Chapter 290: Ryan Vs Penny

“Who are you?” I asked the woman.

She didn’t answer.

For a moment I thought she might. I saw it, the slight parting of her lips, the trembling at the corners of her mouth, something that looked like the beginning of language trying to form itself. Like there was a person somewhere in there reaching for words.

Then her eyes went yellow. All the way, all at once, the irises swallowed entirely by that cold luminous colour.

She came at me like something launched.

I’d known she was fast from the way she’d crossed the building gap in near silence but knowing it and experiencing the full commitment of it were different things entirely. The distance between us collapsed in a fraction of a second, and I was already moving, activating the tattoos along my right arm as I pushed off backward to buy myself room to think.

The green light crawled up from wrist to shoulder, the familiar warmth of it threading through the muscle and bone, the wind blade coiling and ready. My eyes locked onto her movement as I put distance between us, tracking the tentacles that were already extending, probing, testing, reading my reactions the way a fighter reads a new opponent in the first exchange.

I touched the gash at my side. Still bleeding, not deep enough to be critical, but a reminder of how close the first one had come while time itself had been frozen around her. If the Symbiote’s extensions could move independently through the Freeze, getting tagged by one at full speed and full force was going to end this conversation very quickly.

So don’t get tagged.

Three tentacles came first, a spread formation, designed to limit my movement options rather than commit to a single angle. I read the movements, pulled my hand axe from my hip with my left hand, and swung hard into the leftmost one at the same moment I drove my right fist into the two coming center. The axe bit through clean. The wind blade detonated against the other two and tore them apart at the root, the shockwave of it echoing off the building faces with a sound like a sudden gust through a narrow canyon.

She came through the debris of her own tentacles without breaking stride.

Her hand was reaching for me.

I didn’t have time to think about it. I released the axe, let it go with a full snap of my wrist, spinning, aimed at center mass, hard enough to matter.

What happened next I hadn’t seen before except in description.

Something erupted from her body, yellowish, dense, expanding outward from her torso like a membrane of living flesh, spreading between us in the half-second before the axe arrived. It hit the barrier and stopped. Not deflected but stopped, absorbed, held in place and then simply expelled to the side with a casual, almost contemptuous force.

I’d heard about this. The others had described watching Gaspar do it to bullets, the entire volley swallowed by that barrier and neutralized before it reached him. Hearing about it was one thing. Watching my axe disappear into it from three feet away was considerably more instructive.

She was still coming.

I didn’t have time to recover my stance. I crossed my arms in front of me and braced.

The impact arrived like a car door closing on my forearms.

The pain struck me like a a deep, structural shock that radiated up both arms and into my shoulders.

I felt myself leave the ground, the momentum of her punch transferring through my crossed guard and sending me skidding backward across the concrete, boots dragging furrows, the friction the only thing keeping me upright.

I stopped myself. Barely. My arms were screaming. I’d stopped her fist from reaching my chest, which was the only reason I was still standing, but the guard had cost me, my forearms felt like they’d been used to stop a vehicle.

She hadn’t stopped moving.

She was already covering the ground between us again, and I made the decision in the half-second available to me: stop retreating.

If I kept giving ground I was going to run out of it, and I was going to do it having absorbed damage without landing any. That wasn’t a strategy. That was a slow loss with extra steps.

I pushed off the ground toward her instead.

The wind blade expanded around my right fist as I closed the distance, the green light spreading further up my arm than usual, the edges of it sharp enough to throw actual lines of cut air ahead of me as I moved. I watched her body, not her eyes, watched the shoulder, the hip, and tracked the tentacles as they reorganized.

They gathered.

That was new. Instead of spreading into the multi-pronged formation from before, they were consolidating, pulling toward each other, braiding, thickening at her wrist until what had been a collection of independent extensions had become a single dense spear of yellowish biological matter, tapered to a point that caught the light like something machined.

My heartbeat was very loud.

If that connected, if it hit anywhere central, this fight was over in a way that I wouldn’t walk away from. The weight and density of it alone, moving at her speed, would punch through anything short of a solid wall.

But I’m not dying here.

Not on this street. N

ot before I get back to them.

We reached each other.

We both swung.

The collision produced a sound that wasn’t quite an explosion and wasn’t quite a thunderclap, something between them, a concussive shockwave of compressed wind that radiated outward from the point of impact and hit the surrounding buildings hard enough to blow glass dust out of the empty window frames above us.

Pain detonated through my right arm.

The spear had fractured on contact with the wind blade, hadn’t held its shape against the cutting force but the fragments hadn’t gone nowhere. They’d dispersed inward, dozens of dense yellowish needles driving into my forearm and hand from every angle, punching through the sleeve, each one a small separate point of bright agony.

I made a sound I hadn’t planned to make.

But at the same moment, the wind blade had done its own work. The membrane along her arm had been torn, not destroyed, nothing with a Symbiote stayed destroyed for long but lacerated, the yellowish material split and her actual arm beneath it bleeding. Her blood was warm across my face and I ignored it the same way I ignored the needles.

She was pushing back. The raw physical strength of a Symbiote Host at full extension, all of it pressing against my guard.

I gritted my teeth hard.

I can’t lose here.

If couldn’t even beat a Symbiote Host, I wouldn’t be able to protect them.

My women, my friends, my family.

I took a step forward.

The wind blade expanded further, I pushed it, forced more into it than felt safe, the green light climbing toward my shoulder, the edge of it spreading outward in a radius that I felt in my teeth. She felt it too. I saw it in the sudden change in her posture, the slight backward shift of weight, something in her that was recalculating.

I kept pushing.

Her arm was bleeding properly now, the lacerated membrane struggling to close fast enough, and I could feel her footing giving ground one centimetre at a time. I pressed every centimetre.

But at that moment, something moved in my peripheral vision.

A shadow at her back, rising, larger than the tentacles had been, a single heavy extension sprouting from her spine like a scorpion’s tail, arcing up and over in the exact profile of a killing blow, aimed for the back of my skull.

I saw it too late to dodge it clean.

I threw my left arm up on pure, unthinking instinct.

I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for it.

Nothing.

I opened my eyes.

Something had caught the tail.

Not my arm. Something that had come from my arm, extending from the inside of my forearm outward, a membrane of dark, ominous green that had spread between us and stopped the impact cold, the tail embedded in its surface and held there, motionless.

I stared at it.

The membrane was still there, holding the tail locked in place, dark green and faintly luminous at the edges, spreading from the inside of my forearm like something that had always been waiting under the surface for a reason to come out. I could feel it, that was the part that was difficult to process in the middle of a fight, the fact that it wasn’t foreign, wasn’t separate. It was mine. Every bit of pressure the tail exerted against it came back to me as direct sensation, like an extension of my own skin.

Dullahan.

It had to be. Not a conscious decision, not something I’d summoned or activated, the Symbiote had moved on its own, the same way a hand moves to catch something falling before the mind has issued any instruction. Pure reactive instinct, except the instinct wasn’t mine. It was older than me and considerably less interested in dying.

I didn’t have time to examine it. I didn’t have time to feel anything about it except the immediate, practical recognition of what I had in my hand.

I closed my left fist.

The membrane tightened around the tail like a vice, the dark green material compressing around it, and I pulled.

The sound she made was nothing like the controlled aggression she’d been operating with for the past two minutes. It was raw and involuntary and completely human, a shriek that tore out of her throat as I wrenched my arm back with everything I had, the tail stretching, resisting, and then separating from her body at the root with a sensation I felt transmitted back through the membrane like a snapping cable.

It came free.

The thing writhed in my grip, independent, still animate, the yellowish mass of it coiling against the green membrane with a frantic, purposeless energy. I gave it exactly one second of my attention, which was one more than it deserved, and hurled it sideways into the gap between the nearest buildings.

She was already staggering. The separation had cost her, I could see it in the sudden asymmetry of her posture, the way she was compensating for an absence her body hadn’t finished processing yet.

I drove my right fist forward before she finished recovering.

The wind blade was still there, still burning through my forearm and hand despite the needles embedded in it, I could feel both things simultaneously, the clean sharp cold of the blade and the deep puncture pain of the fragments, and I chose the blade and hit her center mass with full force.

Her membrane expanded to meet it. It caught the blow, held it for a fraction of a second, the yellowish surface compressing under the impact and then the force came through anyway.

She went back.

Not stumbling, fully off her feet, the momentum carrying her in a long, skidding arc across the concrete, arms thrown wide, until she lost all of it and rolled, the pavement taking her in pieces.

I stood there and breathed.

My right arm hung lower than it should, the sleeve of my red shirt torn and dark, the needles still in the meat of my forearm. I’d deal with that in a moment. My left arm had the membrane receding back into the skin, fading like heat haze, leaving nothing visible behind, just my arm, unmarked, like it had imagined the whole thing.

I looked at her.

She was on the ground, her body doing something wrong, not injured stillness, but movement, the wriggling, reorganizing of a Symbiote Host knitting itself back together, the biological processes underneath working at a pace that had nothing to do with ordinary healing.

Then she stood up.

And ran.

I blinked.

The full commitment she’d been hitting me with thirty seconds ago, all of it had simply switched off, and now she was moving away from me down the street at a speed that ate distance without apparent effort, already half a block gone and pulling further away with every stride.

I fell silent for a moment.

Something was wrong about her.

She’d been about to speak. Before the yellow took over, before the fight started, her lips had been moving. There had been a person in there reaching for words.

I wanted to know what they were.

I wanted to know what was happening.

I took one breath. Felt the needles in my arm remind me of their presence with considerable emphasis. Ignored them.

And ran after her.

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