SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts Chapter 621

Not to the targeting — it could not meaningfully protect the damaged shoulder without restricting its own arm’s function beyond what its combat logic apparently accepted as a trade-off. It adapted to his approach angles, the ones he had been using to reach the shoulder, and adjusted its own positioning to make those angles require more commitment from him before he could execute them.

He found new angles.

The ribs next. The golem’s torso had less articulation than its limbs, the stone construction of the main body more monolithic and therefore more vulnerable to the specific cracking force that had worked on the shoulder, just requiring more strikes to initiate the crack where the material was thicker.

He initiated it.

Two strikes to start it.

Three more to extend it.

The golem hit him twice during those five strikes. The first he took on his forearm guard, the reinforcement holding but the force communicating itself through the bone beneath in a way he filed under later consideration. The second he half-evaded, the edge of the strike catching his shoulder and rotating him, and he used the rotation rather than fighting it, turning the displacement into a pivot that gave him the angle for the sixth strike.

The sixth strike landed at the rib crack’s deepest point.

The sound of it was different from the previous ones.

Not a crack initiating or extending. A different sound, deeper, the sound of something that had accumulated enough damage that the next force applied to it was not extending the crack but reaching through it, the structural integrity that had been maintaining across the accumulated damage finally giving in a specific section.

A chunk of the golem’s torso displaced.

Not fell off — the construction was cohesive enough that even displaced sections maintained their connection to the whole. But the displacement changed the golem’s mass distribution and the golem had to account for the change, its movement adjusting slightly, the precision of its strikes losing the specific quality that the intact structure had provided.

He pressed.

The bad feeling had been with him since the golem revealed itself.

It had not improved as the fight developed.

He was winning. He knew that. The golem’s accumulated damage was significant, the shoulder crack now deep enough that the arm’s range of movement was visibly reduced, the torso displacement affecting its center of gravity, the map of damage growing across the golem’s form strike by strike in the one-directional way of a fight he was not losing.

The bad feeling was not about losing.

It was about winning.

The specific, formless quality of it that he had been unable to identify since the golem stood up from its rock configuration was not improving with the fight’s progress. If anything, the closer the fight moved toward its conclusion, the more present the feeling became, the sense of it growing in the background of every exchange, quiet but persistent and attached to nothing he could look at directly.

Something about defeating the guardian was going to produce a result he had not accounted for.

He did not know what.

He also did not have the option of not defeating it. The altar was behind him, the blood on his palm still wet, his hand having been within a breath of completing the final registration when the earthen spear had arrived. The golem was between him and the altar in the specific sense that the golem being alive and functional in this plain meant the altar was not safely approachable.

He had to defeat it.

He accelerated.

Not recklessly. But with the specific decision to increase the rate of engagement rather than maintaining the careful, managed pace he had been running. The golem’s reduced mobility from the accumulated damage made the acceleration viable — he could get to more of the angles more quickly now that the arm’s range was limited and the torso displacement was affecting the golem’s weight management.

He went to the shoulder again.

The crack was through now, not a surface fracture but a full structural compromise from the impact point down through the joint’s depth. He put two strikes into it in sequence, the second arriving before the golem had fully processed the first, and the joint gave.

The arm’s function ended.

The golem did not stop.

One arm gone and it came at him with the other, the weight of the remaining arm unchanged, the force of its strike not reduced by the loss because the remaining arm was intact and stone did not lose force from asymmetry the way biological bodies lost force from injury.

He took the strike on his guard.

His arms screamed at him.

He took it anyway and came back immediately with the strike to the torso’s displaced section, the third and fourth strikes in the sequence he had been building, and the displaced section went further.

The golem stumbled.

It corrected.

Came at him.

He hit it five more times across the next sequence of exchanges, each strike finding the map of accumulated damage rather than intact stone, each one taking the previous one’s progress and extending it, the golem’s structural integrity decreasing in the specific way of something that had been absorbing more than it could indefinitely sustain.

The bad feeling peaked.

He threw his full weight behind the next strike, the palm flat, the reinforcement at maximum available, the target the deepest crack on the torso where the displacement had been growing.

The impact was different from all the previous ones.

The sound was different.

The golem shattered.

Not exploded — shattered, the specific mechanical conclusion of a constructed form that had exceeded the damage threshold its material could maintain, every crack that had been present across the whole of its body reaching through to all the other cracks simultaneously, the accumulated damage network connecting into a whole that expressed itself as the form’s complete structural failure.

Pieces.

The golem was in pieces.

Large pieces, small pieces, the specific distribution of debris that shattered stone produced, scattered across the plain around the point where the form had been standing.

Dust settled.

He stood in it.

His arms were very present in his awareness. His left side with the cracked ribs was making an argument he was not able to dismiss the way he had been dismissing it during the fight. His shoulder from the edge-of-strike hit was going to need attention before it was not a concern.

He looked at the pieces.

The bad feeling was at its worst it had been since the golem stood up.

He turned back toward the altar.

It was still there. Undamaged — the earthen spear it had thrown at the beginning had chipped the altar’s edge but the altar itself was intact, the carved script present, the resonance of it reaching him from three meters away.

He looked at the altar.

Then at the plain around him.

Then at the forest’s edge in the direction of the center, where the seal was.

The bad feeling did not name itself.

It just persisted and so he walked to the altar.

The pieces of the first golem were still settling when the plain moved.

Not in one place. Across the full expanse of the rock cluster, across the wider distribution of the strange-shaped stones he had been reading since he crossed the grass border, across every section of the plain where a shape had registered as irregular or oddly positioned or simply wrong in a way he had noted and filed and moved past.

All of it was moving.

The sound of it was not loud. Stone moving from a stationary position did not produce much noise on its own, the slow unfolding of mass that had been still for a very long time expressing itself as a low, grinding presence rather than any kind of announcement. But it was everywhere simultaneously, and everywhere simultaneously was its own kind of loud.

He stood at the altar and watched it happen.

The shapes clarified.

Not quickly — the process of a golem unfolding from its resting configuration was not fast, the mass of each one requiring time to arrange itself into the standing form that the first one had arrived in. But it was consistent, each shape going through the same process, the same sequence of internal rearrangement that produced a form with arms and a torso and the specific, weighted stance of something that had just committed to being upright.

He counted.

Three.

Five.

Nine.

Twelve.

Thirteen.

He stopped when the movement stopped, the full count settling at thirteen additional golems distributed across the plain around him. The ones at the far edge had the distance of their original positions. The ones closer to the altar cluster were already within the range that made their intent clear.

He understood the bad feeling now.

The specific, unresolvable quality of the premonition had been pointing at this — not at the first golem as a threat in itself, but at the first golem as the representative of something larger.

The reason he had not been able to identify what the feeling was attached to was the same reason he had not known the rocks were golems until one of them threw an earthen spear at him.