Ash drifted over Sector B.
The dead Honju lay motionless. Acid pooled near its severed knee, hissing as it melted the broken asphalt into gray slag.
Caleb braced his good shoulder against a brick wall. He let his knees buckle, sliding downward until his boots hit the dirt.
The combat stimulant wore off.
Withdrawal hollowed him out. A starving knot coiled beneath his sternum. The unnatural heat stripped every spare calorie from his system just to move his paralyzed arm. Nausea rolled through his gut. His muscles cramped. He squeezed his eyes shut, dragging thin streams of oxygen through his pinched regulator.
Footsteps crunched over the gravel.
Elara walked out of the impact crater. Her First Division collar cut a clean line through the settling dust. She bypassed the hovering camera drones, stopping near the scattered recruits.
"Report," Elara said.
Hiro lowered his smoking rifle. His knees shook. He fumbled with an empty magazine, dropping it into the dirt. Iharu stood nearby, chest heaving. The redhead's armor bore deep scorch marks from the acid.
"Thirty-two crawlers eliminated," Hiro stammered. He swallowed hard. "Iharu ran suppression on the left flank. I held the right with shock bursts."
"Ammo count?" Elara asked, checking their armor for structural breaches.
"Empty," Iharu said, wiping soot from his visor. "Burned through the reserves. We held the line."
Elara looked at the fresh ice crystallized across the pavement. She traced the impact zone back to Hiro's position, noting the shattered crawler shells littering the street.
"Good overlapping fire," Elara said. "You pinned its mobility. Good work, rookies."
Hiro let out a rattling breath. Iharu's shoulders slumped.
Elara turned her head. Her gaze found Caleb.
She walked past the prodigies, stopping three feet away. She studied his bruised right arm strapped tight against his ribs. She examined the blood-soaked canvas jacket hanging off his shoulders. Tracing the line of sight across the street, she located the piece of steel rebar buried deep in the Honju's shattered knee.
"Potatoes," Elara breathed.
Caleb dragged air through his teeth. "You're late."
"Traffic," she replied quietly.
Caleb let out a harsh huff, gripping his ribs. "Could've taken a shortcut."
Elara crouched down. Her scarred leather jacket creaked. "I did. That's why you're breathing. Keep pulling air. Medics are breaching the blast doors right now. Stay awake."
"I'm awake," Caleb rasped. "Just hungry."
The blue HUD inside Caleb's cracked visor flickered. The diagnostics corrupted into bright purple.
[??? : Stop moving. Your blood pressure is dropping.]
Data scrolled down the side of the glass. Caleb's private viewer count rolled over. Fifty thousand. One hundred thousand.
Public comments flooded the chat log.
User841: did that scrubber just use a pipe? RedLine: dude in the surplus gear carried the princess. G-Corp: [Automated] Private Bid Request Initiated. Vanguard_fan: is she leaking blood?
[??? : They are watching you carve up a 6.4 with garbage. You belong on the top tier.]
Caleb closed his eyes. He leaned his head back against the brick. The network numbers meant nothing. He just needed his heart to beat until the trauma teams arrived.
Metal scraped against concrete.
Ten yards away, Kikaru leaned her weight against an overturned transport truck. Her white armor bore deep cracks. Favoring her bleeding right arm, she pressed her left hand hard against her ribs.
She pointed a trembling, dirt-stained finger toward the dead Honju.
"Looks like one of the crawlers survived inside the carcass," Kikaru muttered. Her voice cracked, stripped of its corporate polish. She wiped a smear of soot from her polarized visor. "Tell me one of you idiots sees that too."
Caleb opened his eyes.
The dead Honju's chest cavity bulged outward. Shattered ribs snapped with a wet crunch. A pale, humanoid shape slid out of the ruined meat.
It dropped onto the broken asphalt. A heavy slap echoed across the street. Blade-like arms gripped the concrete. Sensing organs flared along the base of its skull, twitching as they tasted the air.
It pivoted away from Iharu lifting his empty rifle. It tilted its head, staring directly at Kikaru.
"Survived...?" it said.
The voice was a garbled mimicry of Kikaru's pitch.
Kikaru froze. Her jaw parted behind her visor.
Caleb stopped breathing. Kaiju didn't talk. In a decade of scrubbing containment bays, he had never heard a monster speak a human word.
It raised a single bladed finger.
Two jagged bone spikes shot from its knuckle.
One spike punched clean through Kikaru's chest plate. The next drove straight through her thigh, pinning her to the steel chassis of the transport truck.
She gasped, choking on the impact. Her hands clawed uselessly at the jagged bone protruding from her chest. A wet cough racked her lungs, spraying bright blood over her chin guard. She thrashed against the truck chassis in raw panic.
Hiro dropped his rifle. Iharu stood paralyzed.
Heat flared beneath Caleb's sternum. A starving cramp twisted his empty stomach. The metallic taste of the stimulant vanished from his tongue, leaving only dry ash and copper.
The synthetic fibers lining his thighs snapped rigid. The joints of the surplus armor locked. The metal whined under a sudden surge of raw pressure. Red warning text flooded his cracked visor as the power output jumped to thirty percent.
He drove his boots into the brick wall. The masonry splintered. He launched forward. The asphalt cratered into dust under his impact. He crossed thirty feet of broken street in two rapid strides.
His shoulder crashed into Kikaru's cracked armor. He shoved her backward. Her spine hit the rusted truck chassis.
The creature's blade swept through the smog.
Caleb twisted his torso. He shielded her with his own body. The bone edge cleaved through his canvas jacket. The surplus back plating shattered. Fire tore across his spine. He hit the ground hard, his jaw slamming against the gravel.
The creature pivoted smoothly. It raised its blade.
Elara stepped into its path.
Her black boots emitted a high-pitched whine. She crossed the gap, drawing a Phase-Blade from her back rig.
The creature brought its massive arm down. Elara flicked her wrist, deflecting the heavy strike. The impact cracked across the sector, shattering the remaining glass in the storefronts.
Hiro racked the bolt of his rifle. He fired a desperate barrage of ice rounds. Iharu dropped his empty gun entirely. The redhead yelled, rushing the creature to tackle its legs.
The creature stepped sideways. Hiro's frozen bullets hit the dirt, crystallizing the gravel uselessly. The creature swatted Iharu out of the air with the back of its hand.
Iharu tumbled into the rubble. He rolled onto his side, spitting a mouthful of gravel and blood. "Son of a bitch," Iharu snarled, fighting his way up to his knees.
The creature's multi-faceted eyes tracked only Caleb.
Elara parried another strike. She locked her boots onto the asphalt to ground her weight. Her Phase-Blade hummed, carving a white arc through the air. Stepping inside the creature's reach, she severed two of its sensing organs with a brutal upward slash.
"Fall back!" Elara barked over her shoulder. "Get her out of here, Caleb! Now!"
The creature flared its remaining sensing organs outward from its skull.
A pressurized bomb of dirt and toxic dust detonated from its narrow chest.
The shockwave scattered the camera drones into the walls. Choking brown powder swallowed the entire sector.
Elara coughed. She swept her blade through empty air.
Through the dense dust, a long blade-like arm reached past the truck chassis. It bypassed Kikaru entirely. It clamped around Caleb's ruined harness.
The creature lifted him off the ground.
Caleb dangled in the air. He kicked the smog. The hollow void in his chest screamed for calories. He was starving, exhausted, and bleeding heavily down his spine.
[??? : Drop the girl! You are bleeding out!]
Caleb ignored the purple text.
He held Kikaru tight against his side with his left arm. The bone spike remained lodged deep in her chest. She coughed blood onto his jacket. He locked his grip. If he let go, she was dead.
Kikaru's dropped combat knife lay in the dirt near his left foot. The blade still glowed with residual plasma from her fight.
He swung his leg, kicking the hilt upward. Catching it out of the air with his left hand, he awkwardly adjusted his grip on Kikaru's harness to keep her suspended.
He pressed the glowing hot flat of the knife directly against the gaping hole in Kikaru's chest armor, right where the spike met her flesh.
Burnt meat and ozone filled the air. Kikaru let out a raw scream. She spasmed violently against him. The plasma instantly cauterized the ruptured artery.
Caleb locked his jaw. He held her steady against the searing heat while hanging suspended by his throat in the grip of a monster.
The creature held him perfectly still, studying him through the choking dust. It tilted its head.
"So this is what got OUR attention," the creature said. Its garbled voice lost Kikaru's tone. It sounded ancient.
The thick dust split.
Elara exploded through the smoke. Her scarred leather jacket whipped behind her.
"Get the hell away from my allies!" Elara yelled.
She drove her Phase-Blade horizontally. The high-frequency steel cleaved the creature from its shoulder down to its hip in a single motion.
The monster shrieked. It dropped Caleb.
Caleb hit the ground hard. He rolled, shielding Kikaru with his body as the creature thrashed.
Dozens of barbed spikes erupted from the creature's skin. Elara stepped backward. Her boots whined. She wove flawlessly through the lethal projectiles, deflecting the incoming spikes.
She planted her boots in the gravel. She raised her blade.
"Captain Ren Kade, NOW!" Elara screamed toward the elevated staging platform.
The creature attempted to regenerate its severed shoulder. It froze.
Blue gel bubbled inside the deep cut from Elara's blade. The chemical expanded and hardened instantly. It locked the creature's joints in place, paralyzing its nervous system.
Heavy boots pounded through the settling dust.
Hiro and two bulky recruits dove into the crater. They grabbed Caleb by the shoulders. They hooked their arms under Kikaru's harness. They dragged them both rapidly out of the blast radius, their boots slipping on the slick pavement.
High above the arena, the head proctor stood on the edge of the metal observation deck.
Captain Ren Kade hoisted a massive, shoulder-mounted Heavy-Mass Driver. The weapon's core whined. Ambient light bent around the thick barrel, distorting the air into a pulsing halo.
His long proctor coat snapped wildly in the artificial gravitational pull. The steel struts buckled under his boots from the sheer localized pressure.
"Gravity lock!" Kade shouted.
He aimed straight down into the dust and pulled the trigger.
The air warped. Sound vanished completely from the sector.
An invisible, crushing pillar of localized gravity slammed into the street. The sheer pressure flattened the paralyzed creature directly into the asphalt. The foundation of the arena cracked, spider-webbing outward into a hundred-foot crater.
The creature's exoskeleton shattered under the impossible weight. Black blood sprayed across the concrete in a violent starburst.
The crushed mass on the ground shimmered.
The broken shell distorted. It bent the light around itself like a heat mirage. The creature dissolved into the smog, turning completely invisible. The presence vanished entirely from the street, retreating deep into the subterranean fissure.
The crater sat empty. Dust slowly drifted toward the ceiling vents.
Emergency sirens wailed from the deployment tunnel. The heavy blast doors ground open. A dozen Defense Force medics flooded through the gap, carrying stretchers and heavy trauma kits. Armed security guards fanned out, forming a tight perimeter around the ruined street.
Elara stood at the edge of the gravity crater.
She flicked the black blood off her Phase-Blade with a sharp downward motion. She sheathed the weapon. She turned her head, walking right past the security perimeter toward the medical team swarming around Kikaru and Caleb.
Caleb lay in the dirt. His unarmored arm was bruised purple. His canvas jacket was soaked in his own blood. He breathed in shallow, ragged gasps.
A lead medic reached down to grab Caleb's shoulder.
Elara stepped smoothly between them. She planted her boots into the gravel. She rested her hand near the hilt of her blade. She looked at the proctor stepping down from the platform, then stared down the medic.
"He comes with me."