Chapter 998: Only Getting Started

Kaiden dropped off the barricade with the greatsword already forming, and the market square gave him thirty meters of open flagstone to cross before the nearer pack reached the squad’s line.

He crossed it in four strides. The first hound reached his hip and lost its head without slowing him down. The second he ran straight through, the blade going in behind the shoulder and coming out with enough of the thing still on it to knock a third off its legs.

Calypso came off the wall a breath after him and took the other pack’s front rank in one horizontal.

When the last of them committed, the ranged fire stopped.

Behind the two of them the family stopped feeding the barricade and put all of it into the packs instead. The pack that had been thirty seconds from the medic stopped existing.

Kill notifications stacked down the edge of Kaiden’s vision, a tidy column he had no time to read.

Behind all of it, unwatched, the wall took back nearly all ten minutes of digging.

The thing poured off the roofline like spilled oil, hit the street behind the shopfronts, and was gone down a walled chute. Alice’s beam chased it half a block and lost it between roofs.

By the time the last spider-hound died, the square was silent and the town was pretending again that nothing lived in it.

On the joint feed, the world had just watched a monster shoot a man and leave.

The medic worked on Oda under the awnings with hands that shook so badly the onmyoji had to open her kit for her. The shoulder was a ruin, but it was a shoulder, and Oda was swearing in Japanese through gritted teeth.

Asakura crossed to Kaiden, bowed low, and stayed down. "Lord Grey. My squad cost you the wall."

Her English came slower than ever, each word carried separately. "You stopped cutting because we cannot survive this square. If we withdraw to the cordon, you will not need to stop again. I am ashamed to ask which you prefer."

Behind her, her fighters stood in a loose rank with their eyes anywhere but on the family.

"Captain." Kaiden let the weapon rest on his shoulder and gave the question the moment it had cost her. "How long does an undertaking usually run, out here? A gate like this one."

She blinked at the question. "...Days. For a deep gate, weeks."

"Weeks," he repeated. "We’ve spent only a few minutes, and these minutes already bought us a lot of information."

He nodded toward the barricade. "Those packs came out of the walled streets. It didn’t build this town a maze, it built itself covered roads, and it defends that wall like its life is on the other side."

"This told us that we were right. They don’t want us to enter here, and now we know we should be careful of ranged fire."

He smiled. "Long story short, your team is needed here."

Asakura straightened out of the bow. She looked at him, at the wall, at her medic elbow-deep in gauze, and when she spoke again her voice had its parade-ground level back.

"Then we stay. Thank you."

She did not move away at once. Her eyes stayed on the barricade, and she picked her next English words one at a time.

"Lord Grey. In ten years of gates, the boss sits on the core. It guards. It lets the small ones die and spawns more. They do not leave. It is the one law. Every diver on these islands puts their life on it. Mine also."

"Monsters do not build walls, either," Bastet said from the stall row. She was looking at the barricade and not at any of them. "They do not clear their homes of prey. They do not save their shots for the ones who cannot dodge. They do not-"

She did not finish the thought.

...

The second plan took twenty seconds to establish, made in low voices in the lee of the barricade, where no roofline had an angle on lips.

"Three perches see this square," Asakura said, sketching quick lines on the back of the gate file. Her squad had garrisoned this valley, and its rooftops were theirs. "The fire-watch tower. The pachinko sign. The grain elevator on the river."

Alice’s halo tilted through all three of them in one slow sweep and swung back. "I can hold all three at once from up here. The second that mouth cracks open I’ll have the line it’s shooting down, and everybody gets it in their ears before the round does."

"I’ll take the roofs," Aria said. "Out in the open sky I am the easiest target, so I can’t provide proper aerial overview."

The Moon Valkyrie looked frustrated with herself as she admitted, "I’m afraid it only needs to land one shot."

"Then I’m gonna hide under one of those places and wait for it to come back," Luna said, and her grin had no play left in it. "Come on, you cowardly roach. Pick my spot."

Kira’s voice reached them from the cordon, quieter than it had been all day. "We’re cutting between eight of your own POVs down there. Whatever happens in that square, nobody at home misses it."

Asakura had not moved. When she spoke again she was looking at the barricade instead of at Kaiden.

"Lord Grey. My heavy fighters can swing a hammer." She paused, found the next piece, and set it down. "They can help break down the wall. Then your eyes are free for the roofs. And it will shoot at us instead of at them."

Behind her the spear-user shifted his grip and did not object, which for a man of the Twelfth was the same as volunteering.

"It’ll aim at you first," Kaiden said. "But I assume that’s what you’re asking for."

"Yes." Asakura’s chin came up.

Kaiden looked at her a moment longer than he needed to.

"Alright. Take the north side, beside Calypso."

Luna and Aria went first. They took their marks the way lightning and moonlight take marks, which is to say that between one breath and the next the square simply held two fewer women.

The assault resumed. Kaiden’s greatsword collapsed into the gauntlet and came back out as the pickaxe, and the barricade came apart faster than it ever had, with more shoulders behind it than it had seen all day.

The whine arrived when the sun sat two fingers off the hills.

"Grain elevator! Right side of the catwalk!" Alice’s shout burst out of the halo doubled and chiming, and it beat the round to the square by a full second.

The shot burst against the lip of Calypso’s crater, showering her in gravel. She spat and did not miss a stroke. Luna was already gone, up the riverfront as a bolt of violet-white, Stormblade first.

She landed on the catwalk half a heartbeat behind the round that had left it, and there was nothing up there to kill. The rail was still shaking. All she found on two hundred meters of gantry was a patch of warm steel where something heavy had been lying on its belly.

"It didn’t wait!" Her voice returned flat with disbelief. "It was already leaving when it shot!"

The second round came from the ground.