Chapter 659: Dragon HEART Forge
The four horn dropped.
Not stumbled, not fell. Chose to drop, the decision visible in the way its body moved before it hit the ground, the massive frame folding forward onto both hands with a deliberateness that said this was not a concession to gravity but a preference. Its knuckles hit the dirt and the ground cracked beneath each one and then it was moving, all fours, and the speed at which something that size moved on all fours was the kind of information that the human brain received and then spent a full second refusing to process correctly.
It covered twenty feet before either of them reacted.
Egor reacted first.
He went to the ground to meet it, not diving out of the way but driving forward, dropping into the four horn’s path and putting his shoulder into the charge, and the collision of those two things produced a sound that had no clean analogy and a result that sent both of them rolling through the forest floor with the accumulated debris of the fight scattering around them in every direction.
"RENDER!" Egor’s voice came out of the rolling mass of man and harbinger, and his hand came up open, and the hammer which he had released in the collision flew upward, spinning, the golden glow trailing off it in a spiral that climbed above the treeline.
Noah was already moving.
He went up, white chi through both legs, the jump carrying him above the hammer’s arc, and he caught it at the apex with both hands and felt the golden enhancement energy hit his palms and run up his arms immediately, the weapon recognizing a holder and responding to it, and he came down with the full weight of the descent behind the swing.
KROOOOM!!
The hammer connected with the four horn at the point where its neck met its shoulder and the impact drove the creature sideways out of its roll with Egor, the force traveling through the dense muscle and hide and finding the skeleton beneath and telling it something it did not enjoy hearing. The four horn hit the ground on its side and Noah was already letting the hammer go, the release sending it spinning back toward Egor who had come out of the roll on one knee with his hand extended.
Egor caught it.
He was already swinging before he had fully risen, the hammer coming around in a horizontal arc aimed at the four horn’s skull while it was still on the ground, and the four horn’s leg came up.
BOOM!!
The kick caught Egor across the chest at the midpoint of his swing and the air that left him was audible from twenty feet away, a sound like a bellows being compressed by something that had no interest in being gentle about it, and Egor went backward into the tree line for the second time tonight and the trees said so.
Noah closed the distance.
Three punches. He did not wind up, did not telegraph, did not give the four horn the courtesy of a readable approach. The first fist was already at the four horn’s ribs when the creature was still processing Egor’s departure, the VPT compression loaded and releasing at contact, the impact drilling through the outer hide with the needle-point force of the technique finding the junction beneath.
CRACK.
The second fist was at the same point before the tissue had registered the first.
CRACK.
The third hit the same spot with dark chi running through the knuckles alongside the white, the combined energy detonating at contact, and the four horn’s body absorbed all three the way a mountain absorbed weather, with patience and without moving significantly, and then it stood up.
Noah was already under the swing that followed, his body dropping below the four horn’s arm as it came around, and he drove upward with his right leg, the axe kick loading white chi from hip to heel and coming down from above onto the crown of the four horn’s skull with everything the drop had generated.
The four horn’s head went down.
Not far. Three inches. But down.
Noah’s left arm was already coming around before the right foot found the ground, the haymaker wide and loaded and carrying dark chi that ran visibly red-white across his forearm and fist, and it connected with the four horn’s jaw from the side with a sound that was less impact and more announcement.
THWOOM!!
The four horn skidded.
Its feet carved twin trenches through the forest floor, the earth turning up in waves on either side, roots tearing free of the soil, and it came to a halt twelve feet from where the punch had found it with the expression of something that had been surprised by exactly one thing in recent memory.
Noah’s hands came up.
His white chi built fast, faster than he usually let it build because fast building meant less refinement and less refinement meant more surface area when it released, and when it released it came off both palms simultaneously in a burst that covered the distance between him and the four horn in a fraction of a second and hit the creature across the chest.
KRROOOOM!!
The smoke from the burst rolled outward in a ring and the four horn was somewhere inside it and Noah was already crossing the distance, the haymaker loading, everything remaining in his arm and his chi reserves compressing into the strike, the kind of commitment that said he had made a decision about this punch before he threw it.
The smoke was still thick when he entered it.
He saw the four horn’s outline resolving out of the grey.
He committed.
BANG!!
A tail came from below the smoke line.
It did not swing. It snapped, the motion starting at the base and traveling to the tip in a wave that arrived faster than the eye tracked it, and the tip when it reached Noah did not hit him the way a tail hit something.
’It’s not the tail,’ Noah thought, in the half second between contact and consequence. ’It’s the force alone.’
His entire body went backward.
Not stumbling, not falling. Backward, horizontal, leaving the smoke and traveling through the space beyond it and continuing to travel because the force behind that snap had not finished expressing itself yet. He hit the ground once, skipped, hit again, and arrested his momentum with both hands in the dirt, gouging furrows through the forest floor before he stopped.
He looked down.
A gash ran across his torso from his left hip to his right side, wide and deep, the edges of it not ragged the way a cut was ragged but clean, the force of the snap having done something more precise than a blade would have managed. Blood was already soaking through what remained of his shirt.
[-143 HP]
[Health Points: 3,443/3,720]
He pressed his hand against it. Felt the regeneration beginning its work, slow and determined and nowhere near fast enough to matter in the next thirty seconds.
’Fine,’ he thought. ’Noted. Move.’
He moved.
The four horn was coming out of the smoke with that baseline patience restored, the brief surprise of the haymaker already filed away, its healing factor working on whatever the chi burst had done to its chest. It walked toward him without hurry because hurry was something it had never needed.
Egor came out of the tree line.
His face was a map of the last fifteen minutes, the blood from three separate sources having found each other and combined, his jacket gone entirely, his hammer in his hand with the golden glow running at the level it ran when Egor was beyond thinking about conservation and had arrived at the mathematics of spending everything.
He looked at Noah.
Noah looked at him.
Neither of them said anything because nothing needed saying. They had been doing this long enough together tonight that the communication had moved below the level of words.
Egor threw the hammer upward.
High, higher than the trees, the golden light of it shrinking to a point above the canopy and then growing again as it came back down, and Noah’s eyes tracked it without his head moving and his hands came up as it descended.
He felt it before he caught it. The golden energy coming off it in the air above him, warm and building, and when his hands closed around the handle the enhancement ran through him instantly and his arms stopped registering the gash across his torso as anything other than information.
He looked at the four horn.
’Everything,’ he thought. ’Not a held-back version of everything. Not a careful version. Everything that is in this body right now, every unit of chi remaining, dark and white together the way I ran them against Gorrauth, except this time not at the chest wall. At the sternum. The junction point. Where the VPT goes deepest.’
’If this doesn’t work,’ he thought, ’it has been a very strange nineteen years.’
The dark chi rose first, running up both his arms and into his hands, coating the hammer handle in that red-white energy that Werner’s father had called forbidden and that Lila had taught him in a different world on a bad evening when he had been running low on options. The white chi came up alongside it, brilliant against the red, the two energies running together at the surface of his skin and generating that sensation of opposing forces occupying the same space and arguing about it.
Both of them went into the hammer.
The golden enhancement energy that was already in the weapon met the combined chi and the result was visible. The hammer’s head ran white at the core and red at the edges and the air around it distorted the way air distorted near a heat source except in every direction simultaneously.
Noah ran.
The four horn watched him come.
It raised one hand.
Noah went under the hand, inside its reach, closer than any exchange tonight had taken him, close enough that the heat from the four horn’s biology was physically warm against his face, and he drove the hammer upward.
The VPT loaded at the point of the hammer’s face, every unit of combined chi compressing into the smallest possible surface area, and it hit the four horn’s sternum at the junction point with the full weight of the swing and the full weight of the running approach and the full weight of everything Noah had decided this strike was going to carry.
THROOOOOOOOOOM!!
The sound was not an impact sound.
It was the sound of something structural being informed that the argument was over.
The four horn’s chest caved inward at the contact point, the combined chi and golden enhancement and VPT compression finding the junction and driving through it, and the creature left the ground. Not the way it had launched itself. The way things left the ground when the ground had been removed from the equation by external decision, traveling backward and downward simultaneously, hitting the forest floor with a force that the forest floor accepted by becoming a crater.
Ten feet deep.
The walls of it were smooth, the soil and root and stone driven outward in a perfect ring, the rim of it standing above the surrounding ground as evidence of the energy that had gone into creating it.
The dust rose and hung in the dawn air.
Noah stood at the crater’s edge with the hammer in both hands and his chest working and the gash across his torso doing something his regeneration was working on and the silence that followed a sound like that sitting over everything.
Egor came to stand beside him.
Neither of them looked at each other. They both looked at the crater.
Seconds passed.
’Stay down,’ Noah thought, looking at the darkness at the crater’s bottom. ’Whatever you are, whatever this timeline has produced that made you, whatever agenda brought you through those water creatures’ mouths onto this shore. Stay down.’
At the crater’s bottom, something moved.
Not much. Not fast. Just the specific, patient movement of a monster that had decided it was not finished.
A hand appeared at the crater’s rim. Dark, scaled, the claw at the end of each finger pressing into the earth and finding purchase. Then a forearm. Then a shoulder.
The four horn pulled itself out of the ten foot crater with the unhurried commitment of something that had been underground before and had not found it particularly compelling.
It stood at the crater’s edge.
The hole in its chest where the hammer had found the junction was closing. Not instantly, not fast, but the tissue was moving, pulling itself back toward the center, the biology underneath working with the patient industry of a Harbinger that had done this before.
It looked at both of them.
Then it rolled its shoulders.
Noah felt his legs doing the arithmetic of what he had left and arriving at a number he did not find encouraging. Beside him Egor was breathing through his teeth and holding his hammer with one arm at an angle that said the other arm had received information it was still processing.
Just then a system notification appeared in Noah’s vision.
Clean white text against the dark of the forest and the dawn and the crater and everything.
[Update: Void Forge]
[AZURA INFERNO DRAGON HEART FORGE COMPLETE]
[CLASSIFICATION: MYTHIC GRADE]
[ITEM READY FOR EQUIPPING]
[Forged Item: THE E.N.D]
[Would you like to equip new forge item?]
[YES / NO]