novelhome Chapter 340: The Transfer
Chapter 340: The Transfer
Violin launched sound wave bindings—not rings, not barriers, the specific close-range application designed to wrap around limbs and restrict movement through vibration. The bindings extended from his hands in luminous coils and reached toward Ragnor’s arms.
Ragnor let them come.
The bindings wrapped around both forearms—the luminous coils closing around the iron-coated arms, the vibration frequency attempting to disrupt motor control through the coating.
The iron coating disrupted the binding frequency.
The disruption spread inward from the coating surface into the binding coils—the same mechanism that had destabilized the barriers, the dense metal interfering with the vibration that held the construct together. The bindings dissolved within two seconds of closing around the iron-coated arms.
Ragnor was free before Violin could reinforce them.
He pressed forward.
Six feet.
Violin backed up—maintaining distance, his concentration rebuilding the barrier constructs, the sound waves around his body brightening as he fed his output into reconstruction rather than into offense. A new first barrier forming at eight feet from his position. A new second barrier at six feet.
Ragnor reached the new first barrier.
Went under it—the same technique, the iron floor transmitting the transfer to the anchor point, the destabilization rising from below.
The barrier dissolved in two seconds.
Violin had expected it.
He had placed the new barrier with its base anchored not to the floor but to a sound construct platform two feet above the floor—the barrier floating, its anchor point inaccessible to the iron floor transfer because the anchor wasn’t touching stone.
Ragnor pressed the face.
The barrier held—the density reinforced, the anchor protected from the floor technique, Violin having used the two seconds of the first dissolve to rebuild with a correction.
Four feet from Violin now.
The second barrier between them.
Violin launched concussive rings continuously from behind the second barrier—maintaining the barrier with his left hand’s concentration, launching rings with his right, the split application running both simultaneously. Each ring arriving at Ragnor’s position while he was occupied with the second barrier.
Ragnor took the rings against the iron shell.
Each hit pushed him back slightly—not far, the coating absorbing the majority of each impact, but the accumulation building across multiple hits as the fight continued. The iron shell was costing him generation—each time he reinforced the coating against the rings it drew from the same reserve he was using to dissolve the barriers.
He made a decision.
He stopped reinforcing the shell.
Let the next ring hit uncoated skin—absorbed it, took the full concussive force against his body rather than against the iron, the hit moving him back two steps but preserving the generation reserve for the barrier technique rather than spending it on defense.
He pressed the second barrier.
It held.
He poured iron into the floor beneath it—trying the base technique despite the floating anchor, the iron spreading upward and finding the sound construct platform the anchor was sitting on.
Iron disrupted the sound platform.
The platform lost coherence.
The anchor fell to the floor.
The barrier lost its protected anchor position and its base touched stone—the iron floor transfer reaching it immediately, the destabilization rising from below.
The second barrier dissolved.
Violin was four feet away.
No barriers between them.
He launched three simultaneous binding constructs—not two, three, aiming at both arms and Ragnor’s right leg, the three-point binding designed to restrict enough movement to create the distance he needed to rebuild his constructs.
Ragnor hardened his right arm specifically—directing the iron generation entirely to the right arm rather than the full body shell, the coating there denser than it had been at any previous point in the fight.
The right arm binding dissolved immediately against the dense coating.
The left arm binding held—the coating there thinner, the iron generation split rather than concentrated, the binding finding enough coherence to close around the left forearm and begin its vibration.
The leg binding held.
Ragnor’s left arm was restricted. His right leg was restricted.
He drove his right arm forward.
The dense-coated arm—the one he had concentrated the generation into—drove toward Violin’s chest at close range. Not the iron transfer. The strike. The dense iron coating on the fist carrying the force of the approach and the coating’s mass simultaneously.
Violin raised a sound barrier between his chest and the incoming arm—a close-range construct, hastily formed, lacking the density of the prepared barriers.
The iron-coated fist hit it.
The barrier dissolved in under a second.
The fist continued through.
It hit Violin’s chest—the iron coating making direct contact with his skin, the transfer beginning immediately at the contact point. Cold metal against skin. The iron liquid flowing from the coating into the contact and hardening—not around a joint, against the chest, the iron spreading from the contact point outward across the chest surface.
Violin tried to back away.
The iron on his chest had hardened—not structurally encasing him the way Cullen’s ice built structural depth, but adhered to his chest surface, the hardened iron plate fixing itself to his skin and adding weight and restriction to every movement his torso attempted.
He launched sound waves from both palms—directed downward at the iron plate, the frequency aimed at disrupting the iron’s coherence the way the iron disrupted sound coherence.
The sound waves hit the iron plate.
The iron didn’t dissolve—it wasn’t a sound construct, the frequency had no mechanism for breaking metallic bonds—but the vibration of the sound waves against the plate created heat at the contact points, the energy of the disrupted frequency converting into thermal output rather than construct dissolution.
The plate heated.
Not enough to matter structurally. Enough to be present.
Ragnor pressed the contact—his right arm maintaining the touch, the iron transfer continuing to flow from his coating into the plate on Violin’s chest, the coverage expanding outward from the initial contact point. The plate was growing—spreading from the center of the chest toward the shoulders, the hardened iron adhering to the skin at the expanding edges.
Violin launched bindings at Ragnor’s pressing arm—trying to restrict the arm before the plate coverage reached the shoulders and began limiting his arm movement.
The bindings dissolved against the dense coating.
He tried a concussive ring at point-blank range—launching from his palm at Ragnor’s face, the force directed upward to push Ragnor’s head back and break the pressing contact.
Ragnor took it against his iron-coated face—the shell closing over his face in the fraction of a second before the ring arrived, the coating absorbing the impact, the press maintained.
The plate reached Violin’s right shoulder.
His right arm’s range of motion reduced—the iron adhered to the shoulder surface restricting the joint’s full rotation, the movement not eliminated but significantly compromised. The sound waves from his right hand lost their precision as the shoulder restriction changed the angle they could be launched from.
He tried to rebuild a barrier—left hand, the only side still at full mobility, projecting a construct between them.
The construct formed.
Ragnor’s iron-coated left arm—the arm that had been held by the binding until the binding dissolved—drove into it from the side.
The barrier dissolved.
The plate reached Violin’s left shoulder.
Both shoulders now—the iron coverage spreading from the chest across both shoulders, the restriction present on both sides, both arms’ range of motion compromised. The sound waves he could launch were narrower in their angles, less precise in their placement, the constructs forming with reduced accuracy as the iron plate changed the geometry of how his arms could move.
He looked at Ragnor.