Chương 57: Lightning Cloak

The twig around Jeremy's leg was the first thing that told him he was in trouble. He'd been going for Mia, seen the assassin drop on her, and moved on instinct, and a length of living wood had come out of the ground and wrapped his ankle and hauled him up short before he'd covered five meters. He tore free without much effort, snapped the wood and kept his feet, but the message had landed. Something did not want him going anywhere, and that something was standing between him and everyone he'd been trying to reach.

The mossback ambled toward him, in no hurry at all, antlered head tilted, bark skin creaking as it moved. [mossbacl level 20]"You're mine, so don't go getting distracted." Its voice was warm and amused, a host welcoming a guest.

"I do like the ones who run. Makes it interesting. I've killed a few of your kind in my time, back home, the fast ones who think speed is the same as winning. It never is." A slow creaking smile.

"You'll make an easy afternoon." Jeremy didn't answer. He'd never seen the point of talking in a fight. He activated Movement Boost and Lightning Step in the same motion and crossed the distance in a crack of white, spear driving for the thing's chest, and this was the part where it usually ended, one flash, one thrust, done. The mossback stepped into it. Not away.

Into it, dropping into a low braced stance Jeremy recognized from a lifetime of watching people who actually knew how to fight, and it took the spear on a turned shoulder where the bark ran thickest, and the point skidded off instead of punching through, and the thing's fist came around at Jeremy's head fast enough that he had to abandon the strike entirely to get out of the way. He flickered back, reset, and understood he'd made a bad assumption.

He'd thought the plant tricks meant it was a caster, soft up close, the kind of enemy his speed ate alive. It wasn't. Under the twig-throwing and the moss was a fighter, a real one, with a stance and a read and hands that had done this ten thousand times. The mossback had chosen him on purpose, because a thing with strong personal defense and real close-combat skill was exactly the wrong opponent for a man whose whole game was landing one clean fast hit. Jeremy's speed got him there.

It didn't help once he arrived, not against something that could simply be too tough and too skilled to punish in the instant he had. He backed off and started pacing himself, which he hated, because pacing wasn't his game either. The fight settled into something grinding and even.

Jeremy would flash in, land a graze or a shallow cut, and flash out before the counter caught him, and the runes on his gear turned the counters that did land into nothing, a fist that should have cracked ribs skidding off enchanted defense. But shallow cuts weren't killing anything. The mossback shrugged off damage he'd have staked a fight on against anything else, and worse, it regenerated, the cuts knitting closed with a speed that told Jeremy the thing ate to heal and had eaten recently.

Every wound he spent precious mana and precious openings to open simply closed again while he reset. And his mana was the limit nobody had warned him about until this exact fight. Lightning Step cost. Movement Boost cost. His whole style ran on a pool that had never been deep, and the Thunder Knight class boosted his entire arsenal but didn't hand him a caster's reserves, and against a normal fight he'd have won long before the tank ran dry. This was not a normal fight.

This was minutes of flashing and cutting against a thing that healed what he did and would not tire, and Jeremy could feel the bottom of his mana coming up toward him with every Lightning Step, and no breakthrough anywhere in sight. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. The mossback felt it too, and got chattier as it did.

"There it is. You're slowing down." It threw a lazy branch that Jeremy sidestepped.

"The fast ones always do. All that speed and nowhere to spend it, and now you're rationing, and I've got all day, and I heal." It sounded genuinely pleased.

"This is the part I like. When they realize." Jeremy realized. He was going to lose this. Not soon, but surely, on the current line, a slow bleed of mana against a thing he couldn't hurt fast enough, and somewhere at the edge of the fight the others were in their own trouble and nobody was coming, and the honest read of it was that he was the weak link, the one this whole plan had correctly identified as beatable. There was a growth happening in him even as he lost, and he could feel that too.

The mossback's close combat was better than his, its battle sense sharper, its experience deeper, and every exchange he survived taught him something, his spear work tightening, his reads coming faster, Piercing Strike evolving somewhere under the pressure into the thing he'd felt it becoming for weeks. He was getting better in real time, faster than anyone had a right to. But better wasn't winning, not yet, and better took time he didn't have with his mana running out.

So Jeremy did the thing you do when the safe line loses. He gambled everything on the unsafe one. He had a skill he'd barely touched, the newest one, the one that drank mana so fast he'd been afraid to use it. He'd been hoarding his pool trying to make the fight last, and lasting was losing, so he stopped trying to last. He dumped everything into Lightning Cloak.

White fire wrapped his whole body, not a step this time but a state, lightning crawling over every inch of him, and the world slowed down around him the way it had never quite slowed even at his fastest. Faster than Lightning Step.

Faster than he'd known he could be, reaction and speed and damage all lifted together into something that made his old flashes look patient, and he had seconds of it, a handful of seconds before the mana ran dry and dropped him, and he spent them like a man who knew exactly how few he had. He was next to the mossback before it finished registering the light.

He cut, and cut, and cut, faster than the eye, and the twigs it threw to foul him burned to ash the instant they touched the cloak, and the fight that had ground on for minutes came apart in a handful of seconds. The mossback's defense was still real. Its regeneration was still real. So Jeremy didn't try to out-damage them.

He waited, inside the cloak, for the one opening the thing's own confidence gave him, and when it committed to a heavy counter, sure it had time, Jeremy activated the other skill in the same instant. Fatal Thrust. The evolved Piercing Strike, the thing it had finally become under an hour of pressure, a single perfect penetrating strike, and he drove it into the mossback wrapped in the full speed and force of Lightning Cloak, the two skills stacking into a synergy that neither had alone.

The strike went through the thing's defense like it wasn't there, through the bark and the muscle and out the back, and the head came apart, and the mossback's confidence and its healing and its long amused patience all ended in the same instant.

The body still twisted, some final plant-thing reflex, branches spasming out of the ruined trunk, and Jeremy, out of mana and out of cloak and running on nothing but the tail end of adrenaline, cut it into pieces to be sure, and got the kill notification, and stood there for a second swaying with an empty pool and a spear slick to the grip. He'd nearly died. He knew it plainly, without drama.

On the safe line he'd have run out of mana and been beaten to death by a better close-combat fighter, and only the gamble had saved him, the willingness to spend everything at once on a skill he'd been too cautious to trust. He took that as the lesson, the real one, that hoarding your resources against a losing fight was just losing slower. He'd also grown. He could feel it, the fight had made him sharper, his spear work a tier better than an hour ago, Fatal Thrust his now and Lightning Cloak proven.

The mossback had been more experienced and he'd beaten it anyway, on raw talent and a refusal to lose, and there was a grim satisfaction in that he'd examine later. For now he wiped his mouth, found his footing, and looked for Ace, because the last he'd seen of his wife she'd been covered in her own blood, and that was a thought he could not hold still inside.