The first wolf-thing hit me at thirty miles an hour and I let it.
Not because I'm stupid. Because I'm doing math.
Kinetic Absorption caught the impact across my forearms where I'd braced the bat horizontal, and the force translated clean. Five percent Strength. Five percent Agility. Thirty-second timer. The wolf-thing bounced off me like it had run into a parked truck and tumbled sideways across the hopscotch grid, already bleeding from where the Dragon Witch's Ring had scorched through its jaw on contact.
The second one came half a heartbeat later, low and fast, going for my knees. I brought the bat down in a vertical chop that split its skull before it reached me. No Spatial Cleave. No Ember. Just the bat and eight thousand points of hidden Strength doing what Strength does when you stop pretending you're C-Rank.
