Just when everything seemed to be over, he suddenly felt a rhythmic pressure coming up through the soles of his boots, heavy and deliberate, each impact spaced wide enough apart that whatever was making them wasn’t hurrying.
Then the divine current in the air shifted, the ambient electrical charge that had been sitting at a background hum since the ridge suddenly sharpening into something focused and directional.
Then the fence on the northern side of the village came down.
The entire section simply fell outward, posts and crossbeams and all, pushed flat by something that had walked through it without acknowledging it was there.
The alpha came through the gap.
Three meters at the shoulder, maybe more. The pack wolves had been different in the way corrupted things were, the divine energy pushed into them sitting badly, flickering at the edges.
This one was different. The corruption in it had settled.. The lightning didn’t crawl across its fur the way it did on the others, it ran through the fur, under the skin, tracing the musculature in constant branching lines that brightened when it moved and dimmed when it was still.
Its eyes found Lucius immediately.
Not the guards or Valeria, who was the most obvious physical threat in the immediate area. Not the civilians still visible at the edge of the central building.
Him.
And he understood why. The solar energy in his chest, the absorbed divine core was throwing a signature that the corrupted lightning in this animal read as a counterpart.
[Appraisal Active]
[Corrupted Lightning Wolf Alpha — Level 18]
[WARNING: Exceeds current combat threshold significantly]
He had time to read it once before the alpha moved.
It covered the distance between the fence and where he was standing in two bounds, each one covering ground that should have taken four or five strides, the size of it making distance work differently than it had any right to.
He threw himself sideways and the alpha’s shoulder passed through the space he’d been occupying and hit the storage building behind him instead.
The building didn’t fall. But the wall caved inward with a sound like a thunderclap and the whole structure shifted on its foundation.
Lucius came up thirty meters away, breathing, reading the animal as it turned.
It turned slowly. Too large to pivot quickly, the weight of it making the turn a committed process. He filed that information away immediately, big things don’t corner well in small places. The alpha was a straight-line weapon, devastating in a charge, manageable if he could keep it turning.
He needed to keep it turning.
"Get the civilians further back," he said, to whoever was still behind him.
He didn’t wait to see if it happened, because the alpha had finished its turn.
It charged differently the second time, not the bounding lope of the first approach but a low flat run, body parallel to the ground, the lightning under its skin brightening to a continuous glow as it built speed.
The air ahead of it crackled. Metal caught it — the nails in the nearest building’s facade sparked, a cart’s iron wheel rim discharged a blue arc, the reinforcing pins in the fence posts on either side of the street threw brief sharp light.
Lucius moved right, toward the narrow alley between two buildings, forcing the alpha to choose between following him into the constriction or aborting the charge.
It followed.
The alley was two meters wide. The alpha was three meters at the shoulder, but it didn’t slow down.
It came through the alley the way water comes through a gap — not fitting, just forcing through it, the buildings on either side cracking and splintering as the animal’s bulk size pushed through them, wall sections falling inward, roof tiles cascading down into the alley ahead of and behind it.
It lost maybe twenty percent of its speed in the transit and came out the other side still moving fast enough to matter, shaking plaster and timber from its back like rain.
Lucius was already gone, out the far end and into the next street, using the two seconds the building resistance had bought him to put distance between himself and the alpha’s exit point.
The alpha emerged into the street and turned. Slower this time, the debris had tangled around its legs briefly and the turn cost it more than the previous ones had.
He used the time.
Solar energy was already building in both hands, not Blazing Sun, he needed his core to last this fight and Blazing Sun would drain it too fast against a level eighteen opponent.
Focused output instead, concentrated into a single point the way he had done against the fourth blessed warrior on the valley road. He drove both hands forward and released it directly at the alpha’s face.
The alpha took it without flinching.
The lightning under its skin brightened in direct response, absorbing the solar impact and converting it, and for a moment the animal’s entire outline blazed white before settling back to its running glow.
His stomach dropped slightly.
’It’s eating my solar output.’
He could see the slight backward shift of the animal’s head, the way the brightness had spiked and then had to process itself back down. It was costing the alpha something to absorb it.
Just not enough to matter at his current output levels.
He needed more.
The alpha came at him down the main street and he ran.
He picked a line that took him past the well, around the corner of the central building, into the wider market area on the village’s western side where the buildings were spaced further apart and the ground was more open. He needed room for what he was building toward.
The alpha followed, closer than he wanted, the ground shaking under its pace.
He vaulted the well without breaking stride. The alpha stepped over it.
He ducked around the corner of the central building and the alpha’s shoulder clipped the corner instead of him, stone exploding outward from the impact, a chunk the size of his torso spinning past his head close enough that he felt the displaced air.
Into the market space, on an open ground. He turned.
The alpha came around the corner and stopped.
’Shit!’