Chapter 518 | The Equation Runs Out of Space [GT BONUS]

Chapter 518: 518 | The Equation Runs Out of Space [GT BONUS]

From the plaza floor behind Nexo, Thatch stood with his hands in his pockets. The black fire had pulled back into his skin, just faint embers glowing at his wrists. He wasn’t fighting. He was watching. Silver eyes tracked every movement I made with the specific focus of someone cataloging data, and something about the way he tilted his head felt wrong in a different way than the monster between us.

"You’re faster than you look," he called across the gap, and his voice had lost that hollow polish, something almost human creeping back into the edges. "I mean genuinely. If I didn’t know any better, I would think you were a top 20 hero not some trainee."

I didn’t answer. Talking cost breath and I had exactly none to spare.

Nexo stepped forward. Crunch. The tile buckled.

I grabbed a fallen support beam with Spectral Reach and swung it like a bat, slamming the entire twenty-foot length of steel directly into the creature’s side. The impact rang out across the plaza, a sound like a car crash. The beam bent in the middle from the force. Nexo tilted its head, absorbing the hit, and reached up with the shorter arm to grab the beam. Fingers closed around the steel, and the creature pulled. The beam tore free from my constructs like tissue paper. Nexo dropped it, and kept walking.

Stamina: Twelve percent.

My vision doubled at the edges. The Cloak flickered, golden threads dimming for half a heartbeat before I forced them back to brightness through sheer spite. Ten minutes and change. I could do this. I’d fought longer with worse odds and walked away laughing.

Except I hadn’t. That was the uncomfortable truth sitting in my chest next to the cold thing that used to be Sadism and was now just fear with better branding. I’d never fought something I genuinely could not hurt, something that absorbed Legendary-tier kinetic output and kept walking, something that didn’t have an Aspect to suppress or a Core to disrupt, and no vulnerability I could find.

This wasn’t a fight. This was geometry. I was the variable and Nexo was the constant, and the only question was how long I could keep solving for X before the equation ran out of space.

Blitz. Fifteen feet right. Stamina: Ten percent.

Nexo’s longer arm was already there, fingers spread, and I twisted mid-transit, burning the last dregs of my Dexterity to abort the dodge and redirect into a dive that took me under the swing instead of through it. I hit the tile on my bad ribs. A wet crack echoed inside my own chest. Blood filled my mouth. I spat it across the floor and rolled, pushing myself upright with one arm because my other shoulder had decided it was done participating in this nonsense.

Stamina: Eight percent.

"That’s fascinating," Thatch said, and he’d moved closer without me noticing, standing maybe thirty feet away now with his leg bouncing that four-beat rhythm. "You’re running out. I can see it in the way the coat’s dimming. Another two minutes and you’ll drop it, and when you drop it Nexo will catch you, and when Nexo catches you this whole thing is over. But you’re not running. You could Blitz to the stairs right now, grab whoever you’re so concerned about, and be three floors up before Nexo finished turning around. But you’re staying here. Between it and them."

He tilted his head, and the burn scars around his eyes flared amber.

"You actually think you’re going to win this."

"Shut up," I managed, tasting copper. "I’m working."

Nexo stepped forward. I threw myself left, no Blitz this time because I couldn’t afford the stamina cost, just raw Dexterity and spite. The shorter arm came around in a backhand. It was just a glancing strike, but it caught my shoulder with the force of a car door. The impact lifted me off my feet and sent me airborne, tumbling backward across fifteen feet of broken plaza before gravity remembered I existed and brought me down hard.

I hit the tile and skidded another six feet. Debris tore at my jacket, my back. When I stopped moving I was staring up at the dome’s emergency lights. My vision kept doubling, refusing to settle into one image.

Stamina: Four percent.

The Lightning Cloak guttered and died.

I tried to push myself up and my arms didn’t respond. Tried again. Nothing. My ribs filed a complaint loud enough to ring in my ears. Behind the ringing I could hear voices shouting my name. Percy ran numbers under his breath. Petra screamed something between an order and a plea.

And footsteps.

Slow. Patient. Wrong.

Nexo walked across the plaza toward where I’d landed, and I got my elbows underneath me, and I shoved, and I made it to one knee before my vision whited out and I went back down. Blood on my teeth. Blood on the tile. The timer in my peripheral said nine minutes and some change.

Three whole minutes. It had cost me everything I had left.

The footsteps stopped.

I looked up.

Nexo stood directly above me, twelve feet of wrong anatomy and patient arithmetic, its longer arm raised, palm angled down. The six horns caught the emergency light at angles that hurt to track. The black bands wrapped around its body pulsed once, twice, a rhythm that felt like a heartbeat if hearts were designed by someone who’d only heard them described and gotten several details wrong.

The palm descended.

And something cracked.

The sound was not tile or ceiling. It was something deeper. Structural. A wall coming down under pressure it was never rated to handle. Light poured through the gap, stark white and furious, nothing like the emergency red or the amber of my constructs. The dome’s northwest wall buckled, then shattered, and through the gap came a voice I’d know anywhere, stripped of everything except the words and the rage underneath them.

"I see him. I’m coming."

Sloane.

Nexo’s palm stopped six inches from my skull, and the creature’s head turned toward the sound, slow and curious, and behind it Thatch’s face split into something between a grin and a snarl.

And I laughed.

I tasted blood and spat it out. I laughed anyway. The cavalry had arrived, and she was pissed. The look on Thatch’s face as his schedule slipped was worth every broken rib.

"Told you," I managed, grinning up at the monster. "Terrible Wednesday."