The Nean Lion walked into the clearing like it owned everything the light touched.
Its fur was a deep, burnished gold, each strand catching the filtered light coming through the canopy and throwing it back warr than it had arrived.
Its eyes glowed, the color a rich, molten amber that held its own light independent of anything around it.
And they could tell... it was not fully grown.
That was the thought that lodged in Lukas’s mind and refused to leave, because a fully grown Nean Lion was an S-rank beast.
This one, this young, not-yet-adult lion that was taking its ti walking towards them, was A-rank.
Nean Lions were regarded as one of the most dangerous Awakener-level beasts on the First Floor.
Veteran hunters avoided them. Guilds with A-rank mbers planned carefully before engaging one. The stories about them were not exaggerated.
Lukas knew all of this, and so did lody.
Neither of them moved.
His heart was hitting the inside of his chest in a way he could feel in his throat. Beside him, lody stood completely frozen, her sword hand painfully tight on the hilt and her breathing controlled but shallow.
"Lukas." Her voice was barely a sound. "I defend, you attack."
He understood imdiately. It wasn’t a strategy born from preference. It was the only arrangent that gave either of them a chance.
Asking him to stand between lody and that lion was asking him to die. His stats were extraordinary for his rank. Against an A-rank Nean Lion, they were insufficient.
But lody was different. Even though she had roughly the sa stats as him, her body was the sa rank as she was. B-rank. And that gave her a chance.
He nodded once.
The lion stopped, then opened its mouth and roared.
The sound didn’t travel through the air so much as it displaced it. Lukas felt it in his chest, in his back teeth, in the soles of his feet through the ground, and through the bones in his body.
The trees around the clearing shuddered and leaves fell.
lody cast [Hex Shield].
And it was just in ti, as the lion moved.
It was a golden blur as it crossed the distance. The shocking thing about it was that it wasn’t fast in the way the Zipper Bears were fast, or the Shadow Panthers.
Those had been fast in ways his eyes could follow if he concentrated.
The lion crossed the clearing in a single motion that his eyes simply failed to track, and the [Hex Shield] lody had created shattered on contact as if it had been made of smoke.
They had already separated, peeling away in opposite directions before the shield broke.
The lion chose Lukas.
He threw himself behind the nearest tree as the lion reached him, and felt the impact before he heard it.
The claws passed through the trunk in a single stroke, the wood parting like it had been waiting for permission to co apart. Chunks of it flew past his face as he kept moving.
From behind the lion, lody was already there. She drove her sword into its flank with both hands behind it, putting her full B-rank strength into the blow.
The blade bounced off.
It wasn’t deflected, and neither was it absorbed. The blow simply did not penetrate.
It felt like throwing an egg against a wall. The rebound of the attack traveled up through the hilt into lody’s arms hard enough to make her stagger.
The lion’s tail moved without the rest of its body turning. It caught lody across the torso and sent her flying, the impact throwing her into the undergrowth at the clearing’s edge.
The lion didn’t look at her.
It looked at Lukas.
He cast [Hex Shields], as many as he could pull together in the seconds he had, layering them between himself and the lion, stacking them the way he had against the scorpion fire beams.
And the lion simply walked through them. His jaw dropped at the sight. It would have been a different situation if the lion had smashed through the shields, but it had simply walked.
Each shield shattered at the point of contact as if the lion were simply walking through curtains, the cursed energy giving no aningful resistance.
And that was when his rank truly sank in. No matter how high his stats were, his skills will always be the sa rank as he was.
D-rank.
He scrambled back, trying to put distance between them, but the lion’s claws descended.
They tore through the [Blood Armor] first, the shell shattering into motes of red light that drifted and disappeared.
Then through the cuirass, the tal splitting open along the lines of the strike. Then across his skin, a graze, technically. A near miss by the standards of what the claws were capable of.
He hit the forest floor hard, the impact driving the air out of him, and lay there for a mont with his vision swimming and a line of burning pain across his torso where the skin had opened. Blood seeped through his torn shirt.
The lion stood over him.
It looked down at him with those amber eyes, and then it opened its mouth and roared again.
The sound rolled over him like a physical weight, pressing him into the ground, and he understood with complete clarity that the lion was not finishing this quickly because it didn’t need to.
It could take all the ti it wanted in the world.
The paw rose... then it ca down.
Sothing hit the lion from the side with enough force to push it off to the side, and the paw slamd into the ground six inches from Lukas’s head, the impact cratering the soil.
lody grabbed him.
They were airborne before he fully processed it, lody’s arm around his torso, her legs driving hard off the ground, carrying them both up into the branches of the nearest tree.
She caught a branch, swung them up, and they landed on a thick limb on the highest point on the tree.
"Thank you," he managed. The words ca out rough.
"Are you okay?" Her eyes were moving over him, checking his injuries.
"Yes." He gritted his teeth against the burning pain across his ribs. "I’m okay."
Below them, the lion growled, the sound vibrating through the trunk beneath them and into their hands where they gripped the branch.
Then it leapt into the air.
It landed on the trunk directly below them, its claws sinking into the bark.
"Oh, shit," they said, at the sa ti.
They leapt to the next tree, and the lion ca after them. They leapt again, and it followed, tree to tree.
"Go right," lody said suddenly. "I have a plan."
He went right without asking. He heard her drop behind him, heard the lion’s path shift to follow her, and kept moving until he found a branch with a sightline back to the clearing.
lody landed in the open ground below, spinning to face the lion as it descended after her.
She waited, watching its arc and timing it. Then she drove her sword into the ground, blade angled up, point aid at the exact spot the lion’s belly would et the ground.
Then she rolled to the side.
The lion ca down.
The impact was enormous, the full weight and montum of an A-rank beast dropping onto a fixed blade, the plan using the lion’s own mass and montum to do what her strength alone couldn’t.
A loud snap rang through the air.
lody’s sword had broken in two.
The lion stood in the crater its landing had made, completely unhard, the broken sword lying in the dirt beside it.
It turned its eyes to lody, who had co to a stop several ters away, her hands empty.
Then it stepped towards her.
She stepped back, her eyes wide, her hands finding nothing where the hilt of her sword should have been.
And the lion kept coming.
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