Chapter 119: The Anime Kind

Tikki’s teeth eased out of my hair one careful degree at a time, while his claws stayed hooked in the skin of my neck, and the whole world finished arriving back into me piece by piece, the fires first, then the wind, then the dial tone of dings still running somewhere underneath everything like a landlord who hadn’t noticed the building was gone.

Blood was moving on my face.

It ran warm out of my nose and over my lip, crawled from the corner of my left eye, tracked down from my ear along my jaw, and dripped off my chin in fat, patient drops, while I stood on the roof of a dented van with my arm still hanging in the middle of a swing I no longer remembered starting.

[... what the fuck...]

I wiped my mouth with the back of my glove and looked at the smear, then at my other hand, which was shaking in small, constant movements, fingers twitching against each other as though they’d forgotten what they were holding.

I rolled my shoulders, and nothing answered.

I bent my neck, breathed all the way down, pressed two fingers into ribs that had eaten a building this morning, and got nothing back from any of it.

There was no pain anywhere in me.

Just a dull pressure sitting behind my eyebrows, patient and wrong, in the exact spot where the drill usually lives.

Then I looked around, and actually saw it.

The district was gone.

Buildings stood opened down their middles with bedrooms and kitchens hanging out into the morning air, entire faces of them peeled off and lying across the streets in sheets, while three avenues had become trenches full of settling dust, and my boulevard, the machine I’d spent a whole night building, lay somewhere underneath a rubble field wearing a few thousand bodies.

One of my Mk 19s hung upside down off half a balcony that no longer had a building under it.

A roof I had personally measured at three in the morning sat in the middle of a street with my own minigun still bolted to it.

[...I... did this?]

Not the Tank, not the charges, not the rockets or the drums or the bird.

My own head had taken a district apart, and the worst part, the part that sat in my chest like swallowed ice, was how little of it I remembered doing.

Meanwhile, across the wreckage, between two broken towers, the Tank was watching me.

No roar came off it, no charge, nothing thrown, it was just standing there, dust sliding off its hide in thin sheets with shallow cuts riddled across its chest and shoulders, and its arterial-red eyes sitting on me without blinking, one predator measuring another across a field both of them had ruined.

[You know...]

Its head tilted by the smallest amount.

[You know I’m dangerous now...]

Behind me, rotors came over the rooftops, and the Ghostbird swung wide around the northern edge of the district with its turbines dragging across all that smoke, and the Tank’s eyes flicked toward it for exactly one heartbeat before coming back to me and staying.

Neither of us cared about the helicopter anymore, and both of us knew it.

Then the pressure behind my eyebrows sharpened.

Slow at first, then faster, a thin line of pain rippling inward and concentrating, packing itself denser into the third-eye spot instead of spreading out into the usual migraine, and I stopped breathing and stood very still and listened to my own skull.

[Oh.]

I know muscles.

Two lives of running, climbing, hauling, fighting, tearing things and healing wrong, and I know exactly what a muscle does when the body decides it is dying, when fight-or-flight kicks the door in and starts throwing out every safety the nervous system ever installed, when mothers lift cars off children and come away with shredded backs they never felt.

Pain gets muted. Limits get ignored. Output goes to a place the manual says doesn’t exist, and the bill arrives later, all at once, and with interest.

And TK... it was never some magical pool.

There’s no core in me, no mana, no glowing reservoir behind my chest, just a strange extra muscle wired into the middle of my head, one that I worked to failure, and then something tried to kill the one thing I love most in two lifetimes, and my body gave me that fight or flight choice, and I chose the former.

My body had stripped the governor off, muted the agony, and squeezed that torn muscle for everything underneath, and it was still squeezing now, which was the only reason I was upright, bleeding from four places, feeling nothing at all. But now that I was sane again, I could feel the bill coming due.

[Not yet...] the grin arrived on my face.

My grin, the real one, sharp and awake and delighted, pulling at the dried blood on my cheek, while the Tank watched it appear from across the wreckage and went very still.

"System..."

-Ding!

{

Listening...

}

"Buy me a sword."

-Ding!

{

Specify weapon classification.

}

I looked across the ruin at two stories of purple patience and grinned wider.

"The anime kind."

-Ding!

{

Processing aesthetic requirements.

.

.

.

Item purchased: Ceremonial odachi, "Requiem of the Crimson Moon."

Blade: 1.4 m. Black steel, silver edge, gold filigree, engraved guard, corded grip, tassel.

Combat enhancements: None.

Cost: 12,000 Credits.

}

The most ridiculous object I have ever owned dropped out of the Inventory into my open hand, a meter and a half of anime nonsense with a gold tassel snapping in the wind, decorated by somebody who had clearly never met the concept of restraint, and it was just steel, ordinary dead steel with no properties at all, and I raised it anyway, blade low, blood running off my chin, cat on my shoulder, city burning behind me.

I let the pose stand for one full breath.

[Yeah... this is stupid... I love it!]

The grin got wider. Eyes got feral. And from deep within, the rippling pain began to subside as adrenaline gushed rivers inside my body once more.