Chương 22: Assault

The statues moved first. I had been standing in the middle of the chamber looking at the alcove shelves when the nearest one stepped off its base. Not slowly. One moment it was stone in a fixed position and the next it was moving, and the sound of it was not the grinding I would have expected from stone in motion but something closer to a crack, a single sharp report like something under pressure releasing all at once. I had the staff up before the second one moved.

"Arcane Burst." [Arcane Burst Rank 2: Active.] The discharge hit the nearest statue in the chest cavity and the stone fractured along the impact line but did not go down. It registered the hit and kept moving, which told me the mana concentration in these things was not in the standard locations. I ducked under the first swing, which came from my left at a height that would have connected with my head, and the arm that swung it was stone and it passed close enough that I felt the displaced air.

Then I noticed the wings. They were folded against the backs of the statues, which was why I had not registered them at first scan. Stone wings, articulated at the joint, and as I was processing that detail two of them spread simultaneously and the downstroke of air hit me before I had fully registered the intention behind it. I came off the floor. One of them had grabbed me.

One hand around my left arm, the grip of stone fingers closing with a pressure that my Vitality could absorb but my arm could not ignore, and then I was rising, lifted toward the high ceiling where the coloured glass windows let in their fragmented light, and looking down at the chamber floor getting further away.

"Shit," I said. I tried to fire a Spellfist discharge into the grip point but the angle was wrong and the stone hand was not presenting a mana concentration I could target cleanly while being carried. I looked up. The ceiling was close. I looked down. The floor was not. I stopped trying to hit the hand and hit the wall instead. I swung my free arm forward, channelled everything I had into the palm, and drove a Spellfist contact discharge into the wall surface as we passed it.

The force pushed me laterally against the grip and the grip broke. I dropped. My arms went out by reflex. I caught the stone frame of a window ledge at about four and a half meters and my shoulder took the full force of the stop. I held on. The statue that had been carrying me banked in the air above me with a movement that was genuinely unsettling from something made of stone, and I watched it turn and understood that it was coming back.

To my right another one was approaching the window line from the air, angling toward me the way something with claws angled toward something it had decided to pick up again. I did not let it pick me up again. I let go of the ledge, dropped the remaining four and a half meters, landed badly but landed, and rolled out of it with less grace than I would have preferred and more function than I had any right to expect. I stood up and wiped dust off my face. [Health: 278 / 310] Thirty-two points from the fall.

Acceptable. There were eight of them total and two were in the air and the other six were moving across the chamber floor toward me with a speed that I had not anticipated from stone. High Agility was not a stat I associated with constructed entities, but these were moving with it, closing distance faster than the golem type by a significant margin. The problem was clear. Arcane Burst worked but it was not finishing them in one hit, which meant each engagement was taking more time and more mana than it should.

Infinite Reservoir was still locked from the penalty window, which meant I could not throw unrestricted output at the problem. Channel Investment drained too fast for sustained use against eight targets. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. That left Spellfist, which required contact range, and contact range with something that had stone fists and functional wings was a high-damage proposition for my health bar.

'Hand to hand then,' I thought.

'Fine.' The first one reached me and I did not back up. I stepped into it the same way I had stepped into the arachnid's leg arc and the ghoul's charge before that, denying it the space it needed to build force, and I drove a palm strike with full Spellfist charge into the joint where the neck met the body. The yellow discharge cracked through the stone at the contact point. [Experience Gained: 1, 400] It went down.

The second one was already inside my guard and the wing caught me across the ribs before I had repositioned. I stumbled right, used the momentum rather than fighting it, and came around with a Spellfist strike to the extended wing joint as it tried to retract. [Experience Gained: 1, 400] Two down. Six moving. Two in the air.

I activated Pathfinder at full output and let Mana Circulation run simultaneously, not using it as a casting channel but letting it move through my whole body the way I had been doing instinctively since floor two. It was not a skill.

It was a circulation pattern, mana moving through blood pathways and muscle groups, and what it did was marginal but real, faster response time, better stamina retention, and an awareness of my own body's state that meant I was not going to miss the moment when something important changed. The Pathfinder trait mapped the remaining six and showed me their approach vectors simultaneously. The two in the air were circling wide, waiting for an opening.

The four on the ground were splitting into two pairs, one pair coming from each side.

'They are coordinating,' I thought. I moved toward the left pair instead of centering myself, which forced the right pair to adjust its angle and bought me a second. I took the front one of the left pair with a Spellfist strike to the chest concentration point that the trait had finally resolved clearly.

[Experience Gained: 1, 400] The one behind it swung while I was still in contact range and I dropped flat under the arc, came up inside its reach, and hit it twice in succession, the second strike pulling on more mana than the first. [Experience Gained: 1, 400] The right pair reached me then and the next thirty seconds were not something I was going to reconstruct in sequence because they moved too fast and the damage was going both directions and I did not have the processing to narrate it while it was happening.

What I had was the training from a thousand runs with martial disciplines that were supposed to belong to other classes, the monk footwork and the swordmaster weight reading and the brawling instinct for close quarters, all of it running underneath the Spellfist channel like a foundation the mage class had not built but had not demolished either. Both of the right pair went down.

[Experience Gained: 1, 400] [Experience Gained: 1, 400] The two in the air descended simultaneously, which was the moment I had been watching for since they started circling. They came from opposite sides, which was the correct tactical choice. I could not address both at the same time. I was going to take contact from at least one of them and the question was which one I let hit me and which one I hit first.

I chose the larger one and charged toward it instead of away, which the smaller one had not predicted because everything it had observed me doing for the last two minutes had been reactive. I met the larger one mid-descent and drove a full-charge Spellfist into its chest with everything I had accumulated in the channel during the ground engagement. The discharge was not the standard yellow. It was the violet-white I had seen when Spellfist ran through the sword on floor three, and the effect was proportionate.

The statue did not fall. It came apart, the mana concentration at its core detonating outward through the stone structure, and the pieces that landed around me were not moving. [Experience Gained: 2, 800] [Bonus: Critical Node Destruction.] The smaller one hit me from behind. Hard. My health dropped. [Health: 201 / 310] I turned around.

The last one was standing about a meter and a half away, stone wings extended, red eyes catching the coloured light from the windows, and it looked at me the way something looked at something it had already decided the outcome for. I had no staff in my hand. I had dropped it somewhere in the ground engagements and had not recovered it. I had no weapon, which was a situation I had been in before and had resolved before and would resolve again. I charged at it.

I put every unit of mana remaining in my working reserve into both palms and drove them simultaneously into the contact points the Pathfinder trait marked on its chest, one discharge layered over the other at the same point in a way I had not done before and did not have a name for. The stone cracked from the contact point outward in a radial pattern and the statue went still.

[Experience Gained: 1, 400] I stood in the chamber alone, covered in stone dust, with my mana at forty-one and my health at two hundred and one and no staff. Then I looked down. Through the gap where one of the statues had been standing on its base, I could see that there was more chamber below this one. Not a floor below. Something else, a space that opened below the chamber's floor level, and in that space there was light that was not coming from the coloured windows. A soft, pulsing light. Blue-white.

Attached to chains. I looked at it for a long moment. Then I looked at my hands.

'No staff,' I thought.

'No distance option. Whatever is down there, I am going in empty-handed.' I had been empty-handed before. On floor three, floor five. Hands were enough when Spellfist was running. I stepped off the edge and dropped into the light below. [New Area Discovered: Chamber Beneath.] [Entities Present: 10.] [Unidentified Object: Contained.]