Chapter 93 – Bring the House Down

  Cole got a clear view of the battlefield as he climbed above it—including the wolf-like knight bounding from fa?ade to fa?ade directly below him like gravity didn’t apply. Each leap carried it closer to the party in the plaza pushing desperately toward the Arena. The top half of the knight’s armor was drenched in multi-colored monster blood and steam billowed from the cracks in his armor. Its claws dug into hard volcanic stone as if it were putty.

  In the square below, the rest of his squad fought their way across, gunning down what few monsters hadn’t swarmed the Beast Cult position. Roxy and Besson cut a path, while Beth swung her bone sword at any monsters coming up from behind. Nona had swapped her carbine for a spear, which she used to pin approaching reptiles for Beth to finish off. Howie and Artian fought from the middle of the pack, spraying slowing ice and firing precise arrows. But the monsters weren’t their biggest problem.

  The Beast Cult mage drifted in the air, working a spell as he looked down at Cole’s team.

  “Howie, three o’clock high!” called Cole. He sighted his rifle on the floating figure, feeding his momentum into his magazine, and fired five quick rounds as he stopped dead in the air. Two of them went wide, skipping off the mage’s shield at shallow angles. But three struck dead-on and the spell flickered. Howie angled his launcher up, firing a shell that left a blue trail of frost. When the mage struck it down with almost contemptuous ease, it burst into a wide cloud of frozen fog that continued to drift, obscuring the squad from the mage’s view. He could sense the Beast Cult mage’s frustration in his body language as he shredded the cloud with giant claws of white energy—only for the fog to fill back in.

  Cole started to fall again, and burned the ability in his Dartwing coils, shunting himself forward into a glide and building up further speed. A sensation enveloped him, letting his already enhanced Acuity feel the air currents like never before. The coils felt like an enormous bird’s wings had erupted from his shoulders and given him total control of his descent. He leaned into it, sweeping out over the wide street and angling back toward the Beast Cult knight on the wall below.

  The lupine knight clinging to the wall tensed for another jump that would bring it only a few pounces away from Nona and Beth. Cole angled himself, imagining those ethereal wings tucking in for a stoop like a falcon. The air around him started to shriek like a Stuka siren.

  I am the projectile. I am the meteor.

  The wraps on his arms burned as he flipped the mental switch that controlled his falling speed and pulled himself toward the ground as hard as he could. He flared off at the last second, turning his falling speed into horizontal airspeed and slammed into the wall just above the wolf knight. Stone rippled out from his point of impact, as though the volcanic building had melted from his strike. The shockwave hit Wolf-head full on, who dug in his claws and tried to weather the impact. But the stone under the hybrid knight’s fingertips broke away, and it was driven down to the streets with incredible force. Cole tumbled down the fa?ade as well, feeling as though every jutting mantle and window hanging managed to find something soft on the way down. He hit the ground on his back, looking up from an odd angle at the side of the ruin. He’d left a crater in the side of the already unstable structure, and cracks were beginning to spread.

  “Oh, fuck!” he shouted.

  The first slabs of stone spilled outward, crumbling and crashing as the entire face of the ruin bulged out and began to slide free in a tide of crushing stone. Cole pushed himself over and up to his feet, desperate to get out of the way as chunks of stone that would crush him to a pulp smashed into the ground around him. A chunk bounced off his helmet, almost dropping him. Without his kevlar, it would have split his skull like a melon, he was sure of it. Cole staggered on as more and more of the structure bombarded the road around him.

  Movement out of the corner of his eye dragged his attention over to where the Beast Cult knight was climbing to its own feet, shaking off the impact of the meteoric shockwave too late as a half-ton block of black stone drove the foul creature to the ground. It howled and thrashed, pinned to the ground by a slab of the ruin. Its helmet had been pulled away, and the snarling creature underneath looked even less human than Ram-head had with its elongated snout bound by thick cables and a single, hate-filled red eye burning in its forehead.

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  On seeing Cole, the thing reached out, snarling through muzzled jaws and scratching against the ground with metal claws. But there was no hope of pulling its way free. Cole lifted his rifle and fired the remainder of his magazine into the wretched beast. But it wasn’t until the building finished collapsing on the creature that it finally died. The cold rush of a level-up washed over him. Cole gasped at the sudden and brief burst of ice flowing through his veins—the only sense of cold he’d felt since coming to the fifth floor of the tower. It forced him to his knees as he grit his teeth. Around him, the rumbling of the collapse finally quieted as the rubble came to rest, with only a few loose stones tumbling down the slope on top of the knight’s obsidian grave.

  No marker for the Beast cult. Cole planted his rifle stock on the ground and levered himself to his feet. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been battered to its limit. Meteoric Leap might negate the kinetic impact of smashing into the front face of the ruin, but not the fall after. He’d be covered in bruises for weeks and probably also dead were it not for his enhanced Resilience. His chest heaved and he spit a mouth full of sticky dust, trying to expel the grit from his mouth.

  “The helmet is down,” he gasped into his radio. “Beast Cult knight is out of play.”

  He stumbled out into the square, where the rest of his squad still dueled with the midair mage, to no apparent effect. Watching the red and white robed mage fend off automatic weapons fire, spells, and even a teleporting sword slash from Beth, he was struck once more by how badly the Beast Cult outclassed his team. Maybe if he had Deadlight or Hard Tone to put the hurt on them, things would look less one sided. But if he hadn’t managed to take out that mage on Curahee, if he hadn’t managed to pierce the first mage’s shield here, and then bury the knight under a building… well, they’d be toast, and that’s all there was to it. They weren’t winning through strength. It was planning, execution, and a double-helping of luck.

  Even defending against everything his team could throw at him, the mage responded with flashes of white ethereal claws that churned deep furrows in the ground and left man-sized claw marks across the faces of the buildings. Roxy caught one on her shield, and it flashed as she took the hit, but the edge of it scored across her arm in a spray of blood. Cole swore, reloaded his rifle, and added his own fire.

  A burning glyph appeared between his fire and the mage, scattering the meteoric rounds. The mage’s mask snapped down in his direction. He dove behind a short wall just as three jagged white slashes tore fissures in the wall above him and the street behind.

  “Bingo charges!” called Howie.

  “Same!” called Roxy.

  Besson’s machine gun had cut off, too. Cole could hear the stunted barks of a service pistol—for all the good that would do against the bastard.

  Cole pushed up from his hiding spot and threw himself to the side just as a hail of ethereal flechettes pulverized the wall behind him. But the mage was forced to guard himself from above as a black mote shot up, and an angry Beth swept her sword down in an overhand swing as she fell. The Beast cult mage manifested a smaller version of its claws, barely deflecting the heavy greatsword enhanced by Beth’s ability. She vanished back into her mote form as the mage grabbed her right out of the air, slipping between his fingers and darting back toward the ground. He sent another sorcerous slash across the ground an instant too late as Beth darted behind Roxy’s shield.

  “Cole, what’s our play?” demanded Roxy. “We’re getting hammered out here!”

  Nothing they had could get through that shield at range. The only thing that could get close at all was Beth. Cole grit his teeth. He hadn’t wanted to put this weight on her. Hadn’t wanted to be forced to rely on the girl they’d come to rescue. Even now, he wanted to tell her to make a break for the stairs, that the Beast Cult was probably after his team, not her. But the truth was, no one knew their true intentions. Even if Cole sacrificed his entire team, there was no guarantee the Beast Cult bastard wouldn’t chase Beth through the entire tower just to get his hands on an attuned Earth hero and take her back to be a soldier slave in whatever land had spawned these animal-human hybrid monsters.

  But there was one play left. Nona gave them access to one trump card even this mage wouldn’t see coming. But she couldn’t do it alone.

  “Roxy,” said Cole. “I need you to pass these instructions to Beth,” he said as he reloaded. “She wanted to see what it was like to fight as a team, have others rely on her. This is her chance.”

  “Send it,” said Roxy.