Free Web NovelChapter 99: Stoneshell Tusker
A full day folded between the cliff and the lower slopes. Lin Xuan moved south through the range without rushing, stopped once at a hollow under a fallen pine to rest until his hands stopped trembling, and finished the last of Lian’s plum strips before sunrise on the second morning. By midday, the air had changed. The cold mineral wind off the upper crags fell away. What came in its place smelled of warm rock, crushed bracken, and the heavy musk of an animal that did not bother to hide where it had been.
Pathfinder lit up a wide patch of disturbed ground to the south. Furrows torn deep into the dirt. Vegetation ripped up by the roots. A creature had passed through with no respect for what it might run into.
He kept walking, Plain Steel a familiar weight across his back.
"If I land this one," he said quietly to the panel at the corner of his eye, "you can reforge Plain Steel. I want to see what it becomes. And after that, the mine."
[ Yes. We come home, take a day, restock what needs restocking, and we move on the mine. I’ll map the interior properly the way I promised. Full layout, guard rotations, depth of the workings, all of it. ]
[ Also. The stealth work you did at the nest carries over to that operation. Cinder Hawks have keener senses than whatever muscle Blood Fang has bolted to those walls. If you can walk past one of those birds, you can walk past their watchmen with room to spare. So a piece of yesterday morning’s frustration is going to pay you back the first time we get close to a guard tower. ]
He considered that as the trail steepened into a long, shallow descent.
"I’ll take it. Wasn’t expecting the climbing wall to come with a return on investment."
[ Most disciplines do. People just don’t notice while they’re complaining. ]
"Was that aimed at me?"
[ Not specifically. Take it personally if you want. ]
He let the corner of his mouth move under the hood and kept walking. The trail bent around an outcrop of moss-furred granite. Past it, the ground opened out into a wide clearing of bracken and trampled earth.
Pathfinder dropped a single red dot at the far edge. It was big.
The Stoneshell Tusker had not yet noticed him. It rooted under the lip of a fallen log, snout buried, the tusk-grooves working in the dirt with the patience of something that had never been hurried in its life. The plates of its back rose and fell with each breath in pale, dust-coloured tiles, layered like fish scales over a barrel of muscle. Sixty kilos, maybe seventy. Easily the size of a small bull.
Pathfinder dragged a soft line along its body and put a small target marker between the shoulder blades, on a plate slightly darker than the rest. A graphite-toned tile, faintly underglowed by Qi the system could read but the eye could not.
[ That one. Dorsal central. Touch the edges and the plate cracks. We need it whole. ]
’Belly kills it. Side cut keeps the plate. Form Seven gives me one shot at both without a chase.’
[ Plant the cut at heart-line. Below the dorsal ridge. ]
He stepped out from behind the granite.
The Tusker raised its snout from the dirt. Small eyes set deep in armoured sockets registered him for half a heartbeat. Then the body remembered what bodies of its kind did when something stood in front of them. Hooves struck the earth. The plates along its back lifted a fraction and locked into a tight posture. It charged.
Forty meters of ground vanished under it in the space of four seconds. The vibration of its weight reached him through the dirt before the sound caught up.
Lin Xuan did not move.
His feet planted. His weight centered. Plain Steel hung across his right side at half-height, edge angled toward the line the boar was running. He stopped breathing. The second of stillness began.
Inside him, Qi gathered faster than it ever had. A wholesale evacuation of every reserve he could spare, drawn out of arms and chest and legs and packed into the core of the blade. Plain Steel began to burn under the touch of it. The metal turned a deep, pure gold, the colour of the inside of an old coin held against a flame.
A shape gathered along the blade.
It was not painted. It was not summoned. It formed where the Qi pooled. Scales of light layered themselves down the length of the steel. A long, narrow head took shape just above the hilt, with an eye that burned brighter than the rest. Coils wrapped the edge in soft golden weight. A dragon, half a meter long, curled along his sword the way a hound curls in front of a fire, patient and contained and waiting.
The Tusker was at three meters.
The second ended. The cut came. It was a single horizontal sweep, edge first, perfectly level. The dragon along the blade slid forward as the steel moved and passed straight through the body of the boar at the height of the heart. There was no flash. There was no explosion. There was only the small, definite sound a knife makes when it passes through fat, and a brief golden brightness that flickered out the other side of the Tusker like a thing that had finished its task.
The boar passed Lin Xuan at full charge and made three more strides before its body remembered it was supposed to be dead. It dropped without folding its legs. The plates along its back chimed once against the dirt and went still.
The dorsal plate, between the shoulder blades, did not have a scratch on it.
Lin Xuan breathed out. His Dantian had emptied to a quarter of itself. His arms felt distantly hollow. He held the position for two more seconds before he let Plain Steel rotate down to his side. The dragon’s after-image floated at the edge of his vision, fading in slow golden coils.
[ Plate is intact. Twenty minutes of resonance before degradation starts. Move. ]
He moved. Short knife from the sleeve, the lines Pathfinder marked on the boar’s spine, the cuts at the corners of the central plate, all of it done in under a minute. The plate came up whole, heavier than he had expected, warm enough to feel through the leather of his glove. Qi ran in fine lines across its underside. He sealed it into a wrap and dropped it into the inventory, where Mira’s stasis ward closed around it without comment.
A panel bloomed.
[ Bestiary update: Stoneshell Tusker — Rank E high — 1 defeated. +60 OP ] [ Stoneshell Spine Plate obtained. ] [ Plain Steel Reforge Components: 3 / 3 ] ƒreewebɳovel.com
He stood up.
Twenty paces from the carcass, in a corner of the clearing where the bracken thinned to a patch of bare dirt under the slow noon sun, he set Plain Steel down on the ground. He pulled the phial of Iron Vein Marrow from his sleeve and laid it beside the blade. He took out the Crimson Feather Quill in its dark wrap and set it next to the phial. He drew the Stoneshell Plate from the inventory in the same patient motion and let it rest beside the other two.
Three materials. One sword. The sun caught the gold thread in the quill, the metal hairs in the marrow, the faint Qi-lines along the plate, and the worn flat of Plain Steel between them.
The panel returned, quieter than it had been all day.
[ Shall we begin? ]
He let himself smile, properly, for the first time in three days.
"Go ahead. I want to see what Plain Steel becomes."
