Perhaps it was a final blaze before the flame went out — the Rathalos's death-charge somehow summoned a fury that almost matched its full rage state. It barrelled toward Lin without hesitation, and Lin simply stood there, solar axe hanging loose in one hand, waiting.
Sergeant Arlo and Lieutenant Vigan, chasing the Rathalos from behind, watched the scene unfold and felt their hearts leap into their throats.
Sergeant Arlo even began to second-guess himself — why had he let Lin go ahead to block the Rathalos's escape route? Lin had said before the hunt that he was going to set up measures to prevent the beast from fleeing, but the fight had already thrown up so many surprises. Who was to say any of those preparations were still viable?
He knew full well that Chaplain Lin's augmented legs had been damaged in the crash-landing earlier. They had been repaired enough to walk on, yes — but that was a far cry from being able to dodge a high-speed charging Rathalos the way an Astartes could.
He might have already lost one brother. If he lost Chaplain Lin too, how would he ever face the others?
"Chaplain Lin!" he bellowed with everything he had. "Get clear — left or right, now!"
"Dodge it?"
Lin shook his head. "No. It should be dodging me."
The moment the rampaging Rathalos thundered across a stretch of ground that had been carefully prepared in advance, the trap Lin had been quietly readying this entire time was triggered. The large paralysis trap he had constructed from collected Thunderbugs finally earned its place.
Lin had originally intended to make the trap from the paralytic fangs of a Velocidrome — a substitute for the Flashbombs during the opening phase of the hunt. But he had never managed to track down the right creature to harvest the materials, and that plan had been quietly shelved.
Fortunately, Thunderbugs — those common creatures of the Monster Hunter world, known for discharging electricity on impact — existed on this planet as well. Their output wasn't enough to replace a Flashbomb and lock down a Rathalos in peak condition, but as a finishing tool against a Rathalos already torn apart by wounds, it was exactly sufficient.
Deep blue current crept along the rivers of blood running down the Rathalos's body, spreading across it entirely. The Rathalos, whose scales conducted electricity by nature, let out an agonised shriek. Its legs turned to stumbling, lurching things, and the charge lost every last shred of its momentum.
But the dying beast still refused to go quietly. It tried to regain its footing and surge forward again — and Lin gave it no chance. He raised the solar axe high overhead, fired the jet engine he had jury-rigged from the plasma drive salvaged off the escape pod, and launched himself high off the ground.
The Rathalos tracked Lin's rising arc with its head, lifting its gaze until it found Lin's silhouette — overlapping with the sun itself. And the solar axe in his hand, now fully charged, blazed brighter than even the sun at that moment.
At the apex of his leap, Lin came down like a falling meteor. The momentum of the descent, the fully charged solar axe, and the hydraulic drive of the powered arm combined into a single, merciless blow — brought down with no flourish whatsoever directly onto the crown of the Rathalos's skull. The strike split that thick, armoured cranium clean in half.
Lin wrenched the axe free. Through the crack he had opened, he could actually see the Rathalos's brain matter. The beast didn't even have the strength left to cry out. Its head dropped — and Lin rode that motion down, landing safely back on the ground.
He stood before the Rathalos where it had collapsed, and met its gaze.
The Rathalos glared at him with pure, undiluted hatred. A low, grinding rumble rose from its throat — the pitch shifting and rolling like a vile and bitter curse. It seemed furious at its own defeat, and equally furious at Lin's use of ranged weaponry and traps.
But before long, its own blood rose into its throat and drowned the sound entirely.
Lin cared nothing for the Rathalos's curse, and had no interest in wasting time here. He drew his Plasma Pistol and shoved it into the Rathalos's mouth.
Lord of the earth. Absolute sovereign. Tiger of the wastes. Devourer of the end… These were the titles the Rathalos had carried. Each one greater than the last, each one higher than the one before.
As a beast that had subdued all other creatures through brute force alone, it had never once made a wrong choice. When it had ranged freely across the land, when every other living thing had given ground before it, when all the world had named it the strongest and most ferocious creature in nature — how could it ever have been wrong?
It had believed that every living thing within its territory owed it fear, worship, dread, and submission. But when a Plasma Pistol was shoved into its mouth, it finally understood the truth: there is always a higher peak beyond the mountain, always a wider sky beyond the horizon.
Only the lesson had come far too late, and the understanding far too slow. Lin pulled the trigger. The air filled at once with the scent of roasted brain matter. Every title it had ever held turned to ash in the plasma's searing heat — and the Rathalos, which had refused to close its eyes even now, finally closed them.
Lin calmly withdrew his Plasma Pistol, wiped the blood from it, then produced a welding torch and a hunting knife and settled in for some serious work. The other Astartes, arriving at a run only now, had already witnessed Lin's performance on their way in — a display that looked less like combat and more like a god descending from the heavens. They crowded around him, equal parts astonished and elated, words of praise tumbling freely.
"Chaplain Lin, I never imagined you could fight like that!"
Sergeant Arlo looked him up and down — not a scratch on him — and spoke with complete sincerity: "That final leap into the air especially — by any Astartes standard, it was flawless."
"A man who walks the world needs something to stand on. Besides, the Rathalos has a strong fighting instinct — it doesn't have much wariness toward traps. Against an opponent who couldn't be outmanoeuvred like that, I probably couldn't have pulled the same results."
Lin didn't look up as he carved away at the Rathalos, separating material after material. His mind had already begun turning over what weapons he might forge from these parts. "I need to stay here and harvest crafting materials from the Rathalos. You don't know where to start with it — standing around watching would only slow things down. Better to go quickly and find the brother who got sent flying earlier."
"If your Sus-an Membranes haven't failed, his chances of survival should be around 82.46%. But every ten minutes that passes drops that figure by roughly five percent… Find him and come back to me. I'll perform emergency treatment on his wounds."
"Don't you need us to leave a few men as a guard?" Lieutenant Vigan asked, a note of concern in his voice.
"The Rathalos was the apex predator of this entire territory. Until its rivals are certain it's truly dead, none of them will dare show their faces here. I'm counting on that window to harvest as much usable material as I can — I don't need anyone keeping watch. And the more of you there are searching, the faster you'll find that brother… Lieutenant Vigan, surely I don't need to lay out the basic probability and statistics for you in numbers?"
A few words of plain logic were enough to persuade both Lieutenant Vigan and Sergeant Arlo. They left one man to escort the Astartes who had taken the boulder head-on — multiple fractures and severe bruising across his body — back to camp ahead of the rest. Everyone else set off in the direction the thrown Astartes had disappeared into the treeline.
Lin threw himself body and soul into harvesting the Rathalos's materials.
But convincing others with logic doesn't mean events will follow logic…
Lin, who had given not a single thought to the Rathalos's dying curse, was utterly absorbed in his work. That absorption didn't last long. After a while, the sounds from behind him — movement, and the distinct footfalls of a large creature — broke his focus.
He turned, alert. What he saw made his eyes go wide: a massive dragon-like creature, nearly twenty metres long, with skin the rough mottled green of a dried loofah, was watching him from a distance. Its maw was packed with tusks, and thick ropes of saliva dripped freely — every detail an advertisement for bloodthirst.
Those blood-red eyes were locked on Lin, unblinking, as though it had already decided he was prey.
"A Deviljho?" Lin said, surprise entirely justified.