Chương 61: Chapter 60: A tough battle

A person at Tier 2 can, on average, hold their own against two Tier 1s. A Tier 3 against five T1s. The numbers do not scale evenly because the attributes do not scale evenly. A person with Strength 10 who can lift a rock of weight x will lift around 1. 2x at Strength 11, and closer to 1. 5x at Strength 12. Each point is a recalibration, fit to millions of data points across the full range of human performance. Skills compound this further. Experience compounds this further still.

What this means in practice is that the gap between tiers is not the gap it appears to be on paper, and people who treat it as arithmetic tend to learn otherwise at the worst possible moment. - From the memoirs of Nathan Hoffstar, 80th Principal of the Progenitor's faction The morning session lasted an hour. They worked the two gaps - Waggy's overcommitment on sharp turns, and the canopy overlap at full pace - and extracted what progress was possible.

Waggy's turning tightened through repetition and one correction that Ren and Kohaku demonstrated. When Waggy's rear haunches dropped too early on a hard redirect, Kohaku ran the same movement at half pace and Waggy watched her with full attention. By the fifth attempt, the overcommit was mostly gone. The geometry problem was different. At half pace it held. At full pace it fell apart, the two canopies finding each other at the wrong moment and leaving a gap neither of them intended. They ran it eight times.

They got it right twice. Ren commented, "Maybe it just has to get worse before it gets better." Kara considered this. Two out of eight was not progress. It was coincidence wearing the clothes of progress. The shelf sat roughly an hour and a half north of camp, above a long traverse of exposed rock that gave way to the snow-covered plateau where they had spotted the Yamaarashi group the previous evening.

The terrain between offered something worth considering - a narrow gulley cutting diagonally across the traverse, wide enough for one person to walk through comfortably, its floor dropping sharply where the rock had fractured along a ledge around ten feet below. A natural overhang jutted inward above the ledge, angled to catch and redirect anything that came through at speed. Ren walked its length twice, tested the lip with his boot, then looked at Kara.

"If it went in fast," he observed, "the ledge would do most of the work." They spent the better part of two hours on it. The gulley's natural entrance was too wide - a Yamaarashi Tier 5 would see the drop and slow. They narrowed the approach with rocks stacked carefully on both sides, creating a funnel barely wide enough for the creature to pass without angling sideways.

The covering took longer - cedar branches layered with snow, packed firm enough to look solid underfoot, tested twice with Ren's full weight before they were satisfied. Kara stood at the entrance and looked at the line they would need to run. The shelf was about ten minutes out on a dead sprint. The trap was a few minutes behind where they now stood. They cached the cedar and the iron ore together in a crevice a little further east, wedged deep and marked.

Kara did not let himself think about the possibility of not coming back for them. The Yamaarashi were on the shelf where they had been the previous evening, spread across a broad area the size of two football fields. The Tier 5 was unmistakable even at distance - half again as large as the Tier 3s, its quills longer and denser, their tips catching the thin mountain light. It moved along the shelf's northern edge, working at something below the snow. The Tier 3s were grouped loosely toward the shelf's centre.

One sat apart on the southern end, closest to the traverse. Waggy lay flat behind a rock outcrop not too far away, watching. His haunches were tense, eyes and ears angled towards the lone Tier 3.

"They are territorial by nature," Ren murmured.

"If something small moves on its edge of the shelf, it won't wait for the others." Waggy glanced back at Kara.

"Go," Kara said quietly. Waggy moved. He went wide, looping out along the rock to approach the shelf from the southeast, using the terrain to his advantage. He appeared on the shelf's edge within clear sight of the separated Tier 3 and simply sat there. The Tier 3 raised its head. It stomped the ground in territorial displeasure - an intrusion on its perimeter that it would not tolerate. It moved toward Waggy. Waggy moved back along the shelf edge. The other Tier 3s watched without following.

The Tier 5 did not bother looking up. Waggy led it southeast, off the shelf, down onto the traverse, one small deliberate step at a time, maintaining precisely the distance that kept the Tier 3 following without committing to a charge. Kara tracked the distance from behind the outcrop. Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. He met Ren's eyes. Ren nodded. They came around both sides of the rock simultaneously, umbrellas up, and the Tier 3 had no interest in them until Waggy cut sharply left and put Kara directly in its line.

It was not particularly fast. But it was dense and powerful, its quills partially raised, its body low to the ground. What it lacked in pace it made up in force and unpredictability. Sixth Sense alerted Kara to the first quill strike a half beat early. His canopy was already moving when it came, but the deflection was partial - two quills scraped across the outer edge of his forearms. Waggy hit the Tier 3 from the side simultaneously, low and hard, teeth driving into the joint above the rear leg.

The creature's follow-through disrupted. Ren stepped in from the other side. What followed was grinding work. The Tier 3 was solid and stubborn and soaked up punishment like a tank. Kohaku folded her wings tight and drove from above at the angles the canopies created, and Waggy maintained pressure on the hind legs with a persistence that earned him two rakes across the shoulder. Ren's ferrule found the gap behind the skull on the fifth attempt. Kara's knife followed on the sixth. The Tier 3 went down.

Before they could revel in the hard earned victory, as the light left its eyes, it let loose a high pitched screech. The sound went out across the mountain, built to be heard from one ridge to the next. On the shelf to the north, four heads came up. The Tier 5 stopped moving. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Run," Ren said. They ran. Kohaku ascended immediately. Waggy ran flat out across the snow. Kara and Ren moved at the pace the terrain permitted, the exposed rock unpredictable under snow where the wind had covered it unevenly. The Tier 3s were large, their stride long on flat ground, but across broken mountain traverse their bulk was a liability. The sound of pursuit settled into a rhythm that was not gaining. That was manageable. The Tier 5 on the other hand, was not manageable.

Sixth Sense flagged its approach - running a line that cut across the traverse rather than following the path of pursuit. It was not chasing them. It was reading where they were going.

"It's cutting across," Kara said between breaths. Ren pointed upward without breaking stride. Kohaku was already moving. She dropped altitude sharply, angling toward the Tier 5's intercept line. She came in from above and ahead, diving directly at the creature's face and banking hard at the last possible moment, wings snapping wide. The quill caught her on the bank.

The Tier 5's raised array was already moving as she came in and the tip drove through the membrane of her left wing as she pulled away, the sound of her cry sharp and brief above the wind. Her flight path skewed sideways for a moment before she corrected, the damaged wing held at a partial angle. But the Tier 5 had flinched. Its stride broke. Two full seconds of readjustment, its momentum temporarily stalled. It was enough. They hit the funnel entrance running.

Kara peeled left, Ren peeled right, Waggy cut sideways behind a boulder, and the Tier 5 came through the narrowed entrance at full pace and went straight through the covering. The sound it made hitting the ledge below shook the traverse. They came around to the gulley's eastern access point at a controlled descent. Kara could already hear it. It was not the sound of something finished, but the sound of something hurt and furious. He had been hoping for the former but had planned for the latter.

The Tier 5 was on its side when they dropped in, one foreleg moving wrong from the ledge impact, but its quills were fully raised and its head was tracking all four of them with an intelligence the Tier 3s had not shown. This creature understood it had been led here. It was deciding what to do about that. The gulley was a little more than ten feet wide. In open snow this would have been a different encounter entirely.

In the gulley there was not much room to move laterally - only forward and back - and the Yamaarashi's quill spread covered the full width with room to spare. The walls that limited its charge also compressed their movement into the exact range where its quills were most effective. The confined space had not neutralised the Tier 5. It had just changed which advantages belonged to whom.

Kara took the first exchange on his canopy, a full-force strike that drove him back into the gulley wall and left two quills embedded in the canopy's surface. He pulled them free without looking. Ren pressed from the opposite angle and the Tier 5 turned to address him, and Waggy darted in from the side, teeth finding the injured foreleg. The Tier 5 swept sideways with its undamaged shoulder and Waggy took the force of it across his left flank, his body rolling hard into the gulley wall.

Waggy came up slowly, shook once, and went back in. Kohaku landed at the gulley's rear, her injured wing held close. There was no room for her wingspan, so she drove with her weight instead, using her body to press the Tier 5's flank in co-ordination with Ren's ferrule strikes. The Tier 5 turned from Ren to deal with her and Ren stepped into the opening and his ferrule came down twice on the exposed shoulder joint before the creature swung back.

The swing caught Ren across the forearm - blunt force, not a quill, but his grip on the umbrella shifted. Three minutes in and they were trading damage at a rate that was going the wrong direction. The Tier 5 was working through what the gulley offered systematically. It could not charge but it could anchor, and anchoring meant every exchange happened at its preferred distance.

Kara caught two more strikes on his canopy, one partial deflection that grazed his shoulder, and was beginning to understand what the tier gap felt like from the wrong side of it. The creature was injured and outnumbered and it was still making them pay for every inch. Waggy hit the injured foreleg again from below and the Tier 5 reared slightly to address him, exposing the underbelly for a half second.

Kara pressed forward immediately, driving toward the exposed angle, and Sixth Sense caught the backswing coming before his eyes did - a full spread strike, fast, aimed at Waggy who was still underneath and fully committed to the foreleg and had no read on what was descending toward him. Kara stepped across. The quill drove through his left thigh with a force that went all the way up his spine.

He went down on one knee, the leg refusing the load, an involuntary gasp escaping from him even as he grit his teeth so hard he could feel it in his skull. Fluid State and Safe Haven went into overdrive as he shoved himself back to his feet because Waggy was underneath him and the follow-through from the Yamaarashi was already coming in hard and fast. His canopy came up on instinct.

Sixth Sense gave him the angle and the strike hit the canopy's span, pushing it back towards himself, the umbrella briefly coming loose before he changed his grip. The impact drove Kara back into the gulley wall, forcing the breath out of him. Ren was into the right flank the moment the Tier 5's weight shifted, ferrule driving into the damaged shoulder joint over and over. Kohaku pressed from behind, her full remaining weight into the injured shoulder, pinning the foreleg. The creature's balance tilted.

Waggy came over the top. He cleared the Tier 5's back in a single movement, spine fully extended mid-air, and landed on the far side with his teeth clamping the throat from below. A quill drove into his left rear leg. He clamped even harder and held. Kara came in and both the canopies moved together. Both of them, simultaneously, to the same point, covering the full angle above Waggy as the raised quills came down toward him.

The gap that had refused to close through eight practice attempts that morning simply ceased to exist, because the alternative was Waggy. Kara's knife found the throat from his side. Ren's ferrule came down on the side of the skull with everything he had left. The Tier 5 went still. For a moment there was nothing in the gulley except the four of them breathing heavily. Then, from somewhere above, the sound of the Tier 3s arriving at the traverse. They looked at each other.

Kara's leg was carrying a quill and a complaint. Ren's forearm had taken enough blunt force that his grip on the ferrule was different from what it had been an hour ago. Kohaku's wing was held at an angle. Waggy was upright and his eyes were forward but his rear leg was not moving the way he wanted it to. They were still standing. Just barely, the adrenaline not having gone out yet. The first Tier 3 came through the access point. The canopy co-ordination held.

It held through Waggy's tight turn in the confined space and through Kohaku pressing from the side and through Ren finding the angle on the skull and Kara's knife following through. Swift and decisive, the four of them working as one cohesive unit. The remaining three had reached the gulley's edge above and were looking down. They saw the Tier 5 and the Tier 3 beside it.

Something in the way they had come up the traverse - confident, purposeful, the momentum of a group that considered this area of the mountain theirs - went out of them. They recalculated, initiating a slow withdrawal back up the traverse, each one moving away without turning its back, as though they were taking an informed choice. Ren exhaled beside him. They both knew the outcome of a potential fight against the remaining Tier 3s in their current states. They sat down in the snow at the gulley entrance.

Waggy put his chin on Kara's knee. Kohaku folded her good wing over Ren's shoulder. The mountain was very quiet. The wind came down off the peak and moved through the gulley. Eventually Ren said, "The quills. We need to take them out carefully. They are barbed."

"I know," Kara said.

"Isamu was very clear about the angle."

"Ren."

"Right," Ren said.

"One more minute." They gave it one more minute. Then Ren cut his own quill short, hissed once through his teeth, and began working the shaft out at the angle it had entered. Kara watched him, looked at the quill in his own thigh, and decided Ren's expression was not encouraging. When they had finished - and it took time, and care - they turned to the Yamaarashi. Ren moved to the nearest body and worked through the process exactly as Isamu had described it days ago.

The quills came away clean at the base node, snapped rather than pulled, long enough to be worth carrying down. The mountain light had moved well past noon. Kara shouldered his pack. His left leg would carry weight for the next day whether it wanted to or not. He looked at his interface. Something was waiting there, at the edge of his awareness. Beside him, Ren had gone still in the same way, looking at something Kara could not see.