"Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes." — attributed to Buddha
The finishing stroke was already falling when the arm finished rebuilding, and that half-second of impossible anatomy saved Joel’s life.
The Chieftain had launched the pillar from muscle memory, the killing arc that had ended a hundred tenants, and then its eyes had delivered the report that the crushed arm was uncrushed, and the strike arrived at its target half-loaded and a hand’s width wide.
Joel twisted on a collarbone that was still healing, took the glancing edge across his shoulder, and rode the impact into a roll across the raked earth while his freshly rebuilt left arm barely registered the blow.
He came up on both feet. His left leg held. His arm held too, and the pink new skin was already toughening to match the rest of him.
The Chieftain did not pursue immediately, which was the tell. It stood over its own follow-through with the pillar buried in the floor, and it stared at the arm it had pulped between two quarried stones.
Joel watched thirty years of hunting instinct collide with something it could not understand.
Prey bled. Prey broke. Prey stopped.
But the thing in front of the Chieftain had broken all three rules and somehow kept coming.
’You have a library,’ Joel thought, spitting ash and blood onto the swept floor. ’And I have just torn out the index.’
[Ding!]
[Lethal engagement survived (critical trauma, full recovery mid-engagement).]
[+0.1 Physique detected. Micro-adaptation logged.]
[Current Physique: 20.1.]
Then the landlord stopped being a veteran, because it chose to become an animal instead.
The change rolled through the enormous body like a tide through a hold full of cargo.
The small dark eyes pinned to slits, the breath shifted from its long tidal cycle into a bellows rhythm, and the crimson fur darkened as the hide beneath it flushed black-red with surge after surge of blood, veins standing up along the scar crosshatch like cables under a tarp.
Steam rose off its shoulders in the cold air of the Barrens, and the four arms spread wide in a display that no longer had any tactics in it at all.
[Ding!]
[Gore-Ape Chieftain has entered Berserk State.]
[Attack +40%. Defense -25%.]
[System Note: cooldown discipline no longer applies to either party.]
’There it is,’ Joel thought, resetting his grip on the cracked shaft.
The berserk phase paid for its savagery with structure, and Joel learned the price within ten seconds.
The forty-second bellow schedule was dead, the roars came whenever the lungs had air, and the pillars became a pair of demolition tools with no rhythm he could chart, sweeping and stamping and crushing the bone wall of the arena into gravel while Joel ran the shrinking floor between them.
The packed-ash earplugs held the sonic dose down to pressure, which meant the roars were now merely weather, and the real problem was that every lane of clean footing he had surveyed was a crater, and Meteor Piercer needed four sequential footsteps of honest ground to load its momentum through his hips.
He tried it anyway, on the only intact plate of earth left, and the attempt cost him the spear’s future.
The form assembled, the rotation came, and a berserk pillar interrupted the release at its root, and Joel converted the entire technique into a desperate shortened thrust rather than die mid-arc with the momentum unspent.
Even amputated, the Rare-tier skill drove the spearhead through the berserk hide and into the flesh beneath.
The Chieftain answered with a backhand.
It caught Joel across the ribs and sent him flying across the arena, straight into the bone wall.
[Ding!]
[Damage dealt: significant. Target Vitality: 89%.]
[Weapon durability: 1/80.]
[Weapon integrity: structural crack detected along the grain.]
[System Note: the pointed stick has one statement left to make.]
Joel lay in the wreckage of the wall and counted the cost as three broken ribs slowly healed.
The numbers had told him exactly how the rest of the fight would go.
His damage came from a weapon with only one thrust left. His survival came from regeneration that needed no weapon at all.
If a gambler couldn’t afford the table’s entry fee, he had to change games.
’Right,’ he decided, standing up out of the bones. ’The spear is the budget, and the body is the income. So I stop defending the budget, and I start spending the income.’
The shift in strategy was, like most of Joel’s strategies, a matter of reading the label honestly.
The Meteor Piercer needed footing, distance, and a spear, and he could guarantee none of the three, so he stopped trying to buy all of them and started buying position instead, paying for it in the only currency the enemy accepted, which was his own tissue.
When the next pillar swept low, he didn’t jump over it. He stepped inside the arc and let the heel of the pillar slam into his hip.
By the time the swing finished, he was already inside the Chieftain’s guard, where its massive arms were slowest.
His blade was already moving.
A short thrust drove straight into the seam beneath the crown ridge.
[Ding!]
[Damage dealt: moderate. Target Vitality: 84%.]
[Lethal engagement survived (deliberate contact, close quarters).]
[Survival Accumulation: 71%.]
The Chieftain learned fast, even in its berserk state.
Inside the inner circle, its elbows and upper fists became a crushing storm.
Joel stepped into it on purpose, letting the Chieftain keep coming.
A forearm caught his shoulder, reopening the wound.
Joel turned the stagger into two more steps forward, closing the distance.
Then he drove the spear into the armpit seam, right where the pillar grip ended.
A grasping upper hand closed around his left side.
Joel let it.
The crushing grip dug deep into his body, but he braced himself against the creature’s wrist and drove his spear upward beneath its jaw.
The point struck before the Chieftain could decide what to do with him.
[Ding!]
[+0.2 Physique detected. Micro-adaptation logged.]
[Damage dealt: significant. Target Vitality: 77%.]
[Survival Accumulation: 90%.]
Somewhere behind the pain, Joel thought this had to be the least dignified swordsmanship in history.
He was a pharmacy tech paying for every inch of ground with a piece of himself, then making the monster pay through its ribs.
But the numbers didn’t care about dignity.
And the numbers were in his favor.
The hide had stopped an 11,200-unit Meteor Piercer at ten centimeters.
But at close range, Joel’s thrusts were still getting through.
They slipped between the plates, straight into the seams, where the armor was weakest. At that range, his factory-stock body could put its full weight behind every point of the spear.
The tide of the fight turned the way tides actually turn, which was slowly and then all at once.
The Chieftain’s berserk rage was starting to run out.
Its fury was fuel, and the fuel was finite.
The bellows began to slow and break apart. The black-red color covering its hide faded, draining back toward its normal crimson across the shoulders.
It had taken eleven short thrusts to do it, and each of those thrusts had been paid for with a wound that no ordinary fighter would have survived past the second.
Joel stood inside the huge animal’s guard with his ribs rebreaking and rebuilding on a two-minute cycle, and watched the landlord’s vitality tick into the sixties and felt the gauge behind his own heart tick toward its ceiling.
[Ding!]
[Lethal engagement survived (sustained attrition, superior entity).]
[Survival Accumulation: 100%.]
[Gauge converting...]
[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 3.]
The Chieftain suddenly stopped chasing him.
Joel’s instincts noticed the change before his eyes did.
The enormous creature planted all four hands against the arena floor. The bleeding seams along its sides no longer seemed to matter.
Then both pillars rose from the ground at the same time.
Higher.
Higher still, until they passed above its crown and reached into the empty air over the ruined arena.
The system spoke first, and for once there was nothing dry in its tone at all.
[Ding!]
[Charging signature detected: ’Quake Slam’ (Boss Ultimate).]
[Classification: area-of-effect, structural, unavoidable radius.]
[Time to release: 3 seconds.]
[System Note: this one is not a blow. It is a demolition.]
Joel Carrow stood in the center of the arena on the last honest plate of footing in the Barrens, with a cracked spear at 1/80, three Fate Points he had no seconds to spend, and a healing factor that mended flesh but had never once been asked to mend a building falling on the flesh, and he looked up at four arms hanging a demolition over his head.
’You cannot dodge it, and you cannot tank it,’ he thought, and his feet were already settling into the opening stance of the form, because there was one option left on the label, and it was the one the webnovels had been promising him since Earth. ’But a demolition has a demolitioner, and he has to stand still to drop it.’
The hips began to rotate.