Chapter 957: Stubborn Tamers Crisis - 3 |
Lin was at the front.
Her posture said something specific to him, not holding position, not waiting for a better moment.
He recognized the preparation a half-second before he understood what technique she was loading into it, and when he understood, something in his assessment of risk shifted.
Power finally exploded and the kick landed against the mass of hundreds of mutants and disintegrated the nearest ones in the immediate impact zone.
The real function followed a fraction of a second later, a pulse of compressed air that drove outward from the point of contact and displaced everything in a twenty-meter arc that wasn’t anchored to the ground.
It was the gap it opened between the mutants, that momentary separation between bodies to allow a clear view that lasted exactly long enough for the three girls to all point at the same spot..
Everything they had, directed at the figure above, released as a single unified attempt.
The entity didn’t move. Still locked in whatever process the transformation required, still building toward whatever it was becoming.
And disappeared.
The figure above didn’t move.
Julius looked at the girls and saw in their stances what he had hoped not to see. Not surrender, none of the three were people who stood like that. But the recognition that what they had just used was the best they had, and the best they had hadn’t been enough.
Suddenly, the energy they had launched, which seemed to have disappeared, reappeared in the entity’s chest and began to spin.
Wrong.
Julius closed his fists. He wasn’t going to reach them in time.
The numbers didn’t work out.
One way or another, he was going to reach them.
Moments earlier...
The faint light the mushroom had left in his chest was still there, quiet and low, like the last ember of a fire that has gone to sleep but hasn’t quite finished burning.
The jade-gold roots had returned to their place. The crack was a fraction smaller than it had been. And the words that had come through that thick wall still rang in him with enough clarity that they weren’t going anywhere, the kind of clarity that comes not from volume but from the dear memory something important is said.
That ’unconfortable’ feeling.
He knew what it felt like. He had been subconsciously avoiding pushing to that direction directly since the first time Liora’s fire had burned him.
This feeling was not corrupted-wrong. Not Selthia’s version of wrong. The other kind...
Selthia was on the floor at the far side of what had been the library. Or what remained of the library’s architecture, the walls still stood, the ceiling was still the correct height, the angle of the floor was still what it had always been.
Everything else, the shelves, the books, the accumulated evidence of everything that had once been stored and accessible here, was simply gone. It was the shape of a library with nothing in it, which had been somehow worse than a different kind of emptiness entirely.
The space was smaller than normal, which meant that when the mushroom’s pulse had driven her across it, the wall had arrived sooner than it might have. She was examining her shoulder with the careful, slightly detached attention of someone assessing minor damage to something they care about, but not panicked or angry yet.
The expression on her face turned to irritation. The specific, slightly absurd kind of irritation that comes not from pain but from indignity.
Ren didn’t answer.
He had learned enough about how she operated in the last few minutes to know that her commentary was never just commentary. It was a hand keeping the door open.
The first second confirmed what he already knew but what his body needed a moment to accept as operational reality.
Without his beasts, without any of the bonuses they provided, without anything except fifteen years of physical conditioning and the principles Lin had drilled into every muscle he had.
In a normal situation 10 years ago, against a girl his age with his level of training, he had a real chance.
But at least in Yino it would be a bit less changed. For someone "frozen in time" even worse. This girl should be far from a gold rank beast... But even so.
With the corruption using her as main body... She could even be as weird as him.
And maybe it was so since when Ren reached her, she slipped the punch without leaving the wall. A minimal lateral adjustment, precisely calibrated, the margin so exact that his fist passed through the same space her face had occupied a half-second earlier with nothing to show for it.
Then she hit him.
The impact sent him across the room.