Free Web NovelChapter 77: Titan Grave (1)
Nobody had cleared a Mythical gate yet.
That was the thing none of the broadcasts said out loud, because there were enough other things to be nervous about. Three hunters were about to walk into something the system had told them could take the city down if they failed. Two of the three were top ten in Mythal. One of them was Raze.
Sora’s stream had four million people on it before Raze stepped onto the platform under Titan Grave. Mayor Ko watched from the Coordination Building with a notebook open. Leo had pulled the kitchen chair around to face the television, and Mina had stopped pretending she was going to fold the laundry. Every guild analyst on the continent had a feed up.
Across the city at the Hollow Sky barrier, Kai watched from the staging area with Sera, Lily, and Victor. The plan was for them to hold until the Titan Grave attempt either finished or stopped finishing. Lily had two screens and a tablet running the public broadcast. Victor stood with his hands in his coat pockets and did not say anything.
Raze put one hand on the barrier.
He walked in.
Mira followed, and Elden was half a step behind her. Nine others came in after them. Level 37 each, all picked because their mana was above the threshold the streamer tests had found at the barrier.
...
Mira noticed it first.
The air in there was heavy. Her breath went out and came back like it had to push through something both ways. When she picked her foot up to take a step, it picked up, but it took a fraction more than her body had set aside for it, like the ground was a little reluctant to let it go.
She rolled her bad shoulder once. Her armor felt like armor and a half.
"You feel that?" she said.
"Yeah," Elden said.
Raze did not answer. He was already looking ahead.
The land opened in front of them.
It was a battlefield.
Not corpses. Things. Broken things, scattered across a wide cracked plain. The skeleton of a siege engine the size of an apartment block was lying on its side with half its wheels gone. A long spar of metal that might once have been a weapon stuck up out of the ground at an angle, taller than any of them. Two huge bronze gloves lay at opposite ends of what could have been a fight, fingers curled around nothing.
Pieces of constructs Mira could not have named lay everywhere, broken open along clean lines, the insides shaped like nothing she had ever taken apart in a workshop.
Something had won here.
She kept walking without saying it.
...
The construct stepped out from behind a leaning wall about two hundred meters in.
It was bronze. It moved on four legs. The body sat over them like a centaur’s, with a long torso and two arms that ended in something between hands and blades. Its head was a smooth bronze plate. No eyes.
It looked at them anyway. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
Then it moved.
Mira had time to register that it was fast, and then it was almost on top of Raze, and Raze was already swinging.
The strike landed clean. The construct’s chest caved along a wide arc, the bronze peeled outward where the cut went deep, and the construct came apart sideways in two pieces and went down.
Sora’s stream cheered.
"That was Raze," Sora said into her camera.
Then she looked at her screen, and she stopped saying anything.
The construct was getting back up.
The chest was still split when it stood. The bronze was still peeled back. It got to its feet like Raze’s strike had been a hard shove and not a cut that should have ended a fight.
At Hollow Sky, Kai felt the distortion stir again. The same way it had when the gates first appeared.
Lily said, without looking up from the feed, "We were wrong about Titan Grave."
Sera said, "We may be wrong about all of them."
...
Mira understood in the same second that Raze did. The damage was real, but it just wasn’t enough. The cut had landed exactly as deep as it should have, and the bronze reacted exactly the way it should have.
The cut should have killed it but then it stood up like nothing had happened.
She heard Elden say, "Oh."
Raze had been the number one in Mythal for two years. He went the only way his instincts knew.
He hit it again. Harder.
The strike was clean. The bronze split wider. The construct staggered half a step.
Then it came at him faster.
The next charge came in faster than the first. The blades came in at an angle Raze had to twist to catch, and he caught it, and he cut again, and again the cut landed beautifully, and again the construct kept its feet, and again the next charge was faster than the one before.
Mira watched it see Raze’s next attack and then hurl itself over, before then landing behind Raze. But instead of striking him from behind, it rushed forward towards one of the other hunters on the ground.
One of the supports at the back of the line had stepped forward with a half-raised hand for Raze’s when the bronze blades went through her. She was down before her arm finished its motion and the construct turned its gaze back to Raze.
Before rushing at him.
Mira said it before she meant to. "Stop hitting it."
Raze didn’t hear her and he swung again.
The next charge crossed the gap between them in half a heartbeat. Raze caught it. Barely. The blade glanced off his guard and opened a long line down his ribs. He stepped back, and the construct came right back in, and Mira saw what was about to happen.
"Raze."
His head snapped toward her.
"Stop hitting it."
He looked at her, then at the construct, and finally at the split chest. A look of frustration flashed on his face before he stopped swinging.
The construct hesitated for one half-second, as if it were waiting for the next hit and could not find one.
Elden raised his hand.
A thin bolt of arcane light slid out of his palm and hit the construct in the side. A small gold crack opened in the bronze, about the length of a finger. It glowed faintly along its length, then dulled.
The construct slowed down for a couple of seconds, enough for Mira to notice. She looked at Elden, and Elden looked at her.
"Again," she said.
Elden tried the leg. The bolt smashed into the legs, and the construct didn’t slow down like before. Instead, it seemed to tremble.
"Hmm. Try the same spot as last time, then."
He did it again in the same spot, and another small crack opened next to the first. Both glowed before the construct slowed again.
"Other side, but this time aim for the lines like before," Mira said.
Elden moved his bolts to the opposite shoulder. A crack opened in the first shoulder, running up the same line the others had taken.
Mira stared. "So it’s the lines. If we strike them..."
Elden was already looking. "It causes a disruption. Which means these are most likely what’s powering them. Or what’s letting them shrug off everything Raze does."
"Not just that." Raze kept staring at the construct instead of the cracks.
"What’s wrong?"
"You found out something else?"
"It’s been bugging me... But did any of you see these things when you entered?"
Mira and Elden opened their mouths before stopping.
"Wait... I’m sure I did... Right?"
"Why does that matter?"
Raze looked at the construct. "Because we never saw its level."
Silence.
"Wait... are you saying it isn’t the real monster?" Mira eyes narrowed.
"He... Might be right." Elden frowned before saying. "In every dungeon before, we had always seen the monster’s level."
"Yes. I don’t believe this one should be any different." Raze finished with a frown.
...
In her studio, Sora was leaning toward her monitor with one hand over her mouth. She moved it away.
"Mira just told Raze to stop hitting things." Her chat broke. "The number one-ranked hunter in Mythal just got told to stop hitting things by the iron specialist," Sora said. "In our first-ever mythical clear attempt." She looked at the camera. "That’s what we are doing now."
In Kai’s apartment, Leo was standing about six inches from the television.
"Wait." He looked at Mina. "Is she allowed to tell him that?"
Mina had stopped folding laundry an hour ago. "Apparently."
The guild forums exploded.
Physical damage penalty CONFIRMED?!
NOT IN THE PREVIEW READS.
The chain hunter said NOTHING about this.
We walked in not knowing! Wait, they couldn’t see its level!?
...
It took them nine more minutes to bring the construct down.
Elden picked the cracks.
Each crack was shallow and each appeared along a glowing line that only stayed visible for a second. Mira called the positioning before they pressed when the construct slowed. And pulled back when Elden needed room to strike.
The other eight also followed Mira’s orders. Hunters with long-range would unleash their attacks onto the constructions, while the supports would continue applying armor over Raze, who was moving forward.
Raze did not swing but acted as the vanguard and shield for the ground. When the construct lunged at Mira, he took the lunge with his armor and turned a swing into a shove. When it tried for Elden, he stepped between them.
Or when it came for the other hunters, he was the wall in between.
He hated it, and Mira could see he hated it. He was used to ending fights, but now he was in a fight where ending it depended on someone else.
Eight minutes in, Elden’s tenth bolt opened the last channel.
The construct came at Raze a final time, and Raze did not cut it. He sidestepped before kicking its leg out.
It went down. frёewebnoѵēl.com
It did not get up.
Elden put one more bolt into the chest to be sure. The bronze cracked along the same lines as the others. The construct stopped moving.
Mira sat down while wincing in pain. Her arm hurt where she’d braced too hard with the bad side and she could imagine it was a big bruise.
Raze was bleeding from the ribs and the side of his neck and the back of his calf, where Mira hadn’t seen him take a hit.
But he was still standing.
"Okay." Raze wiped blood from his jaw. "I hate this dungeon."
...
They walked.
Nine minutes for one construct. They had no idea how long the dungeon was. They had no idea how many of these things were in it. They picked through the broken siege engines and the long weapon-spars and the bronze hands, and they came up over a ridge.
Mira stopped. Raze and Elden stopped beside her. The other eight came up behind them and stopped, too.
The land fell away into a wide plain, and it was full of constructs. The same bronze centaur shape beings. Some of them were walking, some standing still, and some slowly rising up.
There were too many to count in the time her eyes had to count them.
Mira did the count by sections anyway. She counted forty before she stopped after seeing far more than she expected.
A lot more.
Mira looked at the construct they had spent nine minutes killing and then at the plain beyond it.
"That was the scout."
Nobody argued.
