Chương 8: Frenzied First Night

The shadows blocked his path. They levelled their weapons, and one of them lunged at the boy. The pickaxe flew over his chin by inches. In a single movement, he took two of them by the throat and drove them into the floor hard enough to crack the tile." My body is really starting to move on its own." Two more came from behind, hissing. By the time anyone in the room had tracked the motion, both were headless, and Lance was standing with one leg still completing its arc, bringing it down to rest.

He tested the floor with his foot, adjusting his stance.

"Maica, could you take the girl? I'll handle him." Roman burned his hat in his hand, reducing it to a pinch of ash, and revealed dark hair pulled back from his face. He snapped his fingers. A knot of black threads surged around Lance, dragging him down through a pool of shadow that had opened in the floor. Roman descended into another. He brought one finger to his lips.

"It's rude to overstay." Both of them disappeared.

"LANCE!" Jeanne reached toward the dark mass, but she was too late. It was already gone. Maica pointed at her, smirking.

"You can't force open a gate Roman made." A brief pause.

"Doesn't matter anyway. He won't be long with that one." The young face contracted into something that had no youth in it. The girl Lance had freed had found the shelter of a grey sofa. Jeanne looked at her. Her expression was quiet and neutral. She opened her case. A gold light filled the room. Kroonlijst was already in the air, tracing slow circles before it fell. Jeanne caught it without looking, rolling it once around her forearm, shifting her weight to absorb the new center of gravity.

She took the grip and focused. The frame vibrated at her touch: it opened, rotated on its pivot points, and extended. A long gold blade, silver edge, the curved tip like a thorn. Wings at the crossguard, the colour of old bone. Maica looked at the girl in front of her. Solid stance. A blade almost as long as she was tall, and she wasn't favouring it. She wasn't in guard, either: weight forward, tip resting against the floor. Maica moved her eyes across the frame, looking for an opening. She didn't find one.

"Ufufufu. Fine then. I'll break you." She pulled a wrench from the deep pocket of her overalls. It was crusted with bolts and nails. Lance and Roman fell through the shadow gate and landed in an abandoned station buried under the city, emergency lights yellowed by age, structural iron colonized by moss and root systems, the smell of damp metal and closed air everywhere. The tracks were gone; in their place, torn earth and the carcasses of old locomotives swallowed by vegetation.

Lance hit the dusty floor and rolled upright. Roman surfaced from the ground a few metres away.

"Do you know where we are?" He began unbuttoning his jacket.

"Enlighten me." Lance's eyes didn't leave him.

"The old capital station. Buried in the collapse and forgotten." Roman's smile made his wrinkles converge.

"A reasonable place for a burial, wouldn't you say?" Lance moved. Grass fragments and fine dust were scattered behind his acceleration. He came in low, rotating his hip, the whole weight of his body loaded into the shoulder.

"Mh... This speed and strength?" The Frequency output was low. He condensed a defensive mass of dark threads along the incoming trajectory." Will it break?" Lance's right hand drove through it. The mass fractured but slowed the strike enough that Roman caught it on his forearm, wrapped in the same filament material as his constructs. Still, the force was enough to put him through the room. He cleared several rusted signage poles before stopping." He is strong..."

Lance walked toward him, working the hand, checking the joints. A laugh moved through the dark. The vegetation lost colour, greying from root to tip. Roman stood up from the iron bars he'd hit. His jacket was open; the sleeve had torn to show his right arm. The filament armour had shattered at the elbow, flakes of black still falling. For someone projecting the appearance of age, his muscle definition was remarkable. He touched the elbow, wound threads around the forearm, and smiled.

"I wanted to test, but you have the right kind of potential to be interesting." His voice had a distortion in it that hadn't been there before. Every plant in his immediate radius had turned to powder. He pointed his index finger at him. Threads wrapped around Lance's sides, tightened, and squeezed. The mass compacted into something approximating a limb. The surface felt wet and segmented against his ribs, the texture of something invertebrate.

He felt the force before he could think about it, and then the wall of a carriage arrived against his back. The arm rotated. A lamp post disintegrated. The arc terminated against a locomotive. He was bleeding from the head. His left arm was open from wrist to elbow, brown splinters visible between muscle and tendon. His face registered the pain without amplifying it.

"It hurts..." He could feel his Frequency building: heartbeat faster, blood pressure climbing with it. He grabbed what he could identify as one of the thing's fingers. A pale white light moved into his palm. Roman walked toward the wreck of the carriage with unhurried ease." I should have tried to persuade him," Roman thought, looking at Lance's eyes from across the ruin." But that's not the face of someone you can sway." He stopped.

The white discharge moved through the floor, splitting the dry earth and liquefying every metal surface it reached. The dust took on a static charge, sparking in blue arcs through the stagnant air. The smell of rust and burning iron rose in a column from the crater. At the center of it, a figure was getting up from the molten debris. A sleeve had been destroyed; the blood and wounds beneath it were gone, only a dry stain where the flow had been.

One arm surrounded by white current. Lance reached for a partially intact post. The metal distorted under his grip before he pulled it free from the floor, lifting charred root matter with it. Roman stood still, watching. Lance was in front of him before he'd tracked the movement.

"Round Two..." He didn't have time to read the intent. The iron post hit his side with a force that had no relationship to its weight. Roman felt his ribs process the impact, then he was airborne and passing through rusted signage and the wall. He bounced three times before the railway wall ended his flight. Roman lay in the crater. His face was lacerated. His left arm was compound-fractured at least three points; it no longer had a consistent shape. He pressed a hand to his side.

A granular, shifting sensation moved under the swollen skin. He grabbed a rampant vine that had found its way through a cracked window. He exhaled once, slowly." Dush... Krazha." The vine began to tremble, turning grey. The effect spread. Every plant in the carriage, every green thing clinging to the old seats, every root that had grown through the floor. They lost colour and structure, desiccating in seconds. Roman's side knit back together, and he stood.

Lance was a silhouette in the gap he'd made in the carriage wall, backlit by whatever light remained in the station. A faint gold pulse moved through his irises. The post he'd used was bent at two points and twisted around itself. He dropped it. It rang against the floor. He came down into the carriage. They stood close. Roman's smile was gone. The black threads erupted from the floor and tore through the walls, the wood, the old window frames, and coiled around Lance in a series of spiralling loops.

He closed the distance anyway and walked into the web, the threads cutting as he moved. Roman had already drawn it tight in front of himself. His face showed something that wasn't quite discomfort and wasn't quite satisfaction. He watched as the boy fought forward millimetre by millimetre, the threads finding the spaces between skin and clothing." Was pain always this shallow?" Lance kept advancing, fueled by a drive he couldn't quite grasp. Fear should have overtaken him, but he kept on moving.

"I'll offer this once." He wiped a fleck of blood from his cheek.

"Come with me." Lance looked at him. The expression was legible, and it was not one of approval.

"Should have known better..." Roman sighed. Behind him, threads were aggregating into a humanoid shape: uneven, malformed, one arm tapering to a single heavy point. He turned his back and indicated the construct. Then drew a silver cigarette case from his jacket, extracted a cigarette with deliberate care, and lifted a lighter. As soon as he drew the first puff of smoke, a sharp sound crossed the carriage. A condensed line of threads flew from behind Roman's shoulder.

He turned and registered the grip on his skull before he could complete the turn. Lance was in front of him. Covered in blood. A large hole in his clothing at chest height. He wasn't looking at it. He drove Roman down through the floor, his weight pressing through the arm and into the old wood. The planking gave. He brought him back up and put him into the iron wall of the carriage. The wall dented. He pulled him clear and put him back in, faster and harder.

Roman wrenched free and connected a heel with the boy's face. Lance knew that his bones were crushed, but he simply didn't care. He had no time to shift his weight before Lance's grip closed on his jaw. He went into the wall again, this time Lance ran him along it, keeping contact, opening a long groove in the old iron. He stopped hard, rotated, and sent him down the length of the carriage. Roman hit the end wall. He went through it.

He skipped across the platform three times before the railway boundary wall stopped him. He was in the open station now, broken in ways that would take time to fix. His face was lacerated everywhere. The left arm had resolved itself into something that functioned approximately like an arm. He looked up at the boy in the gap he'd made. The gold in the boy's eyes was brighter than it had been.

"Good." Roman reached for the wall beside the collapsed gallery entrance, looking at a mass of vine and fungus that had grown abnormally along the surface.

"So this is a different Frequency?" He watched as the plants' energy entered Roman's body. As it drained, the colour went with it. The smell of fungus thinned and disappeared. Within seconds, nothing living was left in the station. Only the fumes of melted metal and the iron frames of the abandoned trains.

"I didn't expect you to be such a talent." A genuine compliment, without warmth. The network of black threads behind him began to separate and reform, moving like a school of eels in dark water. They fell. The mass spread across the floor, expanding slowly under Roman's feet, and then it split. Two figures. One large: a knight in a thread-and-sludge plate, one arm ending in a blade rather than a hand, the other in a weighted block of compacted filament serving as a shield.

It walked, and the floor compressed under it. The second figure was smaller, more proportionate, almost human, except for the extremities, which were thick with layered thread and barbs. Both turned toward Lance, who was crouched on the wreckage of the carriage wall." These are way stronger than the ones in the hall..." The smaller shadow's grip closed around his ankles before he'd finished the thought. It crushed. He felt the bone in one ankle register and ignored it. The knight was already moving.

Lance tried to pull free, but he could do nothing. The knight was now in front of him. It compacted the blade arm and drew it back. Every nerve in Lance's body fired at once, pumping Frequency through his skeleton. His body threw itself backward. The ankle held. The blade passed through the space his face had just occupied. Several hairs drifted down through the stirred dust. The knight recentered its weight and swung upward, aiming at the exposed side.

He rotated on his pinned leg, breaking it at the ankle, then again, twisting free. He landed on the flat of the blade and used it as a surface to kick the knight in the throat. The impact produced a brief violet flash. The knight flew into the carriage wall, sibilant and shrieking. His ankle was already mending. The second shadow came out of the floor. Its right hand impacted with his shoulder and shattered his clavicle. He rolled with the fall, spitting blood by the time he stopped, and got to one knee.

His arm was shaking." Another direct assault from either of them would be the end of the available options, and I still don't know what that man is doing." He looked toward the far end of the station: a long, dark tunnel, structurally intact. He gathered what was left in his legs. The Frequency went into the muscle and stayed there, building pressure. The knight cut through the carriage side with its blade, opening a rough rectangle.

Lance moved through the gap the moment it appeared, hitting the knight on the way past. The floor deformed at his departure; the nearby iron softened and ran. He left a track of burned earth and white arcs behind him and didn't look back. Roman surfaced from the ground, arm still wrapped in bruised thread and purple discolouration. The shadows bowed while reassembling what he'd destroyed.

"Find him," Roman said, and dissolved back into the floor. The shadows unmade themselves, flattened to liquid, and poured into the tunnel.

"Let's see how long you last, recruit." He was already gone. Meanwhile, in the auction hall, the sofa arrangement no longer existed. What had been cushioned furniture was now triangular shards of fabric and frame, drifting at various heights. The floor and walls had been deformed by a continuous eruption of sharp geometric protrusions: triangles, cubes, and angular columns emerging from every surface. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Jeanne was breathing hard, one hand blood-streaked where she'd been holding Kroonlijst, still in blade configuration. The girl across from her had been cut many times, but each cut had closed over, the skin reforming under a distorted layer of geometric solids.

"Not bad." Maica adjusted her shredded overalls.

"But you can't kill me that way." Jeanne's body moved sideways before she decided to. A column speared up from the floor behind where she'd been standing, branching into a canopy of cement limbs, dropping. She moved through the structure, sinuous, unhurried-looking, catching each branch in her peripheral vision and using the gaps rather than avoiding the whole. The column in front of her exploded. Her blade and Maica's wrench connected in a shower of sparks. Maica drove her heel into Jeanne's side.

"Why is this bitcth so durable?!" That slight distraction opened up her defenses. The silver edge passed across her throat. She went backward, gushing." How did she..." Maica's brain processed the sequence of movements while the rest of her was occupied with the fall. Jeanne took the impact of the kick and rode it into a pivot, pushing off before she'd landed. Jeanne held her side, breathing through her nose. The uniform had absorbed some of it.

Maica hit the floor, both hands on her throat, the red moving between her knuckles and through her fingers regardless. The blood slowed. Stopped. She raised her face. The fight had been going on since Roman and Lance had vanished, but neither of them had landed anything significant. Jeanne had opened the same cuts many times over; Maica had failed to impale or bury her with Distortion on every attempt. The drain was visible on both of them. Jeanne still hadn't used her ability.

Maica had been trying to understand why for a while now. Her technique didn't match any school Maica could place.

"I killed a dozen units of the Andimican army, and none of them had moved like this. She moves like an animal..."

"I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!" She said it like a child being denied something. A mass of geometric shapes coalesced in her palm as she stood from her own blood. She raised the wrench and brought everything she had behind it, charging straight at Jeanne, whose sword was still down and whose shoulder was dropped. At the last moment, Maica planted her foot and threw the wrench instead. The iron split in midair. Jeanne's ascending cut severed it cleanly.

She didn't get the blade back in position in time for Maica, who was under her guard, to drive the sphere of geometric mass directly into her abdomen. The hand sank in but didn't penetrate. A spreading sensation moved from the contact point: nausea and something else, a giddiness that had no source." What?" Jeanne's vision became a kaleidoscope. The room resolved into simultaneous spheres and triangles. Every surface refracted and reassembled in wrong configurations.

Her own skin appeared as an interlocking grid of small shapes. She heard laughter. Then two impacts, one to the abdomen, one to the side, before she could identify where they came from.

"Do you like what you see?" Her body was on the floor. She wasn't sure when that had happened. Maica stood over her, satisfied, watching her own hand, and noticing with a flicker of unease that her fingers were beginning to look squared off and cracked at the edges." Better finish this quickly," She thought. She crossed to Kroonlijst, which had come loose when the vision hit." I hate using this ability. It always leaves me nauseous." She swallowed against a metallic taste."

Distortion is capable of deforming the Frequency of any physical material it contacts, altering shape and structure. Against a strong person's Frequency, it can't alter the body, only the perception. What a hassle..." Maica wrapped her hand around the hilt. A grey, viscous liquid immediately coated her fingers with the consistency of adhesive, but more fluid. It saturated the entire grip. She pulled her hand back, staring at it. The substance clung to her fingers and dripped in long threads to the floor.

A laugh reached her, not frightened, not pained. Jeanne was rising. The liquid had absorbed the blood from her clothing and was running slowly down her thighs, darkening the fabric." Rood." Whispered. Her voice carried a distortion in it now. Her tone completely different. The liquid between Maica's fingers shifted to a deep red and caught fire. She fell backward, throwing her arm out, the flames already at the wrist. She screamed her way through the decision and cut the arm off with a spike, sealing the stump.

Blood sprayed in a fan across the floor. She was already looking at Jeanne by the time the arm hit the ground. Jeanne's hair had come loose, falling past her shoulders, past her waist, almost to her knees. Her eyes were a deep, flat red. She was touching the laceration at her side without looking at it. She walked to Kroonlijst. She kicked it up into the air. The fire was extinguished as the blade spun. It settled into her grip, running with the grey liquid." I'm glad he's not here."

She began unfastening the lower buttons of her shirt. The wound beneath had already closed.

"I wouldn't want him to see her like this." Another button.

"When fighting..." She freed the third. Her collarbone and upper chest became visible.

"She can be fairly violent. I'm talking about Jeanne." She pressed her tongue between the tips of her index and middle fingers. Slowly, she drew them from her shoulder, across the revealed skin, down to the abdomen. When she raised her hand, both fingers were running with the grey liquid: a gelatinous layer coating the skin. She picked up the canvas and drew her coated hand along the flat of the blade, laying the substance across the edge.

A single gesture cleaned the blood from the iron, scattering the liquid across the walls. She raised the weapon and looked at Maica." Rood." Yellow light filled the blade. The flames returned, denser than before, burning without spreading, staying on the metal. The silver of the edge pulsed between the fire, and the red eyes moved in and out of visibility through the irregular gaps in the wall of heat. Maica knew, from her instincts, not to stay still. She felt the heat at her feet before she saw it." DISTORTION!"

A floor beam warped into a sequence of cubes and triangles beneath her. It bought her a second. The blade went through the structure like paper, and what it left behind was polished and glowing. She registered the loss of her right hand before she registered the cauterization. There wasn't time for a sound. Her body was busy staying alive. She staggered back, putting the wall between herself and that thing.

"Now I understand your style." She said it to the wall, keeping it between them.

"You're not fighting to win." The realization had taken her the entire fight to arrive at. Jeanne's technique had no system, no recognizable school, no strategic layer. It was agile and precise and utterly relentless, and its only purpose was not to be killed. Every movement was built around that single condition. Maica landed on a column she'd raised from the cracked wall, looking for height and distance. Jeanne raised the blade. The flames condensed from their full spread, drawing back toward the point.

All of the substance was rushing to the curved tip, leaving the rest of the blade bare. The red eyes were sharp in the concentrated heat. Maica processed the geometry of what was about to happen. A column of fire crossed the room, piercing the wall. When the luminescence died, Maica was encased in a thin shell of compacted cubic fragments: her right arm was completely burned through the reinforcement. The wounds were healing too slowly. Her overalls were half-gone, exposing her side.

Her bluish hair had escaped its elastic and fallen across her shoulders. Her face was tired and frightened." Lichtblauw." Jeanne held the blade two-handed. The flames went out. The liquid returned to its grey-white state and began running from the walls, accumulating near Maica's column. In seconds, the liquid shifted to blue and detonated into ice. A monolith of cold rock drove itself from the floor and began moving toward her, firing ice lances as it advanced.

Jeanne turned her fingers in the air, a slow, unhurried movement, and the trajectory adjusted each time. Maica's ankle was locked in a frozen tendril. She looked down. A deep gold light shone from beneath her, and a sound like a ceramic vase dropped from a height. Crack. Crack. The flat of the blade entered her side completely. She felt her ribs process it, individually, in sequence, like a row of items being cleared from a shelf. The blade continued through the spleen. Probably the pancreas.

The force broke the ice's hold on her ankle and the skin that had been fused to it. Maica slid to the floor and stopped against one of the few intact sofas. The girl Lance had bought was watching from the far side of the room, which was no longer recognizable as a room. The presenter's body had been absorbed by fallen masonry and dismembered by the geometric spurs that had grown from everything.

Debris moved slowly through the smoke, mixed with the delicate condensation rising from the glacier that dominated the room's center. The girl's eyes were on the tall girl. Jeanne stood over Maica. Clothes in strips from the ankle to the hip on the right side, her shirt was darkened by the liquid and old blood. Long hair, perfect posture. Jeanne's face was composed, with something moving through it that hadn't been there at the beginning of the fight.

She brought her fingers to her lips and collected the drops that had settled there. She pressed the fingertip to her tongue. The flush on her cheeks deepened as the warm fluid reached her throat. Maica watched from the floor. She couldn't stand. The stamina was gone, her body was maintaining basic integrity, and she had nothing left." This woman is the devil!" She thought. Maica followed Jeanne's movements as the girl ran her hand from the crossguard to the curved tip of the blade.

With each pass, white-grey drops fell from the gold iron to the wet, ash-thick floor. Then Jeanne gripped the weapon, and it divided. The wings that had formed the crossguard separated and became two grip surfaces. Two daggers — one long and straight, one carrying the curve from the original tip. She looked at them in her hands with satisfaction. Maica held the wall of debris and tried to make her legs work. The liquid coating the room had begun to evaporate, filling the space with a thin white smoke.

Her vision clouded. The fear arrived before she could name the source; she looked at Jeanne, reversing the blades, pointing both toward her." Grijs." The white smoke thickened instantly, forming a curtain, enclosing Maica in the middle. Inside it: a laugh. The sound of ice fracturing against something." Where will it come from?" She cycled through every angle, holding the last small mass of geometric material in her fist, much smaller than anything she'd produced earlier. A gold shape came through the smoke fast.

A column arose from the ground. The dagger went through the cement and stopped millimetres from her eyelashes. She stepped back. The cold arrived at the base of her neck before she processed it as a sensation: iron on skin, then the heat of blood replacing it. The second dagger had connected, but didn't truly pierce through. The hand holding it was trembling. The blade moved in small spasms against the surface of Maica's skin.

Purple veins were moving from Jeanne's hand up into her neck, spreading like cracks, slow and deliberate, working into the skin. The pain pulled her back entirely. Her eyes cleared. Her hair returned to its natural shade. She took her hand from her mouth, trying to stop the coughing that had started. Blood and the white-grey fluid started to come with it." An Overload?" Maica thought, and she was already moving.

Jeanne lowered herself to the floor, searching through her clothing for the case Lance had given her before they separated. She found it under the torn shirt, pulled the straps, and opened it. Three syringes of violet compound. She removed the cap and pressed the needle against the bare skin of her leg." I need to be useful..." An electrical sensation moved from the injection point to the top of her skull and back. Seconds. The veins receded. The coughing stopped. Maica had made it to the door.

A figure in a white coat with a fur collar was in her way, leaning against the wall beside the frame, applauding slowly. He looked more like a senior student than an adult.

"Good work, recruits." He pushed off the wall and began removing his coat.

"Both of you cost me my usual drinking night, but I have to say that I'm impressed." He held the coat out toward the little girl. She took it in both arms, frightened.

"Mr... Clerc?" Jeanne said from the floor, carrying the overwhelming pain quietly. Maica knew the name. Lautre Clerc, trainer, lieutenant major, one of NOIR's most capable. Under the coat: a black vest, and arms that put most of NOIR's trained fighters to shame. The muscle was finely built, textured with scar tissue, long striated marks across pale skin, dozens of them.

"I'm sorry to impose. But you did cost me my drink, and I can't take that out on a recruit. So..." He indicated Maica, his mechanical device catching the light.

"I'll settle the score with you tonight." He closed his fist. The floor vibrated under his feet.

"I really can't escape them..." Klint pressed his back against the wall just outside the station's gallery. He'd come through, the shadows still somewhere behind him in the dark.

"I am scared, and I don't know where I am or what is happening to Jeanne." His hand was slightly trembling.

"I really am..." He calmed it down with his other fingers. He reached into his jacket's inner pocket and touched the small white metal cube with his fingertips. A faint tone was moving through the dark of the tunnel.

"Only one option left." He turned to face the black.