Chapter 163: Seven left

Leon was crouched on the broad plate of the giant’s right shoulder.

The golden wings around his ankles fluttered gently in the wind, and the shield hung loosely from his left arm.

He did not look angry, and he did not look pleased. He looked like a man waiting for a late transport.

"You were saying something about holding back," he said.

"Get off me!"

Batnac jerked his head down and fired. A beam of white light roared out of the barrels in his chest and straight up into the sky.

It missed by a full meter, because Leon was no longer there, and the beam vanished into the clouds.

A hand tapped him on the left shoulder.

Batnac turned his head. The boy was crouched on the other side now, and he was looking at the giant’s face from about an arm’s length away.

"Over here," Leon said.

The giant roared and drove a claw at him with all the force of his thrusters. Leon lifted the shield an inch. The claw hit it.

The sound was like a bell the size of a building. The entire arm, from the shoulder to the fingertips, burst apart in a spray of black metal and white flame, and the force of it spun Batnac in a full circle.

He screamed. Pieces of steel pattered down on the rooftops below.

"One," Leon said.

’You are counting,’ Medusa said, delighted.

’It helps me focus.’

’That is the most arrogant thing you have ever done.’

’It is not arrogant if it is true.’

Far below, the neighbors had begun to climb to their feet.

They stood on their porches and in their gardens with their faces tilted to the sky, and nobody said a word.

A boy in a yellow shirt pointed at the flashing gold streaks that crossed the smoke, and his mother pulled his hand down, and then she looked up again herself.

Iris had opened her eyes. She stood in the middle of the road with both hands pressed to her mouth, and her lips were moving without making any sound.

"What is he?" someone whispered.

Nobody answered that either.

Batnac clutched at the empty socket on his left side. His face had gone gray, and the confident grin was long gone. The sweat on his forehead hissed into steam against the heat of his own armor.

"Impossible," he whispered. "I can track a fly at a kilometer. My sensors have a response time of one thousandth of a second. You are not even moving!"

"I am moving."

"I cannot see it!"

"I know."

He tried anyway. He called up the last of his drones, a handful of silver discs that had been hanging far above the fight, and sent them swooping around Leon in a tight ring.

Their lenses glowed, and he screwed his eyes shut and focused on the stream of data in his head. For a single heartbeat, he caught the faintest trace of motion, a blurred golden streak at the corner of the feed.

Then the streak crossed the ring, and all of the drones fell out of the sky.

They did not explode. They simply dropped, one after another, with a light patter, as though somebody had flicked every one of them with a finger.

They landed on the road in a neat little scatter of silver, and not a single lens was cracked.

Batnac opened his eyes. A cold feeling crawled up the back of his neck, and he did something that he had never done in front of an enemy in his entire career.

He ran.

"Thrusters, full!" he screamed. "Everything!"

The two nozzles on his back blazed white, and he shot away along the street just above the rooftops like a rocket.

The wind tore at his burned hair. The houses blurred past beneath him, and the river appeared ahead like a thin silver thread, and he did not look back. He only flew faster, and faster, until the whole district was a smear of color.

Then a boy stepped onto the ridge of the roof directly in his path.

"Not that way," said Leon.

Batnac had no time to scream. Leon raised one hand, curled his finger against his thumb, and flicked the giant lightly on the forehead plate.

The world turned over.

Batnac went tumbling backward end over end, the whole length of the street, and slammed into the road at the far end with a crash that shook every window in the district.

A crater opened in the pavement. Dust and broken stone rose in a cloud. Leon crossed the rooftops in a few golden flashes and dropped to the road in front of the hole, and the neighbors scrambled back from the edge of the street.

"Get up," he said.

The giant climbed out of the hole. He did not do it gracefully. He dragged himself over the lip with the arms he had left, his thrusters sparking, and stood in the middle of the street, swaying.

"Seven arms," Leon said. "You still have seven arms. Use them."

’You are going easy on him,’ Medusa said.

’Yes.’

’He is trying to kill you.’

’He is not very good at it.’

’Why bother letting him swing?’

’Because I need him to stop on his own.’ Leon’s thought was calm. ’If I break him in one blow, he will only say it was a trick. I want him to understand.’

’Understand what?’

’Later.’

Batnac screamed and attacked with everything he had left.

Six arms came at once, from every direction, so fast that the air shrieked around them. They would have crushed a house. They would have flattened a transport. Leon raised the shield and let them come.

Claw after claw struck the face on the Aegis, and each one rang with a deep, bright note. Fire leaped from the point of every impact.

The shield glowed brighter with each blow, until it blazed like a second sun, and then it opened its eyes.

The light came back out.