Chương 60: [B2] Chapter 18: The Storm

Zero called the fallback before the creature could gather for its next pass, and all three of them broke from their positions toward him without questioning the order, because three weeks of surviving together had taught them exactly when a command from him was worth obeying without discussion first.

"Yukito," he said, fast, "save whatever you have left. Whatever comes after this, I need you to be able to hold something down, not completely spent just from holding yourself up."

"Understood." Yukito's shadow retracted close around him, conserving rather than reaching. Zero didn't need to see his face to know the toll the last hour had already taken. He turned to Miho.

"Your illusion. Can you use it on something that size?" Miho's breath came hard, but her voice held steady.

"At our level against something at 102? A hallucination convincing enough to matter might hold for two seconds. Maybe less."

"Two seconds is enough."

"Enough for what?"

"I need you to bait its roar. The lightning. Make it believe an attack is coming from somewhere it can only answer with that specific ability, somewhere none of its other options can reach." Miho absorbed this, and something in her exhausted expression sharpened into focus.

"I can do that," she said.

"I'll be ready when you are."

Zero found Viria at the clearing's edge, still unsteady on her feet but standing under her own power, bow slung and ready.

"You remember what you need to do?" he confirmed.

"I remember." She managed something that wasn't quite her usual grin, worn thin at the edges but real.

"Are you sure you can do this?"

"It is an insane amount of precision to ask of someone who has been feeding a jungle's root system her own strength for the last twenty minutes, but yes. This is something I can do." She rolled her shoulders, testing the fold already gathering faint and violet at her fingertips.

"Tell Miho I'm ready when she is."

Miho moved into position at the bank's edge, foxfire already gathering pale and cold along her fingers, and Zero watched her build the illusion the way he'd watched her build everything that mattered: carefully, deliberately, spending exactly as much as the moment required and not a fraction more. The Quetzalcoatl's massive head turned toward a point in the clearing where nothing actually stood, gold eyes narrowing on a version of whatever threat Miho had created inside its own momentarily convinced perception.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. It reared. Its throat worked. The roar that followed tore through the clearing with a violence unlike anything it had produced all fight, calling down a bolt of lightning aimed squarely at the illusion's location, a spot on the far bank that every one of its physical attacks would have needed several seconds to reach.

Miho's illusion held for exactly as long as she'd promised, and dissolved a half second before the lightning landed. Viria's fold opened in the same instant, one violet seam tearing open directly above the river's surface where the creature's own coiled body sat lowest in the water, a second seam yawning open precisely where the lightning was already committed to striking. The bolt never reached the empty illusion at all.

It fell instead through Viria's fold, redirected in the same breath it left the sky, and struck the river's surface directly around the Quetzalcoatl's own body.

The impact was total. Water conducted the strike through the creature's entire lowered length, and the surrounding shallows, already thinned by an hour of Viria's draining, erupted into steam as the lightning's heat flashed the remaining moisture into vapor in an instant, stripping away what little reserve the creature had left to draw on at all.

The Quetzalcoatl screamed, a sound with none of the earlier fight's controlled fury left in it, only pain and a confusion that had no context for what had just happened to the one resource it had always been able to trust completely.

"Yukito, now!" Zero shouted, already moving, preparing to shift. Yukito's shadow surged forward, no longer conserved but spent entirely at once, wrapping around the creature's weakened, steam-wreathed length in bands that held with a strength his crude attempts at flight had never suggested he possessed. It thrashed, but the strikes that came were slow now, uncoordinated, a body working without the reserves it needed to make any of its remaining motion count for anything.

Zero, closing the last of the distance at a speed his reinforced legs had been holding in reserve since the fight began, reshaped his right arm as he ran, flesh and bone drawing down into something narrow and precise, longer than any blade he'd ever built, tapered to a point finer than anything he'd attempted before. The creature's eye tracked him, gold and dimming, and Zero could tell it understood, in the half second before contact, that it had nothing left to answer him with.

He drove the needle through the socket in one motion, past the eye and into whatever lay beyond it, and felt the moment the resistance gave way entirely. The Quetzalcoatl's massive body shuddered once, violently, and went still. Zero withdrew his arm slowly, reshaping it back to its ordinary configuration as he stepped back from the creature's now-motionless bulk, breathing hard in a way that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the sheer scale of what had just stopped moving in front of him.

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Viria sat down hard where she stood, all the strength that had carried her through the last hour finally spent completely. Miho lowered herself to one knee, foxfire guttering out at her fingertips. Yukito's shadow retracted fully, leaving him swaying slightly on his feet.

"It's dead," Yukito said, finally, more a statement than a question.

"Yes," Zero said, looking at the creature's stilled form, at the steam still rising faintly off the shallows around it, at the four of them, exhausted and standing, all of it finally, genuinely over. A window resolved above the clearing, quiet, the way the important ones always seemed to arrive once the moment they described had already finished happening. [Level Up! Lv. 49 → Lv. 53] System Notice: All members of Team Zero have reached Level 50 Classes unlocked