Chapter 537 | The Human Lantern

Chapter 537: 537 | The Human Lantern

The alpha’s forehead was slick enough to make an ice rink look generous. I skated two steps toward the third eye on pure spite before my boots caught a ridge of bone. The dead tentacle slid off my waist and flopped into the sea. I gave Blair one full second of gratitude, then filed it under things I would take to my grave before saying out loud.

The wound Naomi had blown open sat four meters below me. Gold light pulsed up through a crater of grey meat. Each pulse hit the graft behind my sternum like a fist knocking on a door. My chest wanted that core the way a starving dog wants a barbecue, and I was the only leash in the neighborhood.

The eye beside me rolled in its socket and fixed on my boots. It was the size of a hot tub, milky white, with a pupil that opened like a camera shutter. I watched my own reflection get bigger in it. I decided I did not like being looked at by something that could fit my whole squad in its tear duct.

"Jace, it knows you’re there!" Belle’s scream carried over the water in a pitch that could shatter glass. "Stop admiring the view and stab it!"

"I’m assessing the terrain, Belle!"

"You’re sightseeing on a monster’s face!"

The skull tilted under my feet. My stomach went sideways. My boots lost the ridge. I jammed the kama into the flesh at the edge of the eye socket to stop myself from sliding into the ocean. The blade sank to the handle. Black rot bloomed out from the cut in branching veins, racing across the grey hide. The eye above it clouded over and went dark.

The alpha shrieked. The sound came out of nine mouths and one throat all at once. It hit my eardrums hard enough that I tasted copper. The whole head reared back, lifting me three meters higher into the tea-colored sky. I hung off the kama by one arm while my legs swung over nothing. The spear slipped out of my left hand and vanished into the kelp below.

That spear had been with me since my first week. I made a mental note to hold a funeral for it later.

"Monroe, hold on!" Misato’s voice snapped up at me from the shelf, flat and furious. "Clones are coming up the left side. You do not let go!"

"I wasn’t planning to let go, Captain, but I appreciate the vote of confidence!"

"Shut up and hang on!"

Two lime-green clones hit the alpha’s cheek and started climbing. They’d fashioned their extendable steel poles into makeshift pitons, driving them into the rubbery grey hide one brutal stab at a time. The skin was tougher up here than it looked from the shelf.

Every time they yanked a pole free, a pocket of black fluid oozed out and ran down the surface in thin rivulets. A tentacle the width of a sedan swept across the cheek in a lazy arc. The first clone saw it coming and tried to flatten herself against the hide, but the angle was wrong.

The tentacle caught her across the spine and she burst into a spray of green light that scattered like fireflies in the tea-colored wind. The mana residue rained down over the kelp.

The second clone kept climbing. Her jaw was set, her green eyes locked on me, grinding upward one pole-length at a time with the same stubborn fury I’d seen on the original’s face every single day since orientation week.

Below the jaw, the sea exploded again.

Naomi came up out of the water in a column of blue-white spray. Spiral energy boiled around her legs and feet, launching her skyward with enough force to send a ring of displaced water spreading outward across the surface for twenty meters in every direction.

I forgot about the monster for exactly one heartbeat.

The Gold buff from the Beloved Cow extraction lit her from inside so hard that her brown skin glowed amber at the throat and wrists, the veins along her forearms showing through like branching rivers of warm light. It made her look less like a person and more like a flare shot up from the bottom of the ocean.

Her braid had come undone underwater, probably torn loose by one of the smaller tentacles she’d been dodging down there. Her pink and black striped hair hung plastered down her back to her hips, the wet strands sticking to her neoprene suit in thick alternating lines.

The suit itself hadn’t survived the trip down. A long tear ran from her collarbone diagonally across the chest panel and down one side, the reinforced fabric peeled back where something sharp had caught her during the fight under the surface.

I could see a long curve of bare dark skin from her ribs to her hip, glistening with saltwater, catching the gold light from her buff every time she shifted her weight on the Wave Motion platform under her boots.

A thin scratch ran parallel to the tear, not deep enough to bleed seriously but enough to prove she’d been closer to those teeth than any of us had planned.

She hovered on Wave Motion three meters above the surface, staff braced against her shoulder, the spiral energy crackling at both ends. She looked up at me hanging off a monster’s eyeball by a death sickle with my feet dangling over open air.

"Why are you up there?" Naomi’s voice shot straight up an octave. Even buffed to Gold, even glowing like a human lantern, she still managed to sound like she was about to apologize for yelling at me. "You were supposed to stay on the shelf and make calls!"

"I made a call, and the call was that I go up here!"

"That’s a terrible call, and you know it’s terrible!"

"You jumped into the ocean because I said so, so I’m not sure you get to judge!"

She fired anyway. The argument and the attack happened at the same time because that was how Naomi worked now. Two months of training and the buff had turned her hesitation into something closer to professional multitasking. The spiral left her staff in a tight corkscrew of blue-white force and slammed into the underside of the jaw just below the wound I’d opened with the kama.

The impact was enormous. Meat tore. Fluid gushed. The whole head jerked up another meter, ripping me higher into the sky while my arm screamed at the socket. The crater under me widened from the shock, the edges of damaged flesh peeling back like wet paper.

More gold spilled out from underneath, that deep metallic glow that meant we were close. The core showed through, round and huge, at least the size of a beach ball, ringed with pulsing veins of black and purple that fed into the surrounding tissue like roots from a rotten tree.

There it was. The whole point of this stupid fight.

Hikaru climbed out of the water behind Naomi without a sound. No splash, no gasp, no announcement. She just appeared, the way she always did, like the ocean had decided to produce her fully formed. She went up a floating tentacle stump in four steps, water pouring off her combat suit in sheets, black hair slick against her skull, red eyes fixed on the core with the kind of focus that made you feel sorry for whatever she was looking at.

She moved her hand once. A single casual gesture, fingers extended, wrist turning. A line opened in the grey flesh between me and the crater, clean and straight, three meters long and deep enough to see pale bone underneath. The cut was so precise that the two walls of separated meat held their shape for a full second before gravity pulled them apart and viscera started to spill.

"Path," Hikaru said, loud enough for me to hear over the shrieking. "You have two seconds before it closes."

"Can I get three?"

"No."