The Impossible Math

The world went to greyscale.

Colour left it entirely. The brazier fires stopped in mid-flicker, frozen into jagged tongues of static. Dust hung motionless. And directly above Gesbiek, an axe and the goblin holding it became a single statue of a thing about to happen.

[FREEZE: 2.00s]

Two seconds.

Gesbiek did not waste any of them on being impressed.

He already knew the chest was hopeless. Two Red Shards behind layers of tissue that had turned his claws away without marking. So he went for the mechanism instead.

Joints. Tendons. The places where a body is a set of connected parts rather than a solid object.

He dropped low and drove his claws into the back of Grolm's right knee, where the great tendon runs, because a Warlord who cannot stand is a Warlord lying on the floor.

Everything an Agility of 82 could produce went into that strike.

[1.00s]

His claws made contact.

And his fingers screamed.

It was not tendon. It was something with the give of a steel hawser wrapped in stone. The joint did not open. It did not part. It did not indent by the width of a hair.

[ATTACK: TIER 3 | DEFENCE: TIER 5]
[PENETRATION FAILED | DAMAGE: 0]

His claws skidded off and left nothing behind, not a scratch, not a line.

Gesbiek understood the shape of his mistake while he was still touching it.

Freeze stopped time. It did not lower a defence value. Grolm was not vulnerable while frozen, because Grolm was not vulnerable, and stopping the clock did nothing about that.

He had halted the world itself and still could not open a knee.

[0.00s]

He shoved off the leg and threw himself backwards, and the world came back with a crack like something structural giving way.

The axe finished.

It went through the floor where he had been and took three feet of stone out of it, and the fragments went across the chamber and rang off the walls.

Grolm stopped mid-follow-through.

He felt something behind his knee. A phantom touch, an itch where nothing had happened. He looked down and checked, and found unbroken skin, and looked around the room with an expression that was not fear but was, for the first time, uncertainty.

To him, Gesbiek had been under the axe and then had been twenty feet away, with nothing in between.

"Tricks," Grolm bellowed.

The twin shards went faster with his heart.

Thump-THUMP. Thump-THUMP.

"You hop about like a flea."

He turned, and the turn was a blur.

"Fleas are still crushed."

* * * *

Gesbiek landed behind a pillar and checked what it had cost him.

[MANA: 43%]

Thirty percent. Nearly a third of everything he had, for two seconds of stopped time that had achieved precisely nothing.

Two more uses. Perhaps three if he was careful, and being careful was not currently on the table.

He looked at his hands. The tips of his claws were split, fine fractures running back through the keratin like the first cracks in ice.

The gap between Yellow-fed claws and two Red shards was not a slope with a difficult section in it. It was vertical. He had assumed, somewhere in the two years of climbing, that enough levels would eventually make the difference a matter of degree.

It was not a matter of degree. It was a matter of category.

Grolm came through a granite table on his way over. Three hundred pounds of stone went into pieces without slowing him.

So Gesbiek stopped trying to hurt him and simply ran.

He went along the walls at full Agility, leaving an emerald smear of afterimage behind him, and for a moment it felt like it might work. Nothing that size could keep this up. Something that heavy had to tire.

Grolm did not chase him.

Grolm watched him for two circuits, and then swung the haft of the axe backward into a piece of empty air.

Gesbiek arrived in it.

It was not the blade. It was the wooden shaft, delivered to a place he had not reached yet by a creature that had simply worked out where he was going.

It felt like running into a falling tree.

He went across the chamber and hit the base of the throne hard enough to crack the dais.

[HP: 65% | STUNNED]
[RIB FRACTURE: MULTIPLE]

He tried to stand and his legs declined.

That had been the handle. Not the blade, not the full swing, not the Rage buff behind it. If any of those had been involved there would be two of him.

Grolm walked over, dragging the axe, the blade screeching a groove across the floor.

He looked, if anything, mildly impressed.

"Tough meat," he grunted. "A normal Grey would be a smear. You have hardened, nephew."

That was the whole of it, Gesbiek thought, lying against the dais with his ribs grinding. The Blue core and the Orange and the Silver had built him a body dense enough to survive being hit by things that killed Blue-tier warriors outright.

He was not strong enough to win. He was exactly tough enough to be beaten slowly.

He spat silver blood onto the stone and watched it steam.

* * * *

From the floor he had a clear view past the throne to the Totem, and to the tether running out of it into Grolm's back.

He watched the Warlord take a breath, and watched the fatigue readouts wipe themselves clean.

[ANCESTRAL RAGE]
[STAMINA REGENERATION: INFINITE]
[PHYSICAL DAMAGE: +300%]

Infinite.

Gesbiek's entire plan, insofar as running away in circles counted as a plan, had rested on the idea that a body doing that much work would eventually have to stop.

The Totem meant Grolm could swing that axe for a week. Gesbiek was burning stamina to stand up and mana to stay alive, and the numbers on both were going in one direction.

The axe came up and came down and he rolled, badly, his body objecting at every point.

BOOM.

The floor cratered six feet across. The shockwave took him off his knees and rolled him again, and stalactites came out of the ceiling and drove into the ground around him like thrown spears.

Grolm was not only trying to hit him. He was flattening the room. Pillars, tables, braziers, every piece of cover in the chamber, until there was nowhere left that was not open floor.

"Stop scurrying," Grolm roared. "Stand and die like your father."

* * * *

Gesbiek tried one more thing, because he had not yet tried it and the list was getting short.

As Grolm hauled the axe out of the crater, he lunged for the chest, and hooked his fingers over the lower of the two Red Shards.

It was hot enough to blister. He pulled anyway, everything he had, both feet braced against ribs.

It did not move.

He could see why, with his face six inches from it. The shard was not set into Grolm the way a stone is set into a socket. Ropes of vein ran into it from underneath, thick as fingers, anchored deep into the chest cavity. It was not jewellery. It was an organ.

Grolm looked down at him with something like curiosity, the way you look at an insect that has landed on your arm and started doing something unexpected.

Then he took Gesbiek's wrist and twisted it.

SNAP.

Gesbiek heard himself shriek from a long way off.

Grolm headbutted him, and the two shards on his chest came into Gesbiek's face like a hammer coming into fruit, and then Gesbiek was airborne again with red and silver static filling his vision.

[HP: 47% | BLEEDING]
[FRACTURES: WRIST, NOSE, RIBS 3-5]

He came to rest against the far wall and did not move for a moment.

Physical attacks: nothing. Joints: nothing. Speed: anticipated. The shards: part of him.

Every approach he had, tried and failed, in under two minutes.

Grolm came on slowly, taking his time now, because taking his time was the point.

"You fought well for meat," he said. "Better than your father. He begged, at the end."

The axe went up.

"Meat is still meat. And I am hungry."

* * * *

It came down, and time did the thing it does, and Gesbiek's mind went very fast and very clear.

He had been asking the wrong question for the entire fight.

He could not kill Grolm. That had been established four separate ways and the System had put a number on it that did not admit of argument.

But nobody had told him to kill Grolm. He had decided that himself, somewhere out in the forest, because it was the obvious shape for the ending to have.

What he had come here for was twenty feet of ironwood standing behind the throne with five Red Shards in it.

He did not need to beat the Warlord.

He needed to get past him.

[FREEZE: EXECUTE]

The world went grey with the axe two feet from his head.

[2.00s]

He did not stand. Standing took time he did not have. He threw himself sideways along the floor, dragging his broken wrist, ribs shrieking, and cleared the impact zone on his elbows and his knees.

[1.00s]

He got up. Three limping paces, four, and a pillar between himself and the statue holding the axe.

[0.00s]

Time came back with a snap, and the axe went into the crater where he had been, and the whole cavern shook.

Grolm roared in triumph, and then stopped, because there was nothing under the blade.

"Sorcery," he bellowed, spitting. "Cowardly Grey magic. Stand and fight."

Behind the pillar, Gesbiek looked at the only number that mattered.

[MANA: 13%]

Stalling was not winning. He was spending expensive fuel to buy two seconds at a time from an opponent with an infinite supply.

Grolm found him, charged, went through a brazier without appearing to notice it, and swung horizontally through the pillar itself.

The stone parted like cheese.

Gesbiek ran the list in his head while the blade came through: Freeze too expensive, Possession needs a living target he can outrank, Vanish useless against something already looking at him.

[CLIP: 15%]

He turned and threw himself backwards into the wall.

The wall went transparent in his sight, wireframe grid showing him the thickness of it, and then it went cold and slick and static and his atoms went between its atoms.

The axe finished its arc through empty air.

"WHERE ARE YOU?"

For about a second and a half, Gesbiek was inside the architecture of the world.

He could see the far side of the textures. Grey unrendered nothing, meshes, the boundaries of the room defined as flat planes with no substance to them at all. Through the wall he could see Grolm hacking at stone, looking for a body that was not there.

[WARNING: INVALID POSITION]
[EJECTING IN 3, 2]

He scuttled sideways through solid rock, ten feet along, navigating by wireframe, and pushed out.

He came through behind a heap of looted chests and landed on the floor and was immediately, violently sick.

[MANA: 1%]

One percent.

Out in the room, Grolm had stopped looking and started demolishing. Chests, tables, the last of the pillars, everything with mass in it going to pieces in a systematic sweep.

He was not hunting Gesbiek any more. He was removing the geometry that kept Gesbiek alive.

Gesbiek wiped his mouth and got his back against the treasure and made himself breathe.

He had survived three killing blows. He had done no damage at all.

The Totem stood behind the throne, and Grolm stood between, holding the middle of the room the way a large animal holds a doorway.

Gesbiek needed something with mass in it. Not a weapon. Weapons broke on that skin.

He threw his senses across the room and let the Sight tag everything that was not rubble.

[ELITE SKELETAL REMAINS]
[QUANTITY: 12 | AVERAGE WEIGHT: 180 LBS]

They were in the corners and under the wreckage of the tables, picked clean and stacked where they had been discarded.

Ogres. Hobgoblins. The Lieutenants who had come for the throne over two winters and had been eaten for their trouble, one at a time, until a second heart grew.

Twelve of them. Heavy, and numerous, and already inside the room.

Gesbiek looked at the bones of everything Grolm had consumed to become what he was, and then at the menu, and at the skill sitting in it that he had never once had a use for.

[REVIVAL]

He could not fight Grolm.

He was in no position to say whether the Lieutenants could, either. But they were not being asked, and at this point in the evening none of them were in a condition to object.