Chương 29: broken

[Tainted Canifolk - Level 13] Alex looked at the tag, and then at the thing wearing it, and understood that the number was the least important part. Everything he had ever fought had been H rank. The bottom rung, the same rung he stood on. This one had climbed off it. He could feel it before he could explain it, the way a man feels a truck coming before he hears it, a pressure rolling off the creature that made his skin want to crawl backward off his body. G rank.

Whatever that meant in practice, it meant more, and it meant this fight had a shape he had never seen. It was tall and lean where the others had been slabs of muscle, and it carried a staff instead of steel, and it did not run at him. Nothing in this tutorial had ever declined to run at him. Around it drifted the spheres. Hundreds of them, fist-sized, glowing a sick yellow, bobbing gently in the air like soap bubbles caught in a slow draft.

They spread as it walked, fanning outward across the field, drifting at the speed of a man strolling.

"HOW DARE YOU." The voice arrived inside Alex's head the way Canifolk voices did, growl resolving into words, and it was shaking.

"Do you have any idea what you have ruined?" The staff came down and it kept walking.

"Fifty. Fifty of them, arranged, timed, and you burn my guards and break my circle in one afternoon. Now I must start again. Now I must wait another five days for the system to permit it. Five days!" It spat onto the grass.

"This system. This bookkeeping. Every step measured, every price paid, and now you cost me the only thing I have earned." Alex had no idea what it was talking about, and hated every word of it.

"You will make excellent replacements," the Canifolk said.

"You especially, big one. You will be the centerpiece. And when my freedom is bought, I will remember that a human paid for it."

"Ace." Alex didn't look back.

"Get behind me. Far behind me."

"Alex-"" Now." He put Reinforce Body into his bones before the first sphere reached him. Alex took stock, and the stock was bad. His mana had gone into the wide core that broke the pack, and then the pack had gone into his body. What was left in him was thin and scraped and nowhere near a Blazing Core. He reached for it out of reflex and found the bottom of himself sitting right there, shallow and cold. Two skills left, and they were the cheap ones. Reinforce Body. Boost. That was the whole armory.

Against a G rank. The first sphere reached him and Alex almost laughed at it. Then it burst, and it hit him like a heavyweight's right hand. No fire. No heat. Just force, a hammering, concussive slam of pure kinetic pressure that snapped his head sideways and rocked him back on his heel and left a shallow dent in the pauldron over his shoulder. Alex stared at the metal. One bubble. One drifting little soap bubble had dented iron.

"They're not fire," he called back.

"It's force. Straight force."

"How bad?" Mia, already drawing.

"Like getting punched by something my size." He did not say the rest of it, which was that he had just been punched by something his size, through iron plate, with Reinforce Body running, and it had hurt. The second one burst against his chest and staggered him. The third caught his helm, and his skull rang, and the world tipped for a half second before it came back. There were hundreds. Mia read them fastest.

She loosed an ordinary arrow into a sphere and it popped harmlessly at range, spending its force on empty air, and she started shooting in earnest, methodical, buying ground three feet at a time. Liam threw mana bolts into clusters and popped four at once, and Alex heard him swearing under his breath as he did the arithmetic. The Canifolk was making them faster than they were dying. It never stopped walking. It never lifted the staff.

Spheres peeled off it in twos and threes, drifting out, spreading wide, filling the field between them with a slow, patient tide of floating impact. They were losing. Mia loosed a Charged Shot at the boss itself, and it vanished into a cluster of spheres that all burst at once, a rolling wall of concussion that ate the arrow whole, and the Canifolk behind it did not break stride.

"Alex." Liam's voice had gone tight.

"We can't get through it." They couldn't. And Alex could see the next ten minutes exactly. The tide reaches them. Ace is soft. Liam is soft. Mia is soft. And it arrives at walking pace and takes its time, and it has already explained out loud what it means to do with their bodies. There was one thing on this field that could survive being inside that swarm. He knew it was stupid. He knew what his father would say. He knew what he had promised over a grave.

None of it moved him, because the alternative was standing here while it walked to his sister. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Jeremy. When I'm through, hit its skull."

"Alex, what are you-" He dropped Boost on top of Reinforce Body and charged into the field. The bubbles drifted slowly. That was the only mercy in them, and it was not much of one. He could not dodge them all. There were too many, packed too close, and every step forward put him into three or four more, and every one of them hit like a fist. Whump. Whump. WHUMP. They burst against his chest and his arms and his back and his legs, and each one drove into the plate and each one drove the plate into him.

His breastplate took four in a row and stopped being flat. His left vambrace crumpled inward against his forearm and stayed crumpled, pressing on the bone. A sphere caught the side of his helm and the ringing in his skull doubled and stayed doubled, a high whine that would not leave. Alone, one was a punch. Twenty in ten seconds was a beating from twenty men. The damage was cumulative. That was what nobody could have seen from outside.

Each hit landed on armor that was already dented, drove metal deeper into flesh that was already bruised, and the plate that had saved his life a dozen times became the thing crushing him. He got fifteen meters and his armor was a wreck. Then he saw the big ones. They rose up out of the smaller cloud, four of them, the size of his own chest, glowing brighter and drifting slower, and he understood exactly what they were before the first one touched him. Whump was not the word for it.

The impact took Alex off his feet like a car had hit him. He was airborne, and then he was on his back ten meters from where he'd been standing, and the smaller spheres closed over him where he lay and started hammering him into the dirt, punch after punch after punch, on the ground, unable to cover, unable to breathe. Get up. He got up.

The second big one caught him in the chest before he was fully upright and put him back down, and the little ones swarmed in again, and Alex lay in the grass under a rain of hammer blows with his ribs screaming and thought, clearly: I am not going to die here. He got up. The third big one clipped his shoulder and spun him and he stayed up, staggering, and he kept moving, because the boss was fifteen meters away and every second he spent on the ground was a second the swarm crawled closer to Ace.

Green light poured into his back the entire time. He could feel his sister burning herself down to keep his legs working, and that was the only reason they still did. Ten meters. Five. The Canifolk's expression changed. It had built a wall of force and watched a man walk into it, and its plan had assumed the man would be a corpse somewhere in the middle of it, and now the man was here. Jeremy hit it from behind in a crack of white-blue lightning. The spear should have gone through the back of its neck.

Instead it struck something invisible a foot from the fur and stopped dead, and a sphere bloomed into visibility around the entire Canifolk, a shell of that same sick yellow light, wrapping it head to foot. A shield. It had been wearing one the entire time. Jeremy's spear skidded off and the boss backhanded him and he went sprawling, and Alex saw the mana gathering in the staff and knew that they had seconds. He got both hands on the glaive and swung with everything his shattered body still had. Cleaving Strike.

The edge hit the shell and the shell screamed, cracks racing across it like ice under a boot, and Alex hauled the blade through and felt the thing give. Then it burst. The shield came apart in a single detonation of concussive force and it threw Alex like a doll. He hit the ground on his back and skidded, and somewhere off to the left Jeremy was thrown too, and for a moment Alex simply lay there with his ears ringing and no air anywhere in his chest. Get up. GET UP. He got up.

Mia's Power Shot arrived in the half-second the boss stood unshielded. The arrow went through its shoulder and out the front and staggered it a full step, and it howled and lost the spell it had been building, and Liam's mana bolts hammered into its knee from the flank, and the Canifolk went down onto one leg with a shriek of pure fury. Alex was already moving. So was Jeremy, limping, spear low. They hit it together.

Jeremy's spear went in under the ribs from the side, and Alex brought the glaive down two-handed into the wound Mia's arrow had opened, and drove it in to the haft, and twisted. Its claws found his side and got under the ruined plate and closed, and Alex did not let go. The staff cracked across his shoulder and he did not let go. He braced a boot against its hip and hauled the blade upward through everything above it, and Jeremy drove his spear deeper, and the thing came apart between them.

[You have killed Tainted Canifolk - Level 13. G Rank.] [Level up. Level 10.] Every sphere on the field detonated at once. Hundreds of them. All of them. The entire tide of drifting yellow light went off in a single instant when the thing that made them died, and the field turned into one enormous fist. The concussion picked Alex up off the ground and threw him, and this time there was nothing left to absorb it. His armor was already broken. His body was already broken.

The blast folded him around itself and the wreckage of his own plate went into him, and he felt things inside his chest tear and shift and stop being where they were supposed to be. He came down somewhere in the grass and did not get up. Then the skills went out. That was the part nobody had ever warned him about. Reinforce Body had not been softening the damage.

It had been holding him together, holding his frame in one piece and keeping the ruin at arm's length, and when the last of his mana burned dry the skill simply ended, and his body sent him the entire bill at once. Everything arrived. His ribs came first, both sides, broken ends grinding against each other with every attempt to breathe, and breathing was not working. His chest wouldn't fill.

He pulled for air and something whistled and something else was wet, and what came up his throat instead was warm and tasted like iron. His left arm did not answer him. His side was open, and he could feel the loose terrible heat of it. Every square inch of him that had taken a sphere, which was every square inch of him, had gone from bruise to something worse, and the crushed armor was still pressing into all of it. The pain went past pain.

It became a pressure, a total noise, and underneath the noise his body was quietly beginning to shut itself down, and he could feel it happening. He could feel the cold arriving in his hands. He could feel his own heartbeat getting further away, as if someone were walking off with it. He couldn't see. The world had gone gray at the edges and the gray was closing. No. I am not going to die here. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. Somewhere far above him there were voices, and he could not make them into words.

I am not going to die. The gray closed further, and the cold came up his arms, and his heartbeat stumbled and missed and caught. I must not die. He took hold of himself somewhere behind his own ribs and refused. There was no skill for it. There was nothing in his status screen that covered this, no notification, no tag, nothing the system would ever give him credit for.

There was only a man in the dark holding onto himself with both hands the way he had held onto everything in his life, which was badly, and stubbornly, and long past the point where it made any sense. The count stops at two. I promised. It stops at two. The darkness took his vision, and then it took the ringing, and then it began taking the pain, which was the most frightening thing that had happened to him all day, because he understood exactly what it meant. He held on.

He held on with everything he had ever been, one second, and then the next, and then the next, with his heart slowing under his broken chest and the black pressing in from every direction and nothing left in the world but the refusing. Not. Yet.