Nick had been terrified of running into a regenerating opponent since the moment that he became aware of the System. Self-healing enemies were a common trope in fantasy games and were notoriously difficult to deal with, especially at low levels.
While he was aware of several strategies for taking regenerators down, none of them were available within the confines of the arena floor. Even if they were, his team hadn’t been given sufficient time to prepare.
Nick wracked his brain as the grotesque once-rhinoceros recovered from its acidic surprise, but he came up empty despite his increasingly frantic attempts. In the end, there simply wasn’t anything he could do to counter an enemy that could heal so quickly, especially one the size of the monster looming before him.
A white wave of despair rose to engulf him, but before Nick could drown within its depths, Sophia yelled out an observation that changed the situation entirely, offering a tantalizing glimmer of hope that they might still manage to pull this off. “It’s purging the afflicted area, not regenerating! It’s lost a decent chunk of mass, and the missing muscle isn’t growing back.”
Sure enough, now that Nick knew what to look for, it was easy to spot the pit in the side of the corrupted rhino’s neck. There was a deep depression where Veronica’s bolt had struck, like someone had scooped out a ball of flesh like ice cream.
“Save your other acidic shot,” Kenji lowered his spear and braced himself to counter a charge. “Wait until it’s distracted so it doesn’t dodge. We have to make it count, so aim for somewhere that it doesn’t have enough muscle to jettison the acid.”
As Kenji’s words faded from the air, the rhino lowered its head, its pitiless black eyes staring straight into Nick’s own. It paused for a heartbeat to gather its strength, then erupted forth with explosive speed, so quick that it barely telegraphed the move at all.
The mutant’s form was reduced to a pink and black blur, streaking straight for the spot where Nick stood like it had been shot out of a cannon. In another second, its branching horns would rend his flesh to smithereens, reducing his legacy to a gore-studded stain along the arena floor.
There isn’t a lot that you can do within a fragment of a second. There’s no time to strategize or evaluate vectors. For an ally to come running to your aid. If he had waited to mindfully react, his life would have been riven from him with the next blink of his eyes.
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This would have been the end of Nick’s story, if a primitive, fundamental awareness in the dark recesses of his mind hadn’t recognized the danger the instant that the rhino poised to charge. That spark of intuition goaded his body into action without waiting for a conscious command.
Thus, by this time, he had already bent his knees and begun leaping to one side. He had just enough time to realize that if this didn’t work, it was going to be the last moment of his life. The primal part of his soul resonated with that terror, that aching desire to live through the day.
Acting on instinct, Nick called upon a form of energy that he had never been able to sense clearly before, which felt like a deep pool of water saturating his being. It had been there all along, but he hadn’t been aware of what it truly was until that moment. It’s stamina. He started pulling the flow of stamina away from the rest of his body and pouring it all into the muscles in his left leg, transforming the pool into a raging river for a fraction of a moment, right where his toes touched the stone below his boots.
A half-second before the fallen beast struck, he pressed against the arena floor with every fiber of his being. The immense monstrosity had grown to fill the whole of his vision by the time that Nick’s body began to move, leaping to his left in an explosive release of power, as that strange energy multiplied the strength of his jump like gasoline poured upon an open flame.
In that fragment of a moment, he was awash in a tsunami of incredible force. A hot, tearing pain erupted within his left leg, as muscle fibers were stressed beyond their limits, snapping like rubber bands pulled apart by an angry giant.
There was a jumbled sense of motion and impact, the world reduced to an inchoate blur as his body was flung hard to one side. But the killing blow he was anticipating never landed.
Nick had dodged the rhino’s horn in the final instant before it struck. The razored tines passed him by so closely that they shredded the tail of his jacket, carving through the toughness modified leather like a chainsaw passing through cheesecloth.
The fallen creature went streaking past his position, its hideous form tearing through the air as wind resistance pushed back against its abrupt acceleration. The beast shrieked in fury, trying to turn and snap at him, but it was helpless to do anything other than ride out its ridiculous momentum.
It braced its legs against the arena floor at an angle, dragging its claws along the polished rock like anchors. The mutant tore great gouges out of the pristine white marble, leaving long scars along the face of the arena.
Nick only had a few precious seconds before the mutant gained control over its inertia and came charging back to claim his life. He really needed to make them count.
Before he could decide what to do next, the consequences of his expenditure caught up to him.