Chapter 16 - 15 — Before the Minute Ends [I]
POV: Jace
The spines went into the wall behind us and stayed there, buried to half their length in the stone.
The Manticore did not follow the volley in.
It stood where it was with its head low, and that human face went across all five of us one at a time.
Then it came back to me and stopped, because I was the one who had opened my mouth before the tail moved.
[Health: 220/220.]
[Mana: 150/170.]
[Androphagos Duration: 00:58.]
Fifty-eight seconds.
A Level 3 Player does not put 3,600 Health into the floor in fifty-eight seconds, and I was not going to pretend otherwise.
But the minute was never supposed to kill it. The minute was supposed to take away the two things that had killed me, which were a tail I could not see coming and a body fast enough to be anywhere it wanted.
Break those, and the fight stops being about levels.
"Bria, hold the centre. Tomas, watch the tail joint. Idris, hit the left foreleg after I do. Nia, stay behind the shield."
Nobody asked me how I knew which leg.
The Manticore came off the rubble and threw itself at me before anybody could.
Inside Androphagos it stopped being one animal and became a set of separate pressures, all moving at once, all of them alive.
The right forepaw swept toward my head while the tail curved out around my blind side, and I felt both of them arrive at the same moment from opposite directions.
I went under the claw.
The tail changed line faster than I could clear it, so I stopped trying to avoid two things and picked one, and I did not reach anywhere near the stinger.
I caught the middle of it between both gauntlets instead.
It tore me off my feet immediately.
My boots dragged across the stone with my whole weight hanging off a length of moving muscle, and my shoulders took all of it until my grip broke and the floor arrived.
[Health: 220/220 → 187/220.]
The gauntlets kept my hands. Nothing kept my shoulders, and the skin came off one knee on the way down.
Androphagos had told me exactly where that tail was going. It had not made the tail any lighter.
But I had held it for about a second, and a second was all Bria needed.
Amber mana ran down her forearms and across her shoulders and spread over the face of the shield until the surface looked thicker than the metal underneath it.
She brought the lower edge down onto the tail and pinned one segment flat against the floor.
"Tomas!"
He already had the bow up.
Mana compressed around the arrowhead until the shaft was humming between his fingers, and he put it into the narrow joint between two segments rather than at the armoured length of it.
The arrow went in deep and stayed there.
[Manticore — Level 24.]
[HP: 3,600/3,600 → 3,492/3,600.]
The Manticore ripped the tail out from under the shield and threw Bria backward across the stone.
The joint still worked. It just did not work smoothly any more, because the arrow caught every time the tail tried to coil, and the beautiful whipping curl that had come around behind my back and killed me was now something that hitched halfway through.
[Androphagos Duration: 00:46.]
It turned toward Tomas.
[Ability Activated: Aten.]
[Mana: 150/170 → 148/170.]
I went inside its reach while its weight was still shifting.
Not the skull, because the skull is bone under a mane. Not the chest, because the chest is the thickest part of the whole animal.
I put my right gauntlet into the inner joint of its left foreleg, where the fur thins out and the limb has to fold every time it takes a step.
Then I let the burst go at the instant the punch landed.
[Additional Mana consumed: 14.]
[Mana: 148/170 → 134/170.]
[Manticore — Level 24.]
[HP: 3,492/3,600 → 3,156/3,600.]
Fur went up, the skin split open along the joint, and the leg buckled for one step before it caught itself.
One step. That was all a Level 3 punch bought against a Level 24 boss, and I had known that before I threw it.
Its head came down at me to bite, and Androphagos gave me the movement before the jaw did.
I twisted under it and went out past the ruined leg.
Idris came in behind me.
Blue mana drew tight along his blade until there was a thin cutting edge standing off the steel, and he did not waste it on the hide, because his sword had already skated off that armour once today.
He put it into the place Aten had opened.
The blade went into the burned joint and made the Manticore shift its weight off that side and onto the other foreleg.
[Manticore — Level 24.]
[HP: 3,156/3,600 → 3,018/3,600.]
None of us could hurt this thing on our own. Together we were opening one wound over and over, and the only reason Idris could cut it at all was that I had burned it open first.
The Manticore gave ground, four steps back, and lifted the tail again.
Androphagos felt the whole length of it tighten before anything left the body.
"Shield!"
Bria planted herself between it and the others.
The amber came back over her shield and went further this time, spreading down both arms and around her boots until it looked like the floor was holding her rather than the other way round.
She angled the shield instead of standing behind it flat.
Most of the spines glanced off the slope of it and went into the walls, and one punched halfway through the metal and stopped there, with cracks running out through the amber around the hole.
Her knees dipped. The light over the shield flickered, went thin, and came back weaker than it had been.
Nothing reached Nia.
The Manticore made a sound out of that human throat, low and wrong, not a roar and not a word either.
Its ears went flat and the tail lashed harder against the floor, because both of the things it trusted had failed against five people who should already have been dead.
[Androphagos Duration: 00:31.]
I started moving toward the side of the chamber where it had come through.
The wall it broke had taken the roof with it on that side.
One support beam was split near the base with its two halves grinding against each other, and the next one along leaned under a section of ceiling that had cracked from end to end.
Dust came down off it every time the Manticore put weight on the floor.
The mine had been rotting down here long before we arrived, and the Gate Failure had shaken it, and then something the size of a cart had walked through a load-bearing wall.
It came after me, because I was the one who had burned its leg and called both of its attacks before it made them.
Bria pushed off the floor to follow.
"Stay with them."
I needed it locked onto one target. If we all moved, it could pick, and picking meant it would go around me toward the archer with the hurt hands or the Healer who could barely stand.
It charged on three limbs.
The wounded foreleg came down only when it had no choice, and Androphagos showed me the weight rolling through its shoulders every time it did, along with the tail cocking back to catch me if I broke away too early.
So I did not break away early.
I let it close until it was committed, until there was no version of the next second where it could stop its own weight on that leg.
The tail came first, exactly as it was always going to, swinging in to herd me back into the path of the body.
I slipped outside the arc of the stinger, put my right gauntlet flat against the split support, and pushed Aten into the timber.
[Aten output increased.]
[Additional Mana consumed: 28.]
[Mana: 134/170 → 106/170.]
[Warning: Structural integrity failing.]
The beam burned through and folded in on itself.
The ceiling above it groaned and sagged and held, because the second support was still standing.
The Manticore was still coming.
[Androphagos Duration: 00:06.]