knight on this field before anyone finished deciding what to do about it.’
He looked at the four horn’s face.
The four horn was looking back at him.
’It sees me,’ Noah thought. ’Not the formation, not the knights, not the battle. Me. It has been looking at me since it surfaced and that is not random and that is not good.’
He pulled his eyes away and turned to the knights nearest him and kept his voice at the level that carried without carrying.
"Listen to me," he said. His chest was still working from the ground engagement and his voice came out rough around the edges. "Whatever you do, attack in groups. Do not go alone, do not engage one on one regardless of what you think your ability can do. Strike for the head and the chest and nowhere else, the rest of it will not—"
BOOM!!!
The ocean split.
Not parted. Not displaced in the way of something large surfacing. Split, the water on either side driven outward in twin walls that reached twenty feet high before gravity reasserted itself, and the seabed between them was briefly, impossibly visible, the dark mud and the ancient rock of it exposed to open air for the first time in geological memory before the water came back in a crash that sent the harbor churning.
The four horn landed on the dock.
KROOOOM!!
The impact went through the ground in a wave that started at the dock and traveled outward through the earth and came up through the soles of every boot on the battlefield simultaneously. Stone cracked from the dock’s edge outward in lines that spread and branched and spread again, the network of fractures covering thirty feet of harbor in the time it took the dust cloud thrown up by the landing to reach its peak height.
The dust settled.
A knight was standing at the dock’s far end where he had been standing a moment ago.
He was standing because the four horn’s hand was under his chin, holding him vertical.
The knight’s head was not present.
The four horn lowered its arm and let what remained fall and it looked at the assembled knights and dragon knights and the recruits frozen at the battle’s edge with blood across its face that it had not bothered to wipe and the expression it wore was not anger and was not hunger and was something for which this language had not,yet developed a word.
Then it smiled.
"ATTACK!"
The shout came from somewhere in the formation and the formation moved because movement was the alternative to standing still while something walked toward you with that smile, and the battle that followed was not a battle in any sense that the word usually carried.
One horns died. Dragon knights who hit them in the head and chest with their full ability output, the blessed weapons finding something in the harbinger biology that regular steel could not, dropped one horns in three, four, five exchanges. They died hard, the healing factor fighting the damage every step of the way, but they died.
Two horns did not die.
A red knight with a lightning blade hit a two horn across the skull with everything his ability and his blessed weapon could generate and the two horn’s head snapped sideways and came back, the wound at the temple already closing, and the two horn’s hand closed around the red knight’s sword arm and pulled and the red knight made a sound that emptied the immediate area of anyone not immediately running.
The two horn used what it was holding as a weapon against the next person.
Noah was already running.
’You do not fight this the way you fight anything else,’ he thought, his feet covering ground, the chi building in his legs. ’You do not win an exchange and move to the next one. You find what it cannot heal fast enough to ignore and you hit it there and you do not stop.’
He went up.
The jump carried him fifteen feet of vertical distance, the white chi detonating downward through his legs at the apex and converting the remaining height into forward velocity, and he came down toward the four horn with his right fist cocked and the VPT compression loading through his knuckles, everything he had narrowed to the single point that the technique demanded.
The four horn did not look up.
Its hand came up.
The catch was absolute, Noah’s fist hitting the four horn’s palm and stopping, the impact traveling back through his arm and into his shoulder with a force that his enhanced durability absorbed in the way a wall absorbed a demolition charge, which was to say partially and with consequences. But the VPT had been loading at the point of contact and the compression released through the four horn’s palm and the four horn’s claw split.
Not broke. Split. The outer layer of the hide parting along the line of force, dark fluid running from the gap.
It began closing immediately.
’Faster than a two horn,’ Noah thought, watching the tissue pull itself back together. ’Significantly faster. That healing factor is operating at a tier I have only seen once before and I barely survived that encounter with a full kit and a support team.’
The four horn looked at its hand. Looked at Noah.
BOOM!!
The hammer arrived with the sound that Egor’s hammer always arrived with, that low whistling note climbing to impact, and it connected with the four horn’s ribs at the moment Noah was still in contact with its hand and the force of the strike lifted both of them off the dock simultaneously.
The world became sky and then harbor and then sky again as they tumbled, Noah releasing the four horn’s hand and trying to find orientation, and the four horn was beside him in the air with its expression unchanged, absolutely unchanged, as if being launched off a dock by a hammer was a minor contextual event.
Noah got his feet under him.
Hit the four horn’s jaw. Once.
CRACK!
Twice.
CRACK!
The third strike found the temple and the VPT compression went through at full concentration and the four horn’s head moved, actually moved, two inches to the left, the first genuine displacement of the fight.
The four horn’s leg came around.
The kick caught Noah in the midsection and the air left him and continued leaving him as he traveled, the force driving through his torso and out his back and he hit the tree line at the field’s edge with enough velocity that the first tree he connected with ceased to be a standing tree.
KRACK!!
The second tree caught him across the back and his momentum ended there, his body sliding down the trunk to the root base.
He lay in the broken wood for one second.
[-67 HP]
[Health Points: 3,653/3,720]
’Three ribs,’ Noah thought, the assessment arriving the way it always arrived, clinical and immediate, before the pain had finished deciding how serious it intended to be. ’Maybe four. The second tree did something to the left shoulder that the first tree started. And that kick was maybe thirty percent of what it can do.’
’Thirty percent.’
He stood up.
"Yep," he said, to the tree and the root system and the general darkness of the forest edge. He spat blood into the leaves. "Something’s definitely broken."
He started running back toward the dust cloud rising from the harbor.
---
Egor was still standing when Noah cleared the tree line.
He was bleeding from his mouth, the blood dropping in a thin line from his lip to the dock planking, and he was standing with his hammer recalled to his hand and his golden glow running at full intensity, and he was looking at the four horn the way Egor looked at things he had decided about.
"I am Egor," he said. His voice carried across the dock with the quality it always carried, no performance in it, just weight. "Dragon Knight of this kingdom. And I am the last thing between you and another sunset."
He threw the hammer.
The four horn clapped.
THROOOOM!!
The sound the clap produced was not a sound that a clap produced. It was a sonic cone that had borrowed the shape of a clap and the content of a geological event, the compressed air driving outward from the impact of those two palms in a wave that hit the dock surface and began pulling it apart. Not breaking it. Pulling it, the planking shredding away from the harbor floor in strips, the nails pulling through the wood as if the wood had decided to offer them up, the debris from the dock surface lifting into the horizontal stream of force and becoming shrapnel that filled the air between the four horn and Egor in a cloud of splinters and iron and rope.
Egor held.
The hammer was in his path and he got it up and the golden glow at its face pushed back against the sonic force, and the blood from his lip floated upward in a thin red thread, rising against gravity, pulled by the pressure differential between the force hitting him and the air behind him, and his boots carved lines in the dock as the force pushed him back inch by inch and his jaw was set and his arm was shaking.
"Such power," he said, and his voice came out through his teeth.
The four horn stepped through the cone’s wake and hit him.
BOOM!!
The punch traveled maybe two feet between the four horn’s shoulder and Egor’s chest and Egor left the dock and went through the tree line at the field’s eastern edge and the trees he went through said so in the sequential cracking of wood that marked his path through them.
Noah was already in the air.
He came down from the tree at the field’s edge with a spinning heel kick loaded with dark chi, the red-white energy running up his shin and foot, and he brought it around at the four horn’s neck from behind with the full rotational force of the jump behind it.
The four horn’s body shifted one foot to the left.
One foot. The entire mass of it, displaced laterally by the impact, and the four horn turned around with the same patience it had turned around in every other moment of this fight.
’One foot,’ Noah thought. ’A kick with dark chi enhancement at full rotation moved it one foot. In my timeline a strike like that would have cracked a two horn’s spine.’
The tail came around first.
It caught Noah across the ribs, the same ribs, and he hit the nearest tree trunk with his back.
KRRACK!!
The trunk split at the point of contact and Noah fell through it and came out the other side on his hands and knees in the dirt.
Two punches found him before he rose. The first drove his guard into his own chest. The second found his chin at the end of the arm that had been up and drove it down. Then a hand closed on his face, the palm covering from his chin to his forehead, fingers at his temples.
BOOM!!
The ground came up.
The impact of his face hitting the harbor dirt created a crater with specific dimensions. Sixteen inches deep at the center, the edges sloping outward for three feet in every direction, the exposed earth showing root systems from the tree that had been above the surface until a moment ago, the white tendrils of roots hanging in open air.
Noah was in the bottom of it.
’Get up,’ he thought. Not urgently. Just plainly, the way you told yourself the next necessary thing. ’Get up because the alternative is staying down and staying down means this thing goes back to that battlefield and nobody there has any idea what they are dealing with.’
He heard the hammer before he finished deciding to move.
The whistle of it cutting air, Egor throwing everything into the throw, and the impact when it connected with the four horn’s side was a BOOM that traveled through the ground and up through the crater walls and hit Noah in the chest from every direction simultaneously.
He used it. Got his hands under him. Got his knees under him. Pushed out of the crater.
The four horn had the hammer.
It was looking at the hammer in its hand, and then it looked at where Egor was emerging from the tree line and it raised the hammer.
BOOM!!
It brought it down on Noah.
The dock surface where the blow landed stopped being dock surface. The wood drove into the harbor water below, the support beams following, the entire section collapsing downward and taking the surrounding material with it, the crater that resulted exposing foundation stone and old harbor mud from the era before the dock had been built.
Noah was in the middle of it.
He was also standing.
His arm was not working correctly. The other one was. He used it.
"What is this thing," Egor said. He had blood on his face from somewhere new, his hammer gone, looking at the four horn with the expression of a man who had significantly revised his estimate of a situation. "What is it."
’A Harbinger,’ Noah thought. ’An apex predator from outside this planet’s ecology that heals faster than we can damage it, is stronger than anything this world has ever produced, and is currently standing in a timeline where nobody alive has the framework to fight it. And it has four horns which means it has been evolving through kills for longer than this kingdom has existed.’
He did not say any of that.
"No idea," he said. "But we have to make sure we are the ones to leave here and not it."
Egor made a sound in his chest that was agreement and exhaustion and something that had not given up yet all compressed together.
They moved at it again.
Not coordinated, not planned, just two people who had been doing this long enough to understand that what the moment required was forward motion and forward motion was what they had available.
Egor went left and Noah went right and the four horn tracked both of them with those eyes that did not miss things and began the process of deciding which one to address first.
It chose Egor.
Which meant Noah had a second.
He put everything remaining into the approach. Dark chi up both legs, white chi at both fists, the combination running simultaneously, the two energies at his skin generating that sensation of being pulled in opposing directions at the molecular level, his hands aching with the pressure of it.
BOOM!!
The four horn hit Egor with a strike that Egor partially blocked and was partially absorbed by the golden glow and the rest drove Egor into the remaining dock with enough force to leave a shape in the wood that would tell the story of this night to anyone who found it later.
Noah’s fists hit the four horn’s back in rapid succession at the same point. Three strikes, each one finding the previous impact and pushing through it, the combined chi detonating at each contact point.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
The four horn’s hide at the impact site split and closed and split again as the accumulated damage fought the healing factor for control of the same few inches of tissue.
The four horn reached back.
Its hand found Noah’s arm and the grip closed and Noah felt his radius and ulna begin a conversation they had not asked to have. It pulled him around, over its shoulder, and the throw sent him across the remaining harbor.
KROOOOM!!
He hit the stone wall at the harbor’s edge and the stone wall provided a brief record of his outline before he dropped.
They came at it again. Egor from the front with the hammer producing golden detonations at every contact point that shook the four horn’s frame visibly.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Noah from the back finding the split tissue and hitting it with the combined chi before the healing factor could fully close it. The four horn took both of them and gave back more, the exchanges leaving marks on the harbor that would take a generation to fully repair.
They fought it to the field’s edge.
They fought it into the field.
They fought it through the field and into the forest and through the forest and the trees said so for a quarter mile in either direction, the broken trunks and the gouged earth and the craters recording what had moved through here and at what scale.
Then Egor hit it with everything.
Not just the hammer. The golden glow itself, the enhancement ability at its absolute limit, a released burst that came off his body rather than the weapon, the kind of output that left him on one knee afterward because the body had limits even when the will did not.
THROOOOOOOOM!!
The explosion turned thirty feet of forest into a memory. The dust from it rose above the treeline and caught the first light of dawn coming over the ridge and turned it gold, and for one suspended moment the whole ruined forest was lit in that color.
When it settled, three shapes resolved out of the debris.
Noah on his knees, one arm functional, the other held against his side, breathing.
Egor on one knee, hammer in the ground, using the handle as a support, blood from his mouth and his nose and a new source at his hairline all running together.
The four horn.
Standing.
Not standing the way they were standing. Standing the way it had stood on the water creature’s back when they first saw it. The same patience. The same baseline. As if the last ten minutes had been a context it had existed within rather than a fight it had been in.
It looked at both of them.
Then it looked around at what had been produced. The destroyed forest. The craters. The broken ground. The distance they had covered from the harbor to here.
Something moved in its face that was not the thing its face had been doing up until this moment.
’It’s enjoying this,’ Noah thought, watching the four horn’s expression shift. ’It is not frustrated. It is not damaged in any way it cares about. It has been watching two people throw everything they have at it and it is having the best time it has had in however long it has been in this timeline.’
’That is the worst possible thing it could be doing.’
When it spoke, the voice came from somewhere that a voice was not supposed to come from. Not the throat, not the chest, some deeper register that was felt before it was heard, the sound of something communicating across a distance that was not spatial.
"EXCELLLLENTTTTT!!"
The sound of it hit the remaining trees and the remaining ground and the remaining dawn air and none of them were quite the same after.