Chapter 1074: Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Digi-Fight - 3 |
Selthia looked at him across the space between them.
The blue in the floor was still losing ground to the purple at the margins, and she had the field, and she was faster, and the gap in raw power was real.
But she had stopped anyway.
Because Ren had been retreating for several exchanges and hadn’t gone anywhere in particular, and the space he kept moving toward was the same general area, which wasn’t what someone did when they were simply buying time. It was what someone did when there was something specific in that area that made it worth being in.
She looked at Ren with the frustration of being managed without seeing toward where, that gap in understanding bothered her more than the managing itself.
But Ren had stopped too.
Selthia spoke after a short, visibly anxious pause. "You need to fight me now!"
Ren smiled.
First time in the entire exchange. The kind that came from finding confirmation of something one had been looking for, not performance.
Selthia raised an eyebrow. What moment was he waiting for when every second worsened his position?
She didn’t ask... Not asking was her way of requesting the continuation without requesting it.
"You think I still see the ruins as untouchable," Ren said. "And you feel very secure in your preparation. As if what you wrote your runes so integrated into them that nobody could touch them and manage affecting you directly."
Selthia said nothing.
"They aren’t."
The mutual understanding between them at this point was almost absurd from the 3rd person pov, if there had been a pov with anyone in it to watch them standing apart while Ren raised one hand...
He needed time.
Selthia needed to understand what he was doing with that time. Both of them knew the other knew, and so the conversation continued because it was what both of them had available at this specific moment.
"You still can’t strengthen the weakest aspect of those mutants’ corruption," Ren said.
Selthia’s eyes opened wide.
Not the gradual opening of someone arriving at a conclusion but the sharp opening of someone just told something they had no business knowing.
A second later they were no longer only strongly opened eyes, but furious eyes.
"That’s not fair!" The calm she had been operating with throughout the conversation was gone; her voice had the temperature of someone genuinely angry rather than strategically expressing it.
"Ever since the idiot king crystallized our main body, the spiritual energy became incompatible with the physical network trapped in the crystal and the spiritual aspect weakened when the minds of all our followers shut down. But you shouldn’t know that without being connected to the golden network. You’re not supposed to know that, it was supposed to be my opening to trap you here, you cheater!"
A step forward, which Ren countered with one of his own, because this advance wasn’t going to stop for words.
She continued... "What I wrote in these runes, the code I built for this, only I know how it works. I invented it. It doesn’t exist anywhere you could have learned to read it."
Ren laughed. The short one he had when something struck him as genuinely funny, not the managed kind.
"Next time make the patches larger."
Selthia looked at him.
"Your invented code is beautiful," Ren continued. "Very expressive... But very small. Small enough that the details are visible even when the rest isn’t."
Another pause.
"Also, the tenth chamber’s runes are untouchable, you’re right about that. But the first nine aren’t, because they’re yours and not ruins. Your mutants built them trying to replicate the internal ones, and when you excavate chambers imitating the originals, and depend on the guardian beast whose illusion was always going to die with it anyway, to hold the idea together to fool me, the beginning of your long design is exposed in the most surface-level nodes."
Selthia didn’t move.
"I told Lin to verify it before rejoining us," Ren said. "And Lin told the others when they went back up. You couldn’t bring your guardian out of its chamber not because you overfed it too big but because the chamber was designed to contain it. And the other nine chambers your mutants built have a serious error."
Another pause, Ren stretching the time, which ended as soon as Selthia moved a foot towards him.
"The error is copying the internal structure of an open ruin in a perfect mirrored structure when building outside it. If I hadn’t entered one identical to the original and thanks to Selphira grandma’s story I might not have caught it. Liora is erasing the important nodes from those false outer chambers right now."
Selthia tried to smile. It came out rigid.
Not quite a smile... Stranded halfway between composure and what lived underneath composure, the expression produced by someone running calculations fast and arriving at options none of which they liked.
"I still win in here," she said, playing her last card with the voice of someone unsure if the card was worth what they thought. "There’s a reserve node in the real chamber... Even if they destroy everything else, that node has enough energy to fully corrupt your beast’s crystal and the crystal of the man you came to save before it collapses. They can tear the whole system apart and I still win on the strength saved in the real ruin."
Ren smiled again, and this time the smile was bigger and had something mischievous in it.
"That’s exactly what I meant when I said you didn’t integrate the runes deeply enough." He looked at her with the attention of someone closing an argument that had started several minutes ago.
"What you wrote in the one chamber that should be untouchable isn’t as integrated as you believe. The vibration of the enormous 1000 tons beast moving while we were in the tenth chamber showed me the exact location of that node. A thousand tons of moving mass leaves marks in the space most affected by your energy redirection, the redirection leaves a thin side for a sequence of runes readable even in your personal code."
Selthia said nothing.
"Liora can destroy that node too with some effort even inside a ruin, because you reduced the reinforcement in that layer when you were redirecting and integrating it." A beat, making full use of Selthia’s open mouth. "And it shouldn’t take long. When you lose the field pressure you have right now, when the rune flow cuts from outside, that’s when I’m going to attack you."
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