Chapter 43 #2
One moment, we were waiting to see what they’d choose.
The next, the air itself split open and something enormous poured through the gap.
Not a creature. Magic. Raw, concentrated and reeking of desperation.
It was hurled from the northern edge of the field.
A force of last resort. Arik’s last flailing attempt to stop Alyssa from doing whatever she was attempting.
And it was aimed at the only thing on this battlefield that posed any real danger to him.
Alyssa’s body.
The strike moved faster than thought. It tore through the space between Arik and Alyssa like a needle through cloth. But there was one thing Arik had forgotten.
Alyssa wasn’t alone on this battlefield.
And there was something standing between him and her.
The bear did not ask permission.
The bear did not wait for my decision.
The bear took over. The final chains broke loose in my mind and the berserker took full control.
I stopped being Tank. It felt like I was falling, as Tank the man slowly slipped into the dark recesses of my mind, away from Alyssa, away from the world. But it was a small price to pay, I’d pay it a thousand times over if it meant she’d walk away from this fight.
But as the berserker took full control, the magic stayed with it and the Spring Court responded.
Power surged upward through the soles of my paws, through my legs, through every fibre of muscle and bone and fur.
The Spring Court magic poured into me with a force that should have been annihilating but instead it felt like coming home.
The land recognised me. The court recognised me.
The ancient, ferocious magic of growth and renewal recognised the savage need to protect inside the bear and said yes.
I became something connected to the realm itself. Not a bear standing on the ground but a bear that was the ground. Massive. Ancient. A primal, unstoppable force of nature protecting its own.
The strike hit me.
Hard.
I felt it even though my consciousness was barely a whisper now.
A wall of concentrated magic slammed into my chest with enough force to level a mountain.
The impact drove me back half a step. One step.
The ground cracked beneath my weight and the ground screamed through the bond, the Spring magic screamed with it.
But I would not break.
The strike battered against me like a wave against a cliff face. It burned. It tore. It tried to find gaps in my defences and exploit them, worming through the Spring magic with the desperate intelligence of something that knew it was the last chance.
I held.
Not with technique. Not with skill. With the blind, absolute certainty that nothing was getting past me. The bear did not think. Did not plan. Did not weigh options or calculate odds. The bear knew one thing and one thing only.
She is behind me. Nothing touches her.
The strike intensified as Arik poured everything he had into it and I roared through the pain and the audacity that this man actually thought he had a chance of touching her.
The sound that came out of me wasn’t a bear’s roar. It was the sound of the earth itself splitting open. The sound of roots tearing through stone. The sound of a mountain deciding that it would not be moved, and meaning it with every atom of its existence.
And Arik’s strike shattered against me like glass against iron.
But it all came with a cost. One I gladly paid. As Tank the man floated further into the darkness, away from everything I had once been and into… nothingness.
After that, there were only fragments of sensation.
Impact. Something hitting me from the left, the right, above.
I caught it. Crushed it. Threw it. The taste of blood, mine and theirs, hot and copper-bright.
The ground shaking beneath my weight as I moved, not with the bear’s usual measured stride but with something primal and ungovernable, a force of nature that destroyed everything between it and the thing it was protecting.
I forgot my name.
The word Tank meant nothing. It was a human word for a human man and I was neither.
I was earth and fury and shield. I was the thing that stood between the light and the dark and refused to move.
I was root and stone and the deep, grinding patience of mountains that had waited millions of years and would wait millions more.
And through it all, she was behind me. The light. The warmth. The thing the earth recognised as its heart. She was becoming something vast and extraordinary.
I was the safety. That was all I was now. All I had ever been. The steady presence. The unmovable object. The bear that would die before it let anything through.
The battle continued. I continued. There was no difference between the two.
I was the shield around a goddess setting right a realm, and there was nothing human left in me to remember what I had been before.
And somewhere, very far away, a man named Tank drifted in the dark and hoped that someone would find him before he disappeared completely. But in that darkness, I had only one thought.
She was magnificent, and all that mattered was her.