Chương 75: Chapter 76: The Rotational Sync

The second wave hit the bottleneck of the cave in a chaotic, snarling mass of cackling jaws and thrashing limbs. Ethan dropped another iron-oxide stone into the pocket of his sling, his arm muscles burning with a deep, heavy lactic ache. He whipped the cords above his head, aiming for the translucent, pulsating neck indicator that his 85 Perception and Linguistic Genesis Engine were tracking across the lead hyena's throat: the נֶפֶשׁ (Nephesh). He released the line.

The heavy red stone tore through the dark, but the hyena violently twitched its frame to snap at the scarab beetle. The stone missed the narrow throat entirely, smashing harmlessly into the beast's thick, dust-caked shoulder muscle. The impact registered as a standard, non-critical blow, barely chipping a fraction off its massive health line. Ethan gritted his teeth, ducking as a second predator rammed its chest violently against the scarab golem's forward carapace.

Under the immense crushing pressure of its jaws, another cluster of the beetle's high-carbon cast-iron armour plates shattered away with a metallic shriek, spraying sharp black fragments across his bare feet. 230/384. The golem's durability dropped to 60%. If that brittle iron shell cracked and disintegrated completely, the soft mud core underneath would melt within seconds, leaving him completely exposed to an open-field mauling. He had to fix his accuracy ASAP.

Ethan backed his heel a fraction of an inch into the loose alluvial silt, adjusting his entire body weight. He was fighting the sling—forcing the weapon with his shoulder and stiffening his forearm, which caused the stone's trajectory to drift wide every time the target thrashed. His thought back to his secondary school Judo training drills. In the dojo, a successful throw never started in the fingers or the arm; it was all about the hips.

A clean drop in your center of gravity and executing a rapid, explosive whip-rotation of the hips. To execute a hip throw, your feet had to lock into the mat while your pelvis snapped to redirect the opponent's entire momentum. Ethan lowered his base. He stopped pulling with his shoulder. He locked his lead foot firmly into the unpaved cave dirt, letting his [Unyielding Frame] anchor his legs like concrete piles.

He dropped another iron stone into the pouch, swinging the sling in a low, tight horizontal arc over his shoulder frame. As the cackling jaw of the next level-44 hyena squeezed through the mud-brick bottleneck, Ethan didn't just throw his arm forward. He drove his weight through his heel, matching the release apex with an explosive, snap-rotation of his hips—the exact same hip-whip torque he had used to throw bigger, heavier opponents onto the mat years ago.

The iron-oxide bullet flew in a straight, un-wavering line across the open clearance of the scarab's back, driving itself straight into the center of the flashing Nephesh. The system let out a deep, heavy critical-hit chime. The hyena's cackle cut off in a choked, wet gasp as its windpipe collapsed, its health bar depleted to zero. Ethan's eyes narrowed as the remaining pack beasts lunged against his crumbling golem.

He loaded, swung, and snapped his pelvis with a renewed fervour, as he improved his strength and accuracy of the sling. Slowly but surely as he wore down their health bars from a safe distance. The moment the final carcass collapsed into the black ash, Ethan didn't pause to breathe. He immediately took out his bronze scrapper trowel from his pack, his [Structural Analysis] multiplier kicking into a blistering 300% extraction speed.

He knelt in the dark, methodically prying open the hyenas' high-density calcified jaws to strip their fangs and their hide. Trying his best to not waste any bit of the hunt.