Chapter 120: Even Titans Bleed

The tank didn’t wait for the little ceremony to finish.

It ripped a sedan off the street one-handed and slung it flat and hard across the four hundred meters between us, and I swung the sword down through the incoming line with both hands and my hips and the pressure behind my eyes and-

-KRAK-!

The car stopped being a car.

Both halves went screaming past my shoulders in a storm of doors and glass while the cut carried on behind them and opened a trench across the avenue, and I stood there looking at an ordinary blade that hadn’t touched anything.

[Oh... It’s basically like an aiming stick.]

A two-meter aiming stick for a muscle that no longer had a ceiling I could find. I was grinning so hard that my face started to hurt.

-GRRAAAAAAAHHHH-!!!

It charged, and this time, I charged back, pulling out the grapple gun and zipping straight at its face.

The Tank crossed the district in strides that burst the pavement, closed the whole distance in four heartbeats, and brought both fists down locked together with its entire mass behind them, and I stood into it, and the barrier handled the rest.

-BOOOOM-!

The street swallowed me whole, shooting me through the roads down below, dropping me through it into darkness, down through rebar and dirt into a hollow that caught me on rails, while overhead the shockwave threw infected off both sides of the avenue in rings.

I lay in the pitch-black darkness of a metro tunnel for one heartbeat with dust sliding past nothing a full meter away from my face while my Awareness poured out around me further than it had ever gone, mapping the tunnel, the platform, the dead train sitting on its rails thirty meters down the dark, all of it arriving at once as though it had always been mine.

Up above, through concrete, I felt it lean over the hole.

[My turn~]

-BOOM-!

The street erupted underneath its feet, and I came up out of the crater riding my own shove with a whole subway carriage wrapped in my grip behind me, forty tonnes of rolling stock hauled up out of the dark into the morning, and I threw it.

And it dodged with a speed nothing that size should own, twisting off the line while the carriage screamed past and opened a building behind it, and I already had the second one rising out of the tunnel, and it dodged that too by dropping under it. The third one passed over its shoulder close enough to shave a lake weed off, reading every line I drew with those red eyes going wider and faster.

"Good!" It came out of me as a shout, high and cracked and delighted.

The fourth carriage was already flying on the same straight line as the first three, and it committed to the same dodge, but mid-air I grabbed the carriage’s tail and bent the whole line sideways like a guided missile.

Its eyes went wide and before it could so much as twicth the other direction-

-KRAAAASH-!

Forty tonnes of steel met its face, and monster and metro car went down together through the road in a crater that drank at least a hundred infected, and I was already moving, already swinging as it shoved the wreck off itself and rose.

-KRAK-!

The arc took it across the chest, and this time the hide didn’t just split.

It opened, one long trench from shoulder to ribs, white gel parting under the cut, and out of the white came red, welling up thick and dark along the whole line and sheeting down its chest.

That was the first blood that thing has shed in its entire existence, and it staggered, one half-step sideways, staring down at its own front.

"SEE KIDS!" The laugh tore out of me before I could own it. "EVEN TITANS BLEED!"

-GRRRAAAAAAAAAHHHHHRRRK-!!!

The roar hit the whole district at once, and I answered it with the grapple gun, the hook biting a broken tower as the line snatched me up and away from claws that turned the van I’d been standing on into confetti, and I kicked off the top of the arc, twisted, and let TK strip my weight while its second swipe closed through the empty air under my boots.

"Too slow!"

It turned, and my grip closed around its ankle.

And the moment it did, the Tank’s eyes dropped to its own leg, then came up and found mine, and for a fraction of a second, in all that fury, I watched it understand.

"Oh-ho, you’re going to hate this."

And with that, I pulled.

Twenty tonnes left the ground sideways, and the first building took it across the shoulders in an avalanche of brick, concrete and dust, and I pulled again before the debris finished falling and put it through the street with a sound that set off every car alarm still alive.

-KRAASH-! -BOOM-!

The third pull dragged it lengthwise through a packed knot of its own kind, painting a forty-meter smear of them across the asphalt, and the fourth put it through a second building, and then I hauled the whole screaming mass of it straight up, higher, higher, until it hung against the morning clouds with its arms wheeling at nothing.

"Mea."

"Yeah."

I let it fall, flat across the district into a corner block that folded around the impact and buried it.

-KRAKABOOM-!

And standing there in the middle of the wreck of everything, I was cackling, actually cackling, blood flying off my chin every time my chest heaved, while the pressure behind my eyes burned white-hot and I fed it more anyway.

And the very next second, the rubble exploded as the Tank leaped out with its claws already buried in the face of the tower beside it, and when my grip closed on its ankle again it did not fight the pull, it anchored, hooking one arm through a building’s bones while the whole structure groaned and shed concrete around its fist, and then, exactly when I leaned everything into the drag, it let go.

And it rode my own force across the district straight at me.

[Smart, smart, SMART-]

I swung on pure reflex, and it crossed both arms in front of its skull and took the arc on its forearms, hide splitting to red along both of them, and the cut blasted it sideways instead of down, bashing it through the street on one hand, sending it rolling through its own momentum.

But even so, before I could even blink my blood-slicked eyes, the Tank came up already sprinting, learning, always learning, and the laugh ripped out of me again louder than before.

"YOU LEARNED! LOOK AT YOU!"

The district stopped being a place after that and became ammunition.

I threw a bus, and it tore through the bus mid-stride, so I caught the halves and threw those, and it dropped behind a mid-rise, so I cut the mid-rise off at the knees and dropped it on top of it, and it came through the falling wreck shoulder-first with a slab held up as a shield, so I split the slab an inch off its knuckles and put the arc behind it into the street.

Every answer it found pulled a worse one out of me, faster, bigger, both of us wrecking a city between us like the world’s most expensive argument, while the horde died in wedges around our edges and the dial tone ran and ran and ran, uncounted, because for the first time in either of my lives I was not counting.

My ears were pouring, blinking felt sticky as there was glue in my eyes. My heart was hitting the inside of my chest hard enough to feel like an impending heart attack, my whole skull was one hot coal, but none of it, not one single gram of it, mattered.

[So this is what it feels like...]

I put it through a parking structure and laughed.

[To stop holding back!]

It threw four cars in a spread, and I opened all four in the air and walked through the falling pieces without breaking stride.

[...I could get used to this.]

And that thought sat there in my head, quiet and warm and absolutely wrong, while Tikki’s claws stayed sunk in my shoulder like an anchor to something I was drifting away from.

Then it stopped.

Mid-district, chest heaving, blood sheeting from six wounds down hide that had never once bled before today. It planted both feet in the wreckage and simply looked at me, and I stopped too, forty meters away on a broken slab, the blade resting on my shoulder, blood dripping from the chin, grinning, while around us the entire northern district burned in every direction, but neither of us moved, and both of us understood.

"One more."

-Thwip-!

The hook took the tallest tower still standing on this shoreline, and I went up it in three pulls and a sprint across vertical glass, up past the smoke, up onto the roof’s antenna platform where the wind came in cold and clean off the lake, the whole battlefield dropping away underneath me into a map.

The quiet up there was enormous.

Wind, clouds moving, my own heartbeat, wrong and fast. Tikki’s claws working deeper through the jacket, his body pressed flat along my shoulder, and a thread of my own will wrapped around him without being asked, the one grip I had never once dropped all morning.

While far below, in the middle of the ruin, a tiny purple figure stood in the wreckage with its face turned up at me, and even from here, even at this distance, I could feel those eyes.

"System."

-Ding!

{

Listening...

}

"Make way... it’s time to end this."

The Ghostbird banked wide and dropped off my line, its rotors fading east, and I brought the sword up behind my shoulder with both hands, and I started to pull.

And the pressure behind my eyebrows answered, and kept answering.

It came up out of the torn muscle in a flood, more than I had ever held, more than I had ever imagined holding, packing itself denser and denser into a point behind my eyes until the air around me started to move, dust lifting off the rooftops below, the tassel standing straight out sideways, my jacket cracking in a wind that wasn’t the lake’s, while far below the surviving infected turned their faces up toward the sky in one slow ripple, even the clouds over the district had begun to slide.

My arms trembled, my vision narrowed down to one tiny purple figure.

All the while, my heart slammed, and slammed, and slammed, each beat arriving like a fist, as the muscle in my skull screamed at me in a language older than words, and yet I pulled more.

Everything I had. Everything I was. Every scrap, every reserve, every last gram.

[Here goes... Everything!]

I roared, and I swung.

-KRRRAAAAAAAAKKK-!!!

And my world instantly went white.

Sound died. My heart hit once, hard enough to seize my whole chest around it, and stopped, and everything inside me went out at the same instant: TK, Awareness, the Barrier, the thread around Tikki, all of it, gone, even the sword fell out of my open hand, and I was falling.

Just falling.

A human body, around ninety kilos of meat and gear, falling from a height that was beyond even the tallest tower on the shoreline with a cat on its shoulder and nothing, nothing at all, between it and the street.

Then the middle of my forehead clenched.

The pressure roared back in, my weight tore itself off the world, the fall slowed to a slow glide through the cold air with my lungs dragging one whole breath down to the bottom while my heart came back alive with a slam that bent me double, then another, then a rhythm, ragged and wrong but running.

Within seconds, my vision sharpened once more.

And I looked down.

The northern district had been split in two.

One line ran east to west through the whole of it, through towers and streets and rubble fields and everything else, a single continuous cleave carved across the face of the city, seventy meters wide where it yawned widest, its walls dropping away into a dark the morning couldn’t reach, buildings on both sides of it sliced clean through and folded inward into the wound, roads ending in open air, the horde cut apart along its whole length, and smoke rising up out of it in one slow, endless curtain, as though the ground itself had been opened for surgery.

I hung in the sky above it, unable to make even a single sound.

[Holy shit...]

My eyes went to where the Tank had been standing, and found smoke, and dust, and the cleave running straight through that exact piece of the world, and nothing else.

"System..." My voice came out shredded. "...Is it dead?"

-Ding!

{

Received no Credits bestowal for Variant designation: The Tank.

}

"Damn..."