CHAPTER 41: THE CHASE [1]

CRKSH!

The Bastion Shield died with a shiver like glass losing its temper.

It had done its work.

It had bought them half a minute of impossible luck. The moment it winked out, the city remembered it was a throat and they were the bone stuck in it that it wanted to swallow to relieve itself.

Bam... bam... bam...

Rifles thundered from three roofs. Resonance smoke from the bombs crawled low, warping sight-lines into knives even as alley mouths yawned black.

"Move!" Kara snapped, shouldering Reid into a lurching run.

Holt slung Travis’s arm over his neck while Jonas staggered under his own weight, breath rattling but alive, barely, courtesy of the new healer who now looked as hollow as a drained battery.

And for the first time since leaving the forest, Ethan took point.

The Shadowstep hummed in his bones like a coiled spring, a new instinct. He could feel that new, unnervingly natural certainty that he could put his foot where the world hadn’t yet decided for it to exist.

It was an ability that defied nature.

The ability went against everything he knew once as natural, it tore physics out of the window, embracing the supernatural.

"East two blocks, cut north!" Holt called, his eyes skimming grit patterns, shattered glass, and the slant of smoke. "Pike’s shifting left. He’ll box us again if we go straight".

Above, a cold voice could be heard over clattering boots. "Crown one and two, pinch to the gridline, do not lose the runner. Suppress lanes".

Major Harlan Pike hadn’t seen what Ethan was, he didn’t know what his special ability could do but he didn’t need to. Doctrine didn’t care about miracles, doctrine made room to kill them.

They ran; they ran without looking back.

The first alley that they entered had a tripwire at shin height.

Holt’s hand flicked. "Stop!" Ethan stopped just as he was about to hit the wire; he was mere inches from touching it.

The wire sang in the wind that Mira flattened. Anchoring resin cones were connected to the wire that would have exploded when disturbed.

Ethan felt cold sweat gather in his forehead.

Kara didn’t stop. Once she understood why they stopped, she slipped forward and snapped the wire free, tapping the anchoring resin cones with her spear-tip in a way that disabled them as the cones hissed dead.

It was risky, any mistake and they would have exploded but at the moment, they didn’t have the luxury of not taking risks.

As soon as the explosives were disabled, they dashed through as a Rifle cracked brick where their heads had been a second earlier.

They barely left when they met them... Gutter Rats, F Rank.

They burst from a split storm drain with glassy incisors and panting hunger.

Ethan didn’t waste a draw.

"Left!" Kara barked as she swept the Gutter Rats into a wall with the haft of her spear, her bone-dense legs absorbing the rebound.

Jonas swore between teeth and booted a straggler into a puddle so hard it folded. With Travis having done his part, though he was still weakened, his superhuman regeneration was already beginning to do its work.

After that, they hit an open street where the world tried to end them again.

Bam... bam... bam...

Muzzle flashes lit the air from a rooftop rail.

Holt didn’t flinch. He planted his feet, exhaled, and put two rounds into glare instead of flesh just to throw them off their game.

One of Pike’s shooters folded. The second recoiled, ducking as he swore, his discipline wobbling for a fraction.

Scanning the surrounding with his eyes, Ethan did it again.

~----~

[Shadowstep Dash Activated!]

~----~

The city dimmed as all sound softened.

And then, he became a smear of motion, footsteps silent, light bending off his shoulders as he moved with an artist’s grace.

Bullets drew white chalk in the air where he’d been. He cut oblique across the kill lane in one heartbeat of invisibility, reappearing in a doorway that had been a shadow until he asked it not to be.

"Clear!" He called, and they poured after him.

"Keep the pressure!" Pike snarled somewhere above the skyline. "Shields break, miracles end, they always end! C’mon!" He urged his cohort.

As for Ethan’s group, they cut through a ground floor café that was covered in ash. Inside, tables lay on their sides, cups melted into saucers, and on a corner stood a chalkboard menu that still offered sourdough to a dead world.

Jonas clipped a chair and hissed, while Travis tightened his grip around Holt’s neck, lips bloodless. "I’m okay," he lied, voice strained. "I’m okay."

"Save your breath," Holt snapped. "You’ll need it later."

"Here," Ethan led the way forward.

They clattered up a fire escape.

Ethan reached the roof first and froze just long enough to see it. He saw the sky bridge ahead, and he also saw a cracked glass tube spanning the narrow street to the next building.

It provided cover from above if they could reach it.

"Go!" He shouted.

They barely moved when they more monsters.

DING!

~----~

[You have encountered a pack of F Rank Monsters: Perch Murder – Corvid Mutant]

~----~

They rose from the far roof in a greasy flap of wings.

As soon as they moved, Mira’s hands carved the air as her wind stacked against the tube, shoving the birds aside in a tumbling squall.

Kara got Reid into the bridge and spun to cover. Behind them, Holt hustled Travis and Jonas through, then turned to slice a shot across a shadow.

Halfway across, the bridge groaned as spiderweb cracks ran across paneled glass, whining. "Don’t stop!" Ethan quickly said; he could tell that stopping would teach the bridge to break.

They erupted into the opposite building, lungs screaming.

Ethan checked corners, then shouldered a door that resisted until it didn’t. Inside, they thundered down a corridor past walls of peeling motivational posters.

[TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK] They were printed in a font that felt like mockery.

A set of stairs appeared in front of them.

"Stairs or windows?" Kara panted.

"Neither," Holt said, keeping his voice low. He’d stopped at a junction and was kneeling in dust he hadn’t knelt in before. "They’re herding us west-by-south with fire lanes. Pike wants us in the square".

"Why?" Reid rasped.

"Because the square is flat," Holt said, his eyes going colder. "There, we’ll have no cover. Good wind, and they’ll get a clean kill".

"Then we avoid the square," Ethan said. "We go where cover is a crime".

Mira’s eyes flicked up, catching his meaning. "You mean down?"

They didn’t ask more, they cut left.

There, a janitor door proved stubborn for a heartbeat before yielding to Kara’s boot. And then, a concrete stairwell yawned out in front of them, letting out a breath of cool air and damp stone.

The sign on the wall read...

[METRO - SOUTH LINE]

"Wait," Holt whispered, stopping them. He leaned and tasted the air with something more precise than senses. "There’s no tripwire, no resin cones too. Pike hasn’t seeded this place yet..."

But then, the stairwell suddenly exploded in noise.

BZZZT!

A resonance grenade clanged off the landing and popped, warping the sound of their own breath into knives.

Ethan’s vision tilted. Kara grabbed Reid and wrapped him protectively with her body, taking the brunt as Jonas stumbled. Travis would have fallen if Holt’s hand hadn’t found his collar.

"Down!" Ethan coughed, ears ringing. "Go!"

Then, they plunged into the metro.

The station was a cavern of blown tile, the turnstiles twisted into iron reeds. Old posters rippled in the wind, selling holidays that would have never been taken.

Further ahead, the track tunnels yawned black, their edges lipped with glass formations like frost arrested mid-bloom.

And then, the system whispered in Ethan’s periphery.

DING!

~----~

[Zone Shift: Underground Artery]

[Threat Density: Moderate ~ High]

~----~