Chapter 575: The Stormhorn IV
Damien moved but it was not enough.
Not fully.
He moved enough that the horn missed the left chest.
And took the right instead.
The impact was unlike anything in the fight before it.
Not the shoulder graze from the first charge. Not the horn-field discharge. Not the head sweep or the compression trap. This was the horn itself. The full, dense, essence-laden length of it, entering his body through the right side of his chest with the force of the Stormhorn’s full weight behind it.
He felt it go in.
Schwaaak!
That was the worst part. The specific, detailed awareness of the intrusion, the way his reinforcement absorbed what it could and failed to absorb the rest, the sensation of the horn reaching depth before the pain caught up with what was happening.
The pain caught up.
He did not make a sound.
What he did was grab the horn.
Both hands. Around the base of it, fingers locking against the essence-dense surface, holding on with the specific desperation of someone who understood that the thing currently inside them coming out quickly would be worse than it going in.
The Stormhorn stilled.
For a moment they were locked in place with him on the end of its horn, both hands holding it, the Stormhorn’s weight held by his grip, the forest entirely quiet around them.
Then something rose in his chest.
Not from the wound but from deeper. A pressure that had nothing to do with the physical damage and everything to do with the body’s fundamental response to catastrophic intrusion. He felt it build behind his sternum and then it arrived at his throat and he had no choice about what happened next.
He spat.
A mouthful of blood.
Dark. More than he expected. The kind of quantity that said something significant had been reached by the horn’s depth, something that was not supposed to be reached, something that was generating this much blood this fast because the organ it had touched was not built to be touched.
He looked at what he had spat. Small chunks of flesh hidden with it.
Then he turned to the Stormhorn.
Its eyes were close now, his hands on its horn putting them within a meter of each other, the ancient eye regarding him with the patient assessment of a creature waiting for the thing on the end of its horn to stop holding on.
He held on.
The pain was significant.
He acknowledged it and set it aside in the specific way he had learned to set things aside—not suppressed, not ignored, filed. Inaccessible for the next few minutes in the same way the information on the altars had been inaccessible while he was reading the record. He would retrieve it later. Right now it was not useful.
What was useful was the next thing.
He thought fast.
His right side was compromised. His grip on the horn was the only thing preventing the Stormhorn from extracting it and ending whatever option he still had. His palm entry technique was not going to work in this position as both hands were occupied, and his body weight unsupported. There was also no stable platform for the essence cut he needed.
He needed something different.
He had done something like this before.
Not exactly this. Not in this way and definitely not for this purpose. But the principle of it, which was coating the external surface with Luton’s abilities, using the slime as both armor and weapon simultaneously, he had used that against the demon captain.
He had used it defensively.
This time was going to be different.
He sent the mental command through the bond.
Not to Fenrir. Not to Cerbe. Not to Aquila or Skylar.
To Luton.
"Summon Luton." Damien commanded his system and almost instantly, it fell out of the blue portal and landed on his head.
Giving the required command to the slime, it moved.
Down from his head. Along his neck. Past his shoulder. Down his arm.
He kept his left hand gripped on the horn.
The right hand, the one that had been holding equally, was the one he released.
He extended it outward and Luton flowed down it.
Not the thin layer it had formed across his vital points in the captain fight or the combat surge it used against groups of enemies.
Something more deliberate than either. It shaped itself into a focused coating, dense and purposeful, building across his palm and his fingers and the front of his fist with the specific quality of a tool being prepared for a specific use.
The Stormhorn felt the change.
Registered that one of his hands had released the horn.
It began to pull back but it was late as he tightened his left hand’s grip with all the power he could gather and held it in place.
The Stormhorn was physically stronger. It would win this grip contest eventually and that was not in question. The horn was going to come free whether he held it or not, and when it came free the wound it left behind was going to be the most serious thing he had carried out of any fight in his life. A gaping hole in the chest.
He needed to end this before that happened.
His right hand was ready.
Luton pulsed against his knuckles showing that it was present, dense, absorbing the ambient essence of the fight and the forest and everything around it, holding it in the contained potential that was the slime’s specific and terrible nature.
Damien looked at the Stormhorn.
At the eye close to his.
At the ancient intelligence behind it.
He found the spot he’d been looking for.
Not the side entry. Not the underbelly. Not the neck.
The forehead. The place where the horns met the skull, where the bone beneath was thickest but where the accumulated essence of decades of horn-building had created a convergence point — all of that compressed essence meeting in the structure that generated it, dense in a way the hide elsewhere wasn’t, but dense with the Stormhorn’s own power.
The same principle as the captain.
The same logic, applied differently.
His right fist drew back.
One motion.
Everything he had left, directed at the convergence point.
Luton was ready and the fight would come down to the result of their next encounters.
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