Free Web NovelChapter 557: Attack On The Third Base III
The silence lasted exactly as long as it took the Captain to decide it was over. "Destroy him."
Then everything moved at once.
Not the Captain though. Everything but the captain resumed.
The vice captains came first, and they came the way they had clearly always come in fights that mattered: together, and without the half-second of hesitation that most fighters needed to commit.
The one on the left—the attacker—closed the distance in a single explosive burst, covering the space between them with a speed that forced Damien to move before he had finished reading the approach.
Its weapon came in on a downward diagonal, dense with compressed demonic essence, the strike carrying the weight of something that had practiced this exact motion until the practice was indistinguishable from instinct.
Damien moved sideways.
The blade carved through the space where he had been and hit the ground hard enough to crack it, the shockwave of impact rippling outward underfoot.
He countered immediately with a strike toward the attacker’s exposed flank as it recovered from the follow-through.
The second vice captain was already there.
It didn’t attack or try to close distance or press its own offensive. It had simply moved, a single, precise repositioning that put it between Damien’s strike and the attacker’s flank, its guard absorbing the blow with a reinforced forearm that took the impact and transferred it harmlessly sideways.
The attacker reset.
Damien pulled back a step.
And he immediately understood.
He had registered the dynamic intellectually when he first saw them enter together. The offset positioning, the one slightly forward and aggressive, the one slightly back and ready. He had understood what it meant.
Feeling it was different.
The attacker threw everything into its strikes because it didn’t have to protect itself. The defender covered everything the attacker left open because it didn’t have to threaten anything.
Between them they had solved the fundamental problem of single combat—that you could not simultaneously hit as hard as possible and defend as thoroughly as possible—by simply splitting the requirement across two bodies.
One hit. One covered.
Perfectly.
To break the attacker’s guard, you had to go through the defender. To punish the defender, you had to survive the attacker long enough to reach it. And to do either one, you had to ignore the other, which the system was specifically designed to prevent.
Damien processed this in the space of the next exchange which was faster than the last one.
The attacker came in again but not through the same angle nor same trajectory. It had adjusted after it read something from the first exchange and changed the approach. High this time, then immediately low, the feint coming before the real strike in a pattern designed to force a response to the first movement and leave the second undefended.
Damien didn’t take the feint.
He read the weight distribution through the attacker’s first movement—the way the commitment to high wasn’t full, wasn’t the weight shift of something actually throwing everything at the high target—and waited for the low.
Damien blocked it but the impact was heavy enough to shift him back half a step.
The defender moved the instant he blocked. This time, it was not to cover the attacker this time, but to capitalize on the backward shift, closing his flank while his weight was committed to the block.
He turned it.
Barely.
The defender’s strike grazed his side—not deep enough to matter immediately, but it landed.
Reinforced as he was, it registered as pressure and displacement rather than damage.
Still.
It had landed.
He reset.
The vice captains reset with him.
Then the Captain moved.
It had been watching. Standing back with its aura already expanded, reading the opening exchange between its subordinates and Damien with the patience of something that was not worried about the outcome and was simply determining how it wanted to enter.
It had determined.
When it moved, it didn’t accelerate gradually.
It was simply there.
In front of Damien, inside the range that the vice captain exchange had been operating at, its right fist already committed to a forward strike that carried with it a pressure so concentrated it felt like impact before it arrived.
Damien crossed his arms.
Reinforced everything he could at the moment to the forearms.
BOOM!
The force drove him back three meters.
It was not a stumble but a controlled backward slide, boots carving into the corrupted ground, his body absorbing and redirecting the momentum.
Still, three meters was three meters, and the crater the Captain’s fist had left in the ground in front of him said clearly that three meters was the minimum, not the average.
Damien steadied.
Looked at the Captain’s arm then at the Captain’s face.
The Captain looked back.
No expression that he could read. Just presence—massive, dense, the kind of contained power that hadn’t started warming up yet and already felt like standing too close to something that generated its own gravity.
This was going to be a different problem.
He looked left.
At Fenrir.
Then right.
At Cerbe.
Both of them were already reading his intent—the summons’ awareness of him in a fight had sharpened over time to the point where he didn’t need words for most things. A look was enough. A shift in posture.
He gave both a slight forward tilt of his head. freēwēbηovel.c૦m
The direction of the vice captains.
Fenrir moved left without hesitation.
Cerbe moved right.
The vice captains registered the split instantly—the attacker’s stance tightening as Fenrir closed, the defender shifting to cover its partner against the new threat—and then the two of them were no longer exclusively Damien’s problem.
They were a different problem.
Fenrir’s problem. Cerbe’s problem.
And those two summons were not unchallenging problems to have.
Damien heard the engagement start behind him. There was the crack of Cerbe’s jaws meeting a weapon, and the dense impact of Fenrir’s shoulder driving into something that tried to stop it—and he simply trusted them with it completely.
His attention went to the Captain.
"Luton," he said without looking. "You can deal with the rest."
The slime pulsed behind him and moved, spreading wide across the stronghold floor in the direction of the remaining demons that had pulled back. It wasn’t alone—Aquila was already rising, having held its position since the captains appeared and now releasing back into its aerial role with a screech that cut through the noise of the engagements below.
Skylar had also shown up.
He called the summon with a mental command, the portal opening high above the stronghold’s exterior, the Shadowfang Wyvern dropping through it and immediately orienting on the clustered foot soldiers with the focused, efficient intent it brought to everything it did.
The remaining demons would not remain alive for long.
But that wasn’t his concern anymore.
His concern was in front of him.
The Captain had not moved since its initial strike.
It stood in the same position, its aura continuing its steady expansion—not aggressive, not explosive, just continuous. Growing incrementally the way something that had a great deal to grow could afford to be patient about it. The pressure of it was already more noticeable than it had been thirty seconds ago.
That was the thing Damien had clocked immediately. ’The longer this goes, the stronger it will get.’
Not through skill acquisition mid-fight. Not through technique refinement or adaptation. Through raw physical escalation—the kind built into the Captain’s nature, probably, the way certain mana beasts grew more dangerous the longer a fight lasted as their essence output increased with sustained engagement.
The Captain was that, but in a demon that could think and coordinate and aim.
Which meant Damien could not afford to let it warm up.
