Chapter 42: Untitled
"Maximum effort!!"
Ethan closed the remaining distance at full speed, the crossbow already raised, and released the bolt of fire at the top of his approach.
—boom
The explosion landed across the wyvern’s head and splintered outward in several simultaneous bursts, the heat and force of it carrying the equivalent of a tier 7 beast’s strongest output concentrated into a single point of contact. Against anything operating within a reasonable range of that tier, the impact would have driven it into the ground and kept it there.
The wyvern shook its head.
The lava residue clung to its scales for a moment and then ran off, the beast registering the contact roughly the way a person registered a fly landing on their sleeve. It turned its gaze toward the direction the attack had come from.
Tier 6.
The gap between tiers wasn’t linear. It wasn’t a matter of being somewhat stronger or somewhat faster. Each tier represented a categorical difference in what a creature was, in how its body processed damage, in the raw output it could generate and sustain. What Ethan had just thrown at it was genuinely powerful. It had simply landed on something that existed in a different category of existence entirely.
The wyvern was not hurt.
It was insulted.
"Shit."
Ethan turned and ran.
White Transit fired and bat evasion took him through the gap in the same motion, his figure dissolving and reassembling ahead of the position he had just vacated. Behind him the wyvern moved, and the difference between their two approaches to the horde became immediately visible.
Ethan was navigating it.
Finding gaps, reading the movement of the mass ahead of him, threading through the spaces between bodies at a speed that required constant adjustment and attention.
The wyvern was not navigating anything.
It moved through the horde the way something moved through an obstacle that had no right to be in its path. Beasts that couldn’t clear the space fast enough were simply removed from it, sent sideways or down by contact that the wyvern didn’t slow to deliver. The sound of it followed Ethan through the mass, a continuous crashing that told him exactly how much distance was between them without needing to look back.
’This is by far the hardest thing I’ve done in my life!!’
The thought arrived with full sincerity.
He had scraped against a tier 7 and walked away from it. That had been at the outer limit of what his current build could handle, and he had walked away from it carrying damage. Tier 6 was not a scaled version of that problem. Tier 6 was a different problem entirely, and the beast currently tearing through the horde behind him was demonstrating that with every step it took.
He kept moving.
Because there were things in this horde that weren’t afraid of a tier 6 beast either. He had clocked them during the first seconds after entry, filed the locations away, and started building toward this before Davos had finished watching them descend.
He locked eyes with one of them ahead and adjusted his angle without breaking stride.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
"Interesting tactic."
Davos watched from above with the removed interest of someone who could see the full shape of what was happening while the people inside it could only see the piece directly in front of them.
To the wyvern, Ethan was simply running. A small creature that had struck it and was now fleeing in the expected direction, away and fast.
Hela had already disappeared from the immediate picture.
But the broader view showed something else. Ethan wasn’t running away from the wyvern. He was running it toward something. The angle of his movement was too consistent, the adjustments too deliberate. He was leading it, and whatever he was leading it toward was somewhere ahead in the mass.
As for Hela, her line through the horde was already curving back.
She was making for Ethan’s position.
Minutes passed with the horde churning around both of them.
They caught sight of each other and converged without slowing, their paths meeting in the open corridor between two surging sections of the mass, and ahead of them in that corridor stood a tier 6 Dark Wolf.
Its frame filled the space between the surrounding beasts, its presence pressing outward the way tier 6 presence did, everything near it either moving with deliberate deference or staying very still.
"Brace yourself!!"
Hela’s voice came across the gap between them.
They went through.
Straight between the wolf’s legs, low and fast, the light creature carrying them through the gap before the wolf had fully registered what had passed beneath it. The wyvern behind them had no such option and no interest in finding one.
—boom!!
The collision hit like two forces of nature discovering they occupied the same point.
The wyvern drove into the dark wolf head-first and the impact sent both of them off their feet, their combined mass crashing through the surrounding horde and scattering everything within range. Before either beast had found its footing, the instinct that governed creatures at that tier took over, and what had been a collision became a fight.
Ethan and Hela looked at each other.
The exchange lasted less than a second.
’Kill two birds with one stone.’
They positioned without discussing it, moving to the edges of the space the two tier 6 beasts were occupying, finding angles and pressing attacks into the gaps that the struggle between them kept opening. Not trying to finish either beast. Accumulating damage while the beasts were occupied with each other, keeping the pressure distributed, letting the situation do the work that direct engagement couldn’t.
Above them, Davos exhaled.
He appeared over the two beasts without announcing the movement, his presence landing on the situation like a weight dropped from height.
"That’s enough!!"
The beasts separated.
Not gradually. Immediately. The growling continued at a distance, the aggression still present but contained, two tier 6 creatures holding their ground without closing it because the thing standing above them had spoken and that was the end of the negotiation.
Davos could not control every beast in the horde. The mass of it was too large and too varied for that kind of reach. But the strong ones, the few at the top of the internal hierarchy, those were entirely his.
He stretched one hand toward the wyvern.
"Hand it over."
The wyvern whined, the sound of something that understood the order and didn’t want to follow it. Then it opened its jaw and spat.
A golden ingot hit the ground, the surface of it traced with the markings of a spell inscription worked into the metal itself. Davos looked at it for a moment, reading what was there.
"I see."
He picked it up and looked back toward where Ethan and Hela had been standing, his expression carrying the coy satisfaction of someone who had arrived at the end of an exchange and found himself holding everything of value.
They had come down here for a reason.
He had simply removed the reason before they could reach it.
He would always be the ultimate winner.
He had not accounted for the warship.
"You green-haired monkey!!! Come taste this old woman’s fists!!"
The voice came from above, sharp and carrying the particular fury of someone who had been traveling at speed toward this location for long enough that the anger had built significant pressure behind it.
A warship broke through the sky overhead, its hull cutting the air above the horde, and on its helm stood a woman looking down at the scene below with an expression of complete contempt.
The White Tower had arrived.
Comments