Chương 31: Crushing Stone

Kurisu snatched his katana from the back of the Miller's truck, unlocking the guard as he reached to draw. He paused. Looming over the scrub oaks and pines of the canyon, a fifty-foot titan of granite and moss splintered the treeline as it ambled toward the clearing. After taking in the golem's rocky surface, he looked down at the katana. Better to leave the steel behind; a normal blade would only shatter against solid stone.

Shaking his head, he clicked the weapon back into its sheath, returning it to the back seat before turning back to the threat.

"Get inside!" he called over his shoulder. Met by silence, Kurisu looked back, catching the group's open-mouthed expressions as they gawked up at the creature. With a snort, he slapped his palms against the earth, causing the ground to surge upward, birthing a five-foot-tall and two-foot-thick wall of reinforced stone around the vehicles. Continuing with a fluid sweep of his arms, he shifted the soil beneath the barrier into a high-speed current that glided the group a hundred yards back from the combat zone.

"Should we help him?" Kenji shouted over the grinding of the titan while peering over the top of the barricade. Steven placed a hand against the thick stone, his voice tight.

"He built this wall for a reason. Let's stay behind it and let him work." Dropping into a low Senryū no Kamae, Kurisu watched the golem swing an arm the size of a redwood in a sweeping arc. Kurisu vanished just before the blow landed, a spark of Raiki directed into his calves. The giant limb cleaved through the empty space, carving a deep trench where he had stood a moment prior, snapping branches from adjacent trees with the displaced wind.

Blurring back into reality beside the huge wrist before the giant could even retract its arm, he delivered a spinning heel kick. The impact echoed with a crack, pulverizing a chunk of granite from the joint. Yet, a slurry of mud flowed up from the ground, crawling over the titan's legs and torso to run down the length of its arm and knit the shattered limb back together in seconds. Kurisu's eyes narrowed, his jaw tightening at the sight. Was the beast using the mountain to reconstitute itself?

With the sound of grinding boulders, the golem swatted at him in a horizontal sweep. With a drop to one hand, Kurisu spun on the heel of his palm, narrowly sliding beneath the rushing stone before leaping high to drive an elbow into the creature's knee. The shockwave sent a crack spider-webbing up the thigh, but the relentless mud pulled more stone from the hillside to seal the breach before the dust could even settle.

Pressing the assault as the creature brought its arm down, Kurisu leaped to intercept the strike, grappling the earthen construct to dig his fingers into the granite forearm and send thick arcs of electricity coursing into the stone. The rock flashed from gray to cherry-red before erupting into a blinding white in a heartbeat, sloughing the arm off in thick, molten globs as it yielded to the blistering heat.

Upon releasing his grip on the dissolving limb, Kurisu clicked his tongue as he watched the river of soil and mud surge up the flank yet again. The wet earth cooled the slag, reforming the limb thicker than before in mere seconds. A breathless grunt punched from his throat as the titan's knee suddenly crashed into his chest, the impact launching him twenty feet higher into the air. Before he could right himself, the golem backhanded him out of the sky.

Slamming into the hard-packed earth, he tumbled across the dirt, met immediately by a stomp that shook the valley floor. With a swift roll to the side, he narrowly dodged the crushing foot, tumbling away from the ensuing shockwave. As he scrambled to his feet, he was met instantly by the golem clipping him with a broad strike.

The blow launched him backward, skipping him across the forest floor to crash through the trunks of young pines before he slammed into a granite boulder, the force of the impact reducing the rock to a cloud of dust and gravel.

"Kurisu!" Charlotte lurched forward, her hands flying to her mouth.

"Oh my god, is he okay?" Ignoring the fallen warrior, the titan turned its faceless visage toward the stone barricade. Slowly, it began ambling toward the families. Refusing to back down, Ace and Kenji stepped to the edge of the barrier, hurling a barrage of fireballs, while Kellevra stamped his foot, launching a volley of sharp stones.

The combined assault pelted the granite skin in a loud but useless display; the sharp stones shattered into harmless gravel, while the fire washed over the surface and fizzled out as the creature advanced unchecked.

"Look there," Steven said, gripping Charlotte's arm as the dust cleared around the Terran.

"He's getting up." Kurisu lifted his head, watching the monster close the distance to the vehicles. Pulling his focus inward, he attempted to flick his Teirin to activate the Genkai. Breathing evenly and sharpening his focus, he'd assumed he had reached the stillness the form demanded. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. However, the spiritual lock refused to budge. He tried flicking the Teirin again. Again, nothing happened. What's going on?

He needed to help them. He had to save them. Why wouldn't it work? He was calm. He was centered. Yet, as he probed the misalignment, an erratic pulse hammered against his ribs. No, I'm not calm, I'm—Fear? That must be it. Feelings of fear must block my Teirin. His thoughts froze for a fraction of a second, his mind flashing back to the Miller's basement after the nightmare.

He had been terrified that night, only managing to awaken the power the next morning once the panic had finally burned away and true calm settled in. This deep, suffocating fear of losing his new clan was completely blocking the Genkai. Amid a sudden flash of his mother's face bleeding into a memory of Rin's smile as she ran through the fields near their estate, he gritted his teeth, burying the panic to find his resolve.

Forcing genuine stillness while they were in the crosshairs was impossible, and fighting his own emotions was a waste of time. He needed to overwhelm the creature with sheer destructive force. In a blinding rush, he blurred back into the fray, moving faster than the dense behemoth could track, unleashing one brutal punch after another against the midsection, shattering stone with every impact.

He cracked the torso, crumbled the knee, and pulverized the left elbow in less than a heartbeat, unleashing a forked discharge of lightning point-blank into its chest to blow a three-foot crater in the stone. Pressing the assault, he expanded a sphere of electricity outward, completely encompassing the fifty-foot titan within a humming barrier. He used the inner surface of the field as a magnetic anchor. Latching his boots to the curved energy, he launched himself across the diameter in a blinding blur."

Shunraiken!" As he vaulted from the upper arc, driving a heel through the golem's collarbone, he rebounded against the lower barrier, shooting upward to core out its midsection before anchoring on the flank, propelling himself horizontally to shear the remaining arm from its socket. The lunges blurred into a continuous barrage as he ricocheted from edge to edge, hammering the construct from all three hundred and sixty degrees.

The relentless assault blasted stone away with every strike, tearing the earthen giant into a crumbling pile of fractured rubble. Kurisu exhaled, dropping to the crater floor as the dust settled. Behind the stone barricade, the families held their breath.

"Is it dead?" Ace whispered. A few moments passed as they waited, holding their breath in the settling dust. Then, the mud surged. Crawling over the broken stones, the slurry once again began knitting the rubble back together, an incessant tide of earth flowing upward to rebuild the towering frame. Fully reconstituted, the earthen titan brought its massive fists down in a double-handed smash.

The force of the blow cratered the ground, whipping a violent shockwave of dust and displaced air across the clearing, the deafening impact leaving nothing but a thick cloud of pulverized rock in its wake. Behind the barricade, Charlotte choked back a sob, burying her face in Steven's shoulder.

"No..." Only the soft hiss of settling dust filled the canyon. Then, the dust flickered. Arcs of electricity sparked through the haze, snapping against the shattered earth. Slowly, the golem's massive fists began to rise, trembling as they were forced upward against their own crushing weight. Beneath the stone limbs, Kurisu stood braced in the crater, supporting the downward force on his forearms.

Half-closing his eyelids into a bored stare, he glared up at the golem, a purple glint flaring in his irises before his eyes glowed with electricity. The air around him thickened, his gathering aura violently arcing off his skin to tear at the surroundings." Ii kagen ni itase." Shoving the stone fists aside, Kurisu backflipped out of the crater. Basic elemental strikes were useless against a foe that rebuilt itself without so much as a thought. He needed to erase it completely, and in a single strike.

He stood slowly from the crouch, his focus narrowing as electricity arced from his skin to the surrounding earth. The ground shattering beneath his boots, he leaped high above the fifty-foot golem. Clearing the granite head, he entered a rapid gyroscopic rotation. The atmosphere howled with screaming wind, snapping branches throughout the valley as the three-dimensional vortex grew larger. More... More. He needed more. Currents of crimson Chi bled from the surrounding foliage, funneling into his position.

The leaves immediately beneath him turned a charcoal-gray as their life force drained to fuel his Ki. Lances of lightning tore through the sky, hammering the mountainside with rhythmic thunder while the gathered power thickened the air. With a whip-like snap, he stopped. The atmosphere fell into silence as the lightning vanished and the flow of red energy ceased. He hung motionless for a lingering heartbeat, a solitary silhouette holding a whining bead of azure-white light at the fingertips of his right hand."

Kutabare!" he spat." Raikōhō!" He thrust his index and middle fingers toward the target; 1. 76 gigajoules of jagged, blue-white electricity erupted downward. The thermal shock flash-boiled the granite head into vapor on contact. Intense heat vitrified the upper torso, melting the stone into liquid glass that poured down the chest like burning honey. Below the melt, the titan's body shattered into fractured chunks, exploding outward like a fragmentation grenade.

The blast drove a storm of shrapnel through the clearing, shredding the remaining timber and lighting the brush on fire. A hundred yards away, chunks of pulverized granite hammered into the two-foot-thick barricade. The dense stone shuddered, its face violently pockmarked by the impacts, but the wall held firm, sheltering the families on the other side. Dropping from the heights, Kurisu struck the center of the scorched pit.

Exhaustion dragged at his frame, forcing him to drop to one knee on the glass-slick floor as the cooling vapor rolled over the wreckage. His chest heaved, the last of the blue-white arcs flickering across his right forearm and the back of his fist.