Chapter 507 | She Earned It

Chapter 507: 507 | She Earned It

The clones came.

They hit us from three angles at once, which was more than the drill sheet called for, which meant Misato had decided we needed to learn the hard way or she was just in a mood, and honestly with Misato those two things overlapped more often than not.

Two came from the treeline. Two dropped from the low branches where I hadn’t even seen them climb. Two came straight up the middle at Naomi, who was the obvious target, the damage dealer, the one you take out first if you have a brain and Misato’s clones always had a brain.

Naomi didn’t flinch. The Gold buff sang through her and she brought the staff around in an arc that scattered blue-white light across the whole field, and the two clones coming up the middle took the blast center mass and dissolved back into green mist before they closed half the distance. She’d never moved that fast before.

The buff turned her from a glass cannon into an artillery platform, and I felt a small, stupid, proprietary pride about that, because I was the reason, because a farmhouse that smelled like wildflowers and a bell around her throat had bought her forty-eight hours of being terrifying.

Jordan’s shadows snapped out and caught two more, wrapping around ankles and dragging them down before they could reach the flank. Belle called positions in that flat, bored voice she used when she was actually focused, and Hikaru moved through the last one with something invisible that I couldn’t see and the clone couldn’t either until it fell apart in two clean halves.

The last one came for me.

Because of course it did. Because Misato had told me I was bait and Misato didn’t say things she didn’t mean, and because a clone that ran the same tactical logic as the woman who made it would look at a diamond formation and go straight for the person standing alone in the rear.

I let it come. Waited until the wooden sword was committed to the downswing, until there was no way to redirect. Then I stepped left, planted, and swept the spear butt against the back of its knee, and when it buckled I put the flat of the blade against its throat at half speed, which was the drill signal for a kill without actually decapitating a facsimile of my captain, because I’d learned that lesson the awkward way in week two.

The clone froze. Then it dissolved.

Silence.

Misato stood at the top of the field with her arms crossed, and she looked at the empty turf where six clones had been, and where six clones had died without taking a single member of the squad with them.

"Again," she said. But her voice had something in it. Not warmth. Misato didn’t do warmth in front of the squad. But the absence of the usual disgust, which from her was basically a parade.

"That’s it?" Jordan said from the grass, where he’d fallen again immediately after his part ended. "We did the thing. Can we eat now?"

"We did the thing once," Misato said. "You do a thing once, it’s an accident. You do it twenty times, it’s a squad. Up."

Blair turned to me while the clones reformed. Her flames had died down. Her face had done something I hadn’t seen it do before, which was consider me as a piece of information rather than an obstacle. "That was clean," she said. Grudging. Like the words cost her actual money.

"You sound surprised."

"I am surprised. Two weeks ago you couldn’t run a mile."

"Two weeks ago I hadn’t been through a Void Gate with you. Turns out that’s a hell of a personal trainer."

Something flickered across her face at that. The gate. The cave. The eighteen inches of stone and the thing that lived under our boots and the specific way she’d looked at me in the dark when she thought we were both going to die. She looked away first, which was new, because Blair Davenport did not look away first from anything, and the color that climbed her throat had nothing to do with her fire.

The System pinged.

Blair Davenport. Devotion: thirty-three percent. Status: ???

Thirty-three. She’d been at twenty-seven when I woke up in the hospital, and twenty-nine after, and thirty-one this morning, and now it was thirty-three, and the number just kept climbing two points at a time like a slow leak in a dam she’d spent eighteen years building.

I did not smile. Blair, unlike Misato, would absolutely notice, and unlike Misato she would set me on fire about it, and I had a shower to get to and a hair-dyeing appointment on Tuesday with a girl who kept a stuffed bat named Vlad and I intended to survive to both.

"Formation," Misato called. "Now. Davenport, you’re calling target priority and this time you’re going to trust that Love can pull her own trigger without a committee vote. Understood?"

Blair’s mouth pressed flat. But she nodded. And she took her position. And when the clones came again, she called targets and then let her squad hit them, and the difference between correcting and calling was the difference between a girl who had to control everything and a girl who was learning, one drill at a time, that maybe she didn’t.

We ran it eleven more times. By the tenth the formation held clean and Jordan had stopped complaining, which was how you knew the sun had achieved something unnatural. By the eleventh even Hikaru offered a two-word adjustment to Blair’s flank coverage, and Blair took it without lighting anything on fire, and I watched two people who’d started the morning ready to kill each other move like they belonged on the same field.

Misato called time at eight-forty. "Weapons back. Shower. Breakfast. We’re at Building C in ninety for gate-bid strategy and if any of you are late I’m running you until your legs file for divorce."

"My legs already sued for emotional damages," Jordan said, flat on the turf. "Settlement’s pending."

Belle stepped over him a third time. "Get up, corpse."

Naomi found me at the weapon rack, cheeks flushed from the drill and the buff, her braid mostly holding after eleven passes through hell. She didn’t say anything about the tree line. She didn’t have to. She just bumped her shoulder against mine while I racked the spear, and she smelled like my soap again, and her hand found the small of my back for one second before she took it away.

"Sixty-one," she said quietly.

I looked at her.

She wasn’t reading the System. She couldn’t read the System. But she’d watched the captain walk off with the field lead and watched them come back different, and she’d done the math the same way Belle did with numbers and Aurora did with people, and she’d landed on the exact right answer without any of the mechanics.

"You’re not mad," I said.

"I’m not mad." She tucked a loose strand of pink and black behind her ear. "I was going to be. On the walk over I practiced being mad. And then I thought about what she did while you were gone." Naomi’s throat worked.

"She earned it. However that shakes out. She earned it."