Chapter 534 | God Sends a Bigger Fish

Chapter 534: 534 | God Sends a Bigger Fish

I didn’t think. I swapped to Reaper’s Edge in the time it took my heart to beat, and the death mana poured cold into my right hand. The kama bloomed out of black smoke and settled into my palm, eighteen inches of crystallized dark that ate the gold light around it. Reaping Dash threw me five meters sideways in a smear of shadow. I landed beside Belle and brought the blade down across the tentacle a hand’s width above her boot.

It went through the rubbery flesh without any resistance. The cut edges went black instantly, and rot spread outward from the wound in branching lines that turned the pale skin grey and then brittle. The tentacle spasmed and let go. Something under the water shrieked loud enough to vibrate the rock under my knees, and the severed length flopped across Belle’s legs and kept twitching.

Belle kicked it off her with both feet and then kept kicking it, long after it had stopped mattering.

"Is it dead? Tell me it’s dead, Jace."

"It’s very dead, Belle, and you can stop kicking it."

"I’m going to kick it until I feel better, and that might take a year."

I hauled her up by the wrist. Her suit had torn along the hip where the suckers had grabbed, and a ragged flap of neoprene hung loose, and I could see the edge of black lace underneath that absolutely did not come from FGRA supply. She followed my eyes down and slapped my chest hard enough to leave a handprint.

"Eyes up, milk boy, or I’m billing you for the suit."

"You wore lace into a gate?"

"I wore lace into a gate because I planned to survive it, and survivors deserve nice underwear."

"That’s the best logic I’ve heard all week."

"I know, and I’m brilliant, now give me my crossbow before I cry."

Hikaru appeared at my shoulder holding the crossbow out, and I hadn’t seen her move. She handed it to Belle with two fingers. Her red eyes flicked to the dead tentacle and then to the kama in my hand, and I watched her file it away somewhere behind her face.

"That’s a new weapon, Monroe."

"It’s an old weapon, Tanaka, and it’s just new to you."

"I don’t like it," she said, and she didn’t sound like she didn’t like it at all.

"The blade eats light," Javier said from behind me, voice pitched up an octave. "It literally eats ambient light, and the wound necrosis rate was instant, which means the death aspect scales on contact instead of over time, and I need to write that down immediately."

"Write it down later, Mendoza, please."

"Twenty minutes," he said, pen already moving. "Count is thirty-one."

The tentacle’s owner didn’t come back up. Whatever it was had slunk off into the deep kelp to reconsider its life choices. I didn’t blame it. I would reconsider mine too, if a lottery kid had just rotted off a piece of me in front of its friends.

The third wave hit from below instead of from the front, and that was the first time the grinder got loud.

They came up through the shallow water right against the shelf’s edge, a dozen of them all at once, and they didn’t bother with the waterline. They leapt straight up out of the sea and landed in the middle of the formation. One of them slammed into Jordan from behind and drove him flat on his face, and his shadows snapped back into his body in a spray of black static.

"Jordan’s down!" Naomi shouted from the spire.

"I’m fine!" Jordan wheezed into the basalt. "I’m lying down on purpose, and this was always the plan!"

A frog-seal climbed onto his back and opened its jaw over his skull. Blair grabbed it by the tentacles with her bare hand and set it on fire from the inside. The creature went rigid, then glowed through its own skin like a paper lantern, then burst. Green gore rained across Jordan’s shoulders.

"You owe me, Wayne," Blair said, and she sounded pleased about it.

"I owe you a lot of things, Davenport, and most of them are therapy."

I put the kama through two more. Misato’s clones took four. Naomi couldn’t fire into the formation without hitting us, so she dropped off the spire and came down swinging her staff like a baseball bat, and she caught one frog-seal under the jaw so hard that it spun through the air and landed in the kelp twenty meters out. Her braid had come half undone. Her pink eyes were lit up and furious, and she grinned while she did it, and my stomach flipped in a way that had nothing to do with the smell.

My sweet girlfriend who apologizes to vending machines had just played home-run derby with an amphibian.

"Did you see that?" she yelled at me.

"I saw it, baby, and I’m going to think about it tonight."

"Don’t say that in front of everyone!"

"You yelled first, so this is on you."

"Monroe, Love, stop flirting and hold your sectors," Misato snapped, and one of her clones cleaved a frog-seal off my left side while she said it.

"Yes, Captain," Naomi said, and her ears went pink.

"Yes, Captain," I said, and Misato’s ring burned hot in the back of my skull.

The last of the third wave went down under Hikaru’s invisible cuts. The shelf went quiet again, green light seeping from a dozen split bellies, and bodies bobbed against the edge of the rock in a slow wet slap. Jordan rolled onto his back and stared at the gold canopy. Belle reloaded. Blair stood in her corner breathing hard, steam curling off her knuckles, and when her eyes met mine this time she held them there and didn’t look away.

"Thirty minutes," Javier said. "Count is forty-six, and we’re eleven minutes ahead of pace."

"We’re going to clear this," Belle said. "We’re actually going to clear this under the tide."

"Don’t say that," Jordan said from the ground. "Every time someone says something hopeful, God sends a bigger fish."

Hikaru turned her head toward the deep water, and every muscle in her shoulders locked.

The kelp beyond the shelf’s leading edge was moving wrong. The stalks weren’t swaying anymore. They were bending, all of them, in the same direction, leaning outward in a spreading ring as if something enormous was rising through the middle of the forest and pushing the water aside to make room. The ripples came in long and slow and heavy. The first one reached the shelf and rolled over the edge and washed across my boots, cold enough to make my toes clench.

The second one came up to my ankles.

"That’s the tide," Javier said, voice thin. "That’s the tide, and it’s thirty-eight minutes early."

"Belle," I said.

"I can’t see it!" Her hands had started shaking on the crossbow. "It’s below my range, and it’s so big that I can’t find the edges, and it’s coming straight up under us!"

"Hikaru, give me a count."

"Three seconds," Hikaru said, and she dropped into her stance. "Maybe two."

The graft slammed against my sternum hard enough to hurt.