Chapter 1073: Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Digi-Fight - 2 |
Ren didn’t attack again immediately.
He read the space instead, the same way he had read the corruption’s signature on the way in, looking for the logic behind how Selthia moved power here, looking for the seams.
"You’ll have to hit me with something considerably stronger than that," Selthia insisted. "Considerably... If you want anything to actually hurt me you need to bring something I can’t simply push back with what the field is giving me."
Ren didn’t respond.
He had used the attack as cover... The time it took to analyze how to reverse the flow, the time Selthia spent moving toward him, the exchange itself, all of it had been useful in a way the attack’s result wasn’t.
He now knew more about how to work against corruption in this space than he had known three minutes ago. He knew more about how to reverse it. He knew what to do with the crystal core to make the process of purifying corruption for Sirius clean rather than messy.
That knowledge was real and it was staying with him regardless of how the rest of this went.
He calculated.
He had found the reduction points, he had read the rune pattern, he had understood enough of the system to know how to reverse Sirius’s crystallization and what the nucleus needed for the process to hold rather than collapse.
The problem was that Selthia’s preparation in this space was enormous. The exterior runes weren’t only amplification; they were a field advantage that made every exchange one where she had more than she should and he had less, and no matter how well Ren understood how to move against the corruption flow, moving against a flow that came from every wall simultaneously while the person directing it had Platinum-level power multiplied by the field was an equation that didn’t close well.
Not yet...
Selthia launched at him.
Between movements she kept talking, because Selthia was profoundly lonely and even in a fight she couldn’t stop herself from maintaining the interaction, the hope that Ren would engage back and give her something to respond to.
"You’ll need to bring something stronger if you want me to feel it," she kept moving, kept pushing.
Ren took a step back.
Then another.
His eyes moved while he retreated, not erratically but methodically, running an inventory of the space that he kept quiet enough not to be obvious from the front. The blue floor bleeding purple toward the margins, and the rate at which it was moving. The structures the system’s architecture formed at the edges of the space and what they could be used for. The flow patterns the corruption followed in transit, not random, because nothing in a designed system was random if you could read the design.
Something at the left edge caught his attention for a fraction of a second.
A point in the space’s structure where the pattern was slightly different, an irregularity that would have passed unnoticed without the context of the last several minutes spent learning what the pattern looked like when it was consistent. The discontinuity was small. Selthia didn’t catch it because Ren barely reacted and she was annoyed by his silence.
He kept retreating. Then he looked at her and gave her what she had been waiting for him to give her.
Attention... Simple verbal engagement.
Selthia noticed the shift immediately, and while she kept advancing, the pace dropped a degree. Just one.
"So?" Ren said, in the tone of someone starting a conversation without particular urgency.
Selthia waited for what came after.
Nothing came...
Her expression moved through several things in quick succession. Surprise first, he had finally spoken, and the first thing out of his mouth was a single syllable with nothing behind it.
Then something between amusement and confusion.
Then, almost against her own judgment, she answered, because Selthia had been alone for too long and couldn’t stop herself when something spoke to her, even when the something was obviously a tactic.
"I didn’t expect that from you," she said, and the pace had dropped another degree. "I always saw you as the cool type who only speaks when he has something important to say." A pause. "You want to make small talk? Genuinely?"
"We can talk," Ren said. "No point attacking you now... You just demonstrated your defense is too amplified. I’d just be burning energy for no result."
"That IS small talk! That’s the most obvious thing I already know you could possibly say to me!"
"..."
Selthia looked at him. She processed the situation with enough attention to realize that Ren was talking to her because he understood that was what she wanted.
Clever... Handsome, and also irritating.
"So what do you intend," she said, knowing the answer would be unsatisfying. "You can’t retreat forever. The corruption is filling your crystal more while you waste time, and when it does I’m going to be even stronger and you’re going to lose your fusion and have even less control than you do now. Retreating only accelerates the inevitable."
Ren cancelled the fusion.
Selthia processed that as a ’dare’ for half a second and advanced, because without the active fusion the power and speed gap between them widened in the wrong direction for Ren and the right direction for her, and not advancing would have been deliberately ignoring a direct tactical advantage.
Ren raised one hand.
A wait signal.
Selthia kept advancing, ignoring it.
Ren held until the distance between them reached the specific point he had calculated, then used the lightning element to move much faster and create the space he needed.
Selthia watched him with the irritation of someone being made to waste time instead of having a real fight.
She closed the distance again slowly.
The lightning came again... Different angle, same result.
The third time Selthia stopped pretending the irritation wasn’t there and moved at full speed, closing the gap with the velocity of something running on more field energy than it could productively spend.
The ray arrived again at the end before she could complete the distance.
Selthia stopped.