Then the roots moved.

All of them at once.

Not the roots near him or the roots near the Snake but every root structure within fifty metres activating simultaneously, every formation, every position, every carefully arranged geometric configuration abandoning its stillness and rising and extending and weaving with the speed of something that had been waiting for this specific moment to use this specific deployment.

Not a cage.

A net.

A three-dimensional net filling the entire volume of air he was elevated in from every direction at once, the root structures closing from above and from the sides and from below with the coordinated comprehensiveness of something that had been placed in its pre-deployment configuration specifically for this.

He dissolved again.

The roots passed through the mist of his dissolved form without finding purchase.

But the dissolution had a cost at this density and this volume of obstruction, his fluid state needing to find unoccupied space in a volume that was primarily occupied, the dispersal taking more of his energy than any previous dissolution had required and making the consolidation more complicated than usual.

He found his way to the outside of the net through the soil, compressed mist through gaps in the packed earth between the root formations, and reformed outside the territory’s deployed architecture.

The Diamond Snake displaced again.

It was standing three metres from him when he reformed.

The fang came at his face with the speed of something that did not need to accelerate because it was already at full speed at the initiation of any movement.

The fog armor absorbed the contact, the fang penetrating into the armor layer at the face but held at the boundary before reaching biological material, and the venom discharged into the fog rather than into him, and the Diamond class venom’s quantity was categorically different from the Gold class, the volume of it that discharged into the fog layer enough that a small fraction of it reached the inside surface of the armor and came into contact with the skin of his face before the boundary fully held.

He felt it immediately.

Not pain, not the Gold class mental pressure, something more structural, something that was engaging with the biological systems of his face at a level that his Phantom passive resistance was fighting but had not stopped.

He drove the Inferno blade into the Snake’s body directly.

Everything he had in the blade at that moment, not rationed, not conserved, not the controlled application of force calculated against future need, all of it, and the blade went through the Diamond class scales at the seam point he found with the future sight’s forward-lag giving him the angle before the armor had fully positioned.

The energy discharged into the Snake’s body.

The Diamond class Snake’s internal temperature spiked and it displaced immediately, the displacement tearing the body off the blade while the discharge was still propagating, and the damage was real, the wound was there, but the Diamond class regeneration engaged with the wound before he had finished registering that the displacement had happened.

He watched the heat signature at the wound site through the chain connection.

It dropped.

Not slowly, not gradually, not in the way that things cooled when the source of heat was removed, but fast and purposeful, the regeneration pulling from the Diamond class Snake’s reserve and applying it to the wound with an urgency and a comprehensiveness that the Gold class regeneration had not had.

In ten seconds the wound had closed to half its original depth.

In twenty seconds it was a surface scar.

In thirty seconds even the scar was gone.

He stood in the black-green territory with the trace of Diamond class venom working on the skin of his face, which his Aquamorph was already producing a response to, and thought about what he had just observed.

The regeneration was not a problem that strength could solve.

It was a problem that method could solve, but only if the method addressed the fundamental mechanic rather than trying to outpace it through volume of damage, which was not a race he could win against a Diamond class regenerator with this depth of reserve.

He needed to force the regeneration to spend against multiple simultaneous wounds faster than the reserve could sustain, and simultaneously restrict the blood flow that the regeneration relied on to deliver its resources to the wound sites.

The Frost chain around the neck in the binding configuration that restricted circulation.

The Inferno blade through the skull in the position that the chain’s downward force kept locked, the heat working inside the skull cavity where the restricted blood flow that the chain created meant the regeneration’s delivery mechanism was compromised at exactly the site where the Inferno was working.

Two tools working against the same target in complementary ways, each one making the other more effective.

He needed to get the neck binding clean on the first attempt.

He needed the Snake to come at him from a direction the displacement could be anticipated rather than waited for.

He needed the Sonic skill running at the low-interference level to disrupt the underground channel tracking that the displacement seemed to use as its endpoint selection mechanism.

He started the Sonic at the calibrated low level, below the Snake’s combat awareness threshold but enough to interfere with the vibration tracking precision of the underground root system, and he felt the territory around him respond to it in the small ways that the root system responded to vibration input it was processing.

The Diamond Snake displaced.

To his left rather than behind him.

The Sonic interference was working on the endpoint selection, shifting the displacement destinations away from the directly behind position that had been the Snake’s preference, producing a lateral emergence instead.

He had the future sight on the lateral emergence before it completed.

The Frost chain was already positioned.

When the Snake’s neck section emerged from the displacement in the lateral arc Neil had the chain moving in the intercept path that the future sight had marked, and the wrap caught the neck at the full committed swing of the chain with the complete weight of the third phase behind it.

The binding took.

The Snake’s full Diamond class strength engaged against the binding immediately and the resistance was the kind of resistance that communicated the gap between this tier and everything below it, the chain straining in a way it had not strained against any other target, the metal of it vibrating under the force being applied against the restraint.

Neil drove the Inferno blade up through the roof of the Snake’s mouth and into the skull cavity from below, the third phase’s enhancement forcing the blade through the Diamond class skull’s resistance with the full force he could bring.

The blade went in.

He held both in place with everything he had.

The Snake thrashed.

The displacement tried to fire.

It could not complete cleanly with the binding preventing the free movement that the displacement required, the power going into the attempt and finding the chain in the way and the transit not completing, the energy of the failed attempt adding to the Snake’s expenditure without producing any movement.

He poured everything he had left into the Inferno blade.

The heat inside the skull cavity was comprehensive, working against the biological systems at the specific location where the restricted blood flow from the Frost chain around the neck was limiting the regeneration’s ability to deliver resources, the two tools compounding against each other in exactly the way he had planned.

The Diamond class Snake was spending against all of it simultaneously.

The Inferno damage inside the skull.

The Frost binding restricting the regeneration delivery to that site.

The displacement attempts that were not completing.

The Sonic disruption working against the underground positioning system.

The reserve was enormous.

But it was depleting.

He could feel it through the connection, the quality of the resistance against the chain shifting gradually, the force it was producing becoming slightly less, then slightly less again, the regeneration rate at the skull cavity beginning to fall behind the rate of the Inferno damage as the reserve allocation became insufficient to maintain both the combat response and the full regeneration simultaneously.

The thrashing became less coordinated.

He held on.

The red eyes dimmed incrementally, the process slow and fighting against it, the Diamond class vitality unwilling to go the way everything eventually went.

Then the Snake’s enormous body settled.

Not all at once, gradually, the fight leaving it in stages rather than a single moment, the tail movement slowing, then the mid-body movement slowing, then the neck pressure against the chain becoming passive weight rather than active force.

The red eyes went fully dark.

Neil released the chain and stepped back and the Diamond class Wood Snake lay in its own territory, still.

He stood there for a long moment.

The Diamond class Snake lay where it had fallen and the black-green territory was quiet around it and the red luminescent growth cast its glow across everything with the same sourceless diffusion it had always had.

He crouched and checked his own state carefully.

The internal damage was significant, the strikes he had taken and the effort of holding the engagement for its full duration showing up in every system in a way that the third phase’s enhanced regeneration was addressing but slowly, the pace of recovery communicating the genuine scale of what had just been expended.

The Diamond class venom trace from the fang contact with his face had been mostly cleared by the Aquamorph response but not completely.

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