Chapter 197

Plan S

Annie was getting her ass kicked.

Not in the dramatic, everything-is-lost kind of way. More in the deeply frustrating, can’t-land-a-clean-hit, every-advantage-neutralized kind of way. She and Felix had the Brute outnumbered two to one, outweighed him by more than she could guess, and were working together better than they ever had in training. When the fight had started, they were pressuring him easily. But now, none of it mattered.

The man was just that good. He’d adapted fast.

Now he fought like someone who’d been killing things bigger than himself for years. Every time Annie lunged, he wasn’t there. Every time Felix charged, the Brute would sidestep at the last possible instant, catch a tusk or the edge of his trunk, and redirect the momentum into the sand. He borrowed their strength, turned it, and gave it back at angles that left them stumbling over themselves.

Annie swung her tail in a wide arc that should have taken his legs out. He jumped it. Not over it. Onto it. Rode the swing for a stride, then leapt off and drove a fist into the side of Felix’s head hard enough to stagger several tons of elephant sideways. Felix trumpeted in pain and the Brute was already gone, rolling under Annie’s retaliatory bite and coming up behind her on her blind side.

She hated that she had a blind side now. Somehow the conjurer’s sword had penetrated the MetaMetal and reached the real eye, which shouldn’t have been possible. Worse, she couldn’t do anything about it even now that the blade was gone.

Felix recovered and charged again, head low, tusks aimed to pin the Brute against a burning vehicle. The man grabbed one tusk with both hands and pivoted, swinging himself up and over like a gymnast on a pommel horse. He landed on Felix’s back, drove a heel into his spine hard enough to make the elephant buckle, then jumped clear before Annie’s jaws could close on him.

He landed in the sand, rolling his shoulders, watching them both. Breathing only a little hard.

The worst part was that he could have run. He was too fast to chase. The conjurer was long gone, having fled into the darkness the moment the other Tier 2 went down. Nobody was coming to help this man. He was outnumbered, alone, fighting two superhumans who were specifically built for this kind of brawl. Any sane person would have disengaged.

But he looked at them like a man who expected to win.

Annie snarled and charged again, Felix thundering in from the opposite angle. The Brute moved between them like water, catching Annie’s snapping jaws on his forearm, letting the impact slide past him as he twisted and drove a knee into the soft tissue behind her front leg. Pain flared and her leg buckled. She stumbled. He turned, planting his feet to absorb Felix’s charge. Caught the trunk. Redirected it. Felix’s momentum carried him past, gouging a trench in the sand.

Annie’s blood was soaking into the sand beneath her ruined eye. Her leg ached. Felix was shaking his head, dazed from the earlier hit. They were losing. Slowly, methodically, and with humiliating precision.

She opened a private channel to Felix.

“Felix. Plan S.”

A pause. “Are you sure? What if I miss?”

Annie didn’t answer. Instead, she roared and rushed the brute head on. He set his feet, hands coming up to catch her jaws again. The same move. The same angle. He’d beaten it once and he expected it to work twice.

Halfway through the charge, Annie shifted.

Fifteen tons of spinosaurus collapsed inward. Scales compressed, bones shortened, mass contracted in a wrenching instant of transformation that left a human woman sprinting where a dinosaur had been. Fully MetaMetal, one eye socket a ruin of blood and silver, arms reshaping into long, bladed edges that gleamed in the firelight.

The Brute’s hands closed on empty air. His eyes widened.

Annie was already inside his reach. She spun, blade-arm carving a line across his ribs that actually drew blood, the first serious wound anyone had landed on him all night. He recovered fast, impossibly fast, and a kick caught her square in the chest. The impact launched her backward and she hit the sand flat on her back, sliding.

She kipped up. He was closing the distance, moving in for the kill.

“Now, Felix!”

Behind the Brute, several tons of charging elephant suddenly wasn’t there anymore. The thundering footsteps vanished. The ground stopped shaking.

Something small and black and white hit the sand where an elephant had been, already in motion, spinning.

The Brute heard the change. He skidded to a stop, turning, bracing for the attack, fists raised, body coiled to meet whatever new threat was coming.

A skunk sprayed him in the face from four feet away.

The effect was immediate and total. Enhanced, concentrated, delivered by a Tier 2 shapeshifter with superpowered biology producing the most potent chemical deterrent in the animal kingdom, directly into the eyes and nose and open mouth of a man who had been breathing hard from combat.

The Brute’s hands went to his face. He doubled over, retching, eyes streaming, lungs seizing on air that had turned to poison. The sound that came out of him was something Annie had never heard before. It was a strangled, choking, whimpered gurgle that sounded nothing like the composed fighter who had been dismantling them seconds ago.

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Annie was already moving. She held her breath, sprinting in from behind, and leapt onto his back. Her legs locked around his torso. She raised one bladed arm high.

He was fighting through it. Already straightening. His hands were coming down from his face, reaching for her, retaliating through sheer force of Will. His fingers found her leg, gripping, starting to pull.

Too late.

Annie drove the blade down through the back of his neck and out through his throat.

He went still. Then down, folding forward into the sand with Annie still on his back, her arm buried to the elbow in a man who had been winning the fight just seconds ago.

She wiggled the blade to make sure, then pulled it free and rolled off him. Lay in the sand for a moment, gasping, one eye staring up at the night sky, the other seeing nothing at all.

Felix stood nearby, small and black and white and ridiculous, watching her with dark little eyes.

“Good little stink monster,” Annie said. “I am so glad my lungs are metal right now.”

Then the sky turned white.

***

The Sidearm fired. Eighteen barrels cycling across three assemblies, plasma tearing through electromagnetic rails in a sustained roar that built on itself, each shot so fast the gaps between bolts were barely perceptible. The weapon kicked against his arm, recoil shuddering through the gauntlet and up into his shoulder, Metallokinesis fighting to keep his aim steady.

The night turned white.

Plasma tore upward in a spiraling storm of light, punching into the sand controller’s defenses with the force of a continuous detonation. The first heartbeat of the assault shredded the outer layer of his barrier like tissue. The second tore deep. And the third punched through.

The scarred man screamed.

Alexander tracked his descent with intense focus. Sweat beaded across his forehead as the Sidearm drank from his Core, pulling Electrokinesis out of him in a torrent that left his body feeling hollowed. His enhanced senses were gone. His awareness of the biomorph below reduced to a tiny stream of Technopathic consciousness from the drones. The world had narrowed to the weapon in his hand and the man below him who was trying very hard not to die.

Plasma bolts tore through sand and found flesh. Again and again. The controller’s Will flared, bright and desperate, his Constitution fighting to protect his body against burning ionized gas that didn’t care how strong he was. The storm raging around him was gone. Reaching tendrils dissolved into loose cascades of glass and scorched particulates.

The man threw everything he had into defending himself while he raced for the ground. The entire desert beneath him bulged upward. A great mass of sand swelling from the earth like something ancient stirring in its sleep, rising to meet its master, trying to swallow him in a cocoon of protection. Layer after layer after layer, building faster than Alexander could tear it apart. The man vanished completely into the sand.

Alexander released the trigger. The barrels continued spinning, whining down, heat radiating from the weapon in waves that distorted the surrounding air. His arm ached inside the housing. His soul felt scraped thin.

But the sand controller was done. Wounded. Buried. Out of the fight for now. Maybe even forever.

He wrenched the Sidearm around, Metallokinesis rotating the massive weapon toward the biomorph below. The drones Talia controlled swarmed the biomorph, no longer cutting or slashing but crashing bodily into his wings, pinning feathers between paired drones, slamming into his face and torso to keep him off balance. They weren’t trying to wound him. They were trying to slow him down. And it was working. The biomorph thrashed and snapped at drones he couldn’t catch, wings beating unevenly, climbing in stuttering bursts. Talia had stopped giving him things to adapt to and started giving him things to be annoyed by.

Alexander lined up the shot, ready to pour what was left of his Electrokinesis into the weapon and light the biomorph up. His thumb pressed the trigger.

Something punched through the Sidearm from below. A sharp, concussive crack that resonated through the central housing and up through his arm, followed by a shriek of failing metal as something inside the weapon shattered. A fraction of an instant later, the same force exited the top of the housing and drove into his right shoulder.

Pain. It carved through muscle and tissue in a line no wider than a finger, boring into his shoulder until his Constitution caught it at the bone. His vision whited out. His jaw locked.

The Sidearm began to shake. A high, rising whine built inside the housing as damaged systems fed power into broken rails and cracked capacitors discharged into components that could no longer contain them.

Alexander released the trigger. Released the grip. Metallokinesis wrenched the weapon away from his body as he pulled his arm free of the housing, and he shoved it back into the ring with a focused thought before it could tear itself apart. Simultaneously, he threw himself sideways, Metallokinesis hauling him through the air in a sharp lateral burst.

A second shot tore through the space he’d just vacated. He heard it pass. Felt the heat of it on his cheek.

Electrokinesis flooded back into his Core. The world exploded with detail as his senses reignited, both physical and powered. Bioelectric signatures bloomed across his awareness. Heartbeats, nervous systems. The biomorph below, still thrashing. The sand controller’s signature, muffled and faint beneath the desert floor, still alive but definitely fading.

And three new signatures. Each of them bright. Each of them strong. Tier 2.

He spotted them at the same moment his eyes confirmed what his senses were telling him. On the slope east of the camp, where there had been nothing thirty seconds ago.

A woman in a business suit and dark glasses, standing with her arms at her sides and her chin raised, staring at him. Behind and to her left, a man lay prone on the sand, eye pressed to the scope of an oversized rifle. The weapon was bulky around the rear, a thick housing packed with hardware that Alexander’s Technopathy itched to examine, tapering to a long, thin barrel that was pointing in his direction. Behind them both, slightly to the side, a teenager stood with his hands in his pockets, looking half asleep.

Alexander’s blood ran cold in a way that had nothing to do with the hole in his shoulder.

Three Tier 2s who were completely fresh and rested. Abilities unknown. And further evidence that AEGIS not only knew about children gaining powers, but was also clearly willing to exploit them. Because there was no way someone that young was Tier 2 without months of hard training.

The woman raised both hands and clapped them together. Once. Sharp.

The horizon folded. There was no other way to describe it. The line where sand met sky on every side crumpled inward, collapsing like paper being crushed in a fist, the edges of the visible world rushing toward them and sealing shut. Then the sky overhead did the same. The stars disappeared behind a ceiling that wasn’t there, replaced by a flat, featureless boundary that pressed down on his senses like a hand on his chest.

Alexander didn’t understand the mechanics of it. He didn’t need to.

The result was obvious.

They were in a box. And the only conventional way out had just been sealed shut by a woman who looked like she’d walked out of a boardroom.

Alexander raced across the sky, drawing an empowered drone into the line of fire just in time to catch the third energy bolt.

The sacrificial drone exploded. More took its place.

“Talia,” he said, keeping his voice level despite the blood running down his arm and back. “Tell me Augustus can get us out of here.”

The silence on the comms lasted two seconds too long.

“No,” Talia said. “He can’t.”

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