SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts Chapter 619

Damien watched them as Aquila descended.

He looked at them the way he looked at most things that produced an ambiguous read — not with the full active attention of someone expecting threat, but with the passive, gathering awareness of someone who was collecting information and had not yet decided what to do with it.

Aquila landed at the plain’s inner edge.

The griffin’s feet found the soil carefully, the landing precise in the way Aquila was precise about things involving terrain it had not previously encountered. It stood with its weight distributed evenly, its golden eyes moving across the plain with the sweep of something that was doing the same gathering Damien was doing and was less patient about keeping the concern it found out of its posture.

Damien dismounted.

He stood on the plain’s soil and felt it underfoot, the specific quality of ground that had not been walked on recently, the surface intact in the way that surfaces that had been undisturbed were intact.

He looked at the altar’s direction.

The resonance was clear from the ground, clearer than it had been from altitude, the carved script’s essence signature reaching him directly now without the distance diluting it. He read the direction and looked across the plain toward it.

The rocks between his position and the altar’s location were not arranged in any helpful way. Some of them were large enough that going around rather than between was the sensible path. He moved that way, picking his route through the stones with the unhurried attention of someone who was not in a rush but was also not interested in adding unnecessary distance to what was already a longer approach than a clear plain would have been.

Aquila followed.

The griffin moved between the rocks with less grace than it would have managed in open terrain, the wing clearance requiring adjustments that Aquila made without complaint but with the visible attention of something monitoring exactly how much space it had on each side.

The rocks were quiet.

He moved through them.

The altar was at the far end of the plain’s interior, closer to the center than the edge, surrounded by the cluster of larger rocks that he had read from altitude as the densest concentration. Up close, the cluster was more significant than the overhead view had communicated — the rocks here were the tallest, some of them twice his height, their shapes the most irregular of anything on the plain.

And among them, the smallest.

A flat-topped stone, barely knee height, its surface different from the others in the specific way that a carved surface was different from a natural one when you knew what to look for. The script on it was finer than any of the previous altars had carried, the lines close together and precisely placed, the visible evidence of a construction that had been done with more care than what had been in the strongholds.

The last altar.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he took out the blade.

His palm was well-acquainted with this process by now, the cut coming quickly and without the hesitation of someone unfamiliar with what they were doing to themselves. The blood welled immediately, the familiar warmth of it, and he crouched beside the altar and pressed his hand against its surface.

The blood spread across the carved script.

He waited.

At the plain’s furthest edge, something moved.

He was not certain he had seen it. The light was the late-afternoon quality of a plain without canopy cover, the shadows falling differently than they did in the forest, and the rocks at the plain’s edge were the ones he had noted as strange-shaped from the beginning. The movement he thought he had seen could have been the light changing on a surface that was not flat.

Could have been.

He kept his hand on the altar and looked at the far edge.

Nothing moved again.

Beside him, Aquila shifted.

Not the adjustment of a creature moving for comfort. A shift of weight in the specific direction that Aquila shifted its weight when its attention had become active rather than passive, the griffin’s body orienting toward something it had registered through whichever combination of senses it was using in this moment.

The griffin was antsy.

That was the word for what Aquila was doing, the specific quality of a creature whose instincts were presenting it with information that had not yet resolved into a clear enough picture for action but was unambiguous enough to change its posture.

Something was up.

He pressed his bloodied hand more firmly against the altar’s surface and looked at the rock cluster at the plain’s far edge with the full active attention he had been keeping in reserve.

The rocks were the same shapes they had always been.

Or they were not.

He was not certain which was true, and not being certain was itself information. He had been looking at the rocks since he crossed the plain’s inner edge and had read them as irregular and strange and natural-in-origin. He was looking at them now and one section of the far cluster had a quality that either had always been present and he had not noticed it, or had not been present and had arrived while his attention had been on the altar.

He kept his hand on the script.

The script was doing nothing yet. The altar had not activated, had not produced the shimmer that preceded the glow, had not responded to his blood in any of the ways the previous six had responded.

He was still waiting.

The air moved.

Not wind. The specific, directional movement of displaced air that a fast-moving object produced when it crossed space at sufficient speed. He read the direction and the speed and the specific origin point in the fraction of a second between the air moving and the object arriving.

He moved his hand.

The earthen spear hit the altar’s flat surface where his palm had been.

Not a glancing impact. A direct, clean, precisely aimed strike, the spear’s point driving into the stone rather than deflecting off it, the force of it enough to chip the altar’s edge in the specific way that significant force did to old stone.

It had been aimed at his hand.

He stood.

Turned.

The rock cluster at the far edge of the plain was no longer a cluster of rocks in the arrangement he had been reading it as since he arrived.

One of them had moved.

Standing was the word, because standing was what it was doing — upright, on limbs that had not been visible as limbs when they were pressed against the surrounding stones, at a height that was the natural result of something very large unfolding from a position it had been maintaining for an indeterminate period.

Humanoid.

The shape of it carried the proportions of a human form scaled to dimensions that a human form was not meant to occupy. Arms. Legs. A torso with the specific width and density of something made from the same material as the plain around it, the stone-and-soil construction of a body that had not grown but had been built.

A golem.

Damien looked at it.

His hand was still extended from the motion of moving it away from the altar’s surface, the cut palm facing outward, the blood still present on it.

He looked at the golem the way he looked at things he was reading.

It did not read cleanly.

The grade was there — significant, the presence of it carrying weight that registered clearly enough in the ambient field. But what the grade was attached to, what the nature of the thing producing the weight was, did not resolve the way a mana beast resolved or a demon resolved or any living creature he had encountered in this forest resolved.

It was not alive in any of those ways.

It was not not-alive either.

It was something that his senses were reading and not finishing the reading of, the way a word looked familiar but could not be identified because a single letter was wrong and the wrongness was small enough that it took effort to find.

He had a bad feeling.

Not from the grade. Not from the size, not from the earthen spear that had been aimed at his hand with a precision that told him immediately whoever or whatever had thrown it could throw things precisely.

From the not-finishing.

From the read that would not complete.

From the specific quality of something that did not belong to any of the categories his experience had built, standing at the far edge of the plain where the seventh altar was, looking at him with whatever the golem used to look at things.

Aquila was very still beside him.

That was its own piece of information.

He kept looking at the golem.

The golem kept looking at him.

Neither of them moved.