SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts Chapter 622

He could not sense them through their essence.

That was the specific strangeness of the read. Every living thing produced essence in a way that his senses could detect. Every constructed thing that had essence built into its function produced it too, in a different quality but still detectable. The golems produced something — the weight in the ambient field that gave him their grade — but the specific character of it, the signature that would have told him what they were, was absent.

As if the essence moving through them was enclosed.

Contained inside the stone in a way that the stone’s surface did not allow to pass outward for detection.

He had not sensed them as golems. He had sensed them as rocks with unusual ambient weight.

Which was, from the Ancient Ones’ perspective, probably the design.

He looked at the thirteen golems and the thirteen golems stood in the distributed arrangement of things that had been doing this for a very long time and had an established approach to the problem of whatever arrived at the seventh altar.

Surrounding was the word.

They had not rushed. Were not rushing. The arrangement they occupied was not aggressive in the way of something charging. It was deliberate, the specific geometry of a group that understood that surrounding something and then reducing the space of the surrounding was more effective than simply approaching it from one direction.

He exhaled.

The sound of it was not a sigh in the resigned sense. The frustration was real — he had been very clear with himself about not wanting additional confrontations before the altar was activated, and thirteen golems were thirteen more confrontations than he had wanted. But underneath the frustration was the other thing, the thing he recognized in himself when the circumstances produced it.

Anticipation.

The golem fight had been the first close-range, pure-physical engagement he had been in since the demon captain in the third stronghold. The captain that had escalated with every exchange, that had nearly killed him with the blow he had moved just enough to survive, that had pushed him to the Luton strategy and the redirected essence combination. That fight had been the most demanding close-range engagement he had been in.

These golems were not the captain.

But thirteen of them, all Grade Three, all with the specific heavy striking that the first one had demonstrated, was a problem with a different character than a single opponent. Not harder in the way that a higher grade was harder. Harder in the way that numbers made things harder, the specific problem of managing multiple simultaneous threats in a space where there was no terrain to use and no summons engaged to create the chaos that gave close-range fighting its breathing room.

He wanted to see how far he could get.

No summons.

Just him.

If it proved too dangerous — and he had a clear threshold in his own mind for what too dangerous meant, a threshold that had been established by experience in engagements that had reached the wrong side of the calculation — he could summon his beasts and end the plainfield decisively. He had that option. Fenrir. Cerbe. Aquila. Lin. The resources available to him, combined, would make this plainfield a different problem.

He wanted to try it without them first.

The nearest golem closed the distance.

He moved toward it rather than waiting.

The decision to attack rather than defend was the specific instinct of someone who had learned that letting a group set the terms of an engagement by allowing them to fully establish their positioning was worse than the cost of pressing before the positioning was complete. Two of the thirteen were still in the process of fully unfolding from their rock configurations. Two fewer upright golems in the first exchange was worth the forward commitment.
𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

His fist drove into the nearest one’s torso before it had fully closed the distance, the force arriving at a slight angle that took the golem’s mass sideways rather than directly back. The impact was the same systemic, distributed weight as the first golem had delivered when it hit him — he felt it through his fist, through the wrist, up the arm — but the crack that ran from the impact point outward was real.

One strike in.

Two of the remaining twelve converged on his position.

He had expected one. The second was coming from an angle he had not been tracking, the golem having moved during the exchange’s focus on the first target and arrived at the flanking position while his attention was committed.

He read it a beat late.

The flanking golem’s strike caught his right shoulder with the specific, unmanageable weight of a full-committed golem punch at close range. The full weight this time, not the edge, and the full weight was what the full weight was.

He went down to one knee.

Not from pain alone. From physics. The force of the impact carrying through him and requiring his body to distribute it across the largest possible base, the knee finding the ground as the most efficient way to redirect the downward component of the force without falling.

He was back up in less than a second.

The first golem he had struck was still functional, the crack real but not the accumulated damage of the fight with the original guardian — one strike was not the end of anything at this grade. It came at him with the same committed forward motion as the first guardian had used, the strike already built before it arrived.

He moved.

Found the angle that put the first golem between him and the second one, using the first as cover against the second’s follow-up while he struck the first’s crack point a second time.

The third golem was arriving from his left.

He committed the second strike, felt the crack deepen, and pivoted before the third could reach its optimal striking position. The pivot gave him the angle for a short, focused strike at the third’s arriving arm before it completed its swing — not the torso, not the structural damage campaign he had run against the first guardian, just the arm, just the deflect, just buying the fraction of a second that created the option for where he went next.

The fourth golem.

He had been tracking four simultaneously and the fifth was entering the inner ring of the arrangement, the surrounding having tightened during the exchanges of the first minute without requiring any of the individual golems to move dramatically. They were just closer now.

He hit the first golem a third time.

The crack went through.

A section of the torso displaced, smaller than what had happened with the first guardian at the same point in the damage progression, because the strikes had been less fully committed with the secondary threats requiring management. But displaced.

The golem’s movement changed quality.

He read the change.

Not ended. Still functional. But changed, the displacement affecting the mass distribution in the specific way that he had read from the first guardian’s damaged torso. Slightly slower. Slightly less precise in the direction of its strikes.

He had one golem meaningfully damaged with twelve functional ones closing the surrounding.

The right shoulder from the flanking strike was very present in his awareness. Not the managed pain of something he had acknowledged and filed. More immediate than that, the kind of signal that required monitoring rather than filing because the question of whether it was going to become a problem rather than an inconvenience was still open.

He monitored it.

And kept moving.

The exchanges continued.

The golems did not tire, did not adjust their strategy, did not respond to the individual outcomes of individual strikes the way that intelligent opponents responded. They simply maintained the pressure of the surrounding, each one following the same forward-committed approach regardless of what the others were doing or what had happened to any individual member of their number.

Their advantage was arithmetic.

His attention was one attention managing thirteen targets. Their attention — if the golems had anything that could be called attention — was thirteen separate applications of the same intent at one target. He could not track all thirteen completely and fight any of them effectively simultaneously. The gaps in his tracking were the gaps their strikes found.

He was taking hits.

Not constantly. Not without managing the rate. But consistently enough that the rate was something he was tracking alongside the fight’s other variables, the accumulation of impact from a group that delivered its blows with mountain weight being a different problem from the accumulation of impact from a single opponent that hit the same way.

He found the angle on the damaged golem for a fourth strike.

This one he put everything available into.

Not sustainably — he could not afford to commit fully with twelve others in the proximity. But for one strike, the full reinforcement available directed at the specific point on the damaged golem where the displacement had been growing, through the angle that gave the strike the most direct path to the deepest section of the existing damage.

Crack!!