Chương 30: The Unfinished Dragon

The system window appeared before any of them had fully processed the scale of what stood above them. IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE Species: Imugi (Sealed Vessel, Incomplete Ascension) Level: 60 (Scaled down from base value for engagement balance) Type: Ascendant Spirit Beast Attribute: Water/Spirit Threat: Extreme Note: Has not undergone final ascension. Vulnerable points present but not yet identified. Viria stared at the number.

"Level 60 is SCALED DOWN???"

"Our average level is 30," Miho said, her voice carrying the particular flatness she used when the size of a problem outpaced her usual register for urgency.

"Even when multiplied by four, that gap is significant." The Imugi's lower body had not finished rising from the basin, coil after coil of jade-dark scale still unspooling from the water below, and what Zero could see of it already suggested a creature whose total length exceeded the hall's visible boundaries. It did not attack immediately.

It regarded them instead, head tilted with an attentiveness that felt less like a predator sizing up prey and more like something ancient noting, with mild interest, that the offering had finally arrived after however long it had waited.

"What's the plan?" Viria asked. Her voice had gone tight, controlled, the particular calm she reached for when panic was a luxury she had decided not to afford. Zero was already running everything he had. System Intuition pulled at him the way it always did when a problem held a solution buried somewhere inside it, not yet visible but present, waiting to be found through attention rather than given freely.

He layered Identify over the Imugi's full length, watching the result resolve slowly, more detail surfacing the longer he held the skill active. Imugi — Extended Read Scale density: Near-total. Localized exceptions Weak point: Unconfirmed.

"There's a weakness," Zero said.

"My system intuition says creatures like this typically retain one, from the ascension never completing. But Identify can't locate it from here. We need closer proximity. Therefore, we need to survive long enough to find it."

"Survive a Level 60 pseudo-dragon," Viria repeated.

"Got it."

"A scaled Level 60," Zero said.

"And we have done difficult things with worse odds than this looked, at the start." The Imugi's head dipped, ending their conversation.

"Incoming!" Miho called, already moving.

The first strike was a test, the same instinct Zero had recognized in the Silver Wind Serpent weeks ago, except scaled to something that made the serpent's length look like a worm. The Imugi's tail swept the hall in a wide arc, not aimed precisely at any of them, simply clearing space, and the displaced air alone was enough to send Viria stumbling sideways even from a distance she had thought was safe. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"It's not even trying yet," Yukito said, his shadow already stretching wide to anchor against the next motion.

"Don't give it a reason to," Miho said.

"Spread out. Force it to divide its attention." They scattered across the hall's wide floor, and the Imugi's attention divided accordingly, its great head swinging between them with a deliberate, unhurried tracking that suggested it was, despite everything, learning their patterns the same way the White-Stripe Tiger had, except with far more processing power behind the calculation. Zero kept moving, kept watching, kept layering Identify against every section of scale that came within range.

Most of it returned the same flat, uninformative density reading. He needed proximity Identify alone couldn't manufacture from a safe distance, and the Imugi was not offering safe distance to anyone for long. A coil swept toward him. He shifted low, plating thickening along his forearms, and let the strike glance rather than connect directly, the impact still strong enough to send him skidding several meters across the stone. He rolled to his feet and kept scanning.

"Anything?" Miho called, deflecting a strike of her own with a precision that nonetheless cost her visible effort.

"Not yet."

"Hurry up then!" urged Viria. Minutes passed in this rhythm: evade, observe, evade again, keep observing. The four of them traded the Imugi's attention back and forth in a pattern that kept any single one of them from absorbing a direct hit, but it cost them steadily mounting fatigue with every exchange.

Zero watched the others as much as he watched the Imugi, unconsciously cataloguing his teammates' current condition: Viria's footwork beginning to show hesitation at the edges of her fatigue, Miho's Returning Step compensating earlier than it should have needed to, and Yukito's shadow thinning at its furthest extensions.

It was Yukito who found the weakness.

"There," he said, voice sharp.

"Where the head meets the body. Look at the scale pattern." Zero turned his attention there immediately, Identify sharpening against the specific junction Yukito had indicated. Structural Anomaly Detected Location: Head-spine junction, dorsal Note: Single reversed scale. Inconsistent growth pattern. Vulnerability likely.

"Confirmed," Zero said.

"Reverse scale, where the head meets the spine. The growth pattern there runs opposite to everything around it."

"That's small," Viria said, breathing hard.

"On something this size, that's tiny."

"It's there," Zero said.

"That's what matters." The Imugi's head turned. Not toward any of them specifically. Toward the place on its own body Yukito had just named, a slow, deliberate motion that made something cold settle in Zero's chest even before Miho confirmed what his instincts had already suggested.

"It knows we found it," Miho said. The Imugi's posture changed, subtly but unmistakably, the long coils repositioning so that the reverse scale, previously exposed during its more aggressive strikes, was now tucked consistently behind the angle of its own skull, guarded by instinct or intelligence or some combination neither word fully captured.

"It's protecting it now," Yukito said.

"Constantly. I don't think it'll expose that angle again unless it's forced to."

"Then we force it," Viria said.

They regrouped at the hall's edge, the Imugi circling at a distance now, patient in the way only something with no urgent need to finish a fight quickly could afford to be.

"We have one good opening, maybe," Miho said, breathing hard, assessing the team's collective state with the same clinical eye she used for everything.

"It's already adjusted once. It will adjust faster the second time it sees us setting up something deliberate. We won't get many more clean attempts after this."

"I have an idea," Viria said.

"But it requires precision I'm not sure I can promise."

"Go on," Zero said.

"The space-severing cut works from a distance, but the timing has to be exact. If I can land it directly on that reverse scale, at the precise moment the angle opens, it should do significant damage. Maybe enough to actually hurt it in a way the other strikes haven't." She paused.

"But it has to be exact. Wrong timing, wrong angle, and I waste the only chance we'll get before it adapts entirely."

"How much preparation does the cut need?" Miho asked.

"More than I'd like, given how careful it's being now. I need it in a specific position, holding still or moving predictably, long enough for me to read the line properly." Viria looked at the Imugi, circling at a distance, patient and immense.

"Given how smart this thing clearly is, we probably get one real attempt at making that happen. If it doesn't work, I don't think we'll get a second." The hall was quiet for a moment, all four of them looking at the creature that had waited, by the journal's account, considerably longer than any of them had been alive, for an offering that had finally, after eleven years of someone else's failure and weeks of their own efforts, arrived complete.

"Zero," Yukito said.

"Do you yhink it's possible for you to read its patterns precisely enough to time something like that?" Zero considered the question seriously, running through everything he had absorbed across the fight so far: the rhythm of its strikes, the half-second delay between its head's intent and its body's commitment, the four of them and their individual speeds, exhaustion, and reaction times.

"Don't worry," he said.

"I'm pretty good at calculating."