Chương 11: Gravity

Ivan couldn't understand why she found the idea so wild. So he explained, "You're fast. High Agility, right? Foxkin usually spec into evasion."

"I am the former Guuji of the Vas Shrine," Rys said with immense dignity.

"I am not bait."

"So 'my lady' was the correct term, Priestess?" Ivan asked, watching her look away.

"So would you rather be the tank?" Rys glared at him. She hated it. She hated everything about it. But Ivan saw the moment she did the math too. She looked at the direction the Wyvern flew, then at her own ragged clothes, then at Ivan. They needed power. She knew it.

"If I die," Rys said, stepping close and poking him in the chest with a sharp nail, "I am going to haunt you. I'm not joking, remember that I'm a Priestess. I will be the most annoying ghost in history. I will make noises while you try to sleep. I will hide your keys."

"Deal," Ivan said.

"But you won't die. I know the geometry."

"Geometry," she scoffed.

"If your math is off by one decimal, we are melted sludge."

"Then I won't be off." Ivan turned and started walking toward the ridge, pulling the stick back out of his inventory. He needed to draft a new schematic. Suspension glyphs wouldn't be enough. He needed anchors. Gravity binds.

"Four hours!" Ivan called back over his shoulder. Rys stood there for a moment, hands clenched. Then she let out a long, suffering groan that startled a nearby squirrel.

"Ren," she commanded.

"Up. We're going to help the idiot commit suicide." Ren scrambled up, clutching his dagger.

"Aunty? Are we really doing this?" Rys watched Ivan's retreating back. He was already muttering to himself, tracing shapes in the air.

"Apparently," she muttered. A small, terrifying smile touched her lips. It wasn't a nice smile.

"But if we pull this off... the loot will be spectacular." She turned to the boy.

"Come along, Ren. Let's go kill a dragon."

"Wyvern!" Ivan corrected from fifty yards away.

"I hate him," Rys said, and started walking.

From the trees, the ridge had looked manageable. Up close, it was broken stone, bad footing, and wind trying to shove him sideways. Rock jutted from the earth in crooked lines, and the slope was littered with boulders and weathered stumps. Far above, the sky opened in a pale blue bowl. Perfect place for something with wings to nest. Ivan stood in a shallow depression near the center of a rocky clearing and traced circles in the dirt with a stick. The ground here was hard-packed, thin soil over stone.

His diagrams sprawled across it in overlapping curves and angled lines, a messy tangle of geometry that only he could read. Rys watched from a nearby rock outcrop, arms folded, hair whipping in the wind. She had agreed to this, reluctantly. Her ears twitched every time his stick scraped against stone.

"You're absolutely certain this will work," she called down.

"Certain is a strong word, fox lady," Ivan answered.

"I'm confident the math is right. The Wyvern's the one who has to cooperate."

"Wow. That's so reassuring." He ignored the dryness in her tone and focused on the main array. The first glyph was already etched, a shallow crater where he had carved the nodes deeper than usual. [Glyph Suspension] allowed him to hang a spell in place, dormant until triggered. The trick here was layering multiple effects. He finished the outer ring and sat back on his heels, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. The wind stole the moisture immediately.

Rys hopped down from her perch and padded over, stepping carefully around the lines. She crouched beside him, her tail swaying lazily. Up close, the wind carried her scent, faint fox and cold ash under the grime.

"Explain it again, darling," she said.

"Pretend I am one of your slow students."

"You'd be my only student," Ivan muttered.

"Exactly. I demand quality." He drew a smaller diagram within the main circle, talking while his hand moved.

"Forest Wyverns live on momentum. Their whole fighting style is built around speed and altitude. Dive, pull up, breathe acid, repeat. If you take away the vertical advantage…"

"They become angry iguanas."

"Angry iguanas with hollow bones," he nodded.

"This glyph here multiplies local gravity for anything inside its radius when I trigger it. Not enough to crush stone, but enough to turn a dive into a fall. Under that, we stack shaped explosions. When it slams down, the runes under its chest detonate upward." Rys frowned.

"You are going to punch the flying lizard with the planet?"

"That's one way to phrase it."

"And I stand right there while it is trying to kill me."

"Briefly." She blew air through her nose, a soft, unimpressed sound.

"If this goes wrong, I am haunting you."

"You already threatened that."

"Just making sure you remember." He checked the last connection node, then reached into his inventory for a vial. Faint blue liquid sloshed inside, the cheap scent of low-grade beast lure rising as he unstoppered it. The lure could attract predators by simulating wounded prey, and it also smelled like something had died in a barrel of vinegar. Rys eyed the vial with deep suspicion.

"What is that."

"Perfume," Ivan said.

"The kind you wear when you really want attention."

"Absolutely not." He held it out.

"Come on, we don't have time for this. This is the bait. The Wyvern hunts by both sight and scent. You smell like blood and mana. This will spike you on its nose over anything else in the area."

"Human."

"Do you want the Wyvern to go after you where we planned, or do you want it picking a fight with us while we're walking back down the ridge with our pants around our ankles." She grimaced, but she took the vial.

"I hate that you make sense."

"Pour it on the outer layer of your clothes. Not on your skin. That stuff lingers."

"Oh, good. For a moment I was worried." Ivan moved to the far edge of the clearing where Ren sat on a flat rock, hugging his knees. The boy's eyes were huge; he kept flicking nervous glances at the sky.

"You stay here," Ivan said.

"Soon as that thing shows up, you crawl under that overhang." He pointed at a narrow gap under a tilted slab of stone.

"If something goes wrong, you run back down the slope. Do not come toward us." Ren swallowed.

"What about you?"

"We're the idiots picking this fight," Ivan said.

"You don't need to be one too." Rys uncorked the vial behind them. Wind carried an instant punch of rot and iron. She made a low gagging noise, then muttered something in a language Ivan didn't know. Probably a curse.

"You better not make a habit of this," she said.

"Next time, I vote you as bait." This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"You're too pretty for math," Ivan said.

"It'd be a waste." Her ears perked just a little at that before she smothered the reaction under a glare.

"Flattery will not save you if this fails."

"Then it's a good thing I brought more than flattery." He retreated to the line of rocks marking his intended observation post. From there he could see the whole clearing and the full circle of his glyph array. The wind favored them, blowing from the ridge toward the open valley beyond. Rys walked to the center of the kill box and stopped. The lure had soaked into the outer layer of her tattered shrine garb, darkening the cloth. The scent rolled off her in waves that even Ivan could smell over the cold air.

She rolled her shoulders once, then dropped into her stance. He had seen her fight in the ravine, it had been wild, feral and efficient. Back then, for a moment he'd even considered if she were a Wolfkin instead. But this was something else. Every line of her body changed. Her toes dug into the soil, knees bent, and her weight settled low gracefully. Her arms rose with a fluid, practiced grace, hands relaxed but ready. The air around her seemed to tighten. She began to move.

"Spirit Dancer" she had called her Class. Ivan's eyes wavered. Until now, he had focused only on the "Spirit" part, on the flashing claws and sudden bursts of speed. Watching her now, he understood the "Dancer." It took Ivan a few breaths to stop reading it as combat. The rhythm was too deliberate for that. She turned in a slow circle, arms flowing through the air in slow arcs. Her curvy hips rolled with the motion, light catching along the faint sheen of sweat on her skin.

Her tail swayed behind her in a lazy counterpoint. Every step dug small crescents into the dirt, careful to avoid the inscribed lines. Really, it was quite artistic. If some god had sculpted an invitation to violence and wrapped it in foxskin, it would have looked like this. Ivan caught himself staring and clicked his tongue. Effective bait. That's all. He dragged his eyes back to the sky and activated [Mana Sense]. The world dimmed, colors washing out into grey, replaced by threads of light and pools of power.

The ridge behind them burned with the slow, deep pulse of old stone and buried veins of ore. They had not observed its route for days. Ivan had the direction it had flown and the mark on the map. That was not the same thing as a route, but it was close enough to gamble on. At least Ivan hoped so. In the far distance, somewhere beyond the treeline, he felt the faint spark of a wandering beast. Above them, faint and high, something brighter moved.

"Hm," Rys murmured, as if she felt it too.

"Company." A shadow slid across the clearing. It started as a smudge against the brightness. Then it grew. The sound came a heartbeat later, a low whump-whump of vast wings pushing air. Wind stirred the treetops before the creature itself appeared, cutting across the sky like a dark green knife. The Wyvern banked once over the ridge, its body coiling in the air. Sunlight flared along its scales, dull emerald shot through with veins of black.

Its wings were huge, membranes tattered in places but still broad enough to cast half the clearing into shadow. It screamed. The sound punched straight through Ivan's skull. It wasn't a roar. It was too high and sharp for that, a metallic shriek that made his bones tremble. Somewhere behind him Ren whimpered and flattened himself against the rock. The Wyvern wheeled, long neck lowering as it sniffed. That glowing furnace of a mana core flared in Ivan's vision as it caught the trail.

Its head turned, golden eyes locking onto the lone figure in the center of the clearing. Rys raised one hand toward it, palm out, as if welcoming a dance partner. The Wyvern folded its wings and dropped. Air pressure slammed into the clearing as it fell. Ivan's cloak snapped against his legs. Dust and loose pebbles jolted upward. The monster didn't descend like a bird, fluttering and adjusting. It fell like a thrown spear. [Wyvern, Level 57] The System helpfully reminded him just how bad this idea was.

Too late to hesitate. Ivan's fingers hovered above the activation node in his mind. The [Glyph Suspension] array pulsed faintly at the edge of his senses, hungry for mana. He ignored it for now. The Wyvern flared its wings at the last possible moment. The air cracked as it bled off speed, turning its fall into a short, brutal glide. Its claws hit the ground with a thunderous impact, stone cracking under the weight. Acidic drool hissed where it hit the earth. Rys wasn't there.

She moved as the Wyvern landed, not away, but inside its reach. One fluid sidestep took her under the arc of its snapping jaws. She pivoted, skirts flaring, and raked her claws along the softer scales under its throat. Blood sprayed in a thin line before she flowed out of range again. Damn. That woman was strong. The Wyvern recoiled, shook its head, and struck again. Ivan did not trigger the trap. Not yet. The beast was still testing the ground, adjusting to the unexpected resilience of its prey.

It snapped and clawed, turning in a tight circle. Rys danced around it, always just beyond tooth and talon. Her bare feet slid and pivoted, her body folding and unfurling with the kind of precision that made professional duelists look clumsy.

"You could have been a performer," Ivan muttered under his breath. The Wyvern reared. Acid light built in its throat, visible even without [Mana Sense]. The gland beneath its jaw swelled, veins pulsing. Its chest expanded as it drew in breath. Now.

"Move!" Ivan shouted. Rys exploded into motion, springing backward with a series of backflips that took her past the etched boundary. Ivan snapped his fingers. The invisible lines carved in the soil lit up in his mind. Three nested circles fed into one another, and at the center, the gravity glyph flared with its sigil spinning like a wheel. Beneath it, the secondary nodes waited, simple explosion arrays drawn with more brute force than elegance. He triggered them.

The air in the center of the clearing turned heavy. No light flashed and no thunder cracked. Ivan felt the change in his gut, the world suddenly denser around the Wyvern. Mid-rear, the beast jerked as if some massive hand had seized its chest and pulled. Its breath weapon never left its mouth. The multiplied gravity yanked the beast downward. Instead of loosing its acid in a wide arc over the ground, it fired straight into the dirt at its own feet.

Corrosive mist and liquid hissed in a tight cone, chewing a crater where its claws had been. Then its own weight finished the job. The Wyvern crashed down with a sound like a hill collapsing. Bone and stone protested together. Its wings slammed against the earth, membranes tearing. The impact was enough to kick dust into Ivan's face even from his vantage point. The second layer of glyphs went off. Explosions bloomed upward from the ground beneath the Wyvern's chest, tightly shaped columns of force and heat.

Ivan had tuned them to punch, not spread. The runes funneled the blast straight into softer underbelly scales. Scaled plates tore. A gout of dark blood and shredded flesh erupted from its side. The Wyvern howled in pain, a broken, shocked sound. It tried to lurch up, only to be dragged down again by the still-active gravity well. Hollow bones, Ivan thought. Fragile under the armor. He didn't smile. His heart was pounding and there was already the copper tang of blood in the air. The Wyvern thrashed.

It kicked with its hind legs, gouging trenches into the earth. Its tail lashed, the barb at the end whipping through the air with enough force to turn a human torso into paste. One wing beat blindly, throwing dirt and bits of shattered stone. The gravity glyph flickered. Too much strain. The spell wasn't built to hold something this big for long. Ivan felt the structure buckling as the monster's raw mass pushed against the borrowed rules. Then the Wyvern opened its mouth and screamed again.

This time the sound came laced with acid mist, a wide cone of sizzling green death that washed over the edge of the clearing. Grass and scrub vanished under the spray, turning into smoking sludge. The smell hit a second later, eye-watering and sharp.

"Down!" Ivan barked, flattening himself behind his slab of rock. The spray stopped short of his position, but only barely. Pebbles around him hissed where droplets landed. Ren yelped and ducked deeper under the overhang. The fox woman hadn't waited for his order, thankfully. She'd already moved in the opposite direction, skirting the far edge of the circle. The Wyvern's breath carved a path between them, leaving a wet wound in the earth.

"That was an acid breath limited cone, big cooldown," Ivan called out, more to keep his own nerves steady than anything.

"Gland needs time to refill!"

"Less talking, more killing!" Rys snapped back. She darted in again while the Wyvern's head was still tilted back from the scream. Her claws bit into the tendon behind its foreleg, digging deep. Flesh parted under her fingers. She yanked and twisted. The limb buckled. The Wyvern collapsed further, one shoulder dropping. Its attempt to push itself up turned into a clumsy sprawl, front half dragging. The gravity glyph died. Ivan felt it go like a snapped wire.

The air lightened, the unnatural weight lifting from his limbs. The Wyvern surged a handspan higher as its own strength no longer fought the spell, but the damage was done. Its breastbone had caved inward from the impacts, and something inside it had shifted wrong.

"Not dead," Ivan muttered.

"Stubborn bastard." Now it was time to get involved. He lifted his hand and summoned [Lightning Spear] from memory. The pattern was burned into his nerves after a week of practice. Mana flowed down his arm, collecting in a tight spiral at his palm. He kept the shape narrow, over-compressed. More spear than bolt now, a crackling javelin of blue-white light that hummed with contained violence. He aimed for the Wyvern's nearest eye and cast.

The spear snapped across the clearing and punched through the thick scaled ridge protecting the socket. There was a wet crunch, followed by a shriek that tore the air. The Wyvern thrashed again, half-blind now, head whipping side to side. Harder for it to track Rys. And- His eyes went wide.

"Rys, watch out!" Ivan shouted. She turned her head too late, and saw the reason behind his shouting a heartbeat later. The tail. While the front half of the beast flailed and sagged, the tail retained much of its murderous precision. The barb lashed toward Rys, low and fast. She twisted aside, but not quite fast enough. It clipped her shoulder, sending her spinning. She hit the ground and rolled, forced more by impact than intent. When she came up on one knee, her left arm dangled wrong, limp at her side.

"Fuck," Ivan muttered. Ivan's stomach dropped. The Wyvern sensed weakness. It dragged itself toward her, pulling with its forelegs. The ruined wing scraped along the ground, leaving a trail of blood and acid. One good hit from that maw and she would be paste. Ivan was already on the move.