SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts Chapter 623

The sound was the shatter-sound.

The same sound as the first guardian, the network of accumulated cracks connecting across the whole structure simultaneously, the form that had been holding together through the damage of four strikes finally resolving the question of whether it could continue to do so.

Debris.

The second golem shattered.

He was already moving through the space the shatter had cleared, the brief zone of open ground that the fallen golem’s position had occupied, using the geometry of the shattered golem as the closest thing to cover available in a plainfield without terrain.

Twelve remaining.

He was breathing harder than he had been a minute ago.

The shoulder was decided — it was going to be a problem. Not immediately debilitating. But a factor, the range and power of his right arm’s strikes reduced from what they would have been without the hit, the specific consequence of a full-committed golem punch landing cleanly.

He managed it.

The surrounding tightened further as he moved.

Twelve golems, all Grade Three, all functional, all maintaining the geometry that was their only real strategy. The strategy was working — he was taking damage at a rate that was not sustainable indefinitely, the exchange rate of his mobility advantage against their numerical advantage running in a direction that eventually had only one conclusion.

Eventually.

He was not there yet.

He found the next target in the ring and began the damage map again, the first strike initiating a crack at the shoulder joint the way the first one had gone against the original guardian. The map would be faster this time — he had the sequence, he knew the points, the execution did not require the same discovery period that the first fight had required.

Faster.

But twelve was twelve.

Around him, the plainfield was exactly what it was — open, flat, without terrain, without cover, without anything except thirteen golems of which eleven were fully functional and one was cracking under the systematic attention he was beginning to give it and one was debris.

The bad feeling was gone.

Not because the situation had improved.

Because what the feeling had been pointing at had arrived and was currently surrounding him on all sides, and dread about something present had a different quality from dread about something approaching.

He was in it now.

He kept fighting.

Eleven golems.

That was the count when he felt the engagement shift. Not in the golems themselves — they did not change strategy, did not accelerate, did not do anything that announced a change.

The shift was in the plainfield’s geometry, the specific arrangement of eleven standing golems around one fighting person having developed, across the minutes of the engagement, into a configuration that was tighter than the one it had started as.

He was aware of this.

He had been managing it, the way he managed the surrounding throughout — moving when the ring tightened too much in one section, using the brief open space created by a destroyed golem’s position before the remaining ones closed over it, keeping the geometry from reaching the state where exits stopped existing.

He was managing.

He was also managing the shoulder, the cracked ribs, the accumulation of the hits that had landed with the golem’s mountain weight across the engagement. The managing was real. The list of things being managed was growing.

He put a third strike into the golem he had been working the damage map on, the crack at the shoulder joint now deep enough that the arm was showing the same reduced range the first golem he had fully destroyed had shown before the fourth strike took it apart. Two more strikes to this one, properly placed, and it would shatter.

He set for the fourth.

The golem behind him moved.

He registered it peripherally — the golem that had been maintaining the ring’s rear section, holding its position at the outer edge of the surrounding rather than closing. It had been there consistently throughout the engagement, patient, not participating in the individual exchanges the closer golems were running.

It was participating now.

It covered the distance faster than the others had been moving. Not the slow, deliberate advance of the ring closing. A committed approach, the full weight-forward movement that the first guardian had used in its initial charge, but this one with the additional speed of something that had been still and was now not.

He read it.

Started to move.

The golem’s fists came together.

Both of them, the specific configuration of two hands clasped into a single impact surface, the mass of both arms combined into one point of force. The motion of it was not a punch. It was a hammer, the assembled weight of both limbs driving downward at the back of his head as he turned.

He had not fully turned.

The impact hit.

The back of his head and the base of his neck received the full committed weight of a Grade Three golem’s combined fist strike and the experience of receiving it was not the managed, distributed experience of the hits he had been tracking through the engagement. It was immediate and total, the force bypassing all the managed variables and arriving at the specific, vulnerable location that the assembled strike had been aimed at.

The world went sideways.

Not his body — his body stayed upright for a fraction of a second longer than the world did, the physical structure of him still vertical while what he was using to navigate that structure went through a brief, catastrophic recalibration.

Disoriented was the clinical word.

Inside the experience it was different from clinical. The plainfield’s horizon was in the wrong place. The positions of the surrounding golems registered but through a layer of noise, the smooth continuous tracking of the engagement interrupted by the impact’s effect on the instrument doing the tracking.

He tried to move and moved in the wrong direction.

Not far. Not falling. But wrong, the intended step going somewhere different from where he had decided to step, the gap between intention and execution that disorientation produced expressing itself in two steps that carried him sideways instead of backward.

The golems read it immediately.

That was the specific quality of what happened next that told him something he had not yet confirmed about the golem collective — they could communicate, or they could read the field collectively in a way that produced the same result as communication, because the response to his disoriented steps was not one golem moving but three in coordination.

The one to his left closed first.

Its strike was aimed not at the locations he had been blocking throughout the engagement. Not the torso, not the arms. The abdomen, the specific targeting of a location where the disorientation’s effect on his blocking accuracy was most exploitable, where the gap between his guard’s intended position and its actual position from the disoriented steps was widest.

He read it a beat late.

The guard was where it should have been if he had moved correctly. He had not moved correctly.

The strike connected.

The force of it was the upward kick of a golem whose leg had the same committed weight as its arms, the mass of the construction concentrated into the joint’s motion and driven into his abdomen with the specific, total application of everything available.

He left the ground.

Not from choice. Not from any managed pivot or redirected momentum. Physics, applied to him, with more force than he was providing resistance to in that particular direction.

He traveled.

The plainfield passed beneath him in the specific, unpleasant way that the plainfield passed beneath someone who had been sent across it involuntarily. The rocks that he had been navigating around throughout the engagement were different from this altitude, the small ones and the medium ones and the taller ones with the strange shapes going past beneath him.

He landed.

The impact with the ground was not clean. Nothing about the landing was managed — he hit the soil with the force that the golem’s kick had carried him here with, minus whatever the air resistance of the journey had removed, and the soil received it through his back and the back of his legs and the parts of him that met it in the order they met it.

He lay still for a moment.

Not unconscious. Present, aware, with the full information of what had just happened available to him and the specific inability to act on any of it that came from a body that had just received two significant impacts in quick succession and was in the process of processing the second one.

He breathed.

The first breath did not work properly. The kick’s impact to the abdomen had involved the muscles that breathing used and those muscles were currently in the specific condition of muscles that had just been used as the delivery point for a Grade Three golem kick, which was not the condition of muscles that cooperated with ordinary function.

He breathed again.

Still not right.

The plainfield around him was quiet in the brief interval between his landing and what came next — the golems had not crossed the distance yet, the flight having covered ground that their walking was still addressing.

He breathed a third time.

Better.

Not good. Better.

He focused on the horizon.