msmithbooks Chapter 810: Ruinwalkers
Chapter 810: Ruinwalkers
The thing had tracked Alice’s firing pattern across two shots and broken stride on the third, changing direction in a lateral snap that carried it past the beam’s landing point by less than a meter, and it was still running.
Kaiden’s blood reserves were running low. Three javelins, a thread, and the sustained Wrath output had eaten most of what the earlier kills had provided.
He pulled what remained from both vambraces and shaped it into a wide crescent along his right forearm, thin as paper and dense as the steel it was mimicking, then flung it sidearm across the basin in a spinning arc that anticipated the runner’s trajectory two seconds ahead of where it was.
The blood crescent hit rock where the runner was going to be. The runner arrived one heartbeat later and the crescent caught it across the throat at full sprint, the paper-thin edge opening the membrane and the flesh underneath in a single clean line that separated the head from the body mid-stride.
The corpse skidded twelve meters across the Mire floor and hit the far wall with its legs still kicking.
[You’ve slain invading Mirescutter (Level 92). +490,000 XP. +760 DMP.]
[Champion Kill: invading Mirescutter (Level 90). +780 DMP.]
[Champion Kill: invading Mirescutter (Level 93). +800 DMP.]
[You’ve slain invading Mirescutter (Level 91). +460,000 XP. +740 DMP.]
The two remaining runners had been in the lanes where the thick ground spores should have killed them. They hadn’t. Their membranes held, and they were twenty meters from the basin exit with nothing between them and the Verdant Expanse.
Then the shadows came.
Two hooked cables shot from the basin’s far wall where Vespera had seeded anchor points minutes ago, braided dark that moved faster than anything alive and caught both runners through the torso from behind.
The hooks drove clean past the membrane, past the hide, past the ribcage, and the shadows yanked both bodies backward in one synchronized pull that slammed them into each other mid-air with a sound that carried across the basin.
They hit the ground as a single tangled mass of broken legs and punctured membrane, spores rising around them in a gentle cloud that found every opening the hooks had made.
Vespera did not look at them. She was still fighting the glutton.
’Yeah.’
Kaiden’s chest was heaving. His mask had cracked along the right side where a piece of debris had caught him during one of the sprints, and the Mire’s air was seeping through the fracture in a thin burn that touched the back of his throat with every inhale.
Alice’s Dominion Convergence pulsed once, the healing glow pulling the irritation back from his lungs, rejuvenating him based on the damage he dealt, and he felt the mana cost land against her reserves like a weight.
She didn’t complain.
He reshaped the mask with what little blood he could spare.
Then the column’s second wave hit the basin.
These were not Mirescutters.
The body that cleared the entrance lane was taller than the glutton and built on two legs instead of four, a bipedal frame wrapped in stone-colored chitin that reflected the Mire’s toxic glow off angular plates, and it was carrying something.
A weapon. A spine-studded club the length of Kaiden’s entire body, gripped in one massive three-fingered hand, with the other hand open and crackling with a green energy that matched nothing in the Mire’s natural palette.
Behind it, four more of the same. Spaced evenly, moving with discipline.
[Warning: chitin-sealed. Toxin resistance confirmed.]
Ruinwalkers. He’d seen them in reports during the mountain range competition, though him and the girls never personally engaged them.
’Of course they’re sealed...’
The lead Ruinwalker read Kaiden across the basin, adjusted its grip on the spine-club, and charged.
It was fast for its size. The two-legged stride ate ground in long loping bounds that broke the Mire floor under each impact, and the club came around in a horizontal arc at the end of the approach that would have taken Kaiden across the chest if he’d been standing still.
He wasn’t.
Wrath carried him under the swing in a forward slide that cooked the ground spores off the floor beneath his body, both blades rising as he passed under the weapon’s arc and drove them into the Ruinwalker’s lead knee from below.
The greatswords bit into the chitin at the joint where the plates met and the Wrath detonation blew the gap open in a flash of heat that cracked the armor for six inches in both directions.
The Ruinwalker’s knee buckled. It caught itself on the club like a crutch and the free hand came down at Kaiden’s back with that green crackling energy concentrated in the palm.
Alice screamed it before he felt it.
He rolled. The palm hit the ground where his spine had been half a second ago and the green energy detonated outward in a ring that dissolved the Mire floor in a two-meter radius, the rock itself disintegrating into powder under the attack.
The shockwave caught Kaiden mid-roll and threw him four meters sideways, ribs singing with the impact as he hit the basin wall shoulder-first.
His left arm went numb from the shoulder down. Bone had cracked on the impact, his or the wall’s or both, and Alice’s healing pulsed hard against the injury in a warm flood that cost her mana she couldn’t afford.
’I’m fine. Save your mana.’
’Then let it be fractured for now. We can’t have you emptying your reserves already.’
He stood on his feet with one blade in his right hand and his left arm hanging at his side, blood running from the shoulder through his jacket in a dark line that reached his wrist and dripped off his fingertips onto the Mire floor.
The ground spores around his boots flared where the blood touched them, his blood too hot from the Wrath to mix quietly with anything.
The Ruinwalker had recovered. Its knee was damaged but functional, the chitin already regrowing in a slower pattern than the glutton’s instant repair, and its four companions had caught up and were spreading into a formation around the basin’s width, each one positioned between Kaiden and a different exit lane.
They were blocking him, holding the width so the next wave of runners could pour through unopposed.
’Smart bastards.’
The stream ticker pulsed in his peripheral. He hadn’t looked at it since the real fighting began, but the number caught his eye in passing.
[Viewers: 46.1M ↑]
The chat was a colored blur, utterly unreadable even with membership mode turned on. Every fifth line was a donation window.
The five Ruinwalkers closed on him from three angles. The lead came with the club high and its open palm charged, and the two on his left flank committed together in a coordinated rush that pinched the space between them and the wall, and the remaining two held position at the basin exits with their clubs planted as barriers.
The attack came at his right side and he met it with his single blade, both hands on the hilt now because the left had enough function for a grip even if the shoulder couldn’t swing.
The impact drove him backward two full meters, boots scraping trenches through the Mire floor, his arms shaking from the force transfer, and the second Ruinwalker’s club hit him across the ribs before the first’s follow-up arrived.
He felt three ribs break.