Chapter 118: Just Another Trumpet

Down in the crater, flat on its back with a collapsed storefront across its shoulders, the Tank stared up at me with its eyes wide, while somewhere far behind my own heartbeat, the counter’s dial tone ran on without me.

[...down.]

I threw myself off the edge headfirst, and the weight left my body without being asked as the fall flattened into a dive, and forty meters of air disappeared while the rebar came back over my shoulder once more.

Below me, that twenty-tonne thing rolled the storefront off its chest just as I swung at it from the sky with everything my arm had and-

-KRAK-!

The tank hurled itself sideways off its own back, and very next second, the street opened where it had been lying, one trench ripped straight through crater and asphalt and the Infected crushed under its landing, their bodies going up off that line in mist and loose pieces while brick jumped in sheets, and I came down through the spray with TK eating the fall and my knees taking whatever was left, already turning, already swinging again.

Through every second of it, one thread out of my forehead stayed wrapped around the small weight at my right shoulder, and no part of me had asked it to.

The Tank came up out of its roll faster than anything that size should move, planted both feet, and turned its whole hip into a backhand the width of a bus, and for the first time in the entire history of us, I did not bother dodging.

-THOOM-!

The bash shot me through the avenue across the air, my back taking a facade with my spine, before bashing through an office in a storm of drywall and glass, through the wall behind it, through the next one, and stopped somewhere inside the third room against a pillar with the dark full of falling ceiling, and crumbling concrete.

But not once, even for a second, did I feel pain.

The grapple gun was in my hand before I thought of it.

My hands had done it on their own, and the line bit through my own exit wound and ripped me back out through all three rooms at once, low and flat through the drywall storm, out of the building into daylight with the snarl pouring out of my throat the whole way, never once hitching.

The Tank was already lunging into the same hole after me the moment I got out, but I was already mid-swing.

-KRAK-!

And this time the hide split.

A line opened across the center of its outstretched palm, thin and shallow, skin parting over the pale gel beneath, white and wet and glistening and bloodless, and the whole avenue went quiet around the fact of it.

It did not roar. It pulled back out of the building’s ruin, brought the palm up close to its face, and turned it slowly against the light, studying the first mark anything in its entire existence had ever left on it, while around the edges of us the infected kept pouring toward the noise and kept dying unattended, either burst open under its heels, or taken apart in the backwash of my arcs, buried in wedges under everything we knocked down.

Then its head came down, the lesson already installed, and it stopped offering me its body~

It tore a city bus off the intersection one-handed, frame screaming, and held all twelve meters of it side-on between us, and when my next swing came in it fed me the bus instead of the arm behind it.

But the sheer brute force that waved out of my swing ripped it all apart, sending it all clattering away in a spray of seats and glass, while the mass behind them was already gone, lateral, low, sliding behind the corner of a mid-rise with its shoulders down.

Even with half my mind already gone, I could tell that thing was running for cover. I could tell this was the first time it was running for cover.

And the drool-dripping grin that broke out on my face touched the very ceiling of feral.

I didn’t bother going around. I just thought and swung without even much power behind it, but the forces that waved it out shredded everything ahead.

I raised the Grapple Gun and the hook carried me through my own cut, through a lobby full of dust and dead ferns, out the far side through a second cut, one straight line drawn through an entire building, while it circled the block wide and fast with its belly low, hunting an angle on my back, running my own old patterns back at me with two hundred and fifty times my mass.

A sedan came off its far hand mid-stride, no windup, flat and hard and timed to the exact top of my next swing.

But I finished the swing anyway.

-KRAK-!

The car shreddedopened in half a meter short of my face, both pieces ripping past my shoulders close enough to drag at my jacket, as the arc carried on through the space it had occupied and took the corner off the building it was circling behind, and the corner let go, eight floors of it, coming down across the street in an avalanche that swallowed forty of the sprinters climbing through it.

Somewhere inside those three swings, the rebar had begun dying.

A crack had climbed out of my fist along the steel, the whole length bending further off true with every time I swung it, until the next swing sheared it at the root and sent it spinning end over end into a shopfront.

But then again, the magic wasn’t in the rebar.

-KRAK-!

The cut came off my bare hand exactly the same, ripping through everything it touched, slashing past its head with less than a meter to spare.

So that thing changed the question again.

Between one cover and the next it stopped caring about distance entirely, came out of the dust at a dead sprint with its shoulders down and both arms spread, and smothered me, two hands folding in around the whole volume of air I was standing in, stealing the room a swing needs to be a swing.

So the swing became a chop.

Short, from the elbow, point-blank into the center of its sternum, with nowhere to spread and nothing to cross before arriving.

-KRAKOOM-!

And twenty tonnes left the ground, sent down the boulevard, through a storefront, through the pillars behind the storefront, and half a block of luxury glass splintering over it in one falling wall while the shockwave shoved the dust flat for a hundred meters and woke every car alarm still alive in the district.

I was already moving before it landed.

Hook, zip, glide, the ground pouring past underneath me. I didn’t even notice, the warmth tracking out of my left ear and down my jaw. More of it ran from my nose, over my lip, into my mouth.

The taste had been copper for a while now.

But every time my ears rang with that Ding, and every time my eyes flashed that snarling face before that small puffed up, arched back... I just couldn’t stop empty hands or even legs. Just couldn’t stop snarling deeper.

And before long, entire wedges of the crowd had stopped existing, even the dial tone Dings had fused into one flat note.

-Ding!

{

Report.

Session kills: 138,204.

Session earnings: 19,486,764.

Balance: 87,049,106.

Query: Orders?

}

The panel hung in the corner of my eye for a long time, while I stood on the van with blood dripping off my chin and oozing out of my eyes.

Nothing in me answered it. There was nothing left to.

In this chorus of snarls, I was just another trumpet.

The Tank came around the ruin of the tower with dust sheeting off its shoulders, the split palm held slightly away from its side, its body now riddled with shallow cuts, and its eyes found me across the wreck of the avenue.

And it took a step back.

Just one. The rear foot lifted, moved, and set down behind it. A full meter of ground, handed over, by a thing that had never in its whole existence moved in that direction.

My next swing did not go at it.

I don’t know where it went.

The arc went long past its shoulder and out across the district, and somewhere at the end of the line the yellow tower crane was ripped in halves across its condo shell.

The swing after that went somewhere else entirely, peeling the face off six floors of a block I had no argument with, and the one after that crossed a rooftop where a tarped shape sat bolted to a mount I had built at three in the morning, and the whole roof slid into the street with my own minigun still on it.

None of it was in my way. None of it had touched me.

Yet I kept swinging even as blood began dripping down my eyes faster and faster.

The red climbed up into the bottom of my eyes, thin threads at first, then a wash, the world hazing along its lower edge while it ran freely now, nose and ear and both eyes, tracking down through the dust on my jaw and dripping off in fat drops, and my arm kept rising while the buildings kept falling, while somewhere in the smoke a two-story shape stood entirely still, watching me do it, and made no move of any kind.

-KRAK-!

-KRAK-!

-KRA-

After who knows how many arcs, teeth closed in my hair and pulled, hard, wrenching my scalp sideways, claws finding the skin of my neck in the same instant, and against my ear, at a volume I had never once heard him use:

"WEAA!"

And everything stopped arriving all at once.

The arm hung where the swing had left it, half-raised over a district on fire, while the dust drifted past on the wind, while the dial tone ran on somewhere far away, while the snarl thinned out in my throat and died and leaving nothing running behind it as I stood on the roof of a dented van, bare-headed and dripping, in the middle of an avenue built entirely out of my own noise, face empty, staring at nothing at all.

[...Tikki?]