Chapter 232: The Camp and Raid — VI
Everyone kept shooting at it.
Bullets, explosives, fire— all of it landing, none of it mattering.
The thing moved through the camp the way weather moved through a place, and everything people threw at it just became part of the noise.
I watched a man unload an entire magazine into the side of its neck and the bullshit thing didn’t even flinch.
Somebody tried an incendiary from one of the towers and the fire caught on the rotting patches of hide and burned for about 4 seconds before going out, like the body had already decided fire wasn’t shit worth responding to.
From somewhere above me, Jisoo’s voice cut across the whole courtyard loud enough to land over the gunfire: "Don’t waste ammunition! Avoid it— focus on the horde! Let the black-haired guy handle the big one!"
And yep... that’s me, the black haired guy.
But, nobody listened. Which, honestly, fair— there was a creature the size of a building in the middle of their camp and the instinct to shoot at it wasn’t exactly irrational.
I stood at the edge of the courtyard and watched it instead.
Not the damage it was doing. [IT.] The way it moved, the weight distribution, the subtle things that didn’t add up when you looked at it as a living animal or creature...
The right arm was mostly bone now, the muscle tissue rotted away to the point where the underlying structure was visible, and yet the arm swung with the same force as the left.
Pupils that didn’t track.
Eyes that followed nothing, didn’t adjust, didn’t respond to the light from the fires around it.
And the footwork— every few steps, the left leg hesitated. Not like injury. Like a signal arriving late. Like something was being told where to put the weight from a processing point that wasn’t inside the skull.
I watched the ankle.
Gigantic fungal roots, wrapped dense and thick around the joint, threading up into the leg— not like a parasite attached from outside but like muscle replacement, structural, load-bearing.
The same at the shoulder on the right side, where the rotted flesh had opened up and the roots showed clearly, pale and thick and moving slightly with each step.
Oh, yep, the body isn’t alive, the fungus is controlling it.
I looked around the courtyard— past the people, past the debris, past the chaos— and found a knife in the rubble of what had been a supply shed. Picked it up. Checked the grip.
I wasn’t going to kill it.
I was going to make it kill itself.
Pulse Step activated the moment I moved— five meters, instant, the skill pulling me sideways before a Sporeherd that had been mid-lunge finished its momentum and hit the ground where I’d been.
I was already somewhere else. Another five meters. Another.
Not attacking— threading through the horde, through the variants, through the smoke and the fire and the wreckage, keeping everything moving, keeping the giant’s attention moving with me.
It tracked me the way a thing being piloted tracks something rather than the way an animal did, reactive, a second behind every direction change.
Well, that’s good.
I just cut sideways again as a swipe came down and hit a cluster of Sporeheads instead of me.
That’s what I need. Keep it laggging and DON’T let it adjust.
Pulse Step. Pulse Step. Two meters, five, back two— the giant’s own momentum becoming its problem, each overcorrection taking out more of its own forces than I could have managed directly.
I redirected it twice more through the horde and watched the bodies pile up and thought, a little guiltily, that this was actually not bad for clearing the courtyard.
Then I pushed the angle outward, toward the camp gate, leading it with me step by step until we were through the gap the thing had made in the north wall, out on the streets beyond, the camp behind us and the ruined city ahead.
"WHERE ARE YOU GOING—" Jisoo, from the tower.
"GOING TO KILL IT—" I shouted back, already running.
A pause. Then, resigned: "Fine."
I saw the skyscraper from two blocks out.
Or what was left of one— 40th no, 50th floors, structurally compromised somewhere around the 20th by the look of the crack running up the facade, the whole building leaning about 3 degrees off vertical. Already damaged. Already committed to the direction it was going to fall. Just waiting for the right push.
I looked at it for about half a second.
Then I smiled, which had nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with finally having a plan that was stupid enough to maybe work.
Pulse Step. Up the facade, finding handholds in the cracked concrete, jumping between them, the skill eating the distance as fast as I could push it.
The giant followed— and here’s the part that made my brain genuinely malfunction— it climbed. It followed me up the building.
I don’t know how.
The body of it shouldn’t have supported the weight, but the fungal roots at its joints found purchase in the cracked concrete and hauled it upward with the slow inevitability of something that had decided it was going regardless of what the physics thought.
I teleported to its left.
It swung. Missed me. Hit the facade instead. Took out two floors of glass and steel in a single motion.
I teleported to the top.
It came after me.
Okay... fuck... I watched it haul itself upward, the building shaking under each impact.
This was always the plan. This is fine. This is completely fine and I’m not reconsidering anything right now.
It reached for me. I teleported behind it. It turned. I Pulse Stepped sideways. It swung and the fist went through the building’s core column— the one holding the lean in check and I felt the whole structure shift under my feet in a way that meant I had about 4 seconds.
3.
I jumped.
The building started going.
2.
I grabbed a piece of falling debris— a section of floor slab, big enough— pushed off it like a platform, redirected myself sideways and outward, away from the fall line, and hit the roof of the adjacent building and rolled and came up already looking back.
1.