Chapter 238: The Mantis Battle
Neil moved through it.
He was not making it dramatic, not creating distance or turning the avoidance into a display, just shifting his weight and his angle by the minimum amount each incoming strike required, the adjustments arriving with the unhurried ease of someone navigating a space they had already mapped.
CLANG
One of the secondary arms caught his forearm, not the edge but the flat of it, and the force behind it was enough to confirm that Mantis was not operating at a level that could simply be disregarded.
That was fine.
That was the point.
From outside the shield the crowd was reading a different story.
What they saw from their angle was a man being driven continuously backward and around the arena by a twenty-foot mantis creature that was landing the close ones regularly and building toward something definitive, the dodges happening by margins that looked uncomfortable from outside the structure and increasingly desperate to anyone who didn’t know what they were actually watching.
"He’s getting pushed all over the place."
"Mantis hasn’t even hit full speed yet."
"How much longer can he keep running from that?"
The voices came from around the shield in the particular register of a crowd that had formed a conclusion and was watching it confirm itself.
Randy, at his elevated position, was watching with the focused attention he reserved for situations that were not developing the way his initial read had suggested, his expression carrying something that was not concern exactly but was the thing that arrived just before concern.
In the seating area, Ileana sat with her arms folded and her expression entirely composed.
Jane beside her was talking about something in a low voice and Ileana was responding, the two of them conducting a separate and comfortable conversation while their eyes remained fixed on the arena with the particular quality of people who were watching something that was not worrying them.
Nobody near them seemed to notice this.
Mantis noted the crowd.
Neil could see it in the way the attacks shifted, the combinations picking up in urgency, the secondary arms incorporating into the sequence in a way that compressed the available angles further.
He was not fighting for the crowd’s reaction.
He was fighting because the people behind him needed this to work, and every failed approach before this duel was present in the force behind each strike.
BOOM
An energy blade launched from the right scythe mid-swing, a compressed disc of essence that split away from the physical attack and came at Neil’s legs while the scythe was aimed at his upper body, the two arriving inside the same response window.
Neil hopped over the disc and pulled his upper body back from the scythe in the same motion, both avoidances resolving in one piece of movement without any scrambling between them.
’That is the real offense,’ he noted. ’Everything before this was the buildup.’
Mantis sent three more energy blades in fast succession, angled to prevent a simple linear retreat, the arena floor cracking and scorching where each one hit the stone or dissipated against the shield wall.
Neil read all three trajectories and moved through the gaps between them without any of it touching him.
The crowd noise changed.
"How has he not been hit by those?"
"Those blades should have caught him at least once at that spacing."
"Is he actually reading all of that in real time?"
Randy had stopped moving between the betting boards.
He was standing still with his hands at his sides and his full attention inside the arena, and something in his expression was revising things he had thought were already settled.
Mantis drove harder.
The scythes came faster and the combinations began overlapping, the energy blades woven into the physical strikes in patterns that had clearly worked against experienced lords because the timing was genuinely sophisticated, each element building a situation that the next one was designed to punish.
WHOOSH WHOOSH
BOOM BOOM BOOM
The arena was filling with damage, the floor crossed with impact lines and scorched sections and the residue of discharged essence that had found stone instead of what it was aimed at.
Neil had not taken a clean hit.
He was still not making it dramatic.
He moved when the movement was required and by exactly as far as necessary, and the absence of any strain in it was beginning to reach the crowd from a different direction than the near-misses had, a quieter unease working through the initial noise as people started asking questions the straightforward read of the fight didn’t answer.
Mantis had used everything available to him that wasn’t a field or giant form.
The combination library had been fully expressed and was cycling back through its opening configurations.
Neil had the complete picture now.
The speed ceiling, the energy blade patterns, the secondary arm timing, the exact way the transformation distributed its weight across the footwork, where the gaps were and how long they stayed open.
He knew all of it.
He had known enough after the first two minutes.
He had spent the rest of the time making certain.
He decided to stop waiting.
The right scythe came in on the familiar horizontal arc, the same opening strike as the very beginning of the fight, the sequence resetting to its start.
Neil stepped forward into it instead of back.
He raised his hand and caught the scythe between his index finger and thumb, pinching the blade two feet from the edge, and the enormous arm stopped.
The arena went silent.
Not the pause of a crowd catching its breath between moments.
The complete and total silence of several hundred people confronting something their understanding of what was happening had not prepared them for.
Mantis pushed.
The full weight of a 5th Origin diamond class transformation drove that arm forward with everything behind it, the chitin structure and the essence reinforcement and all of it pressing against the two fingers holding it.
The arm did not move.
Neil held it between a finger and thumb and looked up at the mantis form from beneath it, and the eyes of the transformation were doing something that mantis eyes did not usually do, which was process a piece of information that had no frame to land in.
"Done?" Neil said.
He released the scythe, stepped forward, jumped, and hit Mantis in the side of the head with a closed fist.
BOOM
The sound was wrong in the way that things were wrong when the scale of them didn’t match what produced them.
The shockwave spread from the impact and hit the containment shield with enough force that everyone standing near it felt the resonance move through the structure and up through the ground beneath their feet, several people stumbling back from it.
Mantis went sideways.
Twenty feet of transformation went sideways across the arena as though the ground had decided not to hold it anymore, the massive form sliding across the floor and hitting the far wall of the shield, the wall flexing outward but holding.
The transformation was still active.
Neil crossed the arena.
He hit Mantis again before the form had finished processing the first impact, this time in the chest, and again the arena absorbed the sound of it in a way that confirmed something about what was behind each strike.
BOOM
BOOM
BOOM
The rhythm had nothing elaborate in it and didn’t need anything elaborate, each hit placed at the point that did the most structural damage to the transformation’s ability to maintain itself, the whole sequence built on the information he had spent the first ten minutes collecting.
Mantis brought the scythes back.
One came across in a wide desperate sweep that had all the remaining composure behind it, and Neil caught it again, this time by the base, used the grip to drag the transformation off its balance point, released it, and hit the exposed flank.
The chitin plates were genuinely strong.
They held through the first three impacts and began cracking after the fifth, the sixth opening seams in the coverage that the seventh found and the eighth pushed through, the transformation losing structural integrity in the visible progressive way of something being asked to absorb more than it was made to absorb.
The crowd had stopped making noise.
Randy was standing with both hands at his sides and his full attention inside the arena and his expression was the one he produced when a situation had moved far enough past his expectations that his usual easy assessment had nothing to work with.
The betting boards behind him were completely still, nobody consulting them, nobody updating them, everyone simply watching.
In the seating area, Ileana watched with the composed expression she kept for things that mattered to her in public, her arms still folded, the small version of something warm sitting quietly in her face.
Jane had stopped talking.
She was watching the arena with her pale eyes steady and her expression carrying the particular quality of someone watching something that confirmed beliefs they had held before there was any visible proof of them.
Inside the arena the transformation came apart.
It didn’t release cleanly, it failed piece by piece, the chitin receding and the form reducing and Mantis returning to his human shape in the centre of the arena with the involuntary quality of a transformation that had been beaten through rather than consciously ended.
He was on his hands and knees.
Blood ran from a cut above his eye and from the corner of his mouth, and his breathing was the labored kind of someone whose ribs had absorbed a comprehensive account of the past several minutes.
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Thanks for reading... adios
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