Chương 54: Zig and Zag; Blink and Bite

'Why is it always packs of animals?' Scarlet sent to Maus as she watched the monstrosities coalesce in the middle distance.

'More they marry her?' Maus sent back.

'The more the merrier,' she corrected reflexively.

'Exactly!' Scarlet just shook her head in amusement, securing the throwing belt to herself as she charged forward. She'd left the cane behind. It was strange watching the creatures materialize. There were four of them. Inspect, plus the info-layer, gave her a considerable amount of information on each of the creatures as they finally finished constituting at the border of the First Layer. They were Tier 0 beasts called garachnics, all under Level 5, though one had an Earth Affinity.

They looked like spiders, only without exoskeletons. Fleshy spiders. With her new mind for strategy, it was effortless to come up with a basic plan of attack.

'Okay, buddy, are you ready?'

'Ready, boss, ready,' he said, eager and excited. He'd never been a particularly violent little guy. Peering into the bond, she could tell he saw this almost like a game. A dangerous game, and he knew that, but much like before the System, he'd always enjoyed a challenge, a puzzle. That's what fighting felt like to him, only backed up by pure animal instinct. His methods weren't refined, but they were effective, the same way a stalking cat was effective.

Lots of enthusiasm and variety, as well as patience and decent attack power. Unfortunately, there wasn't much planning or strategy. This was a perfect opportunity for Scarlet to hone her strategic skills, as well as train her coordination with Maus.

'We'll need to be smart about this,' she told him.' Coordinate. Remember when we read about dodge-tanks?' She sent him a brief visual of what she wanted from him.

'Zig and zag; blink and bite. Got it!'

'And Maus...?'

'Boss?'

'Be careful,' she told him, even though what she'd really wanted to say was please don't sacrifice yourself again. Even though he was back now, the memory of him being killed by that earthen fox still haunted her. With her enhanced memory, she knew it would for a long time. She also recognized just how unreasonable it would be to ask that of him. So, she didn't. The back-and-forth happened faster than normal speed of thought, and in the span of a few heartbeats, both she and Maus were coordinated.

That's when the horde of garachnics charged. Moments before they made contact, Scarlet sent out her instructions.

'Hit the joints,' she began, circling the first and allowing Maus to blink into the fray.

'They're mostly blind, but their sense of touch and hearing is incredibly good,' she continued. Much like spiders could feel the reverberations through their webs to know when prey had been caught, these garachnics could pinpoint movement through the subtle tremors in the ground. Of course, they just had to be fighting in a flat dirt pit. The first thing she tried to do was eliminate those vibrations, or use them to feed the creatures false information.

She felt like a mix between a bootleg physicist and wizard as she drew on her knowledge of kinetic energy, something she should be able to manipulate with her psionics. She had enough scientific knowledge to understand the basic principles. Theoretically speaking, it should have been easy for her. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The calculations came quickly. Where would her next step land? Where should the step after that be placed?

How much force to apply, and where, to generate the effect she wanted? How could she keep it contained? In theory, her strategy was perfect. Reality was not so simple. She pushed psionic energy out of her the same way she did with mana, Mana Manipulation smoothing out the process. Her goal was for the force she expended with each step to stay local instead of spreading outward, then reverse the flow back into the ball of her foot and propel her forward. Too much.

Her next step saw her launched at an angle, propelled several meters forward, only to crash shoulder-first into the dirt. A hasty attempt at a psionic barrier meant that instead of bleeding off energy in the tumble, the way the Skill Tome was guiding her, Scarlet's inertia was stopped. Violently. It jarred her other shoulder and dazed her when the back of her head collided. The barrier dissipated along with her concentration.

She could feel the regenerative process she'd subsumed from the Historian beginning to take place. It would be slow going, but if nothing else, her Vitality stat was definitely going to increase. Miserable, she righted herself, holding in the groan of pain. And this was the arena she'd been most confident in. On a positive note, the kinetic dampening effect had worked. The garachnics had momentarily lost track of her movement until her collision with the ground created unmistakable tremors.

If this was how her first real attempt at combat psionics went, what would unarmed combat look like? The answer came moments later. It was one she'd expected, but hoped wouldn't come to pass. The issue wasn't that Scarlet was an incompetent fighter; it was that she was a pathetically inexperienced one. She'd always stood by the idea that if she was ever in range for direct combat, something had already gone catastrophically wrong, and she stood by that idea now.

The best she could really do was shake it off, and dodge around the group of flesh spiders that stood unnervingly at eye level with her. Maus had no such issues. The Familiar's bond allowed him to borrow mana from her, and while she couldn't access her own, it didn't prevent him from accessing it. Resonant Bite coupled with Blink was terrifying. A truly horrific combination that didn't even touch upon his new upgrades. Her companion was stronger than her, a lot stronger than her.

But that was only when it came to combat instinct. When it came to tactics–'Boss, help!' Apparently the garachnics could shoot webs. Something about them was messing with Maus's ability to Blink. Heedless of the vibrations, Scarlet charged forward and slashed open the ridiculously durable webbing pinning him down before one of the creatures crushed her buddy into paste less than a full day after he'd been reconstituted.

Turning on the ball of her foot as Maus blinked away, Scarlet charged in once more, this time coordinating with him. While he kited three at once, draining her mana reserves at a prodigious rate, Scarlet focused on the strongest one. When it was within arm's reach, she slashed out with her blades in an incredibly awkward move that had one knife ripped from her grip as it blocked her attack with its leg.

Down one knife and not willing to risk losing another, she sheathed her remaining blade and proceeded to duke it out with the creature in a painfully embarrassing slugfest. She swapped roles with Maus to preserve mana. Kiting the garachnics as Maus used her as a launching platform. He would attack, she would kite, he would return, she would pivot. It was a remarkably effective tactic.

Three minutes in, two were down and the other two were wounded, but three minutes of fighting was exhausting, even with their superhuman stats. As she began to flag, she felt the energy in her body automatically working to patch her up, wash away her fatigue, and restore her. Unfortunately, it was slow going, not immediately revitalizing enough to make a meaningful difference. In her frustration, Scarlet made a mistake. She couldn't use mana, and she was painfully clumsy at using surface-psionics.

That's what she was calling the more common manipulation of psionic energy; levitation, forcefields, energy reading and the like. So, she delved into the information-layer just like she had in the pool the day before. It felt like everything sped up as the world became clearer. She needed a small change, something that would even the playing field just a little. Exhausted but alert, she watched as a creature went to place one foot down. Watched.

As intent became energy, as thought became reality, all she needed was for it to stumble. She just needed to edit the placement of the foot. She couldn't make it go backward, that change would be too big, but what about a stumble? Just a small edit was all she'd need. A pinched nerve would do it. A single phrase re-written through energy. Just a little push. The backlash hit her so hard she blanked out for a moment. Information overload. Pressure. Resistance. Reality met her will and pushed back.

She was a grain of sand playing at being a mountain. She was less than a speck of dust trying to terraform a continent. She was a microscopic spore – less even than that – attempting to make a change in reality beyond herself. Then the world snapped back into place.