He threw himself left.
Not a dodge. A controlled fall, dropping his center of gravity below the beast's charge line and rolling across the worn stone of the bowl's floor. The wolf passed through the space where his chest had been, the formation-frequency distortion field raking across his right shoulder as it went. The sensation was like plunging his arm into ice water that was also somehow burning. His routing sense screamed with interference, the beast's corrupted energy patterns clashing with his template's architecture at the point of near-contact.
He came up on his feet three meters from where he'd started. His right arm hung wrong. Not broken, but the muscles from shoulder to elbow had seized, the formation-frequency disruption in the distortion field's wake doing to his body what Wei Sen's conduit attack had done to his template. Interference at the biological level.
The wolf turned.
It didn't slow down to turn. The beast's rear legs dug into the stone, cracking it, and it pivoted with its entire body mass redirected in a motion that shouldn't have been possible for something that size. Momentum didn't work that way for animals. But the formation-frequency energy cycling through its corrupted biology wasn't following the rules of normal physics. The energy gave it leverage that muscle and bone alone couldn't provide.
It charged again.
Lin Feng dropped his routing sense into the conduit lines beneath the bowl's floor.
The infrastructure here was shallow, close to the surface, the activated conduit lines running in a web of amber luminescence two meters below the worn stone. He found the nearest line, found the energy flowing through it, and pulled.
Not a subtle adjustment. He redirected the conduit line's output upward, through the stone, into the surface layer of the bowl's floor directly in the wolf's path. The formation-frequency energy erupted from the ground as a pulse of disruptive interference, the conduit line's regulated cascade output colliding with the corrupted energy in the wolf's biology.
The beast stumbled.
Its front legs caught the edge of the disrupted zone and the formation-frequency clash threw its gait off. Not a fall. A hitch, a half-second of broken rhythm in its charge, one front leg buckling before the corrupted energy in its body compensated and shoved it back into motion.
Half a second. He'd bought half a second.
His template efficiency dropped. Not much, maybe a point, maybe less. The conduit-line redirection was small-scale work compared to the forty-one-kilometer projection he'd done against Wei Sen. But it still cost, and the cost was immediate.
The wolf closed the remaining distance.
Lin Feng dove again but the beast had learned from the first pass. Instead of charging through, it cut its speed and swung its head, the massive skull coming around like a battering ram. The impact caught him in the ribs on his left side, not full force, but the wolf weighed as much as a horse and even a glancing blow from something that heavy at that speed had consequences.
He hit the ground hard. His left side went from functional to a spreading numbness that his routing sense identified as three ribs cracked, maybe four, the formation-frequency data from his own body delivering the damage report with clinical precision while the rest of him was trying to roll away from the thing that was turning for another pass.
The ground. He needed the ground.
He slammed his palm flat against the stone and reached through his direct conduit interface into every activated line within twenty meters.
The conduit infrastructure responded. Three lines, running roughly parallel beneath the bowl's floor, their cascade-specification energy answering the supervisor-class command. He didn't redirect this time. He disrupted. He pushed the formation-frequency output in all three lines into a discordant pattern, the regulated energy becoming chaotic, a burst of interference that radiated upward through the stone in a circle centered on his position.
The wolf was eight meters away and closing.
The disruption hit it at six meters. The beast's formation-frequency cycling, the steady pulse that drove its corrupted biology, clashed with the chaotic output from the conduit lines. Its distortion field flickered. The warped air around its body stuttered and reformed and stuttered again, the energy armor losing coherence.
The wolf stopped.
Not voluntarily. Its legs locked as the formation-frequency clash disrupted the energy pathways that coordinated its movement. For one second, maybe two, the corrupted wolf stood frozen in the bowl's center, its distortion field flickering like a candle in wind, its biology fighting to restore the cycling pattern that Lin Feng's disruption had broken.
Two seconds.
He pushed himself up. The ribs on his left side ground against each other and the pain was a white flash behind his eyes that he processed and set aside because the two seconds were ending. The wolf's corrupted energy was already reasserting itself, the cycling pattern rebuilding from the disruption's edges inward, the beast's instinctive formation-frequency response doing what corrupted biology did: adapting.
When the wolf moved again, it moved sideways.
Not toward him. Away from the disrupted zone, circling to the bowl's edge where the conduit lines ran deeper and the surface interference was weaker. It was learning. Not thinking, not planning, but the same corruption-driven instinct that had let it predict his dodge was now telling it where the ground was dangerous.
Lin Feng's template read fifty-five point two.
He'd lost two and a half points in thirty seconds of conduit-line disruption. The infrastructure work was burning through his reserves faster than the projection against Wei Sen had. Because the projection had been precise, targeted, working with the conduit lines rather than against their natural flow. What he was doing now was brute force. Turning the infrastructure into a weapon by making it malfunction. Expensive. Wasteful.
The wolf circled. It had found the edge of the disrupted zone and was pacing along it, the formation-frequency distortion field fully restored, the corrupted energy cycling at its normal rate. The beast's head tracked him. Reading his template the way it had been reading it since it first sensed him from nine kilometers out.
He couldn't win this at range.
The conduit-line disruption could slow it, could buy him seconds, but every second cost him template efficiency and the beast adapted faster than he could innovate. Given ten more exchanges like the last one, his template would be in the forties and the wolf would have mapped every conduit line in the bowl and learned to avoid all of them.
Old Ghost had said: physical contact. Touch range.
The distortion field had seized his right arm's muscles from near-contact at three meters. Touch range meant getting inside the field. Staying inside it. Maintaining contact while his formation-frequency architecture tried to override the beast's corrupted energy patterns and the beast tried to kill him.
The wolf stopped circling.
It had found what it was looking for. A section of the bowl's floor where the conduit lines ran deep, where Lin Feng's surface disruption couldn't reach effectively. It set its stance, the massive body lowering into the pre-charge posture, the distortion field pulling tight against its fur.
Lin Feng stopped trying to think of a better option.
He ran toward it.
The wolf charged.
They met in the bowl's center. Lin Feng committed to the collision because there was nothing else to commit to, driving his good right hand forward into the distortion field as the beast's head came down for the battering-ram strike that had cracked his ribs on the first pass.
The distortion field hit his arm like a wall of static. Every nerve from fingertips to shoulder fired at once, the formation-frequency interference attacking his biology at the cellular level, the corrupted energy patterns trying to do to his body what they did to everything they touched: corrupt it, absorb it, make it part of the beast's cycling.
His hand found fur. Coarse, bristle-stiff, hot with the energy running through the beast's body.
He grabbed.
The wolf's head connected with his chest. Not his ribs this time, center mass, the full weight of the beast behind the blow. He heard something crack that wasn't bone. The formation-frequency architecture of his template, the relay node's processing capacity, took the physical impact and redistributed it the way it had redistributed Wei Sen's conduit attack. Not perfectly. Not without cost.
He held on.
The consumption began.
Infrastructure consumption had been like drinking from a pipe. Regulated flow, structured energy, the conduit node's formation-frequency medium entering his template in organized patterns that the integration cycle could process.
This was like trying to drink from a fire hose that was also trying to bite his face off.
The beast's energy poured into the contact point where his hand gripped its fur, but "poured" was wrong because poured implied direction and this had no direction. The corrupted formation-frequency patterns in the wolf's biology hit his template from every angle at once, each pattern carrying the stamp of decades of corrupted absorption, the energy twisted into configurations that his architecture didn't recognize and couldn't immediately process.
His template tried to override.
The override function worked the way Old Ghost had described: his formation-frequency architecture imposing its pattern on the incoming energy, reformatting the corrupted configurations into something compatible with the Devourer's Path specification. Like translating a language by force. Like grabbing a river and making it run backward.
The wolf did not cooperate.
It thrashed. The massive body whipped sideways and Lin Feng went with it because releasing his grip meant starting over, meant losing the contact, meant the consumption failing. His fingers dug into the coarse fur and the energy interface held while the beast slammed him against the bowl's stone floor, once, twice, the impacts registered by his template as formation-frequency damage events but processed somewhere distant because the consumption was taking everything his architecture had.
The corrupted patterns fought the override. Each one resisted individually, the decades-old configurations of the beast's energy cycling pushing back against his template's reformatting with the mindless persistence of corruption doing what corruption did. His template processed one pattern, and three more surged into the contact point. He processed those, and eight more arrived.
His efficiency dropped through fifty-three. Fifty-one. Forty-nine.
The wolf bit him.
The jaw closed on his left forearm, the one attached to the hand with three working fingers and two dead ones. The teeth went through skin and muscle and stopped at bone. The pain was distant, processed by the same part of his template that was handling the physical impacts, but the blood was immediate and real, running down his arm and onto the wolf's muzzle and into the stone beneath them.
He didn't let go.
The override was working. Slowly, expensively, his formation-frequency architecture chewing through the corrupted patterns one at a time, converting each one from the beast's configuration to something his integration cycle could eventually process. The energy volume in the wolf's biology was dropping. He could feel it through the contact point: the beast's cycling losing output, the formation-frequency fuel that drove its corrupted biology being consumed faster than the beast could regenerate it.
The wolf's distortion field collapsed.
The warped air around its body smoothed. The formation-frequency armor that had seized his muscles from three meters away disappeared as the energy sustaining it was redirected into the consumption. The beast's biology, stripped of its formation-frequency enhancement, was suddenly just biology. A very large wolf with a very strong jaw that was still clamped on his forearm.
But slower. Weaker. The energy draining out of it with each pattern his template consumed.
The jaw loosened. Not released, loosened, the muscles losing the formation-frequency drive that had given them their crushing force. Lin Feng pulled his arm free, tearing skin against teeth, and maintained his grip on the beast's fur with his right hand.
The last patterns broke.
The wolf's formation-frequency cycling stopped. The corrupted energy, all of it, passed through the contact point and into his template. The beast's body went still, not with the tension of a living animal holding position but with the limpness of something that had lost the thing that made it move.
Lin Feng's hand released.
He fell sideways off the wolf's body and hit the stone. The bowl's floor was cold against his back. The dawn sky above him had gone from gray to pale gold while he'd been dying on the ground.
His left forearm was bleeding from puncture wounds spaced in a semicircle that matched the wolf's jaw. His ribs, the cracked ones, sent data through his template that he ignored. His right arm's muscles had partially released from the distortion field's earlier seizure but were still shaking.
He lay on the stone and tried to read his template.
*Template efficiency: 47.3%.*
Down ten points from the start of the fight. The lowest it had been since his first week in the Barrens.
But that wasn't the number that stopped him.
The consumed energy from the wolf sat in his template like a hot coal in a bucket of water. Not integrated. Not processed. Not even in a format his integration cycle recognized. The infrastructure nodes he'd consumed had delivered their energy in conduit-specification format, pre-organized, ready for the integration cycle to incorporate. The wolf's energy was nothing like that. It was raw. Unstructured. Still carrying the ghost-patterns of the corrupted configurations his template had overridden, the formation-frequency equivalent of food that had been chewed but not swallowed.
His integration cycle touched the consumed energy and recoiled. The autonomous process that had been steadily climbing his template efficiency for weeks made contact with the beast energy's chaotic format and stopped.
Not failed. Stopped. The cycle was running. It just wasn't processing the new energy. It was holding it in a buffer, isolating it from the rest of his template architecture the way a body isolated a splinter.
The beast's energy sat in the buffer. His template's normal integration proceeded around it. Two separate processes, not communicating.
On the ridge, two hundred and thirty meters away, Gao Jun's formation-frequency signature was moving. Coming down. The flat-palm assessment abandoned for whatever came after a man watched his colleague get mauled by a horse-sized wolf and win.
The wolf lay beside him, cooling. Already it looked smaller without the distortion field. Just an animal. A very large, very dead animal with formation-frequency residue fading from its fur like heat from a stone.
His left arm bled onto the rock. The dawn light caught the amber luminescence of the conduit lines beneath the surface and for a moment the blood and the light were the same color.
