Chapter 533 | Tactical Positioning is Her Butt

Chapter 533: 533 | Tactical Positioning is Her Butt

Blair’s fire hit the pinned front row in a wall of blue-white heat, and the humidity fought her for every inch of it.

Steam exploded off the shelf in a hissing cloud that swallowed Jordan to the waist. Three of the frog-seals cooked where they lay, their grey hides splitting open along the belly seams and spilling green light across the basalt. The other three screamed through the fire and kept thrashing against the shadows, skin blackened but still very much alive and very much annoyed.

"Forty percent!" Blair shouted, and her voice cracked on it. "I’m running at forty percent, and this ocean is personally insulting me!"

"You’re still the hottest thing on this rock," I said. "Keep burning, Davenport."

"I will end you when we get home, Monroe."

"Put it on the list, and the list is long."

Javier stepped past my shoulder and put a dagger through the eye of the nearest survivor, then pivoted and opened the throat of the next one in a single backhand. His wrists moved like he’d rehearsed it in a mirror four hundred times, which I knew for a fact he had. The third one lunged at Jordan’s knee, and Hikaru’s hand flicked sideways from ten meters off, and the creature fell into two neat halves that slid apart on the wet stone.

I didn’t even see the cut, and I never do, and that remains the most terrifying fact about sharing a bathroom with her.

"Next wave, twelve meters and closing," Belle said. "They’re splitting around the spire. Six coming right, eight left."

"Left is mine," Blair said.

"Left is ours," I said. "Naomi, drop a spiral on the right flank and hold the rest."

Naomi didn’t answer out loud. She swung her staff down from the spire and a blue-white spiral the size of a car tore into the water off the right edge of the shelf. The sea jumped four meters high, and when it came down it came down red and green together, and chunks of grey hide bobbed to the surface in a slick that drifted toward the kelp. The Gold buff made her glow from the inside out, her brown skin threaded with faint light where the veins sat close to the surface, and her pink and black braid whipped around her shoulders in the updraft off her own blast.

I looked for one second too long, and a frog-seal came over the left edge and went for my face.

Its jaw split open wide enough to fit my entire head, tentacles fanning out around the mouth like a wet flower somebody grew in a biohazard bin. I dropped my weight and let it sail over me, then came up behind it and drove the spear through the soft spot under its skull. The blade punched out the top in a spray of green. The body twitched twice and went slack on the haft, and I kicked it off into the water.

"Stop staring at Naomi’s butt and fight," Belle called without looking at me.

"I was staring at her tactical positioning," I said.

"Her tactical positioning is her butt, Monroe, and you’re not subtle."

"Nobody on this shelf is subtle, Fox," Misato said, dropping out of the steam from somewhere above us.

Misato had split herself six ways, and the clones moved across the shelf in pairs, each one carrying a wooden practice pole swapped out for the real steel she’d sealed in her suit’s thigh pocket. Two of them tore through a knot of frog-seals at the left edge, green ponytails snapping as they worked. The original held the center of the formation and called movement in short barks that hit my ears before my brain processed them.

"Wayne, pull the line back two meters. Davenport, burn the gap. Love, reload."

Jordan’s shadows slid backward across the waterline. The frog-seals surged forward into the space he’d given up, and Blair met them there, both hands out, fire roaring into the fog. The heat licked across my face hot enough to sting, and the smell of scorched fat and seawater filled my nose. Four more went down. Two of them rolled into the ocean screaming and the steam off their bodies drifted up through the gold light in lazy columns.

"Ten minutes," Javier called. "Count is twenty-two confirmed."

"We’re ahead of schedule," Belle said, and I heard her grin. "The grinder works, and I’m taking full credit."

"Scenario Nineteen was mine," Javier said, and then he stabbed something.

"Mathematical foundation is mine, Mendoza, and my name goes first on the report."

"That’s fine, Belle, I’ll put mine in the footnotes."

"That’s where the smart people live anyway, sweetie."

The water went quiet for thirty seconds after that. Not calm, just quiet, and quiet in a fracture space has never once meant good news. I took the gap to breathe. My B-rank Endurance kept my lungs steady, but the neoprene clung to every inch of me, soaked through at the collar where the spray had come over.

I let my eyes do a lap of the formation and immediately regretted it, because I have no self-control and the suits were designed by a pervert.

Belle stood on the right flank with her crossbow up and her zipper still stopped at her sternum, and the spray had plastered the black composite to her like paint. Water ran down the valley of her chest and vanished into the suit, and every time she breathed the fabric creaked. Her blue combat braid dripped over one shoulder. She caught me looking out of the corner of her eye, and she didn’t turn her head, but she arched her back one inch and fired a bolt into the kelp just to make the suit tighten.

That girl weaponizes her own spine, and I respect it more than I respect most governments.

Blair stood on the left with her suit undone to the navel and steam rolling off her skin. The burn scar ran pink and glossy down her left side, from her collarbone past her ribs, and water beaded on the good skin and flashed to vapor on contact. Her red hair had frizzed from the heat. Her ice-blue eyes found me through the fog and locked there, and the air around her jumped five degrees.

"Stop looking at me, Monroe."

"I’m checking your burn, Davenport, because I’m a responsible field lead."

"My burn is healed, and you’re checking my chest."

"The burn is on your chest, so technically I’m doing both."

The rock under her boot cracked. A little hiss of steam came out of the fissure. She turned back to the water and her ears went crimson under the red hair, and the ninth ring in the back of my skull flickered once, bright and ugly and hungry.

"Movement below," Hikaru said. "Twenty meters down, and it’s moving sideways."

Everyone went still. I shifted my grip on the spear and felt the graft pulse against my sternum. The kelp swayed. A long ripple rolled under the surface toward the right edge of the shelf, and something pale rose through the green water behind it, long and ropy and covered in suckers the size of dinner plates.

"Tentacle, right side!" Belle yelled, and then it had her ankle.

It came up out of the sea faster than I could track, thick as my thigh, and wrapped around Belle’s leg twice before she finished screaming. It yanked her off her feet and she hit the rock hard on her back, crossbow skittering away. She slid toward the edge on the wet stone, clawing at the basalt, and the suckers had latched onto her suit and were pulling the neoprene down her hip in a sticky wet peel that exposed a strip of pale skin.

"Don’t you dare take my pants off, you calamari freak!"