Chapter 93. Trial
The stone Tsukuma towered above Shin, its face carved with apathy, save for the one emotion it was ever cursed to feel: killing intent. Its dark, hollow eyes locked onto Shin like a predator stalking a broken prey.
Shin, despite the blood loss soaking through his bandaged side, was already scrambling for his firearm, fingers fumbling with the cold steel though deep down, he knew bullets wouldn’t do a damn thing to something like this. Still, he wasn’t going down without trying.
The creature crouched with impossible speed. For something as titanic as it was, it moved with the reflex of a beast born for war.
Its heavy hands tapped the rocky ground with thunderous force, and in the very next second, the ground trembled violently, as though responding to its command. Jagged spikes of stone began ripping up from the earth, one after another. Sharp as razors, and thick and vicious enough to tear through an elephant and leave nothing behind but a gore of tattered flesh, bones and spilled blood.
[WARNING! DANGER ZONE - Immediate Threat Detected!]
The system alert blared in crimson across Shin’s vision. The attack was fast that if it hadn’t been for the danger alert warning him milliseconds in advance, he would’ve been skewered without even realizing it. But even with the system’s heads-up, dodging was barely possible.
He shifted his weight, stepping hard to the side, then backflipped three times in a row, rolling off to the left just as another spike shot up behind him. The stones followed him relentlessly like the ground itself wanted to kill him, responding to every new step with another stab of death.
"Shit!" Shin hissed.
With a grit of his teeth, he summoned two clones, the max he could handle right now, since he didn’t have the Hivemind skill to allow him to be able to control a lot of clones. But these two were enough.
"Go!" he commanded.
He ran up the side wall, used his momentum to kick off it, and his clones, anticipating his move intertwined their hands to create a makeshift springboard, catching him midair before they launched him higher, but a few milliseconds after, the spikes ripped up from the ground and shredded them into pixelated white dust.
"Slide..." Shin muttered mid-air, wrapping his hands tightly around his firearm.