Chapter 114: Round Two

The smoke took me four full seconds, as I went through it blind with my arms out and my eyes shut, feeling the heat come up under my chest, and when I came out the far side into clean cold air the third tower was already there.

-Thwip-!

One catch off a rooftop antenna mast, one swing, one flare, and my feet had hit the gravel of my third perch.

"Wea-!"

"Complaint noted, filed, and ignored."

Tikki smelled like barbecue and had opinions about it, while the ache behind my eyes stopped being an ache and became a hand pressing steadily on the inside of my forehead.

The Mk 19 waited on its tripod exactly where I’d left it, and I dropped the first can beside the mount, threaded the belt, ran the bolt twice, and got both thumbs onto the butterfly trigger with a fresh six hundred meters of packed road sitting under the muzzle.

While before me, three streets and one luxury tower burned, and my counter had not stopped its dial tone since the drums went.

[Let’s see if I can’t do this twice more before lunch...] I couldn’t help that victorious grin spreading across my face.

Nor could the universe help but take instant offense, because the next second, every hair on my body stood up.

It came through my skin before it reached my brain, a cold crawl up both forearms and across the back of my neck, and my thumbs stopped moving on their own while the grin died on my mouth without ever getting the message from me.

Tikki’s claws were already in.

All eighteen, sunk to the skin, no sound out of him at all, and his head was turned back over my right shoulder toward my back.

And I followed his gaze, followed it two kilometers east, to the roof of a nine-story block that had bowed visibly inward under its weight; the Tank crouched perfectly still.

Water and lake weed still hung off its shoulders in ropes.

It had gone up there after the bird, hunting altitude, looking for the one thing on this lake that would not stop stinging it, and it had found nothing at that height it could reach.

Then it apparently found something better.

Its head did not move as it stared at me.

Not a twitch, not a sweep, no roar, nothing, just tonnes of purple hide holding motionless on a roof it was slowly breaking, with two arterial red eyes pointed across two kilometers at one tiny man on one rooftop.

[It’s looking straight at me...]

I have been looked at by that thing before.

The last time, I bled it twenty kilometers north on a bike I had no business still owning, went off a cliff at two hundred and seventy, and came down through the wall of a stranger’s bedroom with absolutely nothing left in me.

Then I crawled under a wooden table with my Awareness dead and my eyes giving me nothing but smears, while that thing climbed the entire outside of the tower to reach the exact window it had watched me vanish into, and took the roof off the building in one swipe.

And it did not leave.

It had searched, slow and patient and thorough, one degree at a time, leaning over a half-wall a meter from me with its drool coming down in fat ropes onto the tabletop above my skull.

I did not beat it that day.

I hid, and then I passed out, and it eventually ran out of patience and walked down to the water without ever knowing how close it had been.

Apparently it had never once stopped looking.

[It recognized me!]

The blood went out of my face fast enough that my ears rang with it, while my hands went cold on the grips, and I heard myself breathe in through my teeth.

[From two kilometers away... through smoke, through fires, ignoring a helicopter that’s been shooting at it... it picked me out of all of it!]

"SYSTEM!"

-Ding!

{

Engaging.

}

Four rockets came off the right pylon in under a second, four white lines drawing themselves across two kilometers of morning air from a machine that had been holding standoff behind it the entire time.

-Fwoosh-!-Fwoosh-!-Fwoosh-!-Fwoosh-!

All four went into its back.

-KRUMP-!-KRUMP-!-KRUMP-!-KRUMP-!

And the roof of that nine-story block disappeared inside a single orange bloom that punched straight up through itself, concrete and smoke going in every direction at once while the shockwaves reached me two full seconds later hard enough to shudder my chest.

Black filled the whole frame of it.

And for one sweet heartbeat, there was nothing up there except burning smoke, before-

-GRRRAAAAAAAAAHHHHHRRRK-!!!

The roar came out of that cloud wet and clotted and enormous, dragging along the bottom of its own throat, and it went across the entire lakefront until it drowned the fires, the rotors, the horde, my own counter, all of it, until there was one sound in the world and I was standing in it.

And the next second, it leaped out of the smoke.

But it didn’t go up after the helicopter hovering nine hundred meters behind it.

The damn thing cleared almost an entire block in a single leap, and landed running...

Straight at me.

-THUM-!-THUM-!-THUM-!

Every stride shook glass out of frames on both sides of the road; even the horde parted around it or went under it without slowing it by one step, and its arterial red eyes never left my face.

Two thousand meters at a hundred and twenty an hour.

That was sixty seconds.

Sixty seconds to decide what an entire night of work was worth, since every roof I’d bolted a gun to, every drum I’d seeded, every charge I’d seated by hand while my eyes burned, all of it was built around one assumption, and that assumption was that the mountain would stay busy playing with the helicopter.

Millions of credits stood on the road under my muzzle, walking toward me in neat countable increments, while the sun kept climbing toward what was perhaps the most important afternoon of my life.

[Know what? Fuck it!]

I put both hands on the mount and hauled the Mk 19 around, off six hundred meters of packed road and every credit standing on it, until the muzzle sat on one of the few things in either of my lives that I never managed to kill.

"Booger..."

"Mea."

"Round two."

"Mea!"