“Float like a butterfly—”
Alpha chanted as the TAWP slid to the side, narrowly avoiding the large, gleaming fin swinging at him.
“—sting like a bee!”
One of the two smaller pile bunkers on Alpha’s back slammed into the giant penguin’s side with a thump that shook the air and filled the clearing with the screech of metal on metal. Much to Alpha’s surprise, his attack barely punched through the large bird creature’s shiny feathers, not even breaking the skin beneath. Regardless, if the giant creature’s bulging eyes and bloody squawk were any sign, withstanding the blow had been anything but pleasant.
Alpha dodged another blow, the strange, gleaming energy along the fin’s edge striking sparks as it skidded off his hex shield. The first of Alpha’s pile bunkers retracted just as another on the opposite side of the TAWP’s back lashed out, delivering a second bone-shaking blow.
As the name suggested, the [Tri-Horn Pile Bunker] system was made of three individual pile bunkers nestled on top of the TAWP. Two smaller, fast-reloading pile bunkers to either side could alternate blows with surprising speed and force, while a much larger central pile bunker could deliver a blow capable of piercing lower-quality military-grade alloy.
Then again, the [Tri-Horn Pile Bunker] wasn’t a proper weapon. It was primarily used to pry open reinforced hulls and bunkers to let in infantry or drones. He wouldn’t have ever used the device in combat if his supplies weren’t so low. That said, it could easily punch through nearly two feet of reinforced steel. A biological being able to take that kind of hit and not be turned into a wet paste on the ground was nearly unheard of.
The biggest issue Alpha faced right now was lining up the right shot. The penguin’s feathers were hard and almost metallic; a poorly aligned blow would skid over their surface without damaging them. He’d gotten a few good shots in with the smaller pile bunkers, but the creature was agile for its size, and intelligent to boot. Smart enough not to let him get a proper shot in with the primary pile bunker, at least.
If the TAWP had been in good condition, he could have just pinned the thing to the ground and hit it as many times as it took.
But then again, if the TAWP had been in proper working order, he wouldn’t have had to resort to melee at all. The creature’s feathers might be tough, but Alpha doubted they could stop a large-caliber rail slug. A small burst of point-defense turret fire misted another of the smaller penguins as it bit at the TAWP’s back. The smaller ones were becoming an issue, though. They weren’t dangerous, but their sheer numbers threatened to overwhelm him as they swarmed, hindering his mobility. It took time to spike them, and shooting them before they got close ate into his limited supplies. To make matters worse, the slowly building pile of corpses made the ground unstable, even in walker mode.
Alpha needed to figure out how to cut the head from this snake before he was forced to use more supplies. With any luck, the walking whale-puppy snacks would scatter in the wind once the big one was dead.
A sudden stone pillar erupted from the ground beneath the TAWP. It wasn’t hard enough to activate his hex shield, but it forced the TAWP’s legs up and toppled it to the side. Great, it was learning now. Just what he needed. His pile bunker shot went wide and skidded across the surface of the mega-bird’s feathers, eliciting a high-pitched metallic screech.
The penguin leader flinched, but otherwise didn’t react. The rest of the flock weren’t so unfazed. As one, the entire flock dropped like flies for several dozen meters around the two battling titans. Most fell to the ground, stunned. A few of the larger ones writhed in brief agony before turning and vanishing into the ground. The flock only took a few seconds to recover, but it had been enough. Alpha realized what had happened and formed a plan.
He grinned an evil, mental grin and began to scheme schemingly.
—————————————————————
Yutu couldn’t decide if he was the unluckiest man alive or the luckiest. Either way, today had reminded him of the first time he’d ever visited one of the large cities. The excitement of something new, the terror of unknown dangers, the confusion and panic when things went sideways. The constant emotional ups and downs had been exhausting, and he felt the same way he had then. He’d gone from desperation to hope to panic, then back to hope, all in the span of a few brief minutes. That wasn’t proper for a scripter — the general term for an array user without a title.
Arrays weren’t the mystical enigmas that many seemed to think they were. Yes, making them was an art, but arrays were all about patterns and design. It was giving instructions to the Spirit Energy, and like any set of instructions, they had to be clear and concise. A scripter had to always keep a methodical mind and steady heart so that they were properly understood when they ‘spoke’ to the Spirit Energy.
This was one of the major reasons arrays were almost always prepared beforehand: arrays made during combat or stressful situations were often sloppy and didn’t give explicit instructions. This could cause strange and unintended side effects that were just as dangerous to the array user as they were to the enemy.
When he’d chosen to stall the Beast Lord, his initial plan had been to use that very fact. An improperly drawn array could have explosive consequences, true. But what about a properly improperly drawn array? Could the ‘breakdown’ be controlled? Directed? The Slatewalker’s ‘trap’ arrays already worked on a similar principle. When something entered their proximity, they destabilized and activated their effect. He didn’t have time to make a proper trap array, but if he tweaked it a bit, maybe it could work.
If he made it in time, he could stall Kusanagi for quite a while. If he didn’t… well, at least he’d go out with a bang and take a good chunk of the Grassbreakers with him. Ganbaatar’s decision to join him had further bolstered Yutu’s confidence in his plan. That was until Kusanagi showed up almost immediately. The others hadn’t stalled the bastard at all! He’d been following them close this whole time while making it look like he was far farther away than he really was. He’d been watching them, playing with them.
But that habit of playing with his prey would be his undoing. Yutu had gotten to work without wasting a moment while Ganaa guarded his back, fighting off the swarming Grassbreakers as best as he could. Even this was just a part of the ‘game’ for the evil Beast Lord. But Yutu was done playing games; he was done running away. Did Kusanagi want to see what Yutu could do? Fine, he’d show him. Even if Yutu couldn’t kill the Beast Lord, he’d make sure his face was carved into its black soul. He would be the lingering curse that haunted Kusanagi till his dying breath.
He’d almost made it, too: Yutu had only been a few lines away from finishing his array.
Then Ganaa had fallen. Even that meathead couldn’t stand up to a Beast Lord’s prodigy. They’d failed. Yutu stared at the almost complete array as hot tears slipped down his cheek. He knew what he had to do now. If he couldn’t finish the array as intended, he would have to blow it up. Maybe it wouldn’t stall the Beast Lord for long, but what other option was he left with?
Yet, at that moment, a miracle occurred. As Kusanagi’s prodigy moved to finish the fallen Ganaa, and Yutu worked to overload the unfinished array, a black and white blur leaped from behind the circling Grassbreakers.
When Yutu’s overtaxed brain could finally process what was happening, he recognized the form of a young Akh’lut pup, Ganaa’s jacket clutched between its teeth. Yutu could only stare, open mouth, as the wolf-sized creature stared down at the large penguin who’d almost killed Ganaa. Hope he thought he’d lost swelled to life in Yutu’s chest.
A pup meant adults! An adult Akh’lut would be at least [Silver Spirit], maybe even higher! And Akh’lut never traveled alone! Sure, at [Shackle Breaking], Kusanagi was still two steps higher, not an insignificant gap, but the chances of one of the Akh’lut warriors being at least in the early stages of [Shackle Breaking] were high.
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Akh’lut were also apex beasts, meaning they had a natural advantage in combat. Even if a small group of [Silver Spirit] and [Golden Spirit] Akh’lut couldn’t finish Kusanagi off, they’d be more than enough to chase the Beast Lord and a few hundred Grassbreakers off.
There was hope!
But what emerged from the grass after the pup wasn’t the group of adult Akh’lut Yutu had expected. Instead, it was a gargantuan metal… beetle? At least Yutu thought it was a beetle. It was beetle-shaped.
It was a deep black-blue color Yutu had no name for, and long, glowing lines along its carapace pulsed with an eerie cyan light. Several glowing red eyes dotted its surface, and three massive horns stretched from its front to its back. But where a beetle walked on six legs, this one only walked on four, with its front two ‘legs’ short, stubby, and ending in what almost looked like hands. The entire thing even appeared metallic and shiny, as though it was wearing armor.
Yutu had never seen or even heard of anything like this creature in all his life.
Yutu could only stare, transfixed by the sight of the weird beetle-thing. Moving at speeds Yutu could barely follow, it tackled the Beast Lord. Its giant horns cracked like thunder as they slammed into the Beast Lord, causing Yutu’s ears to ring.
It was Ganaa’s voice that broke him out of his shock.
“Yutu! The array!”
Yutu snapped his gaze away from the battling titans and toward the smaller battle only a few meters away. Ganaa was sitting, propping himself up with the broken haft of his spear, the stump of his leg tied off with a torn strip of cloth. The Akh’lut pup that had saved him was currently in a bloody melee with the Beast Lord’s prodigy. Metal flippers blocked razor-sharp claws, even as dagger-like teeth bit into the feathered hide. They seemed near evenly matched, but who knew how long that would last?
Yutu had to work fast. The heavens had given him one last chance. He had to make it count. With newfound fervor, Yutu turned back to his incomplete array.
He would need to make some minor adjustments to account for the new party, but that was quick work. In short order, he was finished. Yutu looked down at his work, carefully studying each line of the array and ensuring it would do what he wanted. Then, his heart pounding, a wide grin spread over his face. This could work! This would work!
[Trap Array: Distant Horizon]. It was an extremely advanced array meant to trap those who had finished the seven steps of [Mortal Foundations] and stepped into the [Earthly Transcendent] greater realm. It would loop a small sliver of space, preventing the target from passing through. They could walk toward the horizon for an eternity and still make no progress.
It wasn’t something he, as a [Stone Body] Cultivator, should ever have been able to complete. He wasn’t sure why the nice elderly couple who’d trained him even had this kind of array manual to begin with. But that didn’t matter. He didn’t need to complete it for what he had planned.
Yutu reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a small vial of liquefied core. Using an alchemical solution in this manner would normally be wasteful, but what use would a dead man have for it, anyway? He pulled the stopper from the vial and poured it into the array lines.
The glittering liquid flowed like a living thing through the various bends and turns of the complex array, not a drop spilling over the sides. It spread itself thin, following the spirit markers he had left in the array to guide it, and barely filled the array by the time the last drop left the vial.
Yutu tossed the empty vial away, placed both hands on either side of the array, and channeled all his remaining Spirit Energy into it. Like a hungry beast, the advanced array devoured his energy until he felt like he was being wrung dry. A long moment passed, and just as darkness crept along the edges of his vision, the array lines activated.
Yutu laughed as the array sprung to life.
“[Cracked Array: Abiding Horizon]! “
—————————————————————
//Warning! Spatial anomaly detected!//
Alpha was pulled from his devious schemes by his monitoring Sub-AI.
What now?! Was a whale going to suddenly be called into existence several miles in the sky?!
Alpha didn’t even bother questioning things at this point. Still, the sudden bright light near the humans was a great distraction! The giant penguin’s head snapped in that direction, and it roared something incomprehensible. The next instant, the glowing light expanded outward with surprising speed and enveloped them all in a giant… bubble?
A thin film of something surrounded everything within for several hundred meters around the origin point, looking for all intents and purposes like the inside of a gigantic soap bubble, complete with swirling, prismatic colors. The outside of the bubble was perfectly visible, but it twisted and turned with the flow of the bubble, like a bad acid trip. Alpha had to admit, it would have been kind of mesmerizing… If his sensors weren’t telling him it was a class-3 spatial anomaly, just shy of another Fold Break. Seriously, what the hell was up with this place?!
The giant penguin seemed to have forgotten about Alpha completely and yelled something, pointing toward the young man kneeling near the glowing core of the anomaly with a sharp flipper.
Whatever it had said, the other penguins understood. As one, they rushed the man, toothed beaks gnashing.
Alpha tsked.
“Oh no you don’t! I’m still here, buddy!”
Thanks to the minor distraction, Alpha had just enough time to finish his plan.
The [Tri-Horn Pile Bunker] quickly dissolved back into the TAWP as the rolling nanoskin reformed into several two-meter-tall poles with several large, flat disks covering them.
“Time for some crowd control! Activating [USW Harpy]!”
With a thought, the system activated, and the disks vibrated, filling the area with ultrasonic waves powerful enough to kill a full-grown human in the TAWP’s immediate vicinity.
The effect was immediate and far more pronounced than what Alpha had observed before. Most of the smaller penguins in his immediate area froze, then fell forward, their hearts stopping in their chest. The penguins farther away almost uniformly collapsed, white foam frothing in their open beaks.
Unfortunately for Snowball and the humans, the Harpy was non-discriminatory. He could aim the more intense waves away from them, but the bleed-off had still hit them, if their writhing forms said anything. Ah well, nothing he couldn’t fix with some quick nanites. It wasn’t his fault biologicals were so squishy.
Even the giant penguin had collapsed and clutched at its skull.
Then something… odd happened.
Several of the largest and farthest penguins from him could still move. Desperate to escape the sonic attack, they lunged at the soap bubble surrounding them.
Instead of being torn to shreds by the spatial distortion as Alpha had expected, they were absorbed by it. Their forms twisted and melted into the anomaly in the same way the image of the world outside the bubble had been.
The things that the bubble spat out a few moments later no longer resembled penguins. They didn’t really resemble much of anything that belonged in an Euclidean reality. Some of them looked like they’d fallen right out of a Salvador Dalí painting. Others were twisted in ways that shouldn’t have been physically possible and made Alpha’s processors hurt just by looking at them — he didn’t know his processors could hurt like that!
Even stranger, Alpha’s biosensors told him every single one was still alive.
A thin, pearlescent film clung to each one, continuing to twist and warp the creatures, even after exiting the anomaly, as if they’d taken a part of it with them just by touching it.
That… couldn’t be pleasant.
Alpha kicked one of the nearby writhing penguins into the bubble and recorded the process again.
“Huh… neat.”
He then turned toward the debilitated giant penguin. Alpha wondered what kind of shape it would make.