Chương 87: The Greater Predator

"Stop! STOP!" shouted Nona.

"Stop destroying the statues!" Cole froze, finger squeezing his trigger all the way to the wall. Three meters ahead of him, a twenty-foot statue of a dragon towered over them, slowly descending to block the road and prevent their escape. But it was slow. He spun in a circle. There wasn't a statue within arm's reach of himself. Yet, each one loomed as though he was only moments from death. Something was fucking with his head, elevating his sense of danger. The same way his sense of safety had been elevated before.

Cole keyed his radio.

"Cease fire, hold position."" Are you serious?" called Roxy. But the sounds of her shotgun cut off. Shortly after, so did Howie's cannon. Beth spun in a circle with her sword, eyes wide.

"What's going on? Why'd we stop?"

"Nona?" asked Cole. Nona weaved her way between the stone statues until she stood before Cole. She put a hand on his top rail and pushed the muzzle down. He let her. Behind her, the statues shifted closer, closing in. His eyes flicked from target to target. Destroy them all. Nona grabbed his face, forcing it down so that he had to make eye contact with her. She looked supremely uncomfortable with the contact, face messed up, and barely able to hold his own eyes. But she held long enough. He blinked.

"The statues aren't the monster," said Nona.

"The monster is beyond the veil. The statues are sealing it away. Every time we break one, more of it comes across." Don't listen. Your team is dying. Cole flinched away, but Nona tightened her grip.

"It's trying to make us free it!" she shouted in his face.

"Just look!" She let go of him and walked between two of the statues. She held out her hands and brushed each of them. Each of them began to move toward her, reaching out. But so slowly that she wasn't in any real risk. Panic, confusion, that was the risk. Expending all their ammunition on bits of carved marble, leaving them defenseless. That was the risk. Releasing whatever the statues held back… God, they'd almost given it exactly what it wanted. Maybe they already had.

Behind them, at the square where they'd first landed after jumping from the second story and cleaved through a dozen or more of the statues, the bubbling, black discharge was collecting, coalescing into the form of a massive human torso as black as a cloudy midnight atop a roiling spiral of pitch. It already stood higher than the building they'd bivouacked inside.

"What the fuck is that?" asked Roxy.

"I think your world calls it a djinn," said Nona.

"A what?" asked Howie.

"A genie," Cole realized. Of all the things to remember from English lit class.

"The only genies I know are blue, sing, and grant wishes," said Howie.

"This one rends flesh and devours souls," said Nona.

"We can't fight it. Not with the weapons we have."

"Can you banish it?" asked Cole. Nona scrunched her face up.

"Maybe. But that's a deific ability." She looked over at the kaleidoscopic wall.

"It's a direct connection to He Who Watches through the Lewis Field," she said.

"And we're not exactly welcome here."

"Then we go with the original plan," said Cole.

"We get away from it—we get Beth away from it." He raised his voice and pointed down a black stone road.

"Fan out! Howie, Besson, southwest. Nona, Roxy, Artian, due east. Beth, you're with me. Rally at the shorter spire east-southeast of us, three klicks out. And don't break any more statues, Hooah?" A chorus of aye, roger, why not, and run awaaaay answered him. Beth looked up at Cole.

"What about us?" she asked. Grabbing her shoulder to keep her close, Cole began to build up speed between the statues, keeping one eye on his path and one on the towering figure that needed an entire constellation of seals to contain. If his original instinct had been right, before that thing whispered in his ear, then the Venus fly-trap analogy wasn't too far off. It would have an outer limit. They could get away. But the slower members of the party needed time, distance, and a diversion.

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"We're all soul-snacks to this thing," said Cole.

"But apparently you're a soul- feast, so we're going to play a high-stakes game of keep-away, and then I'm going to show you my party trick." Beth pried his hand off—Christ, the girl was strong—and increased her pace to run beside him where space between the statues permitted.

The genie, or evil spirit fucker, or whatever it was, must have coalesced enough, because it pushed itself up on arms that extended like pavilion poles, fully ten meters long, at least, and swung its featureless head between the parts of their group fleeing in different directions. It finally fixed its formless black face on them, and started pulling itself along, massive hands digging holes in the walls of stone buildings in its pursuit.

Cole turned and raised his rifle, squeezing off a half-dozen shots that punched holes through the genie as though it were made of smoke—caring less even than his initial brush with a heart-eater demon. It continued clawing its way towards them, gaining quickly. He lowered his rifle and continued on. Worth a try. They turned a corner, facing a veritable wall of the stone statues. Meant to seal the genie, it must have found some way to exert a level of control over them in the time it had been trapped here.

No way through.

"When you do your spark teleport, can you take people with you?"

"It's not a teleport, and I have no idea! I've never tried!" said Beth.

"Try it now," said Cole.

"Burn extra charges if you have to." He pointed to the roof of a long, narrow building running parallel to their street.

"Up there." Beth grabbed his arm and grimaced as she concentrated. Cole felt the pop of an ability being charged before it felt like he'd been jerked by his chest through a stretched-out version of the world, then pulled along a wire at super-sonic speed. He landed on the roof, tumbling, disoriented, before he was able to get his bearings. Beth pulled him to his feet.

"Shake it off," she said.

"What now?" The genie smashed down into the street where they'd stood only a few seconds before. It howled, inside his head, like someone dragging nails across the world's biggest chalkboard. Cole winced, and looked out over the city, seeing both other teams making their way out. From this high up, he could see the perimeter of the statues, forming a rough ring through the ruined streets a klick further. The genie reconstituted itself and started to pull its way toward them again. Give her to me.

"I was a track and field legend," said Cole, breaking into a run down the narrow roof.

"Cross country, javelin, long-jump. Think you can keep up?"" Nerd," teased Beth, pouring on the speed beside him. Cole pumped his legs, focusing on his breathing as he squeezed out every ounce of alacrity the Lewis Field in Babel lent to him. Beth kept pace, but her breathing lacked the trained rhythm he'd built up over the years. She was fast, but she wouldn't be able to hold a sprint. Even an enhanced body had limits.

On the street below, the genie pulled itself along, parallel to them, carefully avoiding the statues as it dug its claws into the road. Ahead, the edge of the roof loomed. Cole felt Beth hesitate next to him, but he reached out and put his arm on the back of her shoulder, urging her to keep moving. The Genie still outpaced the both of them, getting ready to cut sharply across their path.

His enhanced Acuity could see the tension building in its form, the change in its posture, the tightening of tar-textured muscles under its stretched, pitch flesh. Keeping them asleep for so long to prepare its trap had given Cole time for his expended ability charges to refresh. Bright stars burned at the back of his mind, latent pools of power waiting to be harnessed. He activated his sword's speed boost first, putting on such a sudden burst of acceleration that Beth almost stumbled as he pulled her along.

Then he burned two charges of his Meteoric Leap ability and launched them both from the rooftop just as the genie crashed through the building in front of them, tearing through stone and tile. It snatched at them as they rocketed up and over." WHOOOO!" screamed Beth, beside him. Her raven hair whipped around her face, and she laughed, eyes wide, as though she was on the world's best roller coaster.

"You can fly?"

"Nope," said Cole. He gauged the distance, fine tuning his falling speed as he looked ahead in their path. Beth's smile melted away as they reached the apex and started to drop back down toward the ruins, angled perfectly to fall onto a squat, square structure. Beth held her hands out in front of her as she started to scream. The ground rushed up to meet them. Cole braced as well, making sure Beth didn't wriggle out of his grip.

They hit the roof of the ruined building, and the entire top half of the structure blew out, dropping them down another three meters, where they fell hard having already lost the fall-protection when they impacted the roof. Through the choking dust from the pulverized building, Cole pulled Beth up, pointing toward a narrow slit window. Beth nodded, coughing, and spark-stepped them through an opening no wider than his hand.

No wonder she'd been able to hide from that steam dragon long enough for Cole and his team to get there. The girl could slip through tight spaces like a hamster. Back on street level, surrounded by a double layer of statues, they got another 200 meters or so before the Genie crashed through onto the stone road behind them. Beside him, Beth was flagging—even enhanced by the Lewis Field, she wasn't an athlete.

Not used to running all out at such a frenetic pace, especially while coughing dust and debris out of her already-stressed lungs. She could barely get one foot in front of the other.

"Almost there, Beth, stay with me," said Cole.

"One more jump, you ready?" She squeaked out a strained " Fuck yeah," between coughs and flashed him the horns with her left hand while grabbing onto his battle rattle with her right. No shortage of guts, at least. With less time and space to get a running leap this time, Cole burned two more charges anyway and pushed them as fast as he could. They left the street, wind whistling as they arced over a wide thoroughfare clogged with statues, and then suddenly the street below them was clear.

They landed among detritus and debris, but no statues. What's more, the howling, pervasive mind-fogging shriek of the genie and the dark whispers in his mind went silent. The genie, hot on their heels, reached the perimeter of statues, and splashed against a crackling red barrier, tar flowing out along a solid wall in all directions. It quickly pulled itself back together and began to rake the wall with claws the length of fence posts, slamming itself against the barrier.

Beth sat up, dazed, covered in ashen debris, and coughing. Cole pulled her upright.

"Come on, Black. We're still in Hell, remember?" She nodded, letting herself be pulled. They were out of the frying pan, but still in the fire.