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.
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 ignored the hovering camera drones. She surveyed the destroyed street with the sharp gaze of a veteran, stopping near the scattered recruits.
"Report," Elara said. Her voice carried absolute authority.
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. We funneled them."
"Ammo count?" Elara asked. She checked their armor for structural breaches.
"Empty," Iharu said, wiping soot from his visor. "Burned through the reserves. The swarm kept multiplying. Standard operating procedure says hold the line. We held the line. Kept the casualties at zero."
Elara looked at the fresh ice crystallized across the pavement. She traced the impact zone back to Hiro's position, noting Iharu's empty weapon and the shattered crawler shells littering the street.
"Good overlapping fire," Elara said. She offered a slow nod. "You pinned its mobility. You watched your flanks. Good work, rookies."
Hiro let out a rattling breath. Iharu's shoulders slumped. The manufactured arrogance drained entirely out of him.
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." She searched his pale face, tracking the severe tremor in his jaw. "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. Do not let her touch you.]
The encrypted text flashed rapidly. Caleb read the words through the smog. The sharp syntax carried a frantic, territorial edge.
Data scrolled down the side of the glass. The encrypted network manipulated the broadcast grid in real-time. Caleb's private viewer count rolled over. Fifty thousand. One hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand.
Peripheral statistics bled through the purple code. Elara's presence spiked her own feed to over a million viewers. Kikaru plummeted to fifteen thousand. Rapid 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?
[??? : Look at the numbers. I am clipping the ice trap. I am uploading the joint break. 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 to block out the noise. 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 along the torso. Favoring her bleeding right arm, she pressed her left hand hard against her ribs. She panted heavily.
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 sleek humanoid shape slid out of the ruined meat.
The creature 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's stomach dropped. Disposal yard blueprints flashed in his mind. Narrow chest. Elongated grasping limbs. Precision sensing organs. A harvester. A retrieval unit. It breached the sector to find whatever was buried inside his chest.
It raised a single bladed finger.
Two jagged bone spikes shot from its knuckle faster than a rifle round.
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. Genuine terror flooded her face. 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.
Caleb's suit diagnostics shrieked. The leg power spiked from 0.2 percent directly to 30 percent.
Synthetic fibers snapped tight. He launched off the brick wall. The asphalt cratered into dust under his bare feet. He crossed thirty feet of broken street in a blur of speed.
He slammed into Kikaru just as the creature closed the distance. The monster's blade-like arm swept horizontally, aiming to take her head off.
Caleb twisted his torso. He shoved Kikaru flat against the truck chassis and took the strike directly across his own back.
The blade cleaved through his canvas jacket. It shattered the back plating of his surplus armor. The impact threw them both into the dirt.
Fire tore across Caleb's spine. He hit the ground hard, his bruised right arm trapped beneath his own weight. He grabbed Kikaru by her tactical harness with his left hand. Digging his heels into the gravel, he dragged her backward out of the strike zone.
The creature pivoted smoothly. It raised its blade to finish them.
Elara stepped into its path.
Her black boots emitted a high-pitched whine. She crossed the gap, leaving a faint afterimage in the smog. She drew 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 like a sonic boom, 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 in an aggressive sprint to tackle its legs.
The creature stepped sideways, moving with sickening fluidity. 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. His custom armor shed sparks against the concrete. He rolled onto his side, spitting a mouthful of gravel and blood. "Son of a bitch," Iharu snarled. He fought his way up to his knees, clutching his dented ribs. "I wasn't done."
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. She predicted the attack patterns. 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. Keeping her eyes locked on the threat, she yelled again. "Get her out of here, Caleb! Now!"
The creature recognized the stalemate. It 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. Total blindness descended on the street.
Elara coughed. She swept her blade through empty air as the creature vanished from her sight.
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, utterly exhausted, and bleeding heavily down his spine.
Purple text flooded his cracked visor.
[??? : Drop the girl! Compress your own spine! You are bleeding out!]
Caleb ignored the text.
He held Kikaru tight against his side with his left arm. The bone spike remained lodged deep in her chest. She thrashed weakly, coughing up blood onto his jacket. He locked his grip. If he let go, she was dead.
Looking down through the dust, Caleb spotted Kikaru's dropped combat knife 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, gargling scream that tore at his eardrums. She spasmed violently against him. The plasma instantly cauterized the ruptured artery, sealing the worst of the bleeding.
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 and terribly calm. "Not much to do with the trash right now. But I wanted to see it for myself."
The thick dust split perfectly in half.
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, triggering a biological defense. Elara stepped backward. Her boots whined, flashing with energy. She wove flawlessly through the lethal projectiles, deflecting the incoming spikes.
She planted her boots in the gravel. She raised her blade.
"You messed with the wrong people!" Elara screamed toward the elevated staging platform. "Captain Ren Kade, NOW!"
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 physically bent around the thick barrel, distorting the air into a pulsing halo.
His long proctor coat snapped wildly in the artificial gravitational pull. The metal observation deck groaned, the steel struts buckling under his boots from the sheer localized pressure. He held his stance, staring down the creature with absolute calm.
"Gravity lock!" Kade shouted.
He aimed straight down into the dust. He 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 perfect, 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.
Silence fell over Sector B.
The crater sat empty. Dust slowly drifted toward the ceiling vents.
Emergency sirens wailed from the deployment tunnel. The heavy blast doors finally 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 to lock down the scene.
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, his eyes fighting to stay open.
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."