Chapter 227: The Shield Beneath It

Wave Nineteen took the last of the comfortable margin.

It was mixed, and it was fast, and it went on for four and a half minutes. They won it, and by the end Glitch was carrying a shoulder contusion and Flicker had a wing that was not extending fully, and both of them were somewhere under forty percent.

[Glitch — stamina 36% | contusion, right shoulder | abrasion, left flank]

[Flicker — stamina 33% | wing strain, left]

Not good. Not dead.

Jin looked at it and made the assessment honestly: they could not win a long fight and they could win a short one if he opened it correctly.

[Predator’s Tempo — Stage 4 active]

[Checkpoint — Wave 20]

The gate opened onto a wide arena with a raised central ground and open sightlines.

Something enormous was already on it.

[Stonebind Tortoise]

It came up out of the middle of the floor rather than walking in — a low, broad, shell-backed thing the size of a transport, and as it settled, six stone pylons rose around the arena in a rough ring. They were not decorative. Jin could see the ground stress around each base.

The pylons divided the open floor into lanes without actually blocking any of them. Glitch could reach the center quickly, but crossing from one side of the ring to the other would expose him to anything coming down from above.

Then something crossed overhead, fast, and began to circle.

[Galecrest Raptor]

Two health indicators appeared side by side. Nothing explained them.

Jin watched the Raptor complete one circuit and did the arithmetic on its speed.

That’s four stages of Tempo on something that was already an aerial. It’ll be on us before Glitch finishes a turn.

And the other one’s slow, on the ground, in Glitch’s element.

The read was reasonable and he made it out loud.

"Flicker, stay mobile on the outer paths — you’re not fighting the Raptor, you’re not being where it dives. Glitch, hold the center. When it comes low, we punish it."

The Raptor turned over on one wing and came down.

Beneath them, the Tortoise put its head down, and every one of the six pylons began to hum.

The first dive nearly worked, and that was the problem.

Jin read the dive from the Raptor’s angle and shifted Glitch off the line at the last workable instant. The Raptor tore through the space he had left and had to level out four meters up.

Flicker was already at the outer edge of that path.

She hit it as it passed, a full committed strike into the wing joint, and Jin saw the health indicator move.

Then it stopped moving.

Not immediately. It dropped a visible amount and then a portion of it came back, over about a second and a half, and Jin felt something travel through the ground at the same moment because Glitch felt it and pushed it up the bond — a pulse running from the arena floor outward, and then one of the six pylons flaring hard.

What.

"Again — same setup."

They ran it again and it took ninety seconds and the same thing happened. Flicker got a clean strike into the wing and the damage arrived and then a third of it went somewhere else.

Jin’s first theory was regeneration, because it was the obvious one, and he discarded it inside two exchanges because the recovery did not happen while the Raptor was high. It happened at the instant of the hit.

His second theory was better.

It’s not healing. Something’s taking part of the hit for it.

He watched the next exchange without giving orders, which cost him position and bought him the answer.

Flicker struck. Force went into the ground. Glitch, on the connected center, reported the whole path of it — down through the floor, across to the nearest active pylon, and into the Tortoise’s shell, which absorbed it and dispersed it.

The Tortoise had not moved for the entire fight. It was sitting in the middle of the arena with its head down, driving power through six anchors, and one of those anchors was carrying part of every hit that landed on its partner.

"It’s the Tortoise," Jin said. "It’s shielding the Raptor through the ground."

Knowing it did not fix it, which was the part he learned over the following four minutes.

He sent Glitch at the Tortoise and the Tortoise raised a wall.

It came out of the floor in about a second — a section of stone two meters high across the whole approach — and Glitch had to go around it, and while he was going around it the Raptor came down on Flicker at four stages of Tempo and she barely got out from under it.

"Back — Glitch, back to center."

He sent Flicker at an anchor and hit the second problem.

She reached the nearest pylon and attacked it and cracked the visible stone, and the flare moved. Not to the pylon she had damaged — to a different one, on the far side of the arena, and Jin realized that whatever was actually carrying the load was underneath, and the stone he could see was the top of it.

Six pylons and I can’t tell which one’s live.

Glitch could. Glitch could feel exactly which buried connection was carrying, at any given moment, and he was reporting it, and by the time Jin had translated the impression into a direction and given the order, Flicker was forty meters from the right one with a Raptor overhead.

That was the whole fight, right there. The information existed. It existed inside one avatar and needed to act inside the other one, and the pipe between them was Jin, and Jin was too slow.

He tried the split anyway because there was nothing else to try.

"Glitch, force it low and keep it low. Flicker, anchors — I’ll call them."

It worked once. Glitch got the Raptor into a dive he could contest and held its attention long enough for Flicker to reach the pylon Jin had called and break the external structure entirely, and for about eleven seconds the flare went out of it and did not come back.

[Anchor structure destroyed — 1 of 6]

Then the Tortoise rerouted through another one and the shield came back up.

And now it knew where Flicker was going.

The ground attacked her on the way to the second anchor — a ridge of stone driving up under her line — and she avoided it and lost her footing on the debris and the Raptor was already coming.

Glitch went for her.

He got there. That was the cost: he crossed thirty meters at stamina he did not have and put himself under the dive, and Harden came up, and the impact took him off his feet and he got up much slower than he had gone down.

[Glitch — stamina 14%]

They lasted another two minutes.

Flicker went first. She was heading for the third pylon and the Tempo had shortened the Raptor’s approach past what her wing strain allowed, and it caught her in the transition — mid-turn, changing direction after an anchor attempt, exactly where Jin had noted the modifier was most dangerous three waves ago.

Glitch held alone for about forty seconds and Jin let him, because there was one more thing he wanted to see.

He wanted to see whether the shield still worked with the Raptor near the ground.

It did. Glitch got in one heavy strike on a descending wing and the same pulse ran out through the same network and the same third of the damage went into the shell.

So it’s not altitude. It’s the network. Full stop.

Then the run ended.

[Run ended at Wave 20]

[Wave 20 checkpoint: uncleared]

[Predator’s Tempo route bonus: not awarded]

[Permanent achievement rewards retained]

[Current Tide Tokens: 65]