Chapter 90 - 0/60 seconds

[Warning: This attack did not inflict a qualifying severe injury on the target.]

[Verified Impediment Duration: 0/60 seconds.]

[Highest-Priority Emergency Extraction: Locked.]

The cold red text hung in the corner of his vision. The leather-coated man’s laughter caught in his throat, and the muscles in his face began to twitch.

"No... no severe injury?" The shield bearer’s elation vanished. "A direct blast from a 105-millimeter gun, and it didn’t even count as slowing him down?!"

The leather-coated man’s hands began to shake.

Stay calm. Stay fucking calm.

"How many shells left for the 105s?!"

"Three!"

Three.

He ran through his options.

"Hold one back! Load the other two!" He pointed toward the main fortifications, his voice rising to a shout. "Stop standing around! He’s coming straight at us! Get the remaining machine guns out of the depot—both water-cooled Maxims! Set them up on the main line!"

Several kilometers away, black smoke still rolled from the wreck. A dark figure tore out of it, trailing a long yellow dragon of dust across the sand.

"Move! Rookies, get those belts loaded!"

He drew his revolver and fired twice at the feet of two newcomers who had wet themselves.

"Anyone drags their feet, I’ll blow their fucking head off!"

They scrambled for the green metal ammunition boxes.

He hurried to the rear of the position and seized Chen by the collar, his eyes red.

"Chen! I’m begging you! The four of us together—we just have to last sixty seconds! Get through that, and we all go back to Paradise alive!"

Chen sat against the sandbags, his entrenching shovel across his knees.

He studied the face twisted with fear in front of him. Since their first rookie world, they had crawled out of more killing fields together than he could count. The scar running from his temple, through his right eye, and down to his jaw had come from one of them.

That blow should have split his skull. The man now gripping his collar had thrown an arm into its path. The blade had severed the arm and still caught Chen across the face, nearly killing him. His friend had not gotten that arm back until they returned to Paradise.

The scar beside Chen’s eye pulled taut. He pressed his lips together and tightened his fingers around the cold shovel handle until his knuckles whitened. He neither nodded nor pushed the other man away.

Unable to wait any longer, the leather-coated man released him.

"Gun crews!" he roared toward the emplacements. "Fire those two fucking shells!"

...

Wind cut across the open desert.

Lin Yan raced between the dunes, a black blur against the sand. Each driving stride blasted a half-meter-wide crater beneath his boots.

A hundred kilometers an hour.

A hundred and ten.

A hundred and twenty.

Still accelerating.

Wind shrieked through the torn half of his faceplate. The exposed eye remained fixed on the airfield.

A shell whistled down.

The second 105-millimeter high-explosive round struck forty meters ahead and to his side.

BOOM!

Flame and tons of sand erupted into the air. Fragments screamed past him.

Lin Yan did not so much as turn his head. As the blast threw up a wall of sand, he changed direction, cutting several meters sideways and carving deep furrows with his boots. He came through faster than before.

The third shell followed.

BOOM!

It burst behind him. The shock wave drove a sheet of sand against his back, and small fragments rattled across his armor.

"...That all you’ve got?"

The imminent threat that had followed each shell faded from his senses.

No fourth shot came.

Lin Yan stopped holding back.

He drove his legs harder, blasting sand behind him with every stride. His already punishing pace climbed again as he charged straight for the airfield.

...

"One kilometer! He’s inside one kilometer!"

The newcomer watching from the forward position could barely control his voice.

"He’s still speeding up!"

He stared at the yellow trail of dust bearing down on them.

"Nine hundred meters... eight—"

The black figure ate up another stretch of ground before he could finish.

"Fuck! Seven hundred!"

"Fire! All guns, fucking fire!"

The leather-coated man’s scream cut across the position.

Four water-cooled Maxims opened up at once, half-meter tongues of flame jetting from their muzzles. Tracers streaked red through the air as the four streams of fire converged on the charging figure.

Lin Yan did not dodge.

Bullets hammered his black scale armor, throwing off sheets of sparks. They struck his chest, shoulders, and arms. Some shattered; others ricocheted away. None left a mark.

The four guns kept roaring.

He kept coming.

He had not slowed at all.

"Monster..."

One newcomer had gone deathly pale.

"The bullets aren’t getting through!"

Two ammunition handlers broke. They dropped their belts and scrambled toward the rear. Lin Yan spared them no attention, driving on through the gunfire.

A hundred meters.

Seventy.

Fifty!

"ELENA!"

In the shadows behind the line, Elena raised her wooden staff and drove it into the sand.

[Gravity Art—Fivefold!]

A low hum rolled through the position.

Color drained from Elena’s face. Sweat ran down her temples as the sand collapsed beneath Lin Yan’s feet. His charging body dipped, his speed forcibly cut.

At the same instant, a scarlet timer appeared in the upper corner of all three Contractors’ vision.

[Verified Impediment Timer Started: 00:01 / 00:60]

"Fucking DIE!"

The shield bearer charged out of the position.

His body swelled as he ran. Coarse gray-black fur forced its way through his skin, his head lengthened into a wolf’s muzzle, and his fingers became claws with a sickly green sheen.

His werewolf bloodline was fully unleashed.

He now stood a full head taller than Lin Yan. The alloy tower shield that had covered most of his body now hung at his side, gripped in one massive hand.

With a growl, he brought it up and charged.

[00:05]

Lin Yan twisted at the hips and cut upward into the oncoming shield.

CLANG!

Steel screamed against steel. A long split tore through the shield’s face, wrenching the werewolf’s arm outward and pulling his massive body half a step off line.

The instant the shield swung aside, the leather-coated man came in from the flank.

He drove a syringe into the side of his neck and emptied its dark red contents into his veins. Blood-red lines spread across his pale cheeks as his other hand drew the revolver.

The skin of his gun hand split open. Blood seeped along the grip and into the weapon, binding flesh to metal. Inside the cylinder, the rounds darkened to crimson, fine red veins swelling across their tips.

He aimed at the exposed half of Lin Yan’s face.

BANG! BANG!

Two blood-red bullets streaked toward his head.

Lin Yan had been about to strike again. He checked his blade and brought his left forearm across his face.

Both bullets flattened against the armor and glanced away. But the blood coating them burst into a fine mist, spattering his exposed cheek and neck.

Unsure what it did, Lin Yan held his breath.

The effect came anyway.

His body slowed.

Not from the gravity.

His limbs felt heavier, his muscles a fraction late to contract. Even his heartbeat faltered.

That blood was interfering with his own.

[00:10]

Crushed by gravity and caught in the blood curse, Lin Yan’s stride checked for the briefest moment.

Hope flared in the leather-coated man’s eyes.

The werewolf slammed the base of his tower shield into the ground and bellowed through a throat no longer shaped for human speech.

"We’ve got him! It’s working! Hold him for sixty sec—"

The sand exploded beneath the black-armored figure.

The werewolf lost sight of Lin Yan’s body. Something dark filled his vision, a fist driving straight at his face.

CRUNCH!

His head burst.

Blood, brain matter, broken fangs, and splinters of skull sprayed across the sand behind him. His huge body remained upright for a fraction of a second, feet planted deep and one hand still clamped around the shield.

Then it toppled, throwing up a cloud of dust.

Lin Yan flicked his wrist. Pulp caught between the plates of his gauntlet dropped into the sand.

"Shut up."

[00:13 / 00:60]