Free Web NovelChapter 44: A second one
The ground opened up as they moved east, the tunnel network giving way to open sky — or what passed for sky here, the same flat violet overhead that gave light without warmth and covered everything without explanation. Rocky terrain stretched ahead, jagged outcroppings rising from the earth in crooked formations, boulders scattered across the path like they had been dropped from a great height and left where they landed.
They walked in silence.
Then Shiny slowed.
Yuto followed his gaze.
Something moved across the path ahead, and the first thing that registered was the sound — a scraping, uneven drag that did not match the rhythm of a healthy creature. The beetle came into view a moment later, and Yuto understood immediately why.
It was steel-plated, like the others, but the armor told a different story than the one they had encountered the night before. Several plates on its left side were caved in completely, the metal deformed inward as if something had struck them with enormous force. Dark fluid leaked steadily from beneath the damaged sections, leaving a thin trail across the stone. One of its legs did not function — it scraped against the ground with each movement, contributing nothing to its progress, dragging along purely because it was still attached.
Whatever had done this to it had not finished the job.
"It’s injured," Maya said.
"I wonder what could be strong enough to injure a beetle this size," Tami said.
Nobody had an answer for that. The question sat in the air for a moment, unresolved, and then was set aside in favor of the more immediate problem — which was that the beetle had noticed them.
It let out a sound that was not quite the full shriek they had heard before. Broken at the edges. But it oriented on them anyway, and it forced itself forward with the particular determination of something that was hurt and therefore had nothing left to calculate about the situation.
It charged.
Slower than it should have been. Still heavy enough to crack the ground.
Tami’s panther hit low without hesitation, slipping under the beetle’s shifting bulk and tearing into the already caved side. Claws found weakness instead of resistance. The armor there did not hold so much as it failed in stages, cracking, peeling, then giving way with a wet metallic screech as a fresh opening was ripped through what had already been broken.
The beetle answered immediately, not with aim but with instinct.
Its horn carved a wide arc through the air where the panther had been a heartbeat earlier. The swing was too crude to be precise, but heavy enough that the near miss still pushed wind through the space it passed. The panther was already retreating, shaken out of the opening it had created, leaving the wound exposed but not controlled.
Maya entered that space without delay.
She did not chase the beetle’s movement, she stepped into the gap it had failed to close. Her blade found the torn edge and followed it as if the injury itself was a guide. Each strike did not try to overpower the armor, but to persuade it apart, sliding between loosened plates, widening what the panther had begun until the structure itself started to lose coherence.
Metal folded in uneven layers under her rhythm.
The beetle’s damaged side sagged lower, its weight no longer evenly distributed. One leg scraped against stone, struggling to support what it could not properly lift. Every attempt it made to recover its stance only deepened the imbalance she had already carved into it.
Even so, it held.
Yuto came in next, both blades drawn, forcing himself into the space Maya had opened but not owned.
His first exchange was immediate pressure. Steel met shifting armor in rapid succession, not deep cuts but constant interruption. He tried to keep the creature from gathering itself, but the beetle was still too anchored in places, still too stubbornly functional. His strikes landed, but they did not settle the fight.
The creature twisted through him more than it yielded to him.
A horn sweep forced him to break rhythm. One of his blades glanced off a hard plate he had misread, sending vibration up his arm. He corrected late, stepping back in too quickly, then too cautiously. The beetle did not break under him, it endured him, forcing him into constant adjustment rather than control.
He stayed in, but the strain showed in the pace he could not quite maintain.
Then Maya returned to it, and the difference became visible again.
Where Yuto disrupted, she refined. Her sword traced the fractures he had failed to exploit, turning scattered damage into continuous failure. The beetle’s movements slowed further, not from exhaustion, but from structural collapse spreading through its damaged side. Each step now came uneven, delayed, as if parts of its body were no longer agreeing on how to move together.
The balance was finally slipping, but still not gone.
Shiny stepped forward.
There was no rush in it. No adjustment. The space between him and the beetle did not feel like distance being crossed, but like a conclusion being approached.
His blade rose once.
The strike that followed landed exactly where Maya’s pressure and the earlier damage converged. There was no resistance worth naming. The armor did not withstand it, it simply separated, splitting open in a clean failure that exposed what had been hidden beneath.
The beetle stopped moving for a moment, as if the idea of motion had been interrupted before it could complete itself.
Shiny did not wait for that moment to resolve.
His second strike came down through the opening, precise and final, driving through what remained of structure and into the stone beneath. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
The body collapsed and did not rise again.
The crash rolled across the open terrain and faded. Then silence returned, the ordinary silence of the wasteland, flat and absolute.
For a moment none of them moved.
Then a chime sounded in Yuto’s mind.
[Claim Steelplated Beetle as summons]
He stood with that for a moment.
Disbelief arrived first, which was reasonable. Then behind it, slower, came something else — the recognition that this was not actually a surprise, not entirely. He remembered the shift. The change in his soul rank that he had registered somewhere in the noise and chaos of the past days and then set aside because there had been more immediate things to deal with. He had crossed a threshold and not stopped to look at what it meant.
He was a menace now.
And a menace had two summon slots
