Interlude 03
"Level fourteen!" Rhema screamed, her mount sprinting down the corridor carved between two mountains. "Level fourteen my ass, what part of that thing screams level fourteen to you?!"
The spell she'd fired had failed to do what a spell aimed at a level fourteen of this creature's class was supposed to do: finish it off. The Goliath Grey Tortoise hadn't just survived the hit, it was now behind them and gaining, despite its colossal size.
"It is level fourteen, I promise," Lance said, running alongside her. "I just didn't expect a level fourteen Goliath Grey Tortoise to be this much stronger than a level ten Goliath Red Tortoise."
"Didn't expect? Didn't expect?! Screw you, Lance."
"Sorry," he said, turning around, planting his feet, dropping into a wide stance, and layering several physical enhancement skills onto himself in rapid succession before raising his Goliath-Pattern Single.
Bang.
The recoil hit Lance like a live wire buried in his marrow, a violent jolt racing through every bone in his frame.
For an ordinary man, the kick of that revolver-sized hand cannon would have shattered arms and torn ligaments, a death sentence, really.
For Lance, it was just a brutal, shuddering shock he could grit his teeth through.
The pain was a fair trade. The heavy round drilled straight into the beast's staring eye, detonating in a wet, thunderous pop that shredded the orb into a blinding, grisly bloom of yellow and orange fire.
Eyes were usually a guaranteed off switch, a shortcut to blinding, crippling, or dropping a monster where it stood.
Not this time. Not against this thing. The Goliath Grey Tortoise didn't even flinch.
Instead, the mountain of armored flesh slowly ground to a halt, shifting its massive bulk until the full, crushing weight of its remaining seven eyes locked dead onto Lance.
The glare pinning him down could only generously be called retaliatory murder intent.
"It would be wise to run while you can, Master," said Lance's Personal Interface.
"Yeah, no shit?" Lance retorted, doing just that.
He could feel the danger in his bones through the violent tremor of the earth.
The creature's pace was accelerating, its footsteps shaking the dirt beneath his boots.
It was close enough now that he didn't dare look back.
A glance risked confirming exactly how much ground it had gained, a reality he was better off not knowing.
"Run, Rhema!" he bellowed.
While he'd been busy firing his gun, she'd bolted ahead, leaving him behind. Yet despite her head start, he caught up to her in a flash. It made sense. His raw speed stat cleared hers, and her mount's, by a considerable margin, letting him outstrip the frantic pace of the vaulter she was riding.
It was about then that the tremors stopped.
The silence was so abrupt, so total, that Lance was forced to look back just to make sense of it. He knew damn well they hadn't outrun it. Instead, cold dread pooled in his stomach, the exact nightmare he'd desperately hoped wasn't true.
His fears were confirmed a fraction of a second later. A bright warning notification flashed across his vision, bleeding through his Identification skill's detection layer. Before his brain could even process the text into a coherent warning, his instincts had already taken over.
"Careful—"
Sprinting alongside Rhema and her mount, Lance caught sight of an ominous glow bleeding up through the soil, and yanked her violently off the saddle, throwing her hard to the side, away from whatever his Identification skill was warning him of.
His desperate heave spared them the fate that claimed her mount instead.
An instant later, a massive column of displaced ground, jagged boulders, and pulverized stone erupted upward in a violent geyser. The blast obliterated the vaulter, launching its shattered remains into the air along with rock that soon came raining back down on them.
Despite Lance's not-so-gentle rescue, Rhema, still rolling from the throw, kept enough presence of mind to throw up her unique barrier just in time.
The translucent shield held, stopping the raining the heavy boulders that had to be a second effect of the creature's skill beyond the geyser itself, since nothing natural would send rocks raining down with that kind of viciousness.
As soon as the rain of debris stopped, he lifted the now-mountless girl.
There was no outrunning that thing on foot, not at her speed.
Carrying her over his shoulder, he ran through dust so thick he couldn't see where he was going.
That was fine. As long as he moved opposite to where the quake told him the creature was closing in, it was good enough.
The moment he had her over his shoulder, though, he accepted that just running wouldn't work. Not as their only plan.
Bang!
"Can you do what you did against the Red Tortoise?" he asked, reloading a fresh round into his pistol, a chamber that felt less like a revolver and more like a tank cannon.
"What?" Rhema asked, hands clamped over her ears against the thunderous noise of his gun.
Bang!
"The puddle trick! Can you do it again!"
"That was a consumable effect! From a scroll!"
"I know. You still have scrolls?"
"Two. But with the size of this thing, I'm not sure two scrolls are going to—"
"Just target the front legs," he said, conjuring a healing potion from his inventory and chugging it to undo some of the damage from firing the Goliath.
"Both of them, focus on depth, not surface area.
Won't stop it, but it'll buy us a window.
" He conjured another item, not granting healing this time, but a buff against what was coming. "I'll go for the eyes. Ready?"
She answered by pulling the first scroll. At her word, the creature's left foreleg sank into the earth. Lance fired his Goliath again, seconds before the second scroll took the right foreleg too.
The tortoise thrashed, trying to wrench one leg free while the other held it in place, its own momentum working against it for the first time since they'd found it, actually useful for once.
"Well done," he said, already chambering the next round, a four-inch shell into the Goliath. "This is going to hurt," he winced, acknowledging privately that all of this had happened because he'd badly misjudged the danger they'd walked into today. He fired.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
He walked each shot into the creature's eyes, the concussive rhythm of it rattling his teeth, the recoil redistributing itself through his enhanced skeleton in a way that was survivable but agonizing.
He was chambering another when he noticed the creature's head had tilted at an angle that ruined his shot on the eye, and switched the shell for an explosive round instead.
Right as he did, a notification from his Identification skill flashed.
Something was coming.
The creature's roar arrived the same instant as the ground did, a wave of erupting rock and pressurized air that gave Lance zero time to warn anyone before it hit. Rhema threw up a shield at a speed that suggested she'd already been expecting something like this.
Her shield was unique. It didn't deflect incoming attacks so much as act as an active field, draining the kinetic energy of anything passing through it.
Lance watched a massive projectile enter the zone and steadily lose momentum until it ground to a dead stop.
But looking at her expression, horrified now, he realized this was exactly the worst-case scenario she'd warned him about.
The shield had absorbed too much energy and was about to overload.
Knowing what was coming, Lance didn't hesitate.
Stepping into her space, he threw his body over hers.
The air pressure plummeted. A deafening, vacuum-like thump echoed as the shield violently imploded inward, compressing space into a single, hyper-dense point of energy, followed up by a violent snapback.
The implosion reversed in a millisecond, exploding outward with the fury of a detonating bomb. The shockwave tore up the earth, shattered the frozen projectile into shrapnel, and blasted both of them straight into the air.
The world became a deafening blur of violent motion as they were thrown like ragdolls, swallowed by the blinding white light of the barrier's catastrophic failure.
He blinked up at the sky, alive. The answer to why came in the form of a notification warning him that Rhema had deployed a second shield.
"You good?" he asked his savior, the one who'd nearly become the reason they both died.
"What do you think," Rhema spat, shoving him off her, which at least confirmed she'd walked away from the crash annoyed rather than dying.
She was covered in blood. For any ordinary human, the sheer volume of trauma she'd sustained would have been instantly fatal. But she was an awakened being. Years of leveling had bloated her HP pool and physical defense stats well past what a human body should be able to survive
Lance exhaled a long breath of relief. He stood, offered her a hand, which she took. The moment she was up, she crushed a consumable hourglass, and a surge of magical warmth washed over both of them, rapidly knitting their worst wounds shut.
"Thank—"
A roar interrupted him. The Goliath Grey Tortoise had freed itself from the mud, and it was not in a forgiving mood.
"Run, Rhe—"
He was cut off again. This time not by the tortoise, but by a sudden flash in his periphery.
An arrow-shaped projectile, bright red with a gleaming, gem-like tip, arced down from the upper right.
It moved fast enough that only his century of refined perception let him track it at all.
A split second later, it lodged squarely into the gap between two of the tortoise's massive teeth, gleamed once, then erupted.