SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts Chapter 620

Neither of them moved for a long moment.

The golem stood at the far edge of the plain’s rock cluster and Damien stood at the altar and the plain between them was quiet in the specific way that the space between two things about to make contact was quiet — not peaceful, not restful, but compressed, the silence of something that had not yet started but had already decided it was going to.

He read the golem again.

Still the same incomplete resolution. The grade present, significant, the weight of it in the ambient field clear enough that he could measure it without difficulty. But the nature beneath the grade remained the thing his read kept reaching for and not finding. Not alive, not dead, not any of the categories his experience with living things and dead things and the various arrangements between them had built in him.

The golem moved first.

Not fast — that was the first thing he registered. The speed of it was not the surprising element. What was surprising was the quality of the movement, the specific character of how the golem covered the ground between its position and his. Every large creature he had fought moved with the weight-management of something that had to account for its own mass in how it applied force. The golem did not manage its weight. It committed it. Every step was the full application of everything it was toward the direction it was going, no efficiency of motion, no economy of force.

Just forward.

He moved sideways.

The golem’s first strike arrived where he had been standing and hit the ground there with a force that the ground communicated upward through his feet despite the distance he had put between himself and the impact point. The shockwave was not the ripple of a heavy impact. It was the specific, total compression of ground that had received something it had not been designed to receive and had no mechanism for disputing.

A small crater.

From a punch.
𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

He looked at the crater.

Then at the golem, which had already reset and was reading him with whatever it used to read things.

He understood several things simultaneously.

The golem was the guardian of this altar. Not constructed for this moment, not appearing because he had arrived and it had been waiting for a reason. It had been here when the altar was built. It had been here when the plain was what it was before the Forest of Twin Disasters was the Forest of Twin Disasters. The rocks he had been reading as natural were not natural. They were the golem at rest, the specific configuration it adopted when it was not doing what it was currently doing.

It had been sitting here for a very long time.

Its function was to make the altar almost inaccessible.

Not completely inaccessible — something that was completely inaccessible was not a challenge, it was a wall. The Ancient Ones who had built this Ascension Land had built the altar with a guardian, which meant the altar was intended to be accessed, by someone who could get past the guardian.

He was going to have to get past the guardian.

He assessed it properly, the full combat read he applied to serious engagements rather than the passive awareness he had been maintaining since he landed.

The golem’s grade was Grade Three.

Upper tier of it, not peak but well into the range that made the difference between a difficult fight and an impossible one a matter of what he brought to it rather than simply what it was. The golem’s physical construction gave it mass that a Grade Three mana beast or demon of equivalent grade did not have, the stone-and-soil composition providing a durability that living tissue did not provide.

It hit like a mountain.

That was going to be the specific problem of this fight.

He moved toward it.

The second strike came faster than the first had, the golem having read that his sideways evasion from the initial approach was his natural response and adjusting the angle of its second strike to cover the path he had taken. Not by being faster. By being at the right angle before he moved, the intelligence of something that thought ahead of its own movement rather than simply directing its movement.

It fought like a human.

That was the other thing he registered in the first several exchanges. Not the wild, instinctive combat of a mana beast or the calculated but essentially animal intelligence of a demon in a fight. The golem’s strikes had the structure of someone who had been trained. Not trained in a specific technique — he did not recognize the style in the way he would have recognized a named school or a regional approach. Trained in the principles. Cover. Position. The geometric understanding of what being in one place meant for what your opponent could do from their place.

He blocked the second strike.

The impact traveled through his guard, through his arm, through his shoulder, through his spine, and distributed itself across his entire body in the specific way that very heavy impacts with insufficient mitigation distributed themselves. Not one point of pain. A systemic experience, everything in the impact’s path registering it simultaneously.

He stepped back.

His arm was intact. He confirmed this immediately and specifically, because the arm that had blocked the strike needed to be functional and the confirmation needed to be quick. Functional. Painful in the way that arms that had just blocked something at this weight were painful, but functional.

He came back in.

Not with the palm entry of his mana beast technique. Against stone there was no core to extract, no soft tissue to pierce, no biological function to interrupt by removing a specific component. Against the golem, force was the instrument. Direct force, applied through his fist, reinforced to the degree that his current reserves allowed, directed at the points that stone structures showed weakness when force was applied correctly.

The joints.

Where the golem’s limbs connected to its torso were the natural points of structural weakness in any constructed form. Not soft, not unprotected, but carrying the specific vulnerability of a junction between separate masses that had to allow movement and therefore could not be as monolithic as the masses themselves.

His fist found the shoulder joint.

The impact produced a result that was not the same as hitting the main body — a crack, fine, running from the impact point outward in the specific pattern that stone cracked under focused force.

The golem registered it.

Not through pain — it did not have pain in any form he could identify. Through the functional consequence, the slight change in how the shoulder moved after the crack that indicated the crack was real.

The golem struck him.

He was not entirely out of the way.

The strike caught his left side, not full force — he had managed some evasion, enough that the full committed weight of the golem’s arm did not arrive at his body. What arrived was the edge of it, the reduced force of a strike that had been partially avoided.

Partially avoided was still significant.

He went sideways. Not from choice, from physics, his body’s response to the force that had contacted it. He found the ground with his feet after two steps and stopped himself with the specific controlled stop of someone who had been trained not to let an impact turn into a fall.

He checked his left side.

Ribs present. Painful. Not broken, or not more than cracked, and cracked was manageable.

He came back in.

This was the character of the fight that established itself in the first several exchanges and maintained itself throughout. He hit harder than the golem could take from the places he was able to reach. The golem hit harder than he could take from the angles it could achieve. Neither of them was ending this quickly. The golem had more structural mass to damage through before it stopped functioning. He had more mobility to avoid taking the full weight of its strikes.

The exchange rate was the question.

He was landing more cleanly than he was being hit. The golem’s telegraph was its weight — anything that heavy had to commit to its direction before it moved, and commitment before movement was readable if you were paying attention. He was paying attention. He evaded more than he blocked, and blocked more efficiently than the golem’s mass made it capable of evading his strikes.

But the ones that landed on him landed heavily.

The crack on the golem’s shoulder joint was the beginning of a map. He went back to it. The same joint, the same point, each strike finding the crack that the previous one had deepened and extending it further. The principle of targeting a damaged point was simple — a crack already present required less force to extend than intact stone required to crack.

Damien extended it but the golem simply adapted.