SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything-Chapter 24: The Gatekeeper (II)

For a moment none of them moved.

Hide looked at it. Toma looked at it. The Gatekeeper looked at Hide with its two pale eyes — large, flat and faintly luminous, set into a head the width of a dining table.

The head alone was larger than Hide’s entire upper body. The neck connecting it to the shell, that was thick as a tree trunk, scaled in overlapping plates of dark grey that caught the dry heat-light of the gate’s interior atmosphere.

The shell was what held the eye longest.

It was the size of a truck — not like a truck, the size of one, the full mass of it rising from the ground in a domed structure that should have been stone but wasn’t.

It was made up of wood or something that had become wood, probably. Dense interlocking plates of what looked like petrified bark, dark brown at the base and black at the ridges, covered in a shallow moss that moved faintly in the hot air.

The surface of the shell was not smooth. It was knotted, grooved, ancient-looking, like something that had grown into this shape over centuries of existing in a loop.

From the base of the shell, at every point where the body met the ground, tentacles rose like several arms.

Not one or two, but more than a dozen, thick at the root, tapering to a rounded tip, each one moving with the slow and independent intelligence of something that didn’t need direction from the central body to know what it wanted.

They spread outward across the ground in every direction, dragging across the root floor, curling around tree trunks and releasing them, some raised and some flat and some coiled loosely like they were resting.

The Gatekeeper exhaled again. The hot air moved across the clearing and the moss on its shell shifted.

"Hide," Toma said, very quietly.

"Go back to the forest," Hide said. "Go back and hide."

"That... that’s an E-Rank."

"I know."

"You— can’t"

Hide looked at him and tried to smile. It looked absolutely brazen on his face.

Toma stepped back. Then further back, until he was gone into the undergrowth behind Hide, and Hide was alone in the clearing with the Gatekeeper and its two pale eyes.

He gripped the sword.

The Gatekeeper moved first.

It didn’t charge — it wasn’t built for charging, the mass of it too large and too settled for a forward rush. Instead three tentacles on the right flank snapped upright from the ground simultaneously and drove at him like spears, each one aimed at a different point on his body.

Hide threw himself left and two passed through where he had been. The third caught him across the right ribs, just a glancing strike, not a direct hit, but the force of it lifted him off the ground and threw him sideways into the root floor. He rolled and came up onto one knee.

[Abyssal Scale Carapace — Active]

Damage absorbed: 9%

Pain suppression: 50%

[Adaptive Override — Analysis Active]

Blunt Force from a wooden tentacle

Location - Abdomen

Source: E-Rank Calamity Beast — Rootshell Gatekeeper 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Severity: Moderate

System query: Initiate adaptation sequence for this damage type?

[Awaiting command.]

Hide looked at the system screen and smiled. His scales had held and his bones hadn’t cracked.

He stood up and glared at the beast. "Evolve!"

[Adapting - 1%]

[Adapting - 10%]

Hide ran and closed the distance fast, not letting the Gatekeeper build another approach and driving the sword into the base of the nearest tentacle at full force.

The blade went in.

The tentacle didn’t sever cleanly. The wood was dense, fibrous. The sword cut through two-thirds of the diameter before stopping. The tentacle tried to run back, but hide dug his talon like fingers into it and ripped it apart.

The tentacle hit the ground, twitching. And for some reason dark blood oozed from it.

ROARRRR!

The gatekeeper roared a cry and two of its tentacles thrashed wildly. Hide used his sword to block them but the sword broke into two pieces after only two strikes.

He abandoned the sword completely, it wasn’t getting through the tentacle mass fast enough and wasn’t touching the shell at all, anyways.

The 100% physical enhancement the only weapon he had left.

He grabbed a tentacle as it came at him and pulled using his full enhanced strength against the Gatekeeper’s full extension, a direct contest of force, the tentacle stretching taut between them and the Gatekeeper’s enormous body shifting one inch toward him as the angle changed.

The tentacle tore at the root. The fibrous tissue separated with a sound like green wood being split, and the recoil of it releasing sent Hide stumbling back two steps with a full tentacle in his hands.

He dropped it and went for another.

The gatekeeper shrieked and attacked. Hide ripped six of his tentacles within a minute, but then one of them caught him in the knee and he lost his balance.

At the same time, another, sharper tentacle tore through the scales in his right abdomen and passed through. Red blood gushed out of the wound. It was too late by the time hide ripped it out.

"AGHH!" He bit down on the pain and stood up again.

He was going to kill that asshole! He was going to rip his apart!

Just then the system analysis completed and the screen opened in front of him. At the sight of it, a dangerous grin spread on Hide’s face.

"You are fucked."