Chapter 115: Turned Tables

Both thumbs sat on the butterfly trigger, the muzzle lay on that two-story thing barrelling straight at me, and instead of pressing on the trigger, I took my thumbs off.

A Spike ER had gone into that face. Tandem HEAT, a warhead built to open armor, and the thing had stood up out of the shallows and gotten on with its morning.

The last time we did this, I put a forty-millimeter HEAP round on that same face from thirty meters, and all I bought was soot streaks and a look.

[Firing this is the second dumbest thing available to me... the dumbest is firing it twice.]

I slapped my palm on the receiver, dropped the Mk 19 into Inventory with the belt still hanging out of it, and ran.

Sixteen hundred meters out, it came off a rooftop, crossed a street in one leap, and hit the face of the building opposite without slowing down.

And then it did the thing that put ice straight down the middle of my spine.

It went around.

Not through. Around.

It took the corner off a mid-rise, put a hand on the parapet, and swung its own mass through the turn in one motion that never cost it a step, carving the fast line through my burning district while its feet found roof after roof without a single misjudged jump.

[No...]

Last time, that thing could only run straight.

Last time, corners were mine. Curves were mine. Every meter it gained on a straight it handed back the second the road bent, and I built an entire twenty-kilometer escape on that one fact.

"Booger," I said, sprinting for the far parapet, "... we may have a small problem."

"Mrrh."

"Yeah. It turned."

I hit the edge at a dead run and threw myself off it, TK coming up out of the third-eye spot to strip my weight while the drill already living behind my forehead pushed back hard enough to grey out the corners of my vision. The glide took me out over a street packed shoulder to shoulder with five hundred thousand of the reason I came here.

Nowhere to land. That was the whole geometry of this morning.

Under my boots ran a district I had personally set on fire, a rubble field, and a twenty-story anthill of bodies, all of it moving, all of it screaming, every square meter of ground between here and the horizon converted into the world’s worst floor.

-Thwip-!

The hook took a rooftop mast, the System did the arithmetic my spine couldn’t survive, and I came up out of the swing and flattened into the next glide.

-Fwoosh-!-Fwoosh-!

Two rockets came from nine hundred meters out, and both of them went into the back of its neck.

-KRUMP-!-KRUMP-!

Smoke billowed off its shoulders in a sheet; the shockwave rolled up the street, but it didn’t even turn to look.

Not a flinch. Not a check. It came out of its own detonation on the same line at the same speed with its eyes exactly where they had been, and my stomach dropped through the whole sky.

"System, hold fire..." I said. "Save them."

-Ding!

{

Acknowledged. 3 remaining.

Note: Target has disengaged from this unit.

Assessment: This unit is no longer being tracked.

}

"Yeah, I noticed! Shadow me and stay high!"

That helicopter had been the only leash on this lake since the whole thing began, rotor noise and high explosive, and the monster had simply put it down and walked away from it, so the leash was gone. The only thing left on this shoreline it wanted was jogging across rooftops with a cat on his back.

-Thwip-!

Anchor, swing, glide, and I put three roofs and a boulevard between us, cutting hard behind a parking structure to break the line of sight, and got exactly the same answer I got the first time we played this game. It had learned the hiding trick before I even understood it was a trick.

Except now the answer came improved.

It did not follow me into the blind spot. It did not shoulder through the structure to reach me.

It leaped up and got in front of it.

I came off the far side of that building into open air and found the damn thing already standing on the roof I was aiming at, arms out, waiting.

[OH, YOU ABSOLUTE-]

I dumped the glide, threw a TK shove into my own ribs hard enough to make my eyes water, and fell out of my own arc into a service alley with its claws closing through the space my chest had been renting.

-CRASH-!

Twelve floors of luxury apartment came off its own frame behind me while I burned the last of the fall into a low hook and skidded across gravel two roofs down, hands shaking, breath sawing, the drill in my skull upgraded to a hot spike.

"Not fair!" I shouted at it, and I fully meant it. "You were an IDIOT last week! You were a beautiful, drooling, brick-headed IDIOT and I loved that about you!"

-GRRAAAAAAAAHHHH-!!!

"THAT’S NOT AN APOLOGY!"

-Thwip-!

And then it stopped.

Mid-district, in the middle of a hunt, on top of a nine-story block with a clean run at me, it planted both feet and went completely still.

No roar, or windup, nothing thrown, instead, its head came around, slow, and it did not look at me at all, sweeping instead across the three roofs ahead of my nose, weighing the gaps, following the exact chain of anchors and ledges I had already picked in my head.

Then it moved. And it moved to the third one.

To where I was going.

[...It’s reading the map!]

I hung there in the middle of a glide over a river of teeth with my whole plan coming apart in my hands, and I finally let myself look at its face properly.

Its mouth was closed, there was no foam dripping down its jaw, nor any ropes of drool swinging off its teeth.

Last time, the drool was the tell. Last time, the drool meant a heart the size of an engine block spending itself double-time toward bursting, and I had run twenty kilometers on that clock, and I had escaped by exploiting that.

But now, its stomach was full, and it slept it off in the shallows.

It was not burning anything.

This time it could do this all day, and it was me who hadn’t slept in two days.

[Random.]

-Thwip-!

[Fucking.]

-Zip-!

[BULLSHIT!]