CHAPTER 68: THE KILL ROAD [3]

The rush through the Kill Road continued.

And then, the Shieldbearers eventually drew even, now only a car-length off.

Their leader cut a look across the lanes, a measured and acknowledging look, not asking. He lifted his shield an inch as a stray round sizzled past Ethan’s ear.

The pane took the heat; Ethan nodded once in gratitude but the man didn’t nod back. He had two civilians tucked behind him and a world that wanted their blood; he didn’t trust them yet.

Behind both cohorts, the Scavenger Pack ghosted.

When beasts lunged for Ethan’s group, the scavengers slipped past. When holes opened in the Shieldbearers’ wake, the scavengers darted through with the timing of rats who had learned a city’s shutters.

One, a narrow-shouldered man with eyes like bottle glass, glanced at Ethan and smiled without humor. Then he vanished behind a wreck.

Ethan clenched his jaw and pushed pace. If they fell, they’d be crushed, not by monsters, but by fellow survivors with nowhere else to put fear.

The hum underfoot got louder.

The floodlights swung, correcting to hold the new arcs. The wall’s guns adjusted, a machine learning itself.

Then the road vibrated in a different key, deeper and hungrier.

"Hold together!" Reid warned. "Something big is coming out!"

The sound came from their right, from the ruins at the edge of the Kill Road where a concrete wall had blown inward and left a mouth into darkness.

The mouth burped dust and pulled out metal. Loose scrap shivered toward it, screws skittering like water insects, bolts marching in a quiet, creepy tide.

DING!

~----~

[You have encountered an E Rank Rift Monster: Ironjaw Ravager!]

~----~

It stepped through.

BZZZ!

The world shuddered.

The Ironjaw Ravager hit the light like a freight train shouldering a spotlight.

It was cat-slow and bull-heavy all at once, shoulders high enough to kiss a car roof, hide layered in overlapping plates of metal-gray keratin that looked grown from scrapyard steel.

Its head was a wedge with quadruple-hinged jaws that opened and showed three concentric fans of teeth like rebar cut to points.

Between the plates, its flesh glowed a dull, angry orange, as if heat lived where blood should.

BA-DUMP!

Ethan’s heart hit once, hard.

The wall’s guns tried to pivot, but the Ravager was inside the line, too low and too fast for the angles that mattered.

Floodlights blasted it white, but it didn’t even blink. It didn’t need eyes the way they did. It had a sense for metal and for the pull it knew it could own.

"Stay in lane!" Reid barked, but his voice had grit thrown in it now. "Nine minutes!"

The Shieldbearers stamped to a stop in unison, shields slamming into the ground. Their leader’s manifest pane flared, going from oval to square like a wall.

The two civilians pressed close, faces pale.

Behind, the Scavenger Pack stalled like a flock seeing a hawk. They didn’t freeze, rather, they were calculating who would be slower than them.

The Ravager exhaled, and the air rippled as it set a magnetic field.

BZZZ!

Metal around them answered, wrenches, bolts, rebar, and a busted metal door all lifting in a shimmer and floating toward those jaws.

A rusted hood wobbled, then skated across the asphalt like a leaf on a pond. An entire axle yelped free from under a collapsed sedan and skated toward the beast.

"Down!" Kara snapped, and they hit a crouch as shrapnel ravaged.

The wall’s guns stitched the far lanes and left this one to mortal hands. Somewhere a siren yelped a high, confused note; the system that ran the turrets didn’t like firing into its own survivors.

It had to trust them to solve this lane or die in it.

"Clock’s running!" Reid’s voice cut like a whip. "We kill it or we don’t make the gate!"

Jonas bared his teeth. "Then we kill it."

Travis hissed, "This is a terrible time for honesty."

The Ravager walked forward, not hurried. It didn’t need to be. It had the rhythm of a butcher on a day without inspectors. Its jaws opened wider as the magnetic pulse deepened from tug to yank.

Ethan’s grapple launcher twitched and tugged hard enough at his belt to bruise; Holt’s spare mags clattered out of his pouch and skittered along the asphalt like silver fish.

The Shieldbearer’s manifest pane warped, drawn toward open teeth. The bearer roared through clenched jaw, holding it by sheer will.

"Ethan," Reid said in a calm voice that was not loud, and not yet panicked. "What do you have?"

The Wheel spun.

~----~

[Improvisation Draw Activated!]

...

It wasn’t the lazy turn it gave him when it wanted to play; it whirled hard, symbols smearing, gold bright enough to make his vision thin to threads.

Improvisation demanded choice.

The world slowed just enough for him to see the parts... the Ravager’s gait, the pull pattern, the lane’s debris, the sight as the Shieldbearers braced, the Scavengers ready to bolt the second someone else bled a path.

Options flooded him like he’d ripped open a drawer he hadn’t labeled.

The Ravager pulled again and the burned-out car to Ethan’s left shuddered, creaked, and lifted.

It had been compact once. Now it was a coffin with windows, and it rose as light as a feather, turning in the air as the beast dragged it.

Mira reacted immediately, her wind shoving at it as the car tilted. She couldn’t stop it, but she delayed it.

Holt grabbed for a handful of magnet-snatched mags. Jonas planted his feet like a man who had decided to be a wall, and seeing this, Travis reached for him because there was no universe where Jonas didn’t break himself on that choice.

The Shieldbearers’ leader shouted a word that meant now in a language Ethan didn’t know, and their lattice flared.

The Scavenger Pack took one collective half-step backward.

The car came at them.

And Ethan slammed his palm down.

DING!

The Wheel locked on a glyph like a spear tip shoved into the circle itself as light burst behind his eyes.

At that moment, the Ravager roared and hurled.

The sky blotted out as the car spun through the air.

WHOOSH!

Ethan didn’t know what it was yet, only that the Wheel had given him something that matched the situation again...

He trusted his special ability.

He took a deep breath and extended his hand, his newest Improvisation materializing to life in his grasp.