Chapter 200: Book 3: Missed Opportunities
Rhythm. It's all about the rhythm.
It takes me a while to realize it. I don't know how long I try to fight while just bearing the pain of my cracked foundations, holding them together with sheer willpower while I stumble out of a blow or try to tear my way through another part of the Hand. The problem is that it's regenerating almost as fast as we can do damage to it—even with all the power Guard and Ahkelios has gained, we don't have enough. Not to kill something of this magnitude and power.
It's like the Seedmother fight, almost, except Ahkelios doesn't have the Firmament to pull off the strategy we used in that fight. That means we're locked in a stalemate, and that stalemate means we aren't making progress. Even my progress with the second layer has trickled down to almost nothing.
But there's a rhythm to the fight. A push and pull, an ebb and flow. I'm not sure it's something I would've been able to sense if not for the enhanced sensitivity I have to Firmament, but even the environment around us is reacting to this rhythm. All the ambient power around us shifts and pulses in response to every move in the fight, practically in time to what we're doing...
...sometimes even before we do it.
Is that how Premonition works? I'd assumed it had something to do with Temporal Firmament, but maybe that's not what it is. Maybe it's interacting with this background Firmament somehow, detecting a shift in the fight before it happens. The more I watch, the more I see the pattern, and the more I become convinced of one thing.
We aren't going to win as we are.
Something needs to change. Guard needs to complete his first shift. Ahkelios needs to complete his second. I need to finish reinforcing my fundamental layers so I have access to my Interface skills again. We need something capable of completely altering the pattern and changing the flow of the fight.
Which means I'm going to have to take a risk.