"Wall stress on the left side," Aisella said from his right side in a calm voice that sounded more like a report than a warning. "The substrate is responding to impact damage by losing about twenty percent of its cohesion with each major strike."
"Five significant strikes to structural failure per construct," Rex said, working the numbers in the sa mont.
"Approximately," she said.
He took the third construct with a focused application that caught it in mid-stride and drove it straight down into the floor. This made the sound of rock grinding against rock and broke the construct’s left side along a fault line that had probably been there since it was built.
Four of the remaining eleven had detached from the wall.
Rex moved. "Alright, let just handle this!"
He didn’t stay in the middle of the room to greet them. He moved through the space in a very specific way because he knew exactly where everything was going to be three seconds ahead of ti and had the physical ability to be wherever those three seconds pointed.
The telekinesis ford a working field around him that wasn’t a static bubble but a dynamic application that moved with him and reacted to whatever ca his way.
Two constructs tried to get to the sa place at the sa ti from forty-five-degree angles. Rex caught both of them in the field, held them for half a second to make sure they were in the right place, and then pushed them together with enough force to break both of them in the middle.
They didn’t fall right away, but they kept going. And it was clear that they weren’t working together as well as they should have been, and Rex noticed how the amber glow in their eye sockets flickered when they hit sothing firmly.
"The glow changes when the structure is damaged," Aisella said. "I think the construct stops working when the glow goes out."
Rex aid his next application at the eye level of one of the broken constructs. Instead of using the wide applications he had been using, he used a concentrated point of force.
The amber light in its sockets went out from one second to the next, and the construct stopped in its tracks and turned into a pile of rocks that had once been sothing else.
Talyra shot an arrow into the eye socket of a construct that had gotten past Rex’s imdiate area. The arrow hit at the exact angle where the structural fault from the construct’s earlier damage t the light source.
And the glow went out without a hitch.
"Nice shot," Rex said, without stopping what he was doing.
"I know," Talyra said, already getting ready to shoot the next arrow.
The last nine constructs ca off the wall at the sa ti, and Rex knew that this was a programd response to what he thought was a containnt failure. This was the point in the guardian sequence when the constructs stopped working separately and started working together as a single force.
It was a reasonable choice for the design. A simultaneous approach by nine guardian-class constructs at full weight would be impossible against most opposition, particularly due to the overwhelming force and coordination required to effectively counteract multiple adversaries simultaneously.
Rex extended the field to its full chamber-wide radius.
What happened next was not a typical fight; it was a math problem.
There were nine objects in specific locations, each moving at particular speeds, while Rex maintained a field that could reach any of them at any mont within its range. He worked through them in the order that kept each construct as far away from his friends’ positions as possible.
The three constructs closest to Aisella were dealt with first, followed by the two nearest to Talyra, and finally the four that had been advancing toward Rex’s position.
The chamber was filled with noise during this ti, featuring the sounds of rocks colliding with each other and the walls, along with the grinding noise of constructs moving too quickly. Aisella continued to run her diagnostic, relaying the necessary information in her steady voice.
Talyra took the shots that ca up with the accuracy Rex had co to expect.
Four minutes and twenty seconds after the first construct stepped off the wall, the last light in the room went out.
Rex put his hands down.
There were pieces of volcanic rock of different sizes on the floor, and the walls had new cracks that ran through the old ones. The room slled like mineral dust and the dry heat that cos from things that have been holding heat for a long ti and then let it all out at once.
Talyra exhaled sharply through her teeth, a sign that sothing had proven much more challenging than it initially appeared, prompting her to reconsider her stance.
Almost imdiately, she burst into genuine laughter, the kind that felt authentic rather than forced.
"What kind of guardian system is THAT?!" she said, delighted rather than frustrated.
[TALYRA SKYDANCER: DESIRE LEVEL — 68/100 → 79/100]
[AISELLA MOONBLOOM: DESIRE LEVEL — 74/100 → 83/100]
Rex read both numbers and put them in the background, where he kept useful information.
’Oh yeah... I’m so fucking close.’
’I can’t wait to go all in after I get that Avatar Creation.’
"The constructs had a programd response sequence," Aisella said, walking the chamber periter and examining the inactive stone masses with the close attention of soone confirming that her structural damage hypothesis was correct.
"The constructs used an individual approach until that approach failed, after which they consolidated into a wave... classic guardian architecture." She stopped at one of the larger construct fragnts. "The amber glow was the animate core and the point-source energy concentration in the eye formation."
"You figured that out in the middle of the engagent," Rex said.
"Well, you put in charge of diagnosing," she said, not looking up from what she was looking at. "I was going to do my work anyway."
She stood up and looked at Rex across the room with the sa look on her face as when she had made up her mind to say sothing she had been keeping to herself.
"But... I have to be honest with your well-being performance. You moved through all of that like the constructs didn’t matter," she said.
Rex said, "They don’t really go to the field."
"That’s not what I an," she said, and the way she said it was obvious, like when she wanted to be understood exactly instead of roughly. "I an the way you moved through the space..."
"You knew where everything was going to be, and what’s even more impressive is that you didn’t just react to it, but you knew it."
Rex falls silent because what he’s going to do next is sothing that could be called ’gambling,’ but he needs to do it anyway for their trust.
"It was Foresight," Rex said. "One of my skills as well."
Aisella looked at him for a mont like she looked at things that had more than one layer to them.
"It’s not just foresight," she said.
Rex looked her in the eye.
"Yes," he said. "It isn’t."
[AISELLA MOONBLOOM: DESIRE LEVEL — 83/100 → 88/100]
’I think she’s going to be the first one to fall for , but Talyra is the easy type...’
’Well, let’s just see after all of this is done...’
...
The passage beyond the guardian chamber went down again, this ti shorter and steeper, and the walls here didn’t have any writing on them. The area felt different from the upper rooms, like how places feel different after they’ve been used for a certain purpose and absorbed over ti.
This part had been used to keep things safe. Not just a place to store things, but a room made to hold things that are bigger than normal.
It led to the last room.
The ceiling here was vaulted, and the amber light was brighter than anywhere else they had been. The sa careful hand that had built everything else had shaped and extended the natural formation.
The fungi grew so close together around the edge of the chamber that the light was almost white instead of colored.
There was a chest in the middle of the room.
"Oh~! I bet that’s treasure!" Talyra exclaid, her eyes sparkling with excitent.
"It could also be a trap," Aisella cautioned.
"Yeah, look..."
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