Chương 42: 37. The Pin

"ACU 25. I felt it before I saw the number. Something in my hands changed. Ready without being stronger or faster. Like a circuit that had been waiting for enough current to finally close. Donna asked me if it was worth it. I showed her my palms. The burns were already healing. The fire wasn't." - The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr, Marseille The Pin The first pull worked exactly as planned. Steve's flame drew the eastern patrol group like moths to a flame, except these ones weighed over a hundred kilos.

Three armoured boar broke from the circuit and charged the blue-white light. Steve held it for two seconds, long enough for the lead creature to commit, then killed the flame and sprinted for the corridor. As planned, the three followed him in. Arthur caught the first on the Bullguard three metres inside. Structural Reinforcement engaged and blue Ether light traced his frame while the floor cracked under his feet. The impact rang through the shield but couldn't move him.

The boar rebounded from its own momentum and went down at his feet, tusks scraping stone, stunned. The corridor was four metres wide. Enough for two abreast, not three. The second shoved in beside the first and the third scrambled behind, climbing over haunches and working itself into a frenzy. Donna came from the right. The Conduit-Edge Axe hit the second creature's shoulder seam and bit through. The chitin was thicker than the harbour boar, so she ripped it free and struck again at the same seam.

As the boar turned its head to gouge the attacker a third strike went low under the jaw, where the plating thinned. The creature folded. Arthur released Structural Reinforcement and brought the hammer down on the first creature, still stunned at his feet. An almighty slam at the base of the skull, where the chitin was thinner. The creature spasmed once and stopped. The third came tumbling in as the boar in front of it dropped. Arthur bashed it with the shield and Steve's Reacher found its eye from six feet.

The boar thrashed sideways, blinded. Donna drove the axe up through the exposed palate and it went limp. ETHER ABSORBED: 130 ETHER ABSORBED: 140 ETHER ABSORBED: 125 INTEGRATION PROGRESS: 688/778 Three dead in ninety seconds. The corridor stank of blood and the hot-metal smell of broken chitin. They were becoming frighteningly good at this.

"Window's open," Steve said.

"Southern group in ninety seconds." Archie was terse.

"Anterior chitin density exceeds your previous engagement by fourteen percent. Adjust strike targeting to lateral seams."

"Already did," Donna said. The second pull was messier. The southern patrol group was closer than expected by about forty metres. They came fast and they came alert. These three didn't charge blind. They came shoulder to shoulder, tusks lowered, a wall of armoured flesh filling the corridor. The chokepoint proved its worth, turning a line formation into a wedge by allowing access to only two. Arthur braced and the two creatures hit the Bullguard simultaneously, the combined force driving him back a full step.

His forearm guard cracked where a tusk hooked under the shield's edge and levered sideways. Pain shot from his wrist to elbow. Donna went right again with her Reflex Acceleration firing. She found a gap where two creatures pressed together and drove the axe into the seam. The creature she hit spun towards her. Its tusk caught her across the ribs, a glancing blow delivered by a hundred kilos of Ether-enhanced muscle at combat speed. The impact lifted her off her feet.

She hit the corridor wall, bounced, and was back up before Arthur could shout her name. But the strike had taken a toll. Her left hand went to her side and stayed there. Her shoulder hitched on the recovery, the old injury compounding the new. She grimaced and dove right back. She killed the creature with the next strike. One-handed. The axe finding the neck seam. Steve's Reacher took the second in the flank from Arthur's left and got stuck. The creature spun sideways, dragging the polearm and Steve forward.

Arthur's hammer came down on the skull twice before the chitin gave and Donna's axe found the neck while the creature was still bucking and ended the noise it was making. The third came through the gap between the bodies. Arthur met it with a low shield strike against the snout and pinned it against the corridor wall. It thrashed there, with Arthur pushing it against the wall and it trying to gouge him from the sides. Donna stepped in from the side and drove the axe in its belly, tearing it open.

Steve pushed the Reacher in through the hole and the creature screamed and flopped down. ETHER ABSORBED: 145 ETHER ABSORBED: 135 ETHER ABSORBED: 150 INTEGRATION: 1, 118/778 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 8 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 INTEGRATION: 340/950 They had barely taken a breath when Steve's panicked voice came from the corridor mouth.

"Two more. Forty metres. Coming fast." Arthur saw the movement. This was not in the script. He could understand their calculation being off and the third patrol moving in quicker, but two from a three boar patrol seemed off. Either the patrol pattern had changed or there was something else going on and he did not like it. Arthur's hand moved toward the release line. Time for the insurance. Donna shook her head at him, white-faced with pain.

"No! Not now. They are too close to turn our backs to them. We can't outrun them. Kill these two. Then we pull and go." Arthur ran the numbers. Fifteen metres to the rear stairwell. The boars would cover half that before he could drag Donna clear. He let the line go and the shield came up. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Arthur met the first with a shield charge, driving the Bullguard into its chest with everything his Level 7 frame could produce. Opening some space between him and the rest of the party. The creature took the impact and stumbled back, tusks raking the stone walls. He repositioned to block the second one while hooking his hammer over the tusk of the first one and dragging it towards him. For a moment he was Samson, chained between two boars.

Donna came from behind him - one-handed, her ribs screaming - and put the axe through the neck of the boar Arthur had hooked his hammer to. She had to strike three times, her injuries sapping her strength. The seam under the foreleg opened on the third. Arthur jerked his hammer away and the creature went down. Steve was helping to keep the other one contained by stabbing around Arthur's shield. Arthur had swung his hammer to meet the second boar when Steve heard it. Chitin on concrete. Behind them.

The alpha had circled through the construction site's upper level. Arthur's brain registered it in the half-second between Steve's warning and the sound resolving into movement. The alpha had gone around the chokepoint. Up from the street, across the second floor and down behind them. A chokepoint has two ends, and the party had only covered one. They had never considered that these boars were capable of critical thinking. This also explained only two creatures coming from the front.

The main force was sneaking up behind them. What was in front was a distraction. The alpha came through the rear stairwell with three creatures behind it. The multi-eyed cluster fixed on Arthur. The gaze seemed to say, I remember you and I have you exactly where I want you. One in front and four behind. Donna one-handed and white-faced. Steve between them with a polearm and empty eyes. They were trapped inside their own trap. And then Steve screamed and threw fire.

Both hands thrust toward the alpha, Ether pouring through pathways that weren't ready for it. The flame erupted in a ragged cone of blue-white heat that filled the rear corridor. The alpha flinched, the first time Arthur had seen it flinch, and the three creatures behind it scrambled backward as the smell of burnt hair filled the corridor. It lasted maybe five seconds and the flame guttered and died. Steve's hands were trembling, the skin across his palms red and blistering. He moaned and went down.

Arthur didn't think. The part of him that held things up had moved before his brain had fully formulated a plan. He hit the remaining front creature with a shield bash that came from his hips, his legs, every kilogram of his body. As it staggered, Arthur's hammer moved in an upward swing, catching it on the side of its head. The impact driving the creature sideways into the corridor wall.

"Donna! Finish it!" He turned his back on the creature. Turned his back in a four-metre corridor with an injured boar behind him and trusted Donna to do what Donna always did. She would find a way and Steve needed him. He grabbed Steve by the collar of his stab vest and hauled him bodily toward the corridor's front entrance, dragging him across concrete, away from the rear stairwell, away from the alpha that was already recovering from the flame. Behind him he heard Donna's axe. The creature stopped thrashing.

The alpha came through the fading heat. It moved cautiously, the fear of fire still present. One of the three flanking creatures was faster and more reckless than the rest. It charged past the alpha and closed the distance to Arthur. He couldn't turn properly with Steve's weight in his left hand and the shield in his right. There was no room and no time. Arthur did the only thing he could think of. He hurled Steve behind him towards the corridor entrance. As Steve flew backward, Arthur took one step forward.

He would hold. He screamed, a sound from before language, the noise a human body makes when the brain has abandoned everything except the intention to survive, and swung the Bullguard into the creature's skull with his full arm. His forearm cracked. He felt the bone shift, the pain arriving like a white flash that erased everything behind his eyes for a full second.

The creature staggered and Arthur kicked it, a desperate, graceless, boot-to-skull kick with every remaining newton his body could produce, and it stumbled back two steps. Two seconds. It would have to do. He grabbed the release line with both hands, his left screaming, his right pulling. The bolt stripped and the coupling released. Arthur threw himself forward as three tonnes of steel began to fall behind him. The sound was the loudest thing he had ever heard. It was a cascade and then an avalanche.

Each section hitting the next, filling the corridor from floor to ceiling. Steel and concrete and dust and the screaming of creatures caught beneath a weight they could not have evolved to endure. Donna had dragged Steve out and together they stumbled into open air as the scaffolding settled behind them with diminishing clangs and groans. It took Arthur a minute to catch his breath and then he set his jaw and went back in. This was not over yet. The two with the alpha were dead, caught in the avalanche.

The alpha however was not. Donna shouted his name but he didn't stop. You do not leave an enemy half alive to come back and haunt you later. The alpha was pinned under two levels of collapsed scaffolding, alive, the multi-eyed cluster swivelling and one tusk broken. It saw Arthur coming and made a grunt, trying to free itself. He raised the hammer. The alpha's eyes found his. He brought it down.

THREAT NEUTRALIZED ETHER ABSORBED: 124 ETHER ABSORBED: 95 ETHER ABSORBED: 96 ETHER ABSORBED: 326 INTEGRATION: 981/950 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 9 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 6 (3+3) INTEGRATION: 31 / 1, 134 Arthur could feel the level up physically, heat spreading through his chest, his limbs, the Nadi Matrix rewriting his biology in real time. He moaned in relief and dropped to his knees. Arthur stood in the wreckage of his own trap with a dead alpha at his feet and felt his body rebuild itself.

The broken forearm knitting with a heat that was painful and unmistakable. The Constitution wasn't healing the break completely but the bone was stabilising, the swelling receding and the white-hot pain cooling to a deep ache that he could carry. Archie's geometry brightened.

"Dual developmental threshold. Recorded." A pause.

"The alpha demonstrated environmental exploitation consistent with third-tier cognitive adaptation. Your counter-strategy was adequate."

"Adequate," Steve said from the ground. His voice was raw.

"He dropped a building on it."

"The structure was scaffolding, not a building. The result was the same." Steve managed a laugh that was mostly cough.

"Archie. Was that a compliment?"

"It was a tactical assessment. Compliments are outside operational scope." They found three cores in the wreckage. Two from the pack creatures, standard boar cores, mid-grade, the dull crystal Arthur had learned to recognise. The third was from the alpha. Larger, egg-sized, dark and dense with Ether. Its surface showed a depth that the smaller cores lacked. This was the core that would upgrade a weapon. Donna sat against the wall across the street. She hadn't spoken since they'd cleared the corridor.

Her left arm was pressed against her side and her breathing was careful, the shallow, controlled rhythm of someone managing pain.

"How bad?" Arthur asked.

"Ribs. Probably cracked. Possibly just bruised. The level helped." She looked at him.

"Being too clever nearly got us killed."

"The trap still worked."

"The trap worked because Steve set himself on fire and you pulled the pin with a broken arm. That's not 'worked.' That's 'survived.'" Arthur didn't argue. He knew she was right. The plan had worked the way a building survives an earthquake. Still standing, but with cracks in every wall and the certain knowledge that the next one would finish the job. Steve was barely on his feet. His hands were curled protectively against his chest, the burned palms facing upward. His face was grey with Reserve exhaustion.

"There's a doctor at the docks," Donna said. She stood, slowly, using the wall.

"She patched up the dockworker after the harbour fight. She can patch us up." Arthur looked at the corridor. The scaffolding filling it like a steel avalanche. The route to Notre-Dame was finally clear. The hill could wait. Right now, they needed a doctor and a few hours of not moving. They walked north toward the harbour. Three people now Level 9, carrying three cores and a collection of injuries that would have killed them a week ago. Donna walked without leaning on anything.

Arthur noted this and said nothing, because that was the arrangement.