Ruthless V5Ch54-The Panther Queen Fight Part 2

Inside James’s body, strange and titanic shifts occurred.

Bones fractured and reformed, sharp and thick fragments of them migrating through dense and tough flesh or swam through his bloodstream until they drew close to the silk-producing glands.

At the same time, he poured a significant investment of Mana and Stamina into those glands, generating a copious amount of extremely durable, sticky, and flexible silk.

With Full Body Control, he ordered the bone shards into the silk and began expelling some of the silk from his body without breaking the connection between the sticky material and his own flesh. A growing quantity of mixed silk and bone slowly piled up around him, and James continued until the substance stood knee high. It took just under two minutes, during which time the tornado around the Panther Queen only grew slightly larger and began moving, making small circles on the ground as the Queen started actively looking for James.

He waited for her to get closer before he threw the two piles of silk into her vortex.

Predator’s Guided Missile!

The two piles of silk disappeared almost instantly into the wind, and James, still invisible, stepped backward out of the tornado’s capture range.

Then things happened very quickly.

Guided by his Skill and the tornado itself, the silk-and-bone projectiles made their way swiftly up the twister and unerringly toward the eye of the tornado. Once they were close to the eye, the unorthodox biomass weapons made their only fully unnatural move since they had left James’s physical grasp.

They leaped through the wall of wind that separated them from the Panther Queen, and they behaved entangling themselves in her fur. James guessed she was taken fully by surprise, because he felt her resisting, but it was not in a calculated way, but purely instinctual. Her body tried to jerk away from the strange, thick substance that had trapped her lower legs and tail.

The substance responded by clinging harder and beginning to climb up her limbs. The Queen slashed at the silk with her sword-like claws, and the blades made cuts. But they were shallow and did not compromise the strength of the structure as a whole.

And then, as she raised her claw for another forceful strike, a fresh clump of silk made its way through the curtain of wind and latched onto her paw. She still swung it down, but the silk wrapped around her neck as well, and the material fully robbed her of her momentum.

Meanwhile, the silk around her legs climbed higher and higher and tried to wrap around her thighs.

James could feel the Panther Queen beginning to fully lose her grip on the situation as the tornado stopped swirling. She still maintained her position in the sky, standing on her invisible platform of solid air, but she was no longer in a place to attack. She was purely on the defensive, simply trying to escape from the fibers that slowly encased her.

She writhed all of her limbs at once, a violent motion that would surely have shaken off a grappler even larger than herself if it had been a living thing that gripped her.

And she winced. The bone shards had dug into her flesh across all her limbs at the same moment that she chose to fight. Now every resistant movement would drive them in further.

The Panther Queen opened her mouth and began to chant—or tried to. No sound came out.

James smiled. His “Silencer” Title had successfully inflicted the “Silenced” condition. Unless she could use magic silently, as James did, she would be unable to use any additional spells.

No more tornadoes, he thought. No fireballs to burn your way out. Just muscle power. And those blades, if you can get them free. Let’s see what you can do.

It didn’t seem to be very much.

As the silk tightened into a cocoon around the Panther Queen, she struggled less and less. Her blood was seeping into the silk now, and James thought one of the bone fragments might have nicked an artery from the amount of bleeding he sensed.

He knew that every bit of resistance she put up would increase the bleeding as the bone shards were driven deeper into her body. He wanted to warn her not to resist any further—to submit and become one of his subordinates, or at least accept a Blessing of the Fisher King or Curse of the Fisher King that would prevent her from ever taking up arms against him again.

She was spirited and strong, and he would prefer to have her as an ally rather than dead. The Queen was clearly outmatched, and in such circumstances, having given her all, there should be no shame in admitting defeat, especially when the alternative was probably death.

Of course, James could not actually say all of this, or any of it. Not without deactivating “Silencer” and probably giving the Panther Queen an avenue of escape.

Fortunately, she seemed to at least understand without needing to be told that resisting his silk was unwise. Her body grew more still with each passing moment, though her eyes still had plenty of fight left in them.

James deactivated Invisibility for now, so the Queen could see him. He could communicate with body language at least, even if he could not speak. He saw the moment when her eyes locked onto him. A renewed fury surged behind them, and she attempted to resist his silk a bit before the bone shards bit into her anew. That seemed to put out a little of her fire.

Once she had calmed a bit, James pulled on the biomass that he had wrapped around her. The silk dragged the Panther Queen down from her invisible pedestal and dumped her on the ground, still surrounded by his thread cocoon.

He pointed down at the dirt.

Kneel, he wanted to say. Surrender, so I don’t have to take this further.

His gesture seemed to come across successfully, and a number of microexpressions flickered across the Queen’s face in quick succession. Defiance, pain, resignation, spite, sorrow, anger, calm calculation—this spectrum and more seemed to display.

James thought for a moment that he had broken the Panther Queen’s will to resist.

Then her jaws settled into the expression of defiance that he had seen first.

Through the silk and bone wrapped around the Queen, still under his power via Full Body Control, he sensed her body tensing up. He could feel something coming, and James instinctively wanted to back away. Instead of moving his body, he used two different abilities that he hoped would be more effective than simply getting a foot or two of distance.

Simultaneously, he ordered his bone spikes to dig themselves deeper into the Panther Queen’s body, no longer thinking about how to mercifully make her surrender, and he also activated Predator’s Sacred Armor. His body was encased in an energy shield—and not a moment too soon.

The Queen let loose a roar. It almost sounded like the word, “Enough!” but the sound was too deafeningly loud for James to be certain. The only thing he knew for sure was that she had broken out of the silenced condition.

Then there was a mad explosion of power from her body, and James felt the silk cocoon burst in all directions, a second before he was thrown backward by the energy himself.

It’s just pure Mana? he thought. Was there a Skill behind that? Or… maybe that’s how her Ruler powers work. I already know that her territory is inside her and her subordinates’ bodies. She’s very physical.

He simply hadn’t known she could produce an unrestrained burst of power strong enough to break his silk.

His body tumbled through the air, blown backward by the force of the Panther Queen’s explosion but still unharmed. The move was essentially a gift to James, in that sense. It gave him distance without harming him at all. It gave him the chance to take in the results of the Queen’s actions.

The first thing he recognized was that she was charging after him, enraged at having been bound by him even temporarily. The second observation he made was that she had not actually broken his silk. This was roughly the strongest silk he could make in the middle of a battle—when considering the fact that he had specified other qualities to be included as well, such as stickiness—and if she could break it, it would not bode well for his ability to beat her in a physical fight.

Rather than breaking it, her energy had forcefully pushed the silk away from her body, ripping away chunks of her fur as she pushed it to the limit of its flexibility.

It’s possible that her blood soaking into it helped her do that, he thought. Did she bleed more than she needed to from the bone fragments on purpose?

James could have ordered the silk, still fully under his power from being only recently part of his body, to grab hold of the Panther Queen’s legs and try to trip her up. But he didn’t bother. The silk had soaked up a lot of her blood and been stretched out pretty severely by that move she made. It wouldn’t be able to return to its prior tautness or stickiness, so there was no way it could bind her effectively.

On the other hand, if he collected that material after the battle, it was possible that super strong silk mixed with venom-soaked bone fragments and the blood of a powerful Ruler could be turned into a strong monster.

The final thing James found noteworthy about the scene after the Panther Queen’s escape from his binding was that she had used up a lot of power. Though she charged forward fueled by rage, there did not seem to be much else as far as gas left in the tank. She had clearly depleted a large quantity of power just to break free.

James landed on his feet and began taking evasive action. He did not become invisible again just yet. That would only force the Panther Queen to slow down and collect herself, figure out a new plan of attack.

As she caught up to him, he simply sidestepped her first big swings, dipping just out of range of her claws as they swung by.

She threw a third slash and extended her claws at the last moment, but he had accounted for that now, having experienced it once already, and he managed to bend his body around them to go completely untouched.

The next minute was a deadly dance, the Panther Queen slicing the air seemingly ever closer to James’s head.

Yet somehow he was always just out of reach.

He dodged, bent, ducked, rolled, jumped, and performed several other maneuvers to stay barely out of the way of those razor sharp claws. All the way, he was gathering Mana for his next move. No one could see it but him—his “Hidden Magic” Skill rendered these preparations invisible—but the Queen seemed to sense that he was preparing something.

For the next twenty seconds, her attacks were more desperate—clumsier, too—to the point that James sidestepped one baseball-like swing and swept her legs out from under her.

The Panther Queen went down in a flurry of flailing claws, forcing James to jump back rather than trying to press his advantage.

But she slowed down slightly after that, rising to her knees rather than getting back up. She stayed in that position for a few seconds, trying to catch her breath, and James took that opportunity to attack.

Lightning Strike!

He lunged forward and launched a slice with Roscuro. She moved to block him, but James was a little bit too quick, having worn her down. The Soul Eater dagger landed the blow and took her right arm just above the elbow, cutting through the bone and all the way into the Panther Queen’s rib before her own defenses stopped him.

The Queen let out a little groan as her arm flopped away from her body to the side, and she shook her head slightly, as if shaking off the pain of the severed limb.

“Submit,” James said, his tone gentle. “Surrender, and I’ll give you fair terms. You and all your people who survive will be allowed to live on under my rule. I’ll keep you safe, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to hunt our shared enemies. You will have a place of honor. You should talk to the members of my wolfpack. They love me.”

He thought he might be getting through to the Panther Queen—potentially obtaining another powerful subordinate who would fight to defend his country and his family when he himself could not be around. At least, the Queen was staying on her knees and not attacking him as he spoke, though that may have been, at least in part, because she was in a great deal of pain.

She let out a ragged breath as he finished speaking.

“I cannot,” the Panther Queen murmured. “No… I will not!”

The words shook coming out of her mouth, but James braced himself. He could feel something more coming.