Chương 19: Chapter 17 - Gorlothok, the Crimson Bane

Red light washed through the barracks, and the siren did not offer a peaceful awakening. I hit the floor before I was fully awake, muscle memory doing the heavy lifting while the rest of me caught up. They really had put the siren and the strobe inside the sleeping quarters. Whoever signed off on that deserved an exemplary punishment. Around me the squad scrambled. Torres already had one boot on, moving with practice of having been through this too many times.

Manuel got tangled in his sheets, went over the edge of his bunk, and cursed in Spanish the entire way down. Francesca dropped from the bunk below mine, half dressed and completely calm. She met my eyes for a second and said nothing at all.

"Gear up!" Liam shouted over the noise.

"This one is real. Move!" Bro, shut up. I just woke up. Not saying that, I got ready, not even considering the glaive cased underneath my bunk. We moved. The armory ran on controlled chaos. Squads streamed in from every corridor, soldiers pulling equipment out of designated lockers, and the Crusader suits hung in their rows like dormant insects. The air tasted of metal and ozone, magitech systems humming with barely contained energy. I pulled on my uniform, and put on my gauntlets.

Around me the squad climbed into their armor. The Crusader suits powered up with a low hum, indicator lights flickering green across the chest plates. Only Francesca and I stayed out of them, though we both had comms sitting in our ears. I counted the room while I worked. Four squads for an entire coastline, and half of them looked like they'd been assembled out of whatever the medical wing had finished gluing back together.

"Everybody ready?" Liam called out, his voice going slightly mechanical through the comms. I adjusted my earpiece to hear clearly. A ragged chorus answered him. Torres tapped something on his wrist display.

"Four squads deploying. Us, Reaper, Ghost, and the Frontman support team."

"Frontman support team?" Nadia asked.

"The angels," Kara said, checking her load for the third time in two minutes.

"Or whoever is in for the heavy hitters." We finished gearing before anyone else, mostly because we were the only squad in the building that had slept through a full night. I took an anti-kaiju assault rifle off the rack and filled my pockets with magazines, which felt roughly as useful as filling them with rosary beads. The rifles synced their targeting to the Crusader HUD. I didn't have a HUD.

During tryouts I had scraped seventy-three percent on the range while everyone else cleared ninety, and Cross had looked at the number for a long moment before deciding not to say anything kind about it. Still, showing up to a firing line without a weapon seemed like the kind of thing that got noticed. We moved out to the landing zone. The pre-dawn air hit my face, cool and clean, carrying pine needles and aviation fuel.

Three transport choppers waited with their rotors already turning, kicking up dust and dead leaves that stung my eyes. We loaded into the second one. The seats were bare metal and cold even through my uniform, built for people wearing armor. I took the spot nearest the door and strapped in as the bird lifted, the rotor wash deafening me until the gunner slid his panel most of the way shut. We climbed hard.

The choppers skimmed the treetops for the first minute, then rose sharply and held altitude for a long stretch before dropping just as sharply toward the coast. Atlantic City spread out beneath us in a patchwork of light and dark. Half the city still worked, casinos glowing, traffic crawling along certain streets, a police cruiser flashing blue and red somewhere near the edge of the boardwalk. Past that line, the map changed.

First came the empty blocks, where the windows were boarded and the streetlights had gone dark and cars sat parked in front of buildings that had been abandoned and re-occupied. People camped in there, inside fortified pockets folded into other structures. Francesca leaned toward the window beside me.

"Kaiju scavengers. The parts carry real value on the black market, so they set up around the front lines and slip in to take whatever the fighting leaves behind."

"I'd have assumed the secret societies had that locked down."

"They try. There are too many fronts and too many scavengers, so it stays a game of cat and mouse, and the mice do very well for themselves." That told me more than she probably intended. The societies were stretched thin enough to lose the argument, or they had decided the argument wasn't worth the manpower. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Then again, if somebody like my former boss, Isabella, had been running the containment, there wouldn't have been a scavenger left breathing within thirty miles of the coast. The new leadership, instead, sent me. Then came the damaged blocks, buildings holed through and repaired badly or not at all. At the end lay the ruins, and the briefing photographs had lied about them by making them look organized. From the air the craters ran into each other.

The claw marks I'd seen in Liam's aerial shots had been clean grooves in asphalt, almost decorative. In person they had edges, and the edges had cars in them. The smell reached us through the cabin, salt and rot layered over something chemical, burning plastic mixed with copper. The ocean, and whatever the ocean had been growing.

"Southern flank, two minutes to drop," the pilot said over the comms. I looked out at the water. The Atlantic stretched black and endless under a sky that hadn't decided on morning yet. Something was standing up out of it. At first, I took it for a capsizing ship, a mass of shadow shouldering through the waves with water pouring off in sheets. Then it kept rising, and it kept rising, and it stopped being a ship in any sense. Gorlothrok, the Crimson Bane.

The internet had voted it in months ago, and everyone with an actual radio called it the Big Red because nobody had the time. Even from the distance, I could see the massive arm with a pincer.

"There it is," Francesca said quietly.

"You've read up."

"I've read everything about it that exists." She kept her eyes on the water.

"It's through that monster that I'll find who I'm looking for." I turned my head.

"How does a kaiju lead you to a mage?"

"Let's talk when we get back." She finally looked at me, and there was nothing friendly in it.

"Just the two of us." Ah, damn it. Manuel wheezed into the comms.

"El Crabo has sure grown up." Half of us snorted into the comms. The Big Red resolved as we descended. Somebody had thrown a gorilla, a crab, and a nightmare into a blender and scaled the result to the height of the Empire State Building. The lower half ran crab-like, six spiked legs walking it toward the coast. The upper body hunched forward and muscular, with chitin plating over its humanoid arms, one ending in a pincer and the other in something close enough to fingers.

The shell covered everything, and the head looked more like a helmet than a skull, the face a mixture of crab and human like, with two large antennae coming out of the eyebrows, and glowing red eyes underneath. It headed toward the city with visible intent. We came down on a cleared square walled in by rubble, and Liam had us formed before the chopper finished lifting.

"Line on me!" he shouted.

"Facing the water. Kara, Nadia, on our flanks. Luca, Manuel, outside them. O'Connor and Amoretti hold the ends." Luca hesitated for half a beat, looking down the line to where Francesca had gone, on the far side of everyone. Then he took his position without saying anything about it. The rubble covered our sides, which was the only good news the terrain offered.

"That's the Big Red," Liam said, and I could hear him working to keep his voice flat.

"It has been hitting this sector since the first week. Intel calls this its hundred and twelfth attack."

"Hundred and twelfth?" Nadia's voice climbed.

"Nobody's killed it in a hundred and eleven tries, and we're supposed to do what, exactly?"

"We clear the small ones so they can't grow up." Liam checked his rifle without looking at it.

"The big one belongs to the angels." Nadia didn't answer. I glanced down the line at her and found her helmet already turned toward the water, both hands locked on her weapon. A streak of fire crossed the sky and punched through one of the Big Red's shoulder plates. Black ichor geysered out and rained across the boardwalk below. The kaiju screamed, and the sound pierced my skull, rattling my teeth. Its body twisted, and fired a barrage of spikes into the air from the crab half of its body.

The angels came down through the barrage. Raphael led them, and he had half his flight with him. At that distance I recognized none of the others, though I probably knew them. Just Raphael was recognizable with the flame around his wings. They wore new armor. It still looked medieval, and now it carried three times the technology and considerably more crosses. The Big Red straightened and threw the pincer up in an uppercut, and the air cracked with a sonic boom as the arm moved. Right.

It was fast enough to fight Raphael, which meant it had to fight at hypersonic speeds. Raphael dodged, and only just. The shockwave came off the swing and rolled across half a mile of ruins to reach us, and it still put Manuel on the ground and dropped a section of wall forty feet to our left.

"Everybody up," Torres said, hauling him back to his feet by the shoulder plate.

"You're fine." I pushed power into my eyes, spending life instead of mana. Void Gaze. The world inverted, colors flipping over, magical energy blooming through everything like paint spilled by an artist with a grudge. Gorlothrok blazed from end to end, its power bleeding out through the shell. Raphael burned like a small sun and the others burned almost as bright. Faint unstable clouds teetered in the air around my own hands. Aura of Instability apparently worked even when standing still.

I could read the angels' plan from the pattern. They needed multiple cores destroyed in the same instant, so they were circling to build the angles. The kaiju spun with them, swinging, and they slipped the swings and answered with lighter work, fire from Raphael, something grey from the second angel, and what looked like lightning from the third. It was taking too long. Flying and casting at that output burned power at a rate nothing could sustain.

They'd been at it for minutes, and most of what they landed only cracked chitin. Only repeated hits on the same plate reached flesh. They weren't killing it. Given the speeds at which top level mages fought, fights usually resolved within seconds. A minute long fight was already in the championship rounds. Two minutes later they converged on its back, and as it turned they released everything into one point in its side. The blast tore a hole through the body and ripped chunks of it into the air.

Then the whole shape shivered. The colors ran out of it, the form came apart, and the Big Red scattered into nothing over the water. Not a kill. One core destroyed, but not all of them, and the rest of it had walked home. In three or four days it would come back adapted, and the angels would fly out for attempt one hundred and thirteen and file the same report. The angels turned inland toward where their support team had set up.

Somewhere above them, a camera drone would already be uploading footage of a heroic victory. While I tracked them, I spotted a wolf. It sat on the collapsed upper floors of a casino, black and easily the size of a car, watching the coast with its front paws set neatly together. Under Void Gaze, everything in the world glowed. The rubble glowed. The corpses glowed. The wolf had no reading. A creature this size should have had a mana signature.

The sea foamed along the entire coastline, and the small kaiju started coming out, which meant the wolf would have to wait.