I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 52: The Nail

The creature was on the ground for exactly one second.

Revan closed the distance before it could stand, driving his sword downward in a two-handed overhead plunge aimed at the center of the collapsed mass.

The blade hit bone armor and skidded.

The straight-down angle was right but the creature had already started rolling, turning the downward strike into a glancing blow that tore a chunk of plating loose but failed to penetrate.

’Of course. Even half-dead on the ground, you’re still a pain in my ass.’

The creature surged upward.

Revan felt the displacement explode outward as it scrambled to its feet, listing hard on its damaged limb. Something swung at him. He ducked, felt wind tear past his scalp, and thrust forward into the space the swing had come from.

The blade sank an inch before something batted it sideways. His wrist screamed.

’Okay. New question. Where the fuck is your neck? Do you even have one? Every time I stab you, I hit ribs or armor or whatever dense bullshit you’re made of. Where is the soft part? Where is the thing I’m supposed to cut to make you stop moving?’

He’d been fighting this creature for over twenty minutes now.

Twenty minutes of close-range exchanges, grappling, slashing, stabbing. His hands had been on its body. His shoulder had pressed against its flesh. His teeth had been in its skin, for God’s sake.

And in all of that contact, he hadn’t felt a single CT crystal.

The feral creatures from the bone field had crystals embedded in their spines. You could feel them through the flesh, hard and geometric, pulsing faintly with residual energy even in the suppression field. Revan had smashed those crystals with his own sword. He knew what they felt like.

’This is one hundred percent a native creature.’

Revan spat, a glob of blood and mud hitting the slurry.

’I should have read so many more books about the kind of creatures that could exist in a dead zone like this. What an idiot. I was too focused on CT issues instead of the monsters here. If only I’d read up on whatever was living here, everything would be so much easier; I could know their weak points, their form, and their anatomy.’

The creature charged again.

Revan sidestepped, let the momentum carry it past him, and hacked at its trailing side. The blade connected, carved a shallow line through hide, and bounced off the bone plating underneath.

’I keep hitting the same goddamn armor. Side cuts slide off. Diagonal cuts deflect. The only thing that went deep was the straight-down stab when you were pinned and I had gravity behind me.’

He circled. The creature circled with him.

Both of them limping. Both of them bleeding. Both of them running out of time.

Revan frowned, replaying his own thoughts. ’Wait... Gravity?’

’Gravity. That’s the key. This bone armor is layered like roof tiles. Overlapping, angled outward, designed to shed anything that comes from the side. But something that comes from below, pushing straight up against the grain of the overlap—’

Revan stopped circling.

’—splits the plates apart instead of sliding across them. Like prying open a seam from the inside.’

And there was another advantage to attacking from below that had nothing to do with seam direction.

When a creature lunged at you from above, its entire body mass was falling. Gravity wasn’t just pulling it down, it was accelerating hundreds of kilograms of flesh and bone into a downward trajectory.

A blade positioned underneath that trajectory didn’t need raw arm strength to penetrate. The creature’s own weight would do the work, pressing its body onto the edge the same way a man stepping on a nail drove the nail deeper with every gram of his own mass.

Revan didn’t need to swing harder. He needed the creature to be heavier.

And this thing was very heavy.

Volkar’s blade couldn’t channel Aura. No Orichalcum core, no runes, no magical conductivity whatsoever. That old bastard had made sure of it.

Pure carbon steel, forged for a Dead Zone where mana didn’t exist and Aura was a luxury no one could afford.

Which meant the only thing driving this sword through bone armor was going to be physics.

Two forces meeting in the middle: the creature’s mass falling from above, and Revan’s body pushing from below. Hundreds of kilograms pressing down onto a blade held by a man uncoiling every last gram of strength in his legs upward.

The bone armor would be caught between those two opposing forces like a walnut in a nutcracker.

The edge didn’t need to be magical. It just needed to be at the right angle, at the right time, with enough weight on both sides of it.

But Revan’s body still needed to survive the collision.

He split the last dregs of his Aura into two streams.

The bulk went into his legs, condensed thick into his calves and thighs, turning them into coiled springs loaded with as much explosive upward force as his cracked channels could handle.

The remainder, barely a thread, he fed into his hands and wrists, not for strength but for rigidity, fusing his fingers around the hilt so the impact wouldn’t fold his arms and rip the sword from his grip.

Thick in the legs. Thin in the hands. Everything else running on empty.

’Alright. One shot.’

Revan drew a long, slow breath through his teeth. The air tasted like blood and rain and mud. His chest rattled. His vision pulsed at the edges.

The only reason this was going to work was because the creature was done being patient.

Wounded and angry.

It wanted Revan dead right now.

The creature lunged.

Revan dropped low. Lower than any stance he’d used tonight, his knees nearly touching the mud, his center of gravity somewhere around his ankles.

The creature’s attack passed over his head.

From the crouch, Revan drove the sword upward.

The blade entered from below the creature’s mass. The angle was steep, almost straight up, the edge aimed through the overlapping bone plates instead of across them.

The tip caught the seam between two plates and, instead of deflecting, wedged into the gap.

Revan pushed.

His legs uncoiled from the crouch, his entire body rising like a spring releasing. One hundred and seventy pounds of desperate human being driving a blade upward through the belly of an invisible monster.

The bone plates split.

The seam widened. The sword slid between the separating plates and into the cavity behind them. Revan felt the resistance change completely, dense armor giving way to soft, unprotected tissue.

The blade sank deep, and he kept pushing, kept rising, kept driving the edge upward through whatever lay behind the broken seam.

The creature convulsed.

Its entire body seized around the sword. A sound came out of it that Revan felt more than heard, a deep, subsonic vibration that rattled through the blade and into his arms and through his chest and into his fractured ribs.

Then silence.

The body went heavy. Truly heavy. Dead weight.

The displacement that had been orbiting and shifting and pulsing for twenty minutes just... stopped.

The mass pressing down on Revan’s blade became a static, inert load that nearly drove him back to his knees.

He pulled the sword free. It came out slick and dark.

The body hit the mud with a sound like a sack of wet concrete being dropped from a roof.

Revan stood there. Sword dripping. Chest heaving.

And then his lungs seized.

The wheezing started as a thin whistle on the inhale and rapidly escalated into a grinding, rattling noise that sounded like someone dragging a chain through a pipe.

His diaphragm spasmed. His vision dimmed at the edges.

He doubled over, one hand on his knee, the other still gripping the sword, and coughed so hard that something shifted inside his chest with a wet click that made him see white.

’Shit. Shit shit shit.’

He pounded his fist against his sternum.

The third hit dislodged something and he managed a ragged, shallow breath that tasted like copper and mud.

’The ribs. They’ve shifted further. If one of those fragments punctures a lung I’m dead in three minutes.’

He dropped the sword and tore a strip of fabric from what was left of his trousers.

Wound it tight around his lower chest, just below the worst of the fractures, pulling until the pressure made his vision pulse.

He knotted it with his teeth and his one working hand, then added a second strip over the first, tighter, compressing the broken pieces together through sheer external force.

It was barbaric field medicine. The kind of thing that would make Mirael scream at him if she could see it. But it worked enough to stabilize the fragments and let him breathe without the grinding sensation of bone edges sawing against each other.

The wheezing settled into something manageable. Painful, but functional.

He picked up the sword.

Looked at the space where the creature’s body had fallen. The impression in the mud was enormous. Larger than he had estimated from fighting it blind.

The pool of dark fluid spreading around it was already being diluted by the rain, but the volume was significant.

Revan looked up. Looked around.

The white wall pressed in from every direction, exactly as thick and impenetrable as it had been twenty minutes ago. The rain hadn’t changed. The visibility hadn’t improved.

The Dead Zone’s suffocating blanket of mist hung in the air with the same patient, indifferent weight it had carried since they first marched into it.

’Fuck. This completely breaks my logic.’ Revan rubbed his face wearily.

He’d been half-expecting the fog to clear when the monster died, the way smoke clears when you extinguish a fire.

Some part of his brain had assumed that the creature was producing the fog, or at least amplifying it, using it as a hunting ground it had personally created.

’Which means I’m not under the influence of that creature’s power right now. Is this similar to a labyrinth mechanism? I’ve never read or heard of any system having mechanics like this.’

He crouched beside the body.

Ran his hand along the edge of the wound his upward strike had opened. Through the torn bone plates and the split tissue, he could feel the internal structure of the creature for the first time.

Dense musculature. Heavy bone supports.

And something else.

Something he hadn’t expected.

The creature’s body wasn’t built like a single organism. The internal structure had two distinct muscular systems running side by side, each one with its own set of attachment points and its own network of tendons.

Two separate sets of muscle. In one body.

’...You son of a bitch. You weren’t attacking from two directions at the same time. You have two independent halves inside a single frame. Left side and right side operating separately. While your left half strikes, your right half is already moving to the next position. That’s why it felt like two attackers.’

One creature. Two semi-independent halves. Each one capable of acting on its own timing, creating the illusion of attacks arriving from multiple directions simultaneously.

The shriek that came from "multiple throats" made sense now. It literally had more than one set of vocal structures.

’A split predator. Born in a wasteland where nothing can see and prey has to be overwhelmed through confusion. This place really does breed the worst things imaginable.’

Revan stood.

His makeshift chest binding pulled tight against his ribs. His left arm hung dead. His left ear rang. His back burned from four parallel claw marks. His mouth still tasted like the creature’s hide.

Revan let out a long, heavy sigh.

"What am I supposed to do now?"