NOVGO.NET Chapter 234: Before Either Returns
Chapter 234: Before Either Returns
The final run went through Waves 1 to 20 in fifty-two minutes and Jin spent most of that time making one decision.
The boon offers gave him Steady Footing again, which he took, and Light Step again, which he took. At the third interval they offered him something genuinely tempting.
[Kindling: increasing damage per consecutive kill without taking a hit]
[Anchor Weight: increased damage while both feet remain planted]
[Windward: reduced stamina cost when moving away from a threat]
Kindling would have made the whole run faster. Anchor Weight was almost tailor-made for a beast whose entire method was standing still and punishing commitments.
Windward was the boring one and it was Flicker’s.
She’s going to spend the boss fight moving away from a flier and I’m not going to have any way to give her stamina back.
He took Windward and felt slightly sick about it for two waves.
Wave 10 posted at 76 and 79, which was the best condition he had ever brought out of the first checkpoint. Wave 20 he ran with the anchor priority he had learned two runs ago and cleared at 51 and 58.
He checked the clock once, at Wave 20, and did not check it again.
[Estimated remaining: 5–7 hours]
The elite node was a completely different experience the second time and it was not a free one.
He knew all four mechanisms. He knew which junctions in Glitch’s lane were thick enough to fight in and which spans came down if you took a hit on them. The fourth release still sat thirty meters off Flicker’s route, but its maintenance bypass saved Glitch from the slowest armored section below. The detour cost less than the route it removed, so Jin sent her toward it immediately.
The node adapted anyway. There were more hunters in Flicker’s ruins than there had been, and one of them was placed where the third mechanism was, which meant she had to clear it before she could pull it.
Glitch held the brace at the second junction several seconds longer than last time because the thing that came down the lane was heavier.
They came out of it faster, cleaner, and with about nine minutes of run time saved.
[Elite node cleared]
[First-clear rewards already awarded — no repeat]
[Rare temporary boon — select 1 of 3]
[Relay Instinct]
It was in the cache, and Jin took it without reading the other two.
Waves 21 to 29 he ran carefully rather than quickly.
There was one optional side objective on the route — a small marker off the main line, unlabelled, worth some unspecified thing — and Jin looked at it for four seconds and left it alone.
Five hours. One clear that matters. I’m not spending stamina on a marker that might be forty tokens.
He kept Flicker out of every direct exchange he could. Unlike the previous run, she did not trade with anything armored, hold ground, or finish anything that had not already been broken.
By Wave 29 the difference was in the numbers.
[Glitch — stamina 36% | contusion, right shoulder]
[Flicker — stamina 52% | minor abrasion]
He’s carrying it. That’s correct. He’s the one who can.
The Wave 30 gate opened and the Stormburrow Drake came out and Jin spent the entire visible phase managing one thing, which was location.
He did not try to kill it fast. He fought it toward the middle.
Every time the Drake surfaced on the eastern slope, he had Flicker threaten the eastern landing lanes until it took a different one. Every time it went under, Glitch met it closer to the vertical structures than to the wall. On the final eastern pass, Glitch caught the Drake low and put a short burst of Acid Breath into the joint at the base of its wing before letting Flicker turn it back toward the middle.
The visible phase took thirteen minutes instead of eleven, and Jin did not care. When the health indicator emptied, the Drake went down on connected stone a little over twelve meters from the central structures, with a low glide lane running past it on the northern side.
There. That’s the whole preparation.
The corpse split.
[Storm Echo]
[Burrow Echo]
The Storm Echo got airborne and, because of where it had been born, it had to take the northern lane to get any height at all.
"Glitch — burrow. Damage it. Don’t finish it."
Leaving the Burrow Echo alive went against everything Glitch was, even after Jin had spent the whole run preparing him for it.
He put the Burrow Echo into the ground four separate times over the next six minutes, opened its flank with Acid Breath, and found the moving core with Tremor Sense the way he had in the failed run — and every time it was nearly done, Jin pulled him off it.
The bond made its opinion known on all four occasions. Jin answered with the same compressed intent each time: restraint, the second death, wait.
The Burrow Echo went down to about a tenth and stayed there, wounded and slow and still dangerous, which was exactly what Jin wanted.
Meanwhile Flicker did not fight the Storm Echo at all.
She shaped it. She stood in the landing lanes it wanted and made it take the northern one, over and over, and each time it came through low because the northern lane did not give it the height, and each pass took it directly across the ground Glitch was working.
On the fourth pass Jin took it.
"Flicker — turn it. Now."
She broke into the lane and threatened its landing line and the Storm Echo had to commit — a low, fast, shallow approach that had nowhere to go except past Glitch.
[Relay Instinct — window active]
Glitch came off the connected stone into it.
He hit it in the air with everything a Bronze-quality body could produce, with the precision window sharpening what was already the heaviest thing on the field, and the Storm Echo came down.
It did not die from that. It died several seconds later on the ground, with Glitch on top of it and the wing joint he had opened during the visible phase finally giving way.
[Storm Echo — defeated]
The clock started and Jin could see it.
Not as a number. The Storm Echo’s body had begun coming apart into charged material and that material was gathering, orienting, starting to move toward the ground where the Burrow Echo was.
Six seconds.
"Glitch — core. Open it."
He was already moving. He crossed the distance Jin had spent thirteen minutes reducing, hit the wounded Burrow Echo while it was still turning toward the arriving material, and put his whole weight into the flank he had spent six minutes ruining.
The core was exposed. Jin saw it on the panel — the dense moving point, pinned against the inside of a broken flank, in the open for about a second and a half.
[Relay Instinct — window active]
Flicker was nine meters away.
Nine meters, because Jin had put the phase transition in the middle of the arena instead of at the eastern wall. Nine meters, with a movement burst on her and fifty-two percent stamina because she had not spent the run trading with armored enemies.
She crossed it and hit the core.
The Burrow Echo came apart.
Above and behind her the gathering material stopped, hung for perhaps half a second, and dispersed.
Neither avatar moved for a moment.
Glitch was standing over a broken echo at nine percent stamina with his sides heaving. Flicker had landed badly after the strike and stayed down, which Jin registered with a spike of alarm before he saw that she was conscious and simply out of strength.
Then the panels came.
[Wave 30 Checkpoint Cleared]
[Wave 30 First-Clear Reward: 200 Tide Tokens]
[Current Tide Tokens: 550]
[Unknown Event Relic acquired: Tideheart Seed]
Jin made a noise in a treatment bay in the middle of the afternoon that woke a beast three mats over. He sat there grinning at his phone for several seconds before he did anything sensible, then opened the relic entry.
[Tideheart Seed]
[Classification: Event relic — workshop grade]
[Aspect: Tide]
[Note: may support a Tide-adapted development path for one compatible beast.]
[Full analysis requires: Evolution Workshop]
[Assignment unavailable]
He tried to open the analysis anyway and got a clean refusal.
Workshop grade. Of course it is.
[Estimated remaining window: approximately 90 minutes]
The Route Map still had one untouched elite node on it and three sealed objectives, and Jin looked at all four of them and did the arithmetic he had been doing for two days.
Ninety minutes. A deep run takes three hours minimum. The elite node is past Wave 20 and I can’t get there.
He closed it.
Five hundred and fifty tokens, a relic he could not open, and a map with more on it than he was ever going to reach this time.