Free Web NovelChapter 122: Carrying The Party
The Crystal Drake covered the distance in four seconds.
Its crystal plating scraped against the canyon formations as it came, the sound of it bouncing off every reflective surface until the charge seemed to be coming from every direction simultaneously.
The group had just finished processing what the interior of Crystal Canyon actually looked like. Their weapons were up, but the weight distribution was wrong, the instinctive preparation of people who expected more time.
Kai stepped forward, and the Fractured Blade moved once.
The Drake took three more steps. Then its head slid off its body with the specific clean quality of a strike that had found the exact right angle at the exact right moment. The body hit the canyon floor, and the crystal plating scattered.
The group stood in the sudden silence.
Kei slowly lowered his weapon. He looked at the Drake. Then at Kai. Then at the Drake again. "That was rude," he said.
Sera laughed.
"We didn’t even get to participate," Rin said. Her voice carried the flat quality of someone stating a fact rather than complaining, though the line between those two things was thin.
"You participated emotionally," Kai said.
Kei pointed at him. "That’s not a real thing."
"It is now."
Dorn was looking at the scattered crystal plating on the canyon floor. "Does it always go like this?"
"Usually faster," Sera said.
Dorn looked at her with an expression that suggested he was not sure whether to be reassured or more concerned. He chose to keep walking, which was generally the correct decision.
The canyon deepened around them as they moved. The crystal formations grew larger, and some disappeared into the ceiling. Light bounced across every surface, and shadows became unreliable.
Nothing stayed where it looked.
Lina was tracking the formations on the left wall. Rin ignored the first reflection. Then the second. Then the third, and she was looking for the real target.
A dozen shapes appeared among the formations ahead.
[Crystal Wolf.]
[Level 40.]
The wolves blended into the crystal walls so well that the only sign of them was a distortion in the reflections.
Rin fired.
The arrow passed through the nearest shape and hit the formation behind it. She tracked the trajectory immediately. "Illusions," she said.
"All of them," Lina confirmed from her angle.
The real wolf appeared behind Rin without any of the visual warning the others had produced.
Kai stepped sideways, and the Fractured Blade caught the wolf mid-lunge before it completed the distance. He kept moving.
"Left side," he said.
Rin looked left. There was nothing there. "What?"
"Next one."
Three seconds. Another wolf materialized from the reflection pattern exactly where he had indicated. Rin’s arrow was already moving. The wolf came apart.
She stood with the bow still raised and looked at the empty space where the wolf had been. "How did you know that?"
"I looked," Kai said.
Rin looked at him like she didn’t believe him. But also aware that pressing the question in the middle of a dungeon was not optimal.
She kept her bow up and started watching for the patterns Kai was apparently reading, which were not patterns she could currently read but which she intended to eventually.
The canyon continued.
The reflections grew more complex as they moved deeper. Eventually it became difficult to judge distance at all. Dorn had stopped trusting his depth perception and was using touch distance as his primary reference for safe positioning. Lina had shifted to a shorter movement range to maintain accuracy. Kei had gone quiet, which by Kei standards indicated genuine concentration.
It lasted three minutes and forty seconds.
A shape dropped from above without sound. No reflective warning, no approach trajectory visible from the canyon floor. It came straight down toward Kei position with the specific targeting of something that hunted by reading movement rather than by sight.
[Crystal Stalker]
[Level 43.]
Kai was mid-sentence with Lina about the reflection pattern distribution near the larger formations when the Stalker committed to its descent. He did not look at it. The dagger left his hand at the angle the distortion had already calculated and crossed twenty meters in the time the Stalker needed to cover the last three.
The Stalker exploded into crystal fragments. The body landed beside Kei..
Kai finished his sentence.
"...so if the reflections are densest near the larger formations, that’s where the illusion density is highest, which means the real targets are probably—" He stopped. Everyone was looking at him. "What?"
Kei pointed at the fragments beside his feet. "You just saved my life."
"Probably," Kai said.
"You didn’t even look."
"I looked earlier."
Kei stared at him. "That somehow makes it worse."
"That’s impressive," Lina said, and she meant it as analysis rather than a compliment, which was somehow more impressive.
The canyon widened ahead of them into a space where the formations thinned enough to see distance. In that distance were enough crystal creatures to explain why the dungeon had a recommended party size. Packs of wolves moving between formations.
Three more drakes with plating that was clearly more developed.
Kei counted them. "That’s a lot."
"That’s definitely a lot," Rin said.
Kai looked at the spread. The reflections weren’t as bad here and he could see the monsters more clearly. There were several routes through the formation. He started walking. Then the air-step activated, and the second step was longer than the first.
The third was longer than the second, each one holding a fraction more than the previous. The fourth step did not touch anything.
He did not land.
He remained suspended for one full second with nothing beneath him and the canyon floor several meters below and the crystal formations on either side and no surface within reach.
The air was holding him the way it had held him above the Roc’s arena, except longer this time, the duration extending past the single moment it had lasted before.
Then he stepped forward, and the sequence continued, and he came down on the far side of the gap between formations.
Nobody said anything.
They were all staring at him.
"My turn," he said, and the Fractured Blade came out.
He swept through the monsters blocking the way. Fractured Blade shifting into the Flaming Sword as he melted all of the monsters. By the time he was done, the others had finally caught up.
Kei whistles before saying. "No matter how many times I see it... It really is outrageous."
Kai chuckled before they continued.
They reached the canyon’s center section where the boss door was at. Kai pushed it open before everyone stepped inside and then paused.
The scale shifted again.
It was the most genuinely beautiful dungeon space Kai had been in and also the most visually compromised, the two things being directly related.
Then the ground registered a rhythmic impact sequence, and something large emerged from between two of the largest formations.
[Crystal Golem.]
[Level 45.]
The golem looked like it had grown from the canyon itself. Crystal plating covered every part of its body. Kei looked at it and then at Kai with an expression of someone making a formal request. "Let us try for a bit!"
"You guys sure?"
Rin nodded and spoke. "We want to see how big the difference is."
Dorn nodded as he clenched his shield.
Lina says. "We trust you guys to step in if anything bad happens."
Sera smiled and said. "Alright, go ahead."
Kai stepped back.
Kei went first, his fists hitting the golem’s leg with the Pulse Fist and crystal plate around the impact point cracked in radiating lines. Lina followed the crack trajectory, and her blade found the weakness Kei had created. Rin’s arrows were already targeting the joint sections, the exposed connections between plate segments that the initial impacts had revealed.
Dorn charged through the front, crashed into the monster and golem went off balance, and the group pressed the advantage. For a full minute, the fight looked like everything was going okay and gradually they were chipping the golem down.
The golem actually started losing. Then it regenerated, and the cracks closed. New crystal formed over the damaged sections.
Thicker than before.
The golem was rebuilding itself from the canyon. ƒrēewebnovel.com
Kei watched the cracks seal. "That seems unfair."
The golem swung, and the shockwave from the arm’s passage through the air hit before the physical contact did.
Everyone went back.
The golem advanced.
"We should step in now." Seras says softly.
Kai sighed. "Okay." He stepped forward.
The Fractured Blade came across in two movements, the first separating the regenerated plating along the internal structure line, the second going through the gap the first had created.
The golem split from the center outward, and the pieces hit the canyon floor.
The fight was over.
The group stared at it.
Kei lowered his weapon with the energy of someone who has accepted a thing they cannot change. "I was having fun," he said.
"It looked dangerous," Kai said.
"It absolutely wasn’t."
"It could have been."
"No, it couldn’t."
Kai looked at the split golem. "It’s dead now."
Sera had not been focused on the monsters for the last twenty minutes. She was watching Kai, not the combat output but the decisions. The positioning he chose before the engagements started. The way every fight happened in the space he had selected rather than the space the dungeon offered. The information he seemed to have was about where the next encounter was going to be and from what direction.
The dungeon was not controlling the pace.
He was.
The level gap explained the strength, but it didn’t explain the control. She didn’t say anything for now as the dungeon began collapsing and they quickly rushed out of the area. But she had a feeling that Kai was slowly becoming something not human.
And she was concern on how it would change him.
