Chapter 112 - Sorry I'm late
Its left hand came across in a backhand sweep that it clearly didn't aim — just cleared its peripheral space the way you brush something off a surface — and caught Fatso directly. He left the ground and traveled a distance that made everyone watching do the math involuntarily before hitting the ruins of a collapsed building forty meters away.
The snow where he landed exploded outward.
"FATSO—" Zina's voice.
Movement in the rubble. Slow. Then Fatso's hand appeared on the edge of the broken wall. Then his face — cut above the eye, fresh blood running down the left side, the expression of a man who has been introduced to a new and unpleasant data point about the world.
He got up.
Picked up the bat.
Started walking back.
The creature watched him do it. The orange eyes tracked the whole journey — the getting up, the picking up, the walking — with something in them that shifted slightly. Not respect. Something adjacent to it that creatures like this probably didn't have a name for.
"You." It said to Fatso. "You're broken. Why do you come back?"
"Shut up." Fatso said. His voice came out steadier than his legs looked.
---
Judas hit it from behind with a full output energy slash while its attention was on Fatso.
The slash carved across the creature's back — scoring through the outer layer of magma, the deeper fire visible briefly in the gap before the surface sealed itself. The creature turned — faster than before, the intelligence of it updating its approach — and drove a fist at Judas that he deflected with the Fan Rotation Shield.
The deflection sent him back fifteen meters.
He landed, dug in, redirected the momentum. Came back immediately.
'It learns.' He noted. 'Every exchange it adjusts. Give it time and it will close every gap.'
He didn't intend to give it time.
Cleo hit it from the left — a full output energy slash that left him visibly depleted, his face going slightly grey from the expenditure. The creature's arm came around and caught him across the torso — not the backhand, a directed strike this time, aimed — and Cleo left the ground differently from how Fatso had. Less horizontal, more vertical, the force driving him up before gravity took him back down.
He hit the snow hard.
Didn't get up immediately.
"CLEO—" George.
"I'm—" A pause. "I'm okay."
He wasn't entirely okay. But he was conscious and the things inside him that needed to stay together had stayed together and after a moment he got his arms under him and pushed up.
The creature looked at him the way it had looked at Fatso.
"You small things." It said — and something in its voice had changed. Not softer. More present. Like it was paying attention now in a way it hadn't been when it arrived. "You keep getting up."
"We were taught to." Kamira said from behind it — and drove both pincers simultaneously into the joint she had found behind the left knee, Spidey's full strength behind the strike, the black legs of the armor braced against the snow for leverage.
The left knee gave.
The creature went down on it — one knee in the snow, the impact of that much weight hitting the ground sending a tremor outward — and for a moment it was at eye level with the team and the orange eyes moved across all of them and something behind them did its arithmetic.
"More than I expected." It said. Almost to itself.
Then it stood back up.
---
The fight went on.
The team was running out of everything — technique, energy, the physical reserves that had been depleting since the first beast broke through the snow hours ago. They were landing hits. Real hits. The creature's surface showed the evidence of all of them — scored lines across the magma, a deeper crack along the left knee joint that Kamira had been targeting every time she could reach it, one of its eyes dimmer than the other from an arrow Zina had placed into it at point blank range when it came low enough to reach.
An arrow that had been one of her last three.
But the creature kept moving. Kept adjusting. Kept finding them.
It hit George with a directed palm strike that bypassed the gauntlets entirely — hitting his chest, not his hands — and the sound George made when he landed told everyone in the team something they didn't want to know. He was up again thirty seconds later but moving differently. Protecting something on the left side.
Malena was gone — energy dry, sitting against the wall at the edge of the fighting space, watching with the expression of someone being forced to witness something and unable to change it. Her hands were in her lap. She had stopped hiding that she had nothing left.
Kamira's armor had three cracked legs now — Spidey compensating, redistributing, the consciousness inside working through damage that was accumulating faster than it could manage. She could feel the heat inside the armor in her shoulders and her arms and the back of her neck.
'Hold.' She told herself.
She hit the knee joint again.
The crack deepened.
Judas was still at full output — golden aura maintained, techniques landing, movements precise — but the edge of his reserves was a real thing now. He could feel it. The techniques were costing what techniques cost and the reserves were finite and the math on that had a conclusion he was getting closer to.
He had never in recent memory been in a fight where he genuinely couldn't see the end of it from where he was standing.
He didn't like the sensation.
'It shouldn't be here.' He thought again, in the brief space between one exchange and the next. 'A Gold Tier Boss in the outer city. This isn't random. Something sent it.'
---
Then the creature stopped again.
It stood in the middle of the fighting space and looked at what was around it — the team, battered and depleted and still standing, the crowd behind them pressed against the barrier wall, White unmoved at the gate. The ruins of the Outer City burning on all sides.
It raised both arms.
Not to strike. Upward — extending toward the sky above the underworld, the fire gathering between its palms in a way that was different from everything that had come before. Darker at the center. Denser. The gathering of something that wasn't being produced locally but pulled from somewhere above — the underworld's sky beginning to change at the upper limit of visibility, the white haze distorting around something that was descending through it.
Judas saw it first.
"Move the people—" he said — and his voice had something in it that had never been in his voice before in the team's hearing. Not panic. The controlled urgency of someone who has done the math and doesn't like the answer. "GET THE PEOPLE AWAY FROM THE WALL—"
The team turned.
The meteor was visible now — burning as it descended through the underworld's atmosphere, enormous, the heat of it pressing down like a second sky. The crowd saw it. The sound they made wasn't screaming — it was something under screaming, the noise of people whose minds had processed something and found no adequate response.
They had nowhere to go.
The inner city barrier was behind them — sealed, cold, indifferent. White stood at the gate and didn't move. The soldiers held their formation. The people on the other side of the barrier watched from safety and the safety was absolute and the wall between the two was absolute and none of that was changing.
The crowd had the burning Outer City on three sides and the sealed barrier on the fourth.
The meteor descended.
Fifty meters. Forty.
"JUDAS—" Kamira's voice.
"I see it." He was already building — everything left in his reserves pulling together, the golden aura flaring to its maximum, the fan raised. He knew what the math said. He was going to try anyway because that was the only thing left to do.
Thirty meters.
The heat of it was a physical pressure now — pushing down on everything below it, the snow sublimating in a rising column that met the descending fire halfway.
Judas released everything he had.
The golden wave went up — brilliant, the largest output he had produced today — and hit the meteor and pushed against it and the meteor slowed by nothing that mattered and kept coming.
Twenty meters.
The creature lowered its arms and watched. The orange eyes carried something that might have been satisfaction in a thing capable of satisfaction.
"Small things." It said. "You fought well."
Ten meters—
Despair had already flashed in everyone's eyes...They could feel the heat... The heat of the attack ...it was coming down with great momentum ..
"Die you all .." It screamed out loudly ...
Death has already flashed in the eyes of everyone present when suddenly, something appeared behind the Gold Tier Boss ..
"You're the one that needs to die.."a voice rang out loudly as a flash og golden energy followed.
One strike.
The silhouette hit the Gold Tier Boss with a flashy sword that passed through the head of the Boss decapitating it in one single strike .
The creature came apart.
The magma and compressed flame that had held its shape for longer than anyone in the Outer City had been alive dissolved outward in a ring — the fire losing the intelligence that had given it form, the heat dispersing, the deep orange eyes going dark and absent before the rest of it finished falling.
The meteor died with it.
Not in an explosion. In a dissolution — the fire breaking apart from the inside as whatever had summoned it ceased to exist, the energy of it converting as it dispersed, fragments catching the white haze of the underworld's atmosphere and scattering into something that drifted downward like light rather than falling like fire.
It fell across the crowd. Across the team. Across the snow and the ruins and the cooling remnants of everything the last hours had cost.
And then the silhouette lan
ded in the midst of the burning flame , golden gauntlet in hand , golden boots in legs and a flashy sword in his grip...
"sorry I'm late .."
"SOCRATES,....."
.