Chapter 56 - The Weight of the Shield

The digital watch on Dante's wrist read four in the morning when the three cylindrical deadbolts on the bronze door snapped back with a dry clunk.

The granite aqueduct gallery remained shrouded in damp darkness, lit only by the soft sphere of azure light hovering over the brass ring on his right middle finger.

The group filed out across the four hundred meters of clean flagstones, moving without a whisper of sound from their boot soles.

Maria held the center, her brigandine cuirass cinched tight over her torso, gloved hands already resting on the leather grip of the forty-pound greatsword across her back.

Nicole walked on point, her black-scaled coat buttoned to the throat, repeating crossbow held unlatched in her right hand.

They halted at the monumental archway of the crumpled portcullis opening into the Expansion Reservoir.

The heat rolling off the central sludge lake was suffocating. Scalding steam blanketed the water in a thick cowl of gray vapor, but the colossal silhouette of the Slag Serpent rested precisely where they had left it hours earlier: coiled over the wreckage of two overturned locomotives in the center of the scrap island, drinking the continuous warmth hissing from the fractured line.

Its six-foot-wide triangular skull lay flat across the scrap conveyor, the black ferrite plates of its back glistening in the oily reflection.

Dante tapped Nicole's shoulder, pointing toward the conduit catwalk running along the cavern's northern wall twenty-five feet up.

"Your firing perch is there," Dante whispered directly into her ear. "The girders sit clear of the initial strike radius. Two phosphorus bolts into the snout's heat pits the second Maria steps onto the island's first iron footer."

Nicole gave a single nod.

She docked her crossbow in her thigh holster for a beat, vaulted onto the wall's first steel angle-iron with soundless agility, and scrambled up the twenty-five feet of structural iron, melting into the shadows of the upper gantry.

Dante moved to a dry masonry platform fifty feet from the lake shore, taking up a firing angle that commanded a clean line of sight across the entire reservoir.

Maria started down the gravel embankment.

Her iron boots sank into the black mud at the water's edge as she advanced across the scattered scrap blocks forming a crude stepping-stone path toward the central island.

Her two-hundred-pound weight cracked a cast-iron plate beneath the muck.

The snap of breaking metal echoed through the cavern.

The Slag Serpent's eyes opened that very millisecond.

They were no small ophidian slits. They were two yellow orbs nearly two feet across, shielded behind naval steel scales that parted with a wet, suction hiss.

The massive head reared twelve feet above the locomotive carcass, its jaws gaping in an ear-splitting screech of pressurized steam that sent concentric shockwaves rolling across the water.

[Target in Maximum Alert: Armored Slag Serpent.]

[Health Points: 850/850.]

From high on the northern catwalk, Nicole's response cracked with clockwork precision.

THWIP. THWIP.

Two steel bolts tipped in white phosphorus tore through the steam in a flat trajectory.

They buried themselves dead center into the two thermal cavities above the creature's nostrils.

The phosphorus ignited instantly on contact with the beast's moist mucous membrane, erupting in blinding white smoke that seared through neural clusters in a flare of chemical heat.

[-60 HP to target.]

[Effect applied: Total Thermal Blindness for 30 seconds.]

The serpent vented a shrill roar that shook the stone cavern, its sixty-five-foot body uncoiling from the scrap pile like an avalanche of black rock.

Dante's plan was running without a hitch.

Blinded by chemical fire, the horror charged straight down the channel formed by the two toppled girders, driving toward the exact point where Maria stood braced on the iron deck.

Disaster came not from an error in calculation, but from the age of the cavern itself.

Uncoiling with the full momentum of its ten-ton bulk, the rear coils of the serpent slammed into structural pylon four on the northern wall.

The cast-iron column, eaten away by a century of acidic steam, could not withstand the lateral kinetic load.

The beam snapped with the crack of detonating dynamite.

The entire overhead catwalk where Nicole stood collapsed toward the lake in a cascading ruin of sheared grating and blown rivets.

Nicole leaped at the last instant, clawing for a secondary conduit along the granite wall.

Her gloved fingers caught the rusty pipe, but the film of oil caused her grip to fail.

She plummeted twenty-five feet, crashing onto a pile of jagged scrap in the shallows barely thirty feet from the monster's flank.

The impact drove the air from her lungs.

Stolen from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

[-35 HP to Nicole.]

[Nicole's Health Points: 95/130.]

[Status: Mild Muscular Stun.]

The girl scrambled to push herself upright, drawing her right dagger, but her left boot was pinned inside a loop of buckled rebar that had plummeted with the catwalk.

The serpent caught the shockwave in the mud.

Even blinded by phosphorus, its lateral sensory organs registered the physical impact of Nicole's body against the metal scrap yards away.

The beast didn't bother using its jaws.

Its five-ton tail, a tapering wedge of solid ferrite bristling with sixteen-inch cast-iron spikes, whipped through the muck in a skimming horizontal sweep.

The strike swept in at over thirty miles an hour, churning the black sludge with the kinetic force of a runaway freight car.

Nicole looked into the wall of iron spikes driving straight toward her ribs.

Her fingers locked on her dagger, amber slit-pupils wide with cold terror.

With ninety-five hit points and light lizard leather providing defense against nothing heavier than shallow cuts, five tons of swinging ferrite would crush her pelvis and internal organs against the stone wall in half a second.

She slashed at the rebar trapping her boot, but time had run out.

The tail tip was six feet from her face.

The air displacement boomed before iron met flesh.

[Extended Rapid Intervention activated by Maria.]

A geyser of black sludge blasted ten feet into the air as Maria's iron boots tore through the gravel bed.

Her six-foot-three frame closed the twenty-five-foot distance with acceleration that defied her mass.

She did not reach down to drag Nicole away. There was no mechanical window to pull anyone out of the strike path.

Maria simply drove herself into the breach between the spikes and the fallen huntress.

[Active Skill: [Liquid Lead Stance] activated.]

[Passive Skill: [Reactive Impact Carapace] primed.]

Maria swept the forty-pound greatsword up, locking the broad flat of the blade against the left side of her iron brigandine, bracing her corded left forearm behind the steel spine to forge a double bulkhead.

She drove her heels ankle-deep into the mud.

The serpent's tail slammed into Maria's blade.

KABOOOOM.

The impact detonated with the concussive roar of a naval cannon discharging inside a sealed stone vault.

The hydrostatic shockwave blasted water and sludge away from their boots, carving a dry twelve-foot crater in the lake bed for a full second before the muck collapsed back in.

The kinetic shock would have hurled three men in full plate across the cavern.

Maria did not yield an inch.

[Liquid Lead Stance] erased the forced displacement entirely, driving the girl's skeletal frame into the bedrock with the permanence of a bridge pylon anchored in basalt.

[Reactive Impact Carapace] soaked twenty percent of the brutal blow, routing the kinetic payload straight into the dense fibers of her thirty-two Constitution.

The brigandine groaned with a shrill shriek of stressed rivets, and the soles of Maria's boots sank two more inches into solid stone.

[-28 HP to Maria.]

[Maria's Health Points: 132/160.]

[Kinetic Absorption Charge: 50/50 (MAXIMUM CHARGE REACHED).]

Maria let out a guttural roar from deep in her chest, her jaw clamped so hard the veins across her neck stood out thick against her sweat-slicked skin.

She didn't just absorb the blow of five tons of moving iron.

With the carapace charged to capacity and thirty-three points of raw Strength behind her, she drove both arms forward in a violent counter-thrust, heaving the flat of her blade against the mass of the monster's tail.

The skill's repulsion shockwave discharged with a crack of gray electrical force.

The serpent's five-ton tail was batted upward and backward with monstrous violence, its trajectory broken as it slammed into a crumpled boiler on the shoreline with a deafening crash of buckling plate.

A cascade of black mud rained down over the two girls.

Nicole remained frozen in the sludge two feet behind Maria's back.

The girl in the black-scaled coat was completely paralyzed.

Her right hand still clutched her dagger in the air, knuckles bloodless with strain, but all four amber eyes were wide, riveted to the broad back of the six-foot-three vanguard standing planted before her.

Nicole's mind failed to compute what had just happened.

In four years of crawling through the Second Continent's discard trenches, the golden rule she had learned in blood was immediate betrayal. If an ally went down before a Tier Three beast, you used the seconds while the monster chewed them to run the other way and save your own skin.

Nobody threw themselves in front of five tons of iron for a casual partner.

Nobody used their own chest as a shield for someone who had lied about the depths of a military contract two hours ago.

Nicole could not move.

Her breath was locked in her throat, her leg muscles dead from cognitive shock, unable to twitch a finger as she watched dark water stream down the broad steel of that forty-pound blade.

She stayed frozen for four full seconds, eyes glassy on Maria's frame.

Maria did not turn around with theatrical grace.

She spat a mouthful of black mud that had splashed past her lips, reset her grip on the leather hilt, and snarled over her shoulder, her voice carrying a raw fury that shattered the cavern's quiet:

"Get your ass out of the mud, girl!" Maria roared without looking down. "Sit there gawking at my back and this thing turns around and chews both of us up! Grab that damn crossbow and shoot its belly!"

Maria's bellow struck Nicole like a splash of ice water.

The paralysis broke instantly.

Nicole drew a sharp breath through her nose, severed the rebar snaring her boot with one stroke of her dagger, and vaulted from the muck in an agile leap, rolling behind an overturned boiler plate for cover.

She drew her mechanical crossbow with her left hand, feeding three steel bolts into the flight groove with fingers still humming with adrenaline.

"Dante!" Maria roared toward the shore, greatsword held high at chest level. "The snake is turning its neck!"

The serpent, its tail numbed by the kinetic backlash and its snout still smoking with white phosphorus, reared its sixty-five-foot trunk over the two iron girders of the island.

Its triangular head rose twenty feet into the air to locate the source of the impact that had repelled its tail.

The movement laid bare precisely what Nicole had sketched on the control room floor.

The elastic reddish scales of the beast's belly stretched across the gap between the girders, entirely devoid of naval plate, glistening wet eight feet above the gravel deck.

Dante stepped to the edge of the stone platform, the brass ring on his middle finger flaring with pure blue intensity.

[Casting: Rain of Ether Needles - Focused Discharge.]

[Mana Cost: 45 MP.]

[Dante's Current Reserve: 435/510.]

"Maria! Now!" Dante shouted from the shore, leveling the ring directly at the exposed underbelly. "Gut the beast!”