Chapter 54: Zig and Zag; Blink and Bite

‘Why is it always packs of animals?’ Scarlet sent to Maus as she watched the monstrosities coalesce in the middle distance.

‘More they marry her?’ Maus sent back.

‘The more the merrier,’ she corrected reflexively.

‘Exactly!’

Scarlet just shook her head in amusement, securing the throwing belt to herself as she charged forward. She’d left the cane behind.

It was strange watching the creatures materialize. There were four of them. Inspect, plus the info-layer, gave her a considerable amount of information on each of the creatures as they finally finished constituting at the border of the First Layer. They were Tier 0 beasts called garachnics, all under Level 5, though one had an Earth Affinity. They looked like spiders, only without exoskeletons. Fleshy spiders.

With her new mind for strategy, it was effortless to come up with a basic plan of attack.

‘Okay, buddy, are you ready?’

‘Ready, boss, ready,’ he said, eager and excited.

He’d never been a particularly violent little guy. Peering into the bond, she could tell he saw this almost like a game. A dangerous game, and he knew that, but much like before the System, he’d always enjoyed a challenge, a puzzle. That’s what fighting felt like to him, only backed up by pure animal instinct.

His methods weren’t refined, but they were effective, the same way a stalking cat was effective. Lots of enthusiasm and variety, as well as patience and decent attack power. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much planning or strategy.

This was a perfect opportunity for Scarlet to hone her strategic skills, as well as train her coordination with Maus.

‘We’ll need to be smart about this,’ she told him. ‘Coordinate. Remember when we read about dodge-tanks?’

She sent him a brief visual of what she wanted from him.

‘Zig and zag; blink and bite. Got it!’

‘And Maus…?’

‘Boss?’

‘Be careful,’ she told him, even though what she’d really wanted to say was please don’t sacrifice yourself again.

Even though he was back now, the memory of him being killed by that earthen fox still haunted her. With her enhanced memory, she knew it would for a long time. She also recognized just how unreasonable it would be to ask that of him.

So, she didn’t.

The back-and-forth happened faster than normal speed of thought, and in the span of a few heartbeats, both she and Maus were coordinated.

That’s when the horde of garachnics charged. Moments before they made contact, Scarlet sent out her instructions.

‘Hit the joints,’ she began, circling the first and allowing Maus to blink into the fray. ‘They’re mostly blind, but their sense of touch and hearing is incredibly good,’ she continued. Much like spiders could feel the reverberations through their webs to know when prey had been caught, these garachnics could pinpoint movement through the subtle tremors in the ground.

Of course, they just had to be fighting in a flat dirt pit.

The first thing she tried to do was eliminate those vibrations, or use them to feed the creatures false information. She felt like a mix between a bootleg physicist and wizard as she drew on her knowledge of kinetic energy, something she should be able to manipulate with her psionics. She had enough scientific knowledge to understand the basic principles. Theoretically speaking, it should have been easy for her.

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The calculations came quickly. Where would her next step land? Where should the step after that be placed? How much force to apply, and where, to generate the effect she wanted? How could she keep it contained?

In theory, her strategy was perfect.

Reality was not so simple.

She pushed psionic energy out of her the same way she did with mana, Energy Manipulation smoothing out the process. Her goal was for the force she expended with each step to stay local instead of spreading outward, then reverse the flow back into the ball of her foot and propel her forward.

Too much.

Her next step saw her launched at an angle, propelled several meters forward, only to crash shoulder-first into the dirt. A hasty attempt at a psionic barrier meant that instead of bleeding off energy in the tumble, the way the Skill Tome was guiding her, Scarlet’s inertia was stopped. Violently. It jarred her other shoulder and dazed her when the back of her head collided.