Chapter 13 - 12 — Gate Failure [III]
[A dungeon Mana surge has been detected.]
[Warning: Gate structure destabilising.]
[Gate Failure confirmed.]
[Previous Threat Classification: Green.]
[Threat Classification recalculating.]
[Current Threat Classification: Orange.]
[Emergency exit unavailable.]
The others just stared at it, because none of them had been alive long enough as Players to know what any of that meant.
Then the date lined up with the compound, and the compound lined up with the words Green Gate failure, and it all landed on me at once.
A television playing somewhere in the estate. Photographs of newly awakened students in a row under a headline. An anchor saying that an entire rookie group had died when an introductory Green Gate changed classification while they were still inside it.
I had been four days out of my own failed awakening then, and so far inside my own humiliation that I looked at a screen full of dead eighteen-year-olds and felt nothing.
Gates belonged to a world I had already decided I would never be allowed into.
I had forgotten them completely.
And now I was standing in the middle of it.
I looked at the crack running through Bria’s shield, and Idris’s arm, and the six arrows Tomas had left, and Nia holding herself up on somebody else’s equipment.
"FUCK!"
All four of them turned to look at me, because I had not sounded like that once since we met.
No. No fucking way. I had come back six years and I had still walked into it, because I had never bothered to remember it in the first place.
And I had nothing else. The broadcast never said what killed them, or how long it took, or whether anybody got close to the Gate before it happened.
I only knew that everyone trapped in here died.
The wall behind the dead Hobgoblin split from the floor to the ceiling.
Something hit it again from the other side.
Then it came inward in a slab, and the thing behind it walked through the hole.
It had the body of a lion and paws to match, covered in coarse dark-red fur, and a human face sat under the mane where an animal’s should have been.
Its jaw opened wider than any human jaw could, and there were several rows of narrow teeth inside it.
A segmented scorpion tail arched over its back, lined with black venomous spines shaped like spearheads, and its shoulders scraped both sides of the broken opening as it came through.
[Manticore — Level 24]
[Orange Gate Boss]
[HP: 3,600/3,600.]
The boss we had just barely killed had 260.
This had three thousand six hundred, and we had a split shield, a Healer near empty, and a swordsman who could not lift his arm above his shoulder.
It attacked before we could form anything.
The tail came forward and threw a spread of spines across the chamber.
Bria got the damaged shield up and one punched straight through the metal into her shoulder and put her on her back.
Another opened Tomas’s thigh, and his leg folded under him and his bow slid away across the stone.
Idris charged because Nia was standing in the open, and the Manticore hit him with a forepaw. The claws did not catch him properly, and the force still threw him the width of the chamber into the wall.
Nia started toward Bria anyway, barely upright.
[Ability Activated: Aten.]
[Mana: 114/150 → 112/150.]
I got in front of them and burned two more spines out of the air, and it cost me far more than anything the Goblins had, because I had to throw a wider and hotter spread than I had ever tried.
[Aten output increased.]
[Additional Mana consumed: 28.]
[Mana: 112/150 → 84/150.]
[Warning: Output exceeds current safe control.]
White-gold ran up out of the gauntlets and along both forearms.
Aten does not burn its own user, so the solar energy did nothing to my skin, and that was never going to be the problem.
The problem was that my muscles and joints and bones were eighteen years old, they had never carried that much Mana, and they were the ones paying for it.
The Manticore charged.
I stepped into its line rather than let it reach Nia and put a solar fist up under its jaw.
The hit lifted its head and burned a patch of the mane away.
[Manticore — Level 24]
[HP: 3,600/3,600 → 3,248/3,600.]
Three hundred and fifty-two, from a Level 2 rookie, against an Orange Gate boss.
That was Aten proving what SSS meant, and it was not even a tenth of the thing’s Health.
The recoil went back through my right arm and my elbow buckled, and two of my fingers stopped closing properly inside the gauntlet.
It recovered before I did, and its forepaw came across my torso and opened it, and then I was in the air.
[Health: 210/210 → 67/210.]
[Warning: Severe blood loss.]
[Right arm function impaired.]
Nia was trying to crawl toward me.
Bria had venom in her shoulder, Tomas could not stand, and Idris was somewhere near the wall barely holding on to consciousness, and Nia did not have the Mana or the time to fix even two of them.
The Manticore turned away from me and started toward them.
I got onto one knee.
I was not thinking about Mimesis. I was not thinking about cards or copies or what dying might hand me, because there was no room in my head for any of it.
Everyone trapped inside this Gate dies. That was all that was in there.
[Aten output increased.]
[Mana: 84/150 → 52/150.]
My left arm was shaking before the attack was even ready.
Then I got my feet under me and ran at its back.
It was not a clean run. My right arm hung where it was and gave me nothing to balance against, so every stride dragged me off my own line and I had to keep correcting into it.
The tear across my torso opened wider each time my ribs moved, and I could tell how much blood had already left me by how far away the floor kept looking.
The chamber was maybe fifteen strides wide and it cost me everything I had left. My boot caught a rail once and I did not slow down for it, because slowing down meant the thing reached Nia before I did.
Its hindquarters filled up the whole space in front of me, dark red fur sliding over muscle as it walked, and I got close enough to feel the heat coming off its body.
I brought my left fist back with the white-gold shuddering all the way up the forearm.
The body never turned toward me, because by then it could not. I was already inside its length with the flank going up beside me like a wall.
So the only thing that moved was the human head, rolling back over its own shoulder until it was watching me almost upside down.
The tail did not come straight at me.
It swept out wide to my right instead, far enough that it left my vision entirely, and I was already committed with my fist rising.
Then I learned that a segmented tail can curl back on itself, because by the time it came into view again I had already run past where it had been.
Something hit me between the shoulder blades hard enough to take my legs out from under my own weight.
My solar fist was still travelling when the point came out through the front of my chest.
Then the stone left my boots, and the tail took all of me, and I hung there against its flank with both arms falling open.
I looked down at the thing sticking out of me.
The white-gold went out in my left hand before it ever reached the fur.
[Health: 67/210 → 0/210.]
[You have died.]