Chapter 1061: Chapter 1061 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 7
The runes in the 9th chamber walls were in another category from anything he had encountered, yet again...
Not close to the runes he recognized from his experiments, nor the ones he had studied for years at other ruins, not even the ones he had designed himself for the earrings, the mana array or the bows. These were too layered and too dense and written in a way that the surface layer alone was doing things he couldn’t parse, which meant what was underneath it was likely worse.
He looked at them for the full ten minutes.
It gave him a real headache... But not the headache of mental exhaustion. The headache of a system trying to process an input way above its current capacity.
"Do you understand them?" Liora asked, from where she was recovering.
"No," Ren said, a bit dejected.
She left it at that, which was the correct response for someone who understood what happened when you pushed an obsessive person to keep staring at something that was actively hurting them.
Ren looked at the runes one more moment and let them go. Who he needed to understand this was asleep, waiting for him to bring him to Platinum 1 or for a situation that demanded it urgently enough to wake it before the right time.
This wasn’t that situation. Not worth the risk... Not yet.
♢♢♢♢
The ninth chamber had no beasts...
Almost no beasts.
There was something at the far end, a faint presence registering near what should be the staircase to the tenth and final chamber.
But the chamber itself was practically empty, which was the largest anomaly they had encountered in the entire ruin. After eight chambers filled to whatever density their respective levels could sustain, encountering this produced a specific discomfort, that of a pattern breaking without visible explanation.
What the ninth chamber had was those ominous runes.
Ren found out finally that they were the same runes over and over... Now that he wasn’t trying to decipher the meaning, he could see the repeated pattern in "small" patches of around 10x10 meters...
Floor to ceiling on every surface and no empty stone visible anywhere, the layers so deep and overlapping that reading the top stratum likely required knowing how many strata existed below it and in what order they had been applied.
This was the kind of work that only obsessive repetition produced; not someone carrying out a design but something like a mad one that had found a pattern and repeated it thousands of times because repetition was how it forced the runes with the sheer stubborn will and by its pure scale to work like it was wanted.
Everything bathed in brilliant purple... The concentrated mana of corruption in its dense form, which made the colors of the chamber behave differently from how colors behaved in normal light.
The walls seemed to breathe.
The group advanced in silence.
The chamber was enormous. More open than any of the previous ones, and nearly empty, and the combination produced a weird tension. Scattered small pieces of what had been beasts, too consumed to be identifiable, marked the floor at intervals.
They reached almost the end. Almost the staircase to the tenth level.
And there they were.
Two.
Just two beasts, each one the size of a three-floor building. Feeding on something that was no longer recognizable as a beast but clearly had been not long before. No wounds visible. No marks of the forced cannibalizing that had defined every earlier chamber. These two had arrived here with enough to evolve without someone to damage them first.
Platinum 3.
Around three hundred tons each.
The right side one lifted its head from the floor and looked at the group with the eyes that beasts had when they had survived long enough for looking at something new to be a calculation rather than a reflex.
"Well," Mayo said, in the voice of someone doing a precise inventory of the situation, "I suppose putting all the eggs in two baskets does work sometimes."
Ren looked at them.
Platinum 3 marks the point where Ren’s and the others’ beasts are no longer superior in power despite the extra buffs, but it’s not too big a problem either; in theory, Liora’s and Ren’s beasts are sufficient without needing to fuse, to fight under similar conditions.
The problem is that they already pose a risk to their beasts if they decide not to use the fusion.
The second massive mutant kept eating, and neither of them made the movement of something that recognized an immediate threat.
That was somewhat worse than if they had launched instantly.
So the Hydra fired without waiting. The light ray crossed the chamber in a straight line toward the neck of the nearest beast, the cleanest shot available, the kind of attack that had split Platinum 1 bodies in two without particularly straining the effort.
The most powerful single output the group could produce.
The mutant beast turned.
Not too quickly; it didn’t need to be quick with that much mass behind it. Just enough to put the densest section of its anatomy, the dorsal carapace, between the ray and the internal organs.
The impact made noise, left a visible mark, began melting through the thick armor in the way that heat worked on something dense enough to resist it for a while before it didn’t.
But the beast had the size it had, and damage that would have disabled something smaller distributed across a mass that started closing around the wound the moment the wound appeared, the surrounding tissue already beginning the process while the outer surface was still taking hits.
The turn wasn’t momentary, either. The beast maintained it, moving in a continuous spiral, something similar to a massive centipede with different types of limbs at each body segment, rotating around its own axis while slowly closing the distance to the group.
The combination of the continuous rotation and the regeneration meant that by the time the damaged carapace section came around again to face the ray, it was already healing, and the angle was always slightly different from the last pass so the same point never received sustained contact long enough to matter.
Ren watched it regenerate and thought about the Diamond Dragon they had brought down with the group of the strongest ten tamers.
Same problem... Different scale, same problem.
What had worked best then was Selphira’s ice: slowing the healing enough that accumulated cold and damage together could exceed the regeneration rate. The second head of his Hydra launched the cooling ice ray, and the cold reached the wound and the healing slowed, though it didn’t stop; it kept going, just slower, which was the relevant threshold.
With each defensive rotation, the beast gained a meter of ground. But it was accumulating damage now, the carapace degrading layer by layer faster than full regeneration could compensate, and somewhere ahead of this it would give.
The second beast lifted its head from the floor and had seen enough.
It charged, which was different from running... Three hundred tons of mass in directed motion produced a particular kind of terror in the body before the mind had time to process what specifically was frightening about it, the air in the chamber displacing ahead of the thing itself, the vibration arriving through the floor before the visual did.
Liora sent the spirit fire to cover it across the front segment completely, and the Bashe was already arriving when the same shift came, the second beast rotating into the same defensive spiral as its companion, the carapace absorbing the flames while it continued its approach.
Whatever it had learned, it had learned watching the first beast absorb the opening exchange of the fight. The carapace took the fire and the beast kept moving like a massive rotating column of flesh.
The Bashe intercepted it and for a moment the two masses pushed against each other, but the Bashe had eaten well through the previous chambers and was larger than any Platinum 1 it had faced; the Platinum 3, though, had the size of something that had been what it was for longer, and the Bashe had roughly half the mass needed to hold it, and was bounced back.
Ren summoned the Wolverine.
The guards and Mayo adjusted to support. Individually each of them was perhaps thirty percent of the power needed to break the mana density barrier of a Platinum 3, maybe less, but seven combined sources hitting from six different angles created the kind of sustained pressure that mattered even when no single contribution was decisive.
The combined fire from seven directions plus the Hydra plus the Wolverine plus the Bashe started working in the sense that the beast facing Ren stopped advancing and began retreating a fraction, each pass of the spiral losing a little ground instead of gaining it.
Then the second beast joined the first, pressing together toward the center of the chamber, and the two bodies started rotating in the same direction.
The two carapaces overlapping and relieving each other created something that wasn’t precisely a shield and wasn’t precisely a vortex but had properties of both, a spiraling wall of mass and regeneration where the one facing the attack always had the other covering whatever damage got through, and then the roles reversed and the fresh one took the front while the damaged one healed.
The problem doubled.
