Chương 80: The Golden Giant

[kul level 22] Kul activated the skill before they'd even traded a blow, and he got bigger. A golden light poured up out of the orc, and over him rose a giant. Sixteen feet of it, a translucent gold avatar layered over Kul's own twelve, legless, more a projection of his upper body swelling up out of the ground, and in its hands was his axe scaled to match, a blade the size of a cart. The avatar settled over him like a second self, and when Kul moved, it moved.

He shifted his weight and the giant shifted with him, a perfect mirror, every motion he made repeated at twice the size and twice the reach. Alex met the first swing with everything he had, and it wasn't enough. He put thermal and gravity into the glaive and swung Cleaving Strike up into the descending golden axe, and the two met, and Alex's strike slid off.

Deflected along the golden edge like his best blow was a branch against a falling tree, and the momentum of the avatar's axe carried it right through his guard and across his chest. He twisted, took it at an angle, and it still opened him, the golden edge parting his skin and biting into the muscle beneath, a long line drawn across his chest that welled red immediately. It was powerful, one of the strongest blows he had endured.

Alex forged body had reduced it to a gash, but survivable where it should have been fatal. His skin had saved his life and it had still bled. He hadn't taken a wound like that in a long time. He fell back and reset as he tried to understand the power of the individual in front of hiim. He had to use Cleaving Strike. Every time they clash.

The skill was the only thing that let his glaive hold against the golden axe at all, and when he tried to swing without it, to save the mana, to conserve, the avatar's blade simply overpowered him, batted his weapon aside and sent him flying, ten feet, twenty, tumbling across the churned ground to scramble back up with a new bruise and a lesson.

Cleaving Strike enhanced, thermal and gravity poured into every swing, and even then he was barely holding, matching the golden giant blow for blow and being driven slowly backward the whole time, his mana bleeding out fast, his chest bleeding faster. He was losing. Not fast, but surely, ground given with every clash, a stronger and more experienced fighter grinding him down exactly the way the mossback had nearly ground Jeremy down in the ambush.

Kul was level twenty-two to Alex's seventeen, and every one of those levels was in the golden axe, and under it was the skill of a warrior who had been fighting his whole life, and Alex's talent and his forged body were not going to be enough on their own. So something else had to be. It happened the way it always happened, in the middle of the worst of it, when his back was to a wall he couldn't afford.

He was swinging Cleaving Strike for the hundredth time, thermal and gravity braided into the edge, and he was reaching for more, reaching past what the skill had ever given him, and there was a limit in his mind, a wall he'd never quite pushed through, the ceiling of what he believed his affinity could do. And under the pressure of a golden giant that was going to kill him, the wall broke. He had been practicing this for a while now.

Thermal Manipulation and Gravity Manipulation had never been difficult for him to combine. He could already weave the two together naturally, layering intense heat over crushing gravitational force. The problem had always been Cleaving Strike. No matter how well he combined the two abilities, he had never managed to produce the result consistently enough for the System to recognize it as a new skill. Every attempt had fallen just short of whatever threshold it required. But this time, something changed.

He felt his Star Affinity deepen, and both Thermal and Gravity Manipulation suddenly clicked into a depth they had never reached before. They stopped feeling like two separate skills being used together and became a single phenomenon. Then the image came to him. A meteor. A massive piece of blazing rock tearing through the atmosphere, its surface burning from the heat as gravity dragged it relentlessly toward the earth. All mass. All fire. All downward force. The image became reality within his mana.

Alex raised his glaive and brought it down. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. The strike carried the overwhelming heat and gravitational force of a falling meteor, crashing downward with enough weight to make the very air around the blade distort. [Cleaving Strike has evolved into Meteorslash (Rare).] [Thermal Manipulation has advanced to Adept.] [Gravity Manipulation has advanced to Adept.] He ignored every word of it.

There was no time to read notifications with a golden giant in front of him. But he felt the change land in his hands, and the next swing was not the swing that had come before it. Meteorslash came down and met the golden axe, and this time it did not slide off. It broke through.

The strike hit the avatar's guard like a falling star hits a hillside, a blaze of heat and gravity-crushed force, and Kul's block held but Kul's feet did not, the orc driven back a full step by a blow he'd been shrugging off a moment before. The shockwave of it rolled out across the field, metal on gold, a crack that Alex felt in his teeth. They both staggered. And then they came back together, and the fight was different now. Behind them, the rest of the battle held by inches.

Cassandra stood at the mana store with her hand on the device and her crystals in the air, and she did exactly what she did best, which was nothing wasteful. She didn't empty herself in one grand working the way Liam would have. She drew on the reserve carefully, systematically, and picked the army apart a piece at a time, spears of pink diamond finding the strongest enemies, chains snaking out to bind the bosses she couldn't kill outright, every bit of mana spent on purpose.

She was making the whole difference on her stretch of the wall, and the enemy noticed. An arrow came for her, and it was not a normal arrow. Alex didn't see it, but the whole field felt the release of it, a shot fired from somewhere in the enemy ranks with real power behind it, wrapped in something that made the air scream as it flew, aimed dead at Cassandra's unprotected head while she was locked into her work at the device. Bartholomew got there first.

The old smith had planted himself near Cassandra without a word, and when the arrow came he moved faster than a man his size should, his broad shield swinging up and across, and the arrow struck it with a crack like a gunshot and a spray of sparks and did not get through.

It buried itself in the shield to the fletching, an inch of steel and enchantment stopping what would have gone through Cassandra's skull like paper, and Bartholomew grunted at the impact and set his feet and stayed exactly where he was, between the arrow's source and the woman his nephew would never have forgiven him for losing.

"Keep working," he told Cassandra, over the noise.

"I've got this side." She kept working. Across the field Jeremy and Ace fought as one thing, the way they'd learned to, Jeremy a streak of white light killing everything he touched and Ace a step behind him closing every wound the instant it opened, so that her husband could throw himself at anything without fear because his healer was always there. Mia stood high and picked off the strongest enemies one clean shot at a time, taking the dangerous ones out of the fight before they reached the line.

Katelin's light held the whole exhausted camp up. It was working. It was barely working. But the wall held, and the breach was contested, and the camp bled but did not break. Alex and Kul came together again, and now Alex was the one moving forward. Every Meteorslash shattered through the golden guard. His utilization of his newly advanced manipulation rank was still rough, dulled by the unfamiliar sensation of wielding a newly unlocked power like Meteorslash.

He'd swing and the avatar would block and the block would hold and Kul would give a step, driven back by a human a fraction of his level, and Alex saw the confusion in the orc's face turn to something closer to alarm. The avatar was weakening.

Slightly, with each clash, but visibly, the gold a little dimmer, the mirror a fraction slower, and Alex pressed it, Explosive Step cracking him forward to close distance, Meteorslash coming down again and again, driving the golden giant back across the field it had been driving him across a minute before. And Kul, who had been made to feel small once and had swore he never would again, felt himself losing to a human, and refused it. He roared, and something changed.

Steam poured off his green body, hissing into the air, and his eyes went red, a deep furious red, and the golden avatar's eyes went red with them, and the whole giant seemed to swell with a new and uglier power. A rage skill, Alex understood, the orc spending something to buy a surge, and the surge hit like a second opponent stepping into the fight. The avatar came at him faster and harder than before, and Alex, who had just started winning, was suddenly not. He got the glaive up in time.

That was the difference, this time he had Meteorslash, he had his newly deepened manipulation, and he met the berserk strikes with his weapon instead of eating them raw. But the glaive deflecting them wasn't the same as the glaive stopping them, exactly the way it had been at the start of the fight before he'd evolved. The avatar's enraged axe came down and Alex turned it with his blade and the force still got through, hammering into his shoulder, his side, his arm, driving him back, opening him.

He took a good amount of it. Bruises going deep, gashes where the golden edge skidded past his guard, a blow to the ribs that would have shattered a normal man's bones and only rocked his forged ones. Nothing broke. But he bled from half a dozen places now, and his regeneration ran quiet under it, mending what it could as fast as it could, never quite catching up. He gave ground under the berserk assault, and steadied, and did not fall. His glaive was up. His body was holding.

The rage would burn out, skills like that always did, and when it did there would be an opening, and Alex had exactly one thing left big enough to end a golden giant, and he was already, in the back of his mind, beginning to build it. He set his feet in the churned and bloody ground, took the next enraged blow on a glaive wreathed in thermal and gravity, and waited for the steam to run out.