Chapter 67: Initialization

Mio

The frontliners weren’t the issue. She could handle frontliners: punch, Spark, move, repeat.

The mages were.

Casters on the upper tiers lobbing fireballs and hexes in rotation, one volley landing before the last one faded. She’d killed a dozen with Spark already. They kept replacing themselves.

Life Blooms dotted the arena floor. Thirty, forty of them from the fodder she’d punched through, each one a fuse sitting within chain distance of the next. It worked in the slime incursion. Worked in the husk incursion. No reason it wouldn’t work here.

Pon.

That’s all it took.

Arrows rained from the upper tiers. She ducked under the first volley, sidestepped the second, Sparked a third out of the air. Missed the iron hammer swinging from her periphery.

It caught her across the ribs and knocked the air out. She dropped to one knee and the horde didn’t give her a second one.

Bodies crashed into her from every direction. Shields and shoulders and dead weight driving her face-first into the dirt. More piling on. Then more. The weight doubled, tripled, orcs climbing over each other to get on top.

Her ace died on her lip. She couldn’t get it out in time.

Then the second spell hit and her legs went dead. Arms next. The obsidian arm locked mid-push, Can’s strength bleeding out of it.

[Status: Immobilized — Motor Functions Negated (0:30)]

Two spells layered. Voice first, muscles second. The shamans had been chanting since the troll died, and they’d finally landed both.

The arena erupted. A roar that started in the pit and climbed the stone tiers, drums doubling their tempo.

The eagle’s nest king was on his feet with both fists raised. Their champion was down. The celebration started before she stopped moving.

Green and dark bodies pressed her from all sides, the sharp, burning tips nicking at her even at this close proximity.

Scalpels gutting a frog’s liver.

An orc knee pinned her skull sideways. She could see one tusk scraping dirt two inches from her eye and nothing else.

Their weight ground her deeper with every shift, each body above shoving down the ones below. The ones at the bottom kept stabbing because they couldn’t reach the celebration.

[-218 HP]

[-164 HP]

[-91 HP]

[HP: 549/3,066]

She tried to breathe and got a mouthful of hide and sweat. The weight grew every time one of them shifted, her ribs pressing into the packed earth until she felt them flex.

She could hear her own pulse. The drums were somewhere far above, muffled through a hundred bodies.

Neither Kaito nor Mori could reach her. Not that it mattered anyway. She couldn’t even scream for help.

She was suffocating. Under a thousand pounds of orc, this was how it ended.

No. Get up. Get up. Get up, Mio.

She made a promise to see the flowers bloom, to always come back no matter what.

She intended to keep it.

GET UP!

Useless. She couldn’t move at all.

Eighteen seconds on the timer. She told her fingers to close and they stayed open. Told her jaw to move and it sat there, locked around a syllable she’d never finish.

A white sludge melted between the cracks, settling into her left wrist, then into her forearm.

[Equip Chimera: ???]

[Dormant Form: Companion]

[Active Form: —]

Save me, Jii-jii.

[Equip]

The sludge reached her shoulder and stopped spreading. The system display blinked once.

[Initializing…]

Nothing happened.

The orcs kept cutting. The timer kept dropping. Whatever Jii was doing inside her arm, she was taking her time about it.

A blade found the gap between her shoulder blades. Another opened the back of her calf. She couldn’t tell which hurt worse because the paralysis flattened everything into pressure—just weight and math and the slow certainty that the number would hit zero before the dash filled in.

The system display sat there, still loading.

Can had been instantaneous. This one had attitude.

[-84 HP]

[-67 HP]

[HP: 91/3,066]

She hadn’t seen double digits since Mori pinned her to the floor of Sublevel Three and asked if she was afraid.

The weight pressed the last air from her lungs. Her vision went dark at the edges, the body quitting before the number hit zero.

She could feel her heartbeat in her teeth. Then she couldn’t feel that either.

The elf’s memories hit between one heartbeat and the next.

Forests turning gray. Rivers thinning to mud. The floating kingdoms above them drinking the mana out of the earth itself, their wards and spires and humming bridges fed by the land below. Her people sent emissaries. Asked them to stop. The emissaries came back without their tongues.

They wanted peace. They were met with war.

[Initializing…]

Oa-Renmei fell in nine seconds. Elves had practiced magika for centuries—when they put their minds to malice, they knew no limit. Strip the wards from stone, the mana from flesh, and even a floating kingdom was just weight waiting to remember gravity.

Even then, her daughter died to corrupted mana three years after the fall. She’d had a millennium to live. Where was the justice in that? The fall of the three more kingdoms would answer her question.

[Initializing…]

Then the training. A stone courtyard, bare feet on wet rock. The same sixteen steps drilled until her toes bled and the bleeding stopped mattering.

A master who counted the rhythm by striking her shins with a cane—one, two, three, four. Again. Again. Faster. Speed wasn’t the point. The point was removing the gap between decision and motion until there was no gap left.

The Dance wasn’t a technique. It was a language written in the body, and she’d spent forty years learning to speak it without thinking.

She’d used it on six champions. Watched the realization hit each one at strike number four, when they understood the remaining twelve were already in the air.

She’d used it on Mio too.

Watched the girl’s ribs fold and her body ragdoll across scorched earth, and thought: same age as her. Same age as my daughter.

The memories bled away.

[Initialization Complete]

I see now.

[Status: Cleansed]

Thank you, Jii-jii.

[Reverse Lotus Dance]

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