Chương 59: [B2] Chapter 17: The Quetzalcoatl (Part II)

Zero explained it in the space between one exchange and the next, because there was no time to explain it any other way.

"Every ability it uses that isn't purely physical, the water wall, the lance, the storm breath, the lightning, draws from the river itself," he said, ducking beneath a tail sweep that had grown, he noted, marginally slower than the last one.

"Identify confirmed it. The volume is measurably lower than it was an hour ago. This is not an infinite well it's drawing from. It is a reservoir, and it is spending that reservoir every time it reaches for something beyond its own body."

"So it runs out," Miho said, already understanding where this went.

"Eventually.""'Eventually' is not a plan we can afford to wait on passively," Zero said.

"It will replenish from rain, tributaries, and from whatever else feeds this river naturally. Left alone, the depletion would take longer than any of us can survive standing here absorbing tail sweeps."

"Then we don't leave it alone," Viria said.

"We help it along."

She didn't wait for anyone to ask how. She dropped into the same stillness she'd used over the tangled growth in the hollow, palms finding the nearest root system at the clearing's edge, and Zero understood, watching her face settle into concentration, that whatever she was about to do would cost her considerably more than a handful of forced-ripened berries had.

"Root-Waking doesn't just grow things," she said, breathing the counted rhythm he'd seen before.

"It wakes them. It tells them to want more than they currently have. If I tell every root system within reach of this bank to want water badly enough, they'll take it. From wherever the easiest source happens to be."

"The river," Zero said.

"The river," Viria confirmed, and pressed her palms flatter against the bark. The change was slow at first, then unmistakable. Roots that had sat dormant and satisfied along the bank's edge began drawing visibly, bark darkening as moisture pulled upward through channels that hadn't needed to work this hard in decades. The river's edge receded by degrees too small to notice individually, but Zero, watching with the same attention he gave any accumulating data, confirmed the trend within minutes.

"It's working," he said.

The creature noticed considerably faster than any of them expected. Its next storm breath came out thinner than the one that had thrown Yukito into the tree line, the crackling gale reduced to something closer to a hard gust, and the water-lance it threw at Viria a moment later arrived slower, easier to read, and easier to steer clear of.

"It's intentionally reducing the power of its blows," Miho said, blade catching what would have been an unstoppable strike an hour ago.

"It knows the water level is diminishing."

"Then we keep diminishing it," Zero said, and turned his own attention to holding the creature's focus, giving Viria the time and stillness her working required, his plating absorbing what blows came his way rather than dodging them outright, a trade he judged worth making.

The fight settled into something closer to a siege than a battle, all four of them buying time rather than seeking a finish, and Zero found himself, in the strange calm beneath the noise, cataloguing the creature's diminishing options with something approaching satisfaction. Each ability it reached for came out smaller than the last. Each smaller output meant less water spent replenishing itself, and less water meant the next ability would be smaller still.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. It was perhaps twenty minutes later that Viria's voice changed, strain finally cutting through the concentration she'd been holding since she first knelt at the bank.

"It's slowing," she said, not looking up from the roots beneath her palms.

"The absorption. The roots are near their limit. There's only so much a plant can hold before it has nowhere left to put what it's taking."

"How much longer?" Zero asked, deflecting a strike that had, notably, lost most of the force it would have carried an hour ago.

"Not long enough," Viria said, and something in her voice carried real fatigue now, not performance.

"I can feel where the ceiling is. We're close to it." Zero considered this against everything he understood about her other trait, the one that had nothing to do with growing things.

"Your subspace," he said.

"Can it hold what the roots cannot? Expand their capacity artificially?" Viria let out a short, breathless laugh that had almost nothing of humor left in it.

"I've been doing that for the last ten minutes, Zero. Folding excess capacity into subspace the moment the roots hit their ceiling, buying them room to keep drawing. It's the only reason this has worked as long as it has." She pressed her palms harder against the bark, knuckles white.

"But the roots are still finite even with the extra room I'm buying them, and I am considerably more finite than either of us would like right now." She was right, and Zero understood it the moment he actually looked at her rather than simply listening to her voice.

Her color had gone pale in a way that had nothing to do with the earlier parasite, sweat standing out along her hairline despite the cool air off the river, hands trembling faintly against bark that no longer looked like it was accepting her direction quite as readily as it had ten minutes ago.

"You're near your own limit," he said. It was not a question.

"I am extremely near my own limit," Viria said, "which I would have mentioned sooner, except mentioning it does not actually solve the problem, and I did not see the point in adding panic to an already difficult afternoon."

The creature reared for another pass, storm breath gathering in its chest, smaller now, but not so small that it had stopped being dangerous, and Zero understood, watching the last of its reserves visibly straining against a river that had given nearly everything it currently had to give, that they had bought considerable ground and were about to run out of runway to spend it on. He needed something that used what remained of the depletion, rather than simply waiting for more of it.

Something that turned the last of the river's strength against the creature directly, instead of continuing to grind it down one shrinking ability at a time. He looked at the creature's throat, working toward another roar it hadn't yet needed because nothing had forced it to reach that far in the last several exchanges. He looked at Viria, exhausted, hands still buried in root systems that had nearly nothing left to give.

He looked, finally, at the clear patch of sky the lightning had answered from once already, and at the water still pooling, thin now but present, in the shallows around the creature's own coiled length. Something clicked into place, sudden and complete.

"Viria," he said, quiet, close enough that only she would hear it over the creature's rising breath.

"I have an idea."

He told her, fast, low, the words costing him nothing to produce because the plan itself was simple, even if executing it would not be. Her exhausted face went through several stages in the span of a few seconds: confusion, disbelief, and then something that broke, briefly, into a real laugh despite everything her body currently felt like doing.

"That is insane," she said.

"That is genuinely, certifiably insane, Zero, do you understand that?"

"I am aware of how it sounds."

"The worst part is how plausible it sounds. It's exactly unhinged enough that it might actually work." She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of one trembling hand, and something steadier settled into her expression despite the exhaustion still written all over the rest of her.

"Can you pull off your part of it?"

"I believe so."

"That's not what I asked. I asked if you can, not if you believe you can." Zero considered the distinction, and found he respected her for making it.

"I can," he said, with more certainty this time.

"Then I'll do my part," said Viria, and pulled other hand out from the roots at last, rising on legs that shook more than she wanted anyone to notice, already turning to find Miho and Yukito, already beginning, in her own exhausted, determined way, to put the shape of something impossible into motion.