Chapter 539 | The Overclock Crash

Chapter 539: 539 | The Overclock Crash

The cold slammed the air out of me all over again. Green water closed over my face, and the dissolving alpha rained down around me in chunks of grey sludge that clouded everything. My suit filled with water at the collar where the tentacle had torn it. I kicked, and my legs barely answered, because I had spent six weeks learning how to fight and exactly zero minutes learning how to swim in gore.

A hand caught the back of my collar and hauled.

Naomi dragged me up through the murk in one hard pull of Wave Motion, and we broke the surface together in a spray of blue-white light. I came up coughing seawater and monster juice, and she wrapped both arms around my chest from behind and held me up while I hacked my lungs out.

Her body pressed against my back through the torn suit, warm and bare where the neoprene had split, and I could feel her heart racing through her ribs. Her hair floated around us both in a dark cloud, pink at the tips. She hooked her chin over my shoulder, and her lips brushed my ear.

"You’re an idiot," Naomi said, voice wet and shaky. "You’re the biggest idiot on the whole island, and I hate you so much right now."

"You don’t hate me, and you just carried me out of the ocean."

"I can do both!"

"You really can," I said, and I meant it more than I meant most things.

Hikaru surfaced two meters away, calm as a lake, and treaded water with her red eyes fixed on me. Seawater ran off her chin. For half a second I saw her face crack into something soft and relieved, and then she locked it back down so fast that I would have missed it if I blinked.

"Core destroyed," Hikaru said. "Exit portal is forming on the shelf, and you look terrible."

"Thank you, Hikaru, and you look great too."

She didn’t answer, but the pale blue ring in the back of my skull burned a little warmer.

The shelf sat forty meters off, and the ocean had swallowed most of it already. Only the spire poked through the surface now, and a few basalt ridges showing in a rough circle around it. Misato’s clones stood waist-deep on the ridges, hauling people up one after another. Jordan sat on top of the spire, drenched through, scowling at the water with his arms wrapped tight around his knees. Javier crouched beside him, waterproof notebook raised overhead like a shield. Blair stood on the highest ridge with steam rising off her whole body, her torn suit hanging open to the navel, her red hair plastered flat against her burn scar, eyes fixed on the horizon.

Behind them, a vertical tear of sea-green light was pulling itself open in the air above the flooded shelf, edges rippling like silk.

Belle stood at the ridge’s edge with her crossbow slung over one shoulder and her fists planted on her hips, the torn neoprene flapping down around her thigh. The black lace underneath was fully exposed now, and she didn’t give it a second thought. Her amber-brown eyes found me floating in Naomi’s arms, and her shoulders dropped by two full inches. Her whole posture changed.

"Javier!" Belle yelled without looking away from me. "Time!"

"Fifty-eight minutes and eleven seconds!" Javier shouted back, still holding the notebook high. "Sixty-one confirmed kills plus one alpha, and one man-sized idiot retrieved from the water!"

"Put the idiot in the spreadsheet! Red ink!"

"I already did!"

Naomi kicked us toward the ridge in slow, steady pulses of Wave Motion, and Hikaru swam beside us on my other side, close enough to reach if I started sinking. My arms hung limp in the water. The Overclock crash was setting in now, a deep ache in every muscle that made my bones feel like they belonged to someone else. My chest felt hollow. My head felt stuffed with wool. Everything was starting to blur at the edges.

The pale blue ring in the back of my skull burned steady and cold, and somewhere in the distance I could still feel Hikaru watching me.

We came up against the ridge, and Naomi’s arms didn’t loosen. She pressed her face into the side of my neck and stayed there. Her breath came in small, unsteady puffs against my skin. She didn’t speak. She didn’t pull away. Her grip around my chest tightened once, hard enough that I felt it in my ribs, and then it loosened again, and she kept kicking us forward through the water.

The silver-pink ring in my head burned bright enough that my eyes started to sting. I blamed it on the saltwater still dripping down my face.

We reached the ridge. Misato’s clone leaned over the edge, grabbed my arm with both hands, and hauled me up out of the water in one clean motion. I hit the basalt on my knees. The water here was only ankle-deep. Seaweed stuck to my shins. The stone under me felt rough and real, and I was still trying to convince my body it wasn’t about to drown when Misato dropped down directly in front of me.

She grabbed my face with both hands and turned it left, then right, then left again. Her fingers were cold. Her eyes scanned me like I was a crime scene.

"Are you hurt?" Her voice came out low, clipped, and absolutely pissed. "Tell me where you’re hurt, Monroe, right now."

"My pride," I said. My voice came out hoarse. "Took some damage when I lost the spear."

"I’m going to kill you."

"You said you’d kill me later, so I think I have a few hours."

Her thumbs pressed into my cheekbones. Her lime green eyes held mine, wide and wet at the edges, and I watched her breathe through her nose twice before she let go of my face. She stood up and turned toward the portal so the squad couldn’t see her expression.

"Everyone through the exit," Misato barked. "Fox and Tanaka first, then Wayne and Mendoza, then Davenport, then Love and Monroe, and anyone who argues swims home!"