Mechanical-Arm Spider #84.
"What's the stone for?"
Lobo looked at Jake across the street. "You are about to find out."
Then he looked at Oliver.
His attention moving the way a weather system moves -- not fast exactly, but with the total certainty of something that doesn't negotiate with obstacles. He took one step in Oliver's direction and the chain came off his forearm in the same motion, the links already finding their rotation.
Oliver was already reading it. His weight had shifted before the chain left Lobo's hand, the body making the call his conscious mind was still catching up to, and he went right as the spike came through the space his throat had been occupying. It hit the car behind him and went through the door and the frame and out the other side, and the sound of it was wrong -- too clean, too deep, the sound of something that had been thrown with the intention of ending rather than catching.
Jake had the chain's angle before the spike finished its arc. He read it the same way he read everything -- through the spider-sense's pressure, the geometry of mass in motion -- and what he read was that Lobo had not aimed to pin. He'd aimed to kill.
Oliver pulled his leg clear of the spike's return path.
Not clear enough.
The chain came back on Lobo's second pull without retracting -- a wave running through the links, the whole length of it undulating in a motion that was wrong for how chains moved, that said the man throwing it understood its physics the way a musician understood an instrument, and the spike at the end caught the outside of Oliver's right calf on the upswing.
Oliver's leg went out from under him and he hit the ground and rolled and came up on one knee with an arrow already drawn.
Jake had the chain.
He'd closed the distance in the half-second between the second throw and the retraction, both hands on the links above the spike, and the pull came immediately -- Lobo's arm going taut, the force behind it enough to drag Jake's feet across the asphalt before his webs found the building behind him and held. His shoulders screamed. The mechanical arm read the tension as data and reported it without drama, the elbow joint taking the load the biology couldn't.
Lobo pulled with both hands.
The building anchor held for three seconds. Then the web tore at the mount point and Jake went forward two feet before he got another line out, lower, and that one held and he went forward one foot and stopped.
Oliver got his leg free.
Jake felt the moment the weight shifted -- the change in the chain's resistance when Oliver unhooked himself -- and he let go.
The chain snapped back. Lobo took one step to absorb it. One step, and then he was standing exactly where he'd been, coiling the links back onto his forearm, and his expression had moved into something without performance in it.
Jake was already coming.
He went off the ground hard, firing a line to the nearest building face to get the angle he needed -- coming in from above and left, the mechanical arm cocked back, the spider-sense sharp for the first time in the last hour. Lobo watched him come with his head slightly tilted.
The spider-sense hit him from behind.
He turned in the air.
Oliver was down on his back in the street, the broken bow raised in both hands, three arrows nocked across the same draw. His right leg was wrong -- the angle of it, the way he was holding himself around it -- but his arms were steady, his eye on the line, his whole body organized around the shot.
The bow was lashed at the fracture, the two halves not quite aligned, and the arrows left the string in a stagger -- the first a half-breath before the other two -- and because the bow was broken and the tension uneven, the trailing pair came off the nock spinning, catching the first arrow's wake, the three of them moving through the air in a loose helix that looked less like an arrow and more like something that had decided to be its own problem.
Lobo swung the chain.
A single wave sent through the links, low, and it caught Jake at the apex of his swing and threw him wide -- not off the line to Lobo but sideways, his body spinning, the Carnage suit reading the impact and hardening too late to change the trajectory. He was still spinning when he registered Lobo turning back to the arrows.
Lobo raised his free hand and punched them out of the air.
Three arrows, one motion, his expression not changing. The pieces went wide in different directions and one of them clattered against the Space Hog and the other two hit the asphalt, and Lobo looked at Oliver on the ground the way you look at something that has done what it could.
He swung the chain.
Jake was still in it.
He felt the shift in the chain's motion -- the trajectory changing, Lobo redirecting mid-swing with the control of someone who'd been doing this across more years than Jake had been alive -- and the spike end came around toward Oliver's position.
Jake got a line to a building and pulled against the chain's arc, trying to bleed the momentum, and the web went taut and held for one second and then the chain tore through it at the contact point, and he went with the swing.
He got a line to Oliver's belt.
Yanked.
Oliver came off the ground and sideways -- and Lobo switched the chain's trajectory mid-swing, reading the yank, redirecting with a wrist motion that had no right to work at this speed. The spike end came around toward Oliver's new position instead of his old one.
Jake couldn't stop it. He was already at the end of the swing, both of them inside the chain's arc now, and Lobo brought it home.
They hit each other and then the ground, Jake's shoulder taking Oliver's weight and the street taking both of them, the impact compounding in a way that left no clean accounting of what hurt where. The chain dragged across them both on the retraction.
Then the dust came up and covered everything.
Lobo pulled the chain back.
It came through the dust, the links dragging across the broken street, and he pulled again, harder, and nothing came with it. He looked at the dust. Pulled a third time and felt the chain come free of whatever it had caught and come home, and there was nothing at the end of it.
He waited.
The dust moved.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
Jake came up out of it in pieces -- one hand on the ground, then the other, then both knees, then standing. His right side had an opinion about the last thirty seconds that he was not currently in a position to engage with. The Carnage suit had sealed what it could.
His hand found his ankle.
He looked down.
Oliver. On his back in the dust, one hand on Jake's ankle, not gripping exactly -- just there, the fingers closed, holding on. His right leg from the knee down was at an angle that meant something had given in the chain's last pass, something that didn't fix itself, and his face was grey under the blood and sweat and the accumulated cost. His free hand was moving across the asphalt in small arcs. Searching.
Jake looked at what the hand was searching for.
The broken bow had landed six feet away, one half still lashed to the other at the fracture point, the paracord wrap intact. Oliver's fingers were moving toward it with the specific patience of a man who had already run out of everything except the one thing the island had made permanent in him.
He watched the hand moving. Not fast. Not going to reach it.
Jake looked at him for a moment.
Then he looked at his own vision, at the Bonus Rewards still queued from the disc redemption, patient, waiting.
"Totem Icon," he said.
His eyes switched focus before he could register what his next totem hunt looked like. Time was of the essence.
The broken bow lay six feet away, the lashing at the fracture catching the dust still settling around it. Oliver's hand was three feet short of it.
Jake web-yanked it to himself.
Oliver's arm stretched after it and then dropped.
The bow was in his hand. Two pieces, paracord wrap, the hairline mark near the lower limb where the old bullet scar had healed wrong. He held it and waited for the worst of it.
It didn't glow or flicker or dim. He held it a moment longer.
"T.Finder," he said. "Register totem."
🕷️
[Totem collected!]
Category: Rare → Epic
Reward: +96h to your Time Bank
Redeem totem to receive reward? (Y/N)
🕸️
"Redeem." He wasted no breath.
The bow came apart in his hands -- not in pieces, not in splinters. It dissolved upward in starlight, white-gold, the fracture and the lashing and the old scar all going together, absorbed into his chest in a light that was visible for three full seconds before it closed.
Oliver's hand stopped moving.
His whole body went still with a completeness that was different from the stillness of rest -- the hand on Jake's ankle loosening, the searching arm lying flat, the grey in his face going one shade further. His leg had landed wrong and stayed wrong and the light from the bow's dissolution had taken the last of whatever had been keeping him in the fight.
Jake looked at him for a moment.
Then he turned.
Lobo was watching from across the street, the stone still in his left hand, the chain coiled on his right forearm. The light from the bow's dissolution had caught his face -- still fading, the last of it going gold at the edges -- and his expression was reading it the way he'd read everything all morning: with the particular focus of a being who had been cataloging threats across a very long career and recognized the category of what he was looking at.
"No amount of upgrades," Lobo said, "is going to change your fate."
Jake walked toward him.
"We shall see."
~MimicLord
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