Soul Nexus. Volume 2: The beginning of the forced adventurer

30

I felt as if my knee would break. The fall I had suffered earlier was beginning to take its toll, and the pain still afflicted me, but I could not stop, not while that gigantic thing kept advancing.

After a brief rest and a quick change of clothes and gear, we set off at full speed behind the mabeast, trying to catch up with it as quickly as possible, although, truthfully, it was not as if it was a lightning bolt leaving us behind. However, its enormous size and stride allowed it to gain meters steadily. And if we were to approach it as if nothing, we would surely enrage it again, and it would crush us.

We had no choice but to run along the high mountain trails it followed, thinking about how we could stop it before it reached the base of Rezok.

The truth was that we had no idea how to stop such a creature in open terrain. Even if the terrain it walked on was rugged and mountainous, it traversed it effortlessly, knocking down tree after tree, forming a great path that marked its passage and leaving its huge, sharp crystal "footprints" along the way. With each step it took, the vitrotesta drastically reshaped the landscape, changing green and wooded landscapes to much rockier and deformed ones.

We ran alongside it, as if we were a pride of lions seeking to catch their prey of the day, with the enormous difference that ours was hundreds of times larger than a small antelope, and to say that an antelope is small is already an exaggeration, but even more surreal was that giant tortoise that seemed like a dragon carrying a shell of crystal.

Laurent: 『 And how in the world are we going to stop this thing? 』

Cmdr. Rask: 『 I would like to know that too, Laurent! But no matter how, we just have to do it! So, if anyone has an idea...! 』

Hector: 『 This couldn't get any worse. 』

Hector said it right. Without any plan or anything useful. As a reconnaissance team, we are accustomed to devising our strategies well in advance, and clearly, this was completely off-script. We never imagined encountering something of this caliber and finding ourselves in need of fighting it.

Now we had to improvise. In the past, we managed with what we had and what we could do ourselves, but here we had nothing to attack it with. According to Héctor, the skin and especially the shell of a vitrotesta are extremely thick and hard to attempt to penetrate with a large cannon. And I, who only had a miserable bow and arrows, would not even tickle it.

It seemed that the only way we could damage it was through prestidigitation. However, performing commands and elemental attacks was not our specialty. Furthermore, we didn't have any catalysts to help us.

The only one who was attuned to the mana was Jean, but even so, he only knew how to make things explode...

Roef: 『 Hey, Laurent!! Did you manage to tie the bomb to the shell of that thing?!! 』

Laurent: 『 What?! 』

Roef: 『 Did you or did you not?! 』

Laurent: 『 Of course I did! What does that have to do with anything now?! 』

It had everything to do with it. The bomb still remained atop the mabeast, and if I recall correctly, Jean drew one of his pictograms on it to detonate it. So it might still serve us. If we made it explode, perhaps we could manage to finish off the vitrotesta, or at least make it stop. It was worth a try and the only thing we had, and we couldn't keep running the dozens of kilometers remaining to the base forever.

Roef: 『 Jean! How much mana do you have left?! 』

Jean: 『 Enough to keep running from here to the base! Why?! 』