Chương 20: Chapter 18 – First day at work

"Set to burst," Liam ordered.

"Aim." They surged out of the surf, and I revised my opinion of the classification system. The smallest of them ran about the size of a compact car. All of them were crabs first and something else second, with feline or canine features grafted on top of ninety percent chitin, and a few in the back approached the footprint of a house.

"Fire!" I exhaled and squeezed, and so did everyone else. Rifles roared, chitin shattered, dark blood fountained, and the front rank of the swarm came apart. Roughly one shot in five of that was mine. Everyone else had a targeting solution painted across the inside of their visor. I had iron sights, not-default dexterity, and a burst pattern that walked left no matter how kindly I asked it not to.

"Focus flanks," Liam said.

"Don't let them onto our sides." More kaiju crawled over the dead ones and started up the rubble. Manuel shifted his fire to help me cover the debris, which was generous of him, and would have felt more generous if he hadn't been doing eighty percent of the work. Being crab-shaped made them clumsy climbers, so at least they were slow while I missed them. Every corpse became a step for the next one up. They moved over their own dead with a coordination that had nothing accidental in it.

"Back up, keep firing," Liam ordered, and we walked backwards. We didn't get far. The debris choked the street behind us and there was no room left to hold a line in. Two magazines in, I stopped pretending. The rifle in my hands was converting expensive ammunition into noise, and I was the single hardest object on this beach standing in the back row making noise. Then a kaiju with frog legs launched itself out of the tide, high and angled to come down on top of the formation. My turn came around at last.

I stepped once and jumped, dropped the rifle behind me, and caught the thing by a hind leg in midair. My weight broke its arc and dragged us both down into the front of the swarm. I swung it like a hammer as we landed and flattened a crab kaiju with a thunderous crunch. Two more came at me from either side. Somebody started shouting over the comms and I let them get on with it.

I slipped under the pincer coming in from the left and punched the one on the right, and the gauntlet took its head off and sent a shockwave through the body that finished the rest. I turned into the left one, caught the pincer above my head, pulled it down to me, and kicked its face in. The shell burst, and the pincer came away in my hands at the shoulder. Three more swarmed in. I stabbed the closest through the face with the pincer, hauled up, and used it as a mace on the one behind it.

Oh, I had been missing this. I kept swinging until the pincer shattered on the fourth kill, then grabbed a fresh corpse and started again. Grab a kaiju, ruin two more with it, pick up another. Bullets were still coming past me into the mass, which was as good as an invitation, so I pushed further in. Somewhere in there I punched a crab-wolf hard enough to scatter it across two lanes, and then I had nothing left standing within reach. I rolled my shoulders and glanced back.

The squad had split into two groups of three on either side of the corridor, and Francesca stood on top of a heap of sliced-open corpses between them with spectral blades hanging in the air around her. She also fought for real now. She cut apart everything that came within twenty feet of her and didn't bother making it look difficult. My brain finally decided to process the comms.

"The fuck are you doing, O'Connor?" Killing kaiju. It seemed self-explanatory. I tapped the comm.

"Holding the front line."

"That is not how this formation works. That is not how any formation works!" A screech from the water answered him for me. Blood covered me from the hair down, most of it not mine, though some of it definitely was. My whole body ached, and several points along my ribs burned in the specific way that meant something had gotten through while I wasn't paying attention. I had taken hits. I hadn't noticed a single one.

Two days ago on a bus I had explained to these people that I couldn't lead them because my danger evaluation was broken, and I would walk them into something that wasn't a threat to me and would eviscerate all of them. Turned out I could do that from the front rank without the promotion. The next wave came up the corridor, tiny tier all the way through as far as I could judge. I stepped into them and started crushing. This time they didn't stop at me.

Plenty came, plenty died, and plenty simply went around and up onto the debris, which was now completely paved with corpses. That was a problem. I clubbed a path clear with a crab and bolted back to smash one that had almost reached Torres. After that the fight stopped resembling a battle and became a mess. Stolen novel; please report. Francesca covered both flanks by throwing herself from one side of the corridor to the other, blades flashing. The flanks held.

With the gunners split into two groups of three, nothing held the middle. Torres's group managed better. He called the focus fire and Nadia and Manuel followed him exactly, matching their timing so the rounds went in deep enough to break cores. Liam's half of the team actually gained ground. He didn't miss, and he killed on two bursts every time. Kara fired in a slow controlled rhythm with no panic and no waste, and Luca matched her step for step.

I held the middle by killing fast enough that nothing got past me to the others, which I managed by roughly the width of a hand. Liam helped more than I wanted to admit. Then something hit me in the back hard enough to take me off my feet. I flew between the two halves of the squad and went through a wall, and the wall came down, and the building came down after it. I got a breath, found which direction was up, and started digging. Through a gap in the concrete I saw what had thrown me.

Twenty feet of crab with gorilla arms, chitin threaded through with coarse fur. Small tier that hit like a freight train.

"Cover me!" Liam shouted, and went for it. I put my shoulder into the slab above me. A screen popped in front of my eyes. [LEVEL UP!] [AVAILABLE STAT POINTS: 5] [PLEASE SELECT ALLOCATION] Bright green, floating in the dead center of my vision, painted over a foot of rebar and every scrap of light I had left. Not now, for fuck's sake! Dismiss. Cancel. Escape. Fuck. The screens sat exactly where they were.

Through a gap in the rubble, above the screens, I saw Liam vault over a massive claw stab, flying in the air over the kaiju to lan on its back. Over the comms I heard Liam's rifle open up on full auto. Fine. Endurance. Confirm. [PLEASE CHOOSE YOUR NEXT SKILL] [TIDAL WARD x STATBOOST — 2 stats x STATBOOST — 4 stats] I didn't read the ward, just selected the stat boosts for two stats. [PLEASE SELECT TWO STATS] The list unrolled and hung there. With a sharp breath, I selected endurance and speed.

[CHOSEN BONUSES, +30 POINTS TO ENDURANCE AND +30 POINTS TO SPEED] [PLEASE CONFIRM THE ALLOCATION OR RETURN TO PREVIOUS SELECTION] Confirm. Confirm. Confirm. The screens took their time. Get out of my face, you green piece of shit! The screens finally winked out. I shoved the slab off my chest, came up through the debris, and found the fight over. The gorilla-crab lay collapsed on its side with a neat cluster of holes punched through the plating behind its head.

"Cleanup operation," Liam announced.

"We hunt down the stragglers." I dug my rifle out of the rubble and looked at him for a moment. He had taken a small-tier kaiju alone with an assault rifle, and he'd done it in under thirty seconds. Two weeks ago, he had been a recruit with good drill scores. A week ago, I'd watched him move two and a half times faster than he had the week before that, while everyone else improved at a human rate. Impressive work for a man with no magic in him.

We reformed and started working through the district, which gave me a proper look at the layout. The debris had collapsed into a shape that funneled everything from the sea into a single corridor, the one they had dropped us into. Nadia turned out to have an eye for tracks, and better than that, she could tell at a glance which corpses had died and which had only stopped moving. Luca found hiding places nobody else looked at twice.

On their own the tiny ones were barely a threat, and we cleared them out one at a time. But it was crucial, because any kaiju that got damaged without getting its core destroyed would evolve and return. As far as I knew, non-titanic kaiju all started as tiny. The survivors grew into smalls, and so on. The titans had started at large, if I remembered the initial strikes correctly. It took two hours to sweep our whole district, and nothing in it caught my attention except the wolf. It had moved.

It sat on a different section of the casino now, still watching, and when we passed out of its sight line it relocated again without hurrying. I ran the levelscanner on it. No read, which was typical for not-mages. Once we finished, Liam reported in, and the choppers came back for us. They set down on a cleared intersection and we loaded up, filthy and slow. The squad looked wrecked. Torres had to help Manuel up the ramp. Kara sat down and shut her eyes before the straps were fastened.

Nadia's hands were shaking hard with the adrenaline coming off her. Luca sagged against the bulkhead, and Francesca sat apart from everyone, weapons dismissed, examining her own palms. The command channel came alive as we lifted.

"All units, this is Ashworth." The commander's voice arrived clipped and perfectly level.

"Sector is clear. Ghost Squad is returning three. Reaper is returning six of eight. Wharton Squad, report."

"Wharton Squad returning eight of eight, sir," Liam said.

"No casualties." There was a pause exactly one second long.

"Noted," Ashworth said, and the channel closed. Ghost Squad had gone out with eight people. I sat with that for a while, and it didn't sit anywhere in particular. The truth was that I felt good. Better than I had felt since the last time somebody had let me off the leash, and that had been a much worse night than this one. Which probably said something about me that I had no intention of examining. The evacuation zone fell away below us, raked down to foundations.

Past it the rest of the city was waking up, lights coming on in windows, traffic filling in, people getting on with their lives four miles from where a skyscraper with an eye in it had come out of the ocean. My work phone buzzed against my hip. V:'I am told your squad returned intact, which places you in a minority this morning. I trust you have the installation report you promised me at dinner.'

'Dinner got interrupted by a titanic-tier kaiju.'

'Excuse noted and rejected. You can do better. Was the Big Red destroyed?'

'Of course not. Raphael ain't ever killing this one.' The next message took a few seconds longer to arrive.

'Prepare to do it yourself then. The pack will pick you up tonight, so I hope you got enough sleep last night.' I put the phone away. Liam dropped into the seat beside me and pulled his helmet off. His suit was scorched in three places and cracked in two more, and dried ichor streaked his faceplate in a pattern that looked unpleasantly like war paint.

"You didn't follow orders," he said.

"No, I didn't."

"You took the front without permission, and the squad had to rebuild itself around you in the middle of contact."

"I did notice that happening." He was quiet for a moment while the engines droned. Somebody had already started snoring, which meant Manuel had achieved unconsciousness in record time.

"On the bus, I told you that everyone follows orders. You said we'd see how that went." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm.

"I hate this part, but it worked. We killed more than the projections said this squad should have managed, by a considerable margin, and everybody came home."

"You adapted fast."

"I didn't have a choice." He shook his head slowly.

"You are impossible to command. I want you to understand that I know that now."

"I've been told before."

"By who?"

"Everyone who tried." Though they mostly framed it as me being useless. He let that go, which I appreciated.

"The wolf," he said after a while.

"You saw it."

"On the casino, both times."

"I had eyes on it from the rooftops twice before we started the sweep, and it was always where it could see us." He turned his head toward me.

"Any idea what it is?"

"Nope. It's neither a kaiju, nor a mage, so I've got no idea what it is." Liam took that with a grunt and leaned back, closing his eyes.

"I'll put it in the after-action report. Nothing will come of it." The adrenaline crash caught up with him mid-sentence. His breathing slowed and evened out, and inside two minutes he was gone. I stayed awake and watched the sun come up over the Atlantic. First mission finished. Nobody in our squad had died, we had outperformed the projections, and the Big Red had gone back into the water to work out what to do about angels. Ghost Squad had gone out with eight.

Francesca shifted in her seat across the cabin, still studying her hands, and I remembered we had a conversation scheduled.