Act 3, Chapter 122: The disarming attack

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday), past 16:15 p.m.—approximately 6 minutes remain until the record time is lost

Elle Erikson

Dazed by Laurent’s explosion, Kito didn’t manage to attack Milo’s copy proactively. To save himself from the force of the clone’s baseball bat, he lunged forward instead, trying to get inside the reach of its arms and force the fight into close quarters.

Crashing into his opponent, he wrapped both arms around him beneath the chest and drove him hard onto the membrane-covered floor of the chamber, where they rolled over several times.

Meanwhile, Piotr caught the bat thrown toward him and broke into a run toward the center of the chamber, preparing to leap upward and destroy the tongue hanging there.

“We’ll make it!” I shouted, filled with battle frenzy.

I was already heading toward Laurent’s copy, which, abandoned by Liora and still blinded, had begun swinging wildly with the blade extending from beneath the biological copy of the device on its arm.

“I can’t see anything,” Laurent kept saying as Liana forcibly pulled his hands away from his face to check what had happened.

“The clone forced what happened to it onto Laurent,” Patricia said as she examined Bastien’s mangled face. One eye had been torn out by claws, while the other had been bitten away along with part of the bone surrounding the socket. “Let him go,” she told Liana, who had begun to sob.

Pushing her aside, Patricia grabbed some kind of syringe-like pneumatic injector and drove it into the lower part of Bastien’s neck with a quick motion.

“Hey!” the man protested, but his head was clearly already starting to spin, and he began slipping into unconsciousness.

Our combat medic immediately supported him in her arms, bracing him against herself, then grabbed some kind of disinfectant and sprayed Bastien’s face. Afterward, she pulled a compression bandage from her bag and, with several practiced movements, wrapped it around his head, trying to put pressure on the open wounds across his face.

“I’m sorry!” Liora shouted as he flew closer to the two women and Tien. “I didn’t know that would happen, humans.”

“Not your fault,” Patricia replied.

Once she finished bandaging him, she looked around and slowly lowered the man onto the surface, checking his pulse by pressing against the veins at his right wrist. His photography and image-editing device was still attached to his left arm, making it difficult to properly grip the exposed skin there.

I was already beside Laurent’s copy, which was moving toward Kito and Milo’s clone as they grappled in close combat, blindly swinging the blade in front of itself.

Without slowing down, I jumped into the air and kicked it with both feet, sending it crashing to the ground.

At that exact moment, the real Laurent drew in a shallow, drawn-out breath and folded forward at the waist as though he had been the one struck.

“Careful!” Liana shouted.

“I know!” I yelled back, quickly summoning a fresh group of web-slinger minions.

Following the command I had given them along with their Animation ability, they began leaping onto the creature, leaving spiderwebs anchored to the surface behind them. Again and again, surrounding it from every direction, they wrapped it in a cocoon that restricted its movements.

Sliding past its legs while avoiding another swing of its blade, I slapped one hand against its body and left behind a strand of web from the dispenser in my palm. Pivoting into a crouch, I shifted immediately into a lunge that let me circle the increasingly restrained creature at speed.

Running laps around it, I eventually added a web from my other hand as well, and together with my minions, I quickly finished building the immobilizing cocoon around it—while, of course, making sure to leave it enough room to breathe so I wouldn’t kill the real Bastien.

As I finished, thunder cracked overhead.

A moment later, another shockwave tore through the entire chamber, throwing everything to the ground. Then the whole area was showered in a crimson rain of shattered bone, skin, muscle, and blood.

Piotr landed after his strike, panting and clutching his chest—not because of his own exhaustion, but rather because Kito was keeping his clone locked in close combat, holding it in a grip that prevented it from using the hand fused to the bat while repeatedly sending paralyzing electrical shocks through its body.

Only a half-coiled remnant of the enormous tongue now hung from the center of the chamber, exposed by the two attacks of the enraged Pole.

“We’re already out of time,” Piotr muttered under his breath. “Kurwa!”

“Fuck you, Peter!” Patricia suddenly shouted at Milo. “Bastien lost his eyes because these clones copy whatever we do to them onto us. Kito is fighting to restrain yours so he doesn’t hurt you any more than he already has, and all you can still think about is that fucking record! Get a grip, man!”

“What?” Piotr replied, looking at the shouting woman and at Liana crying beside her, her face buried in her hands.

Taking over Piotr’s task, I began throwing fire cards at the tongue hanging above us, hoping it would catch fire. Even though one after another embedded themselves in the fleshy mass without any trouble, the flames refused to take hold.

This chapter is published on the NovelPhoenix site by its author, but the copy shown here was made without consent.

Through one of my eyes, I saw that Kito had lost the close-quarters struggle. Somehow, the fake Piotr managed to strike him in the leg with the bat, instantly crushing it and shattering the bones inside.

To give him credit where it was due, the man didn’t even groan. Instead, he twisted into a sitting position as the monster stood up to strike him again, grabbed it by the legs, and yanked it toward himself, sending it crashing onto its back. A moment later, he climbed on top of it again and locked it down, trapping the arm beneath his own and preventing it from moving.

Exhaustion and panic were both written across Kito’s face, however. His strength was slowly leaving him, while the second Milo didn’t seem to be tiring at all.

It became clear that he was the one we had to deal with first.

Gertrude Monkey

I teleported into Alexandra’s room as soon as Catansi informed me that the phone there was ringing. When I grabbed it, quickly pulling it through space into my hand, Natalie Weber’s name was displayed on the screen.

“What the fuck could she want?” I asked the long-eared cat sitting at the computer. She shrugged in an overly human gesture before beginning to flick her tail in irritation. “Don’t be like that, Ani,” I told her. “You know I restored the connection to your other form as quickly as I could.”

I lied, and she knew it perfectly well. Busy with other matters, I had kept postponing the restoration of the Identity of Anansi to her spider-bunny model, figuring it wasn’t high on my list of priorities since she had access not only to the cat model standing in front of me now, but also to the newly created Ali-Ani. Apparently, however, she took it as a personal slight.

“Do what you have to do,” she replied, then turned away from me and went back to browsing the internet for songs and general information about music as a form of artistic expression.

I swiped the screen and, holding the phone in front of me, put Nat on speaker.

“Jess?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I replied, focusing as best I could on sounding like Jess Hare.

Alexandra was slowly approaching the end of her repair process, and according to our estimates, she should finally be fully healthy in about twenty minutes, though for an undetermined length of time. Further repairs would have to be handled on an ongoing basis until we permanently dealt with the Domains causing the disruptions—Discord in particular.

According to the plan, however, as soon as Alexa was free, she would personally get Jess Hare up and running so she could finally join the roster of Personas.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m calling to give you a head start. If you’re anywhere near Edge of Tomorrow Island, get the hell out of there immediately. Swim if you have to—”

“I’m not on the island,” I replied, surprised. “What’s going on?”

“The Guild sent three archmages to deal with EoT. We’ve learned they’re behind the attack on our Gates. They’re going to turn the island into a fucking war zone and count on Reality to deal with people’s perception of what happened, like with the World Trade Center in 2001. Sorry I’m telling you this so late, but I wasn’t in the loop. I literally just found out from my boss, and they’re already there.”

“What the fuck?”

“Is that a problem for you?”

“Yes,” I replied, wondering whether Zoe was at work today. “Who are the archmages? Quick! What do you know about them?”

“Calm down, Jess. Architecture, Closed Spaces, and Cryptozoology.”

“That doesn’t sound good. Tell me what you know about them, please,” I added, setting the phone down on the desk beside Catansi. In my thoughts, I entrusted her with ending the conversation once Nat had spilled all the details.

At the same time, I summoned the Spellbook and focused on the memory contained within it of the EoT base located in the basement. Unfortunately, my attempt to teleport inside was immediately blocked by Authority opposing my claim—most likely the Closed Spaces Archmage, who had sealed off the entire area against exactly that sort of intrusion.

So I grabbed my second private phone and dialed Zoe’s number. Unfortunately, after several agonizingly long moments, the call failed to connect. I didn’t even hear a single ring.

Instead, I opened the window of my apartment, glanced once at Anansi as she continued listening to Natalia talk, and jumped out, landing on the sidewalk and startling the people who happened to be passing by.

Ignoring them, I ran between the cars onto the nearby street, jumped lightly into the air, and, using the SpellBook I still had with me, summoned the Urban Steed—my motorcycle—under myself. I immediately sped off toward the nearby bridge leading to the island, weaving between cars and pedestrians.

As I raced along, Alex teleported to my location, already standing on his enormous sword, with Maya on his shoulder. Without a word, he rose into the air and both of them headed in the same direction as me.

Elle Erikson

I ran toward the men fighting at close quarters, thinking mainly that I shouldn’t even be here, and that instead of catching fire, the tongue above me was now becoming coated in some kind of strengthening black slime that resisted the cards I threw at it—both the incendiary and explosive ones. It had even survived Milo’s attack, and he landed not far from me, panting heavily.

At the same time, his clone broke free from the grapple and prepared to crush Kito with a single powerful overhead strike, gripping its mutated hand—the one permanently fused with the bat—with its other hand and raising the weapon above its head.

I slammed into it like a cannonball, both legs extended in front of me, knocking it backward and stopping the real Piotr in his tracks at the same time.

“Your clone is too strong!” Liana shouted at Piotr, finally pulling herself together and taking command again after seeing her brother nearly killed by the overwhelming strength of his opponent. “Restrain him if you can, Elle!”

“That’s the plan!” I shouted.

I rushed toward the clone and slid between its spread legs, attaching webs to its limbs. Then I kicked off from the bulge in the membrane created by my movement and vaulted over it as it spun around, trying to hit me.

When I landed, I pulled both lines tight and ran around it, ducking and jumping beneath its bat as I wrapped the webbing around its body. I repeated the maneuver from the other side, slowing it more and more, until it suddenly slammed the bat toward the ground and created a base that tore through my lines and hurled me toward the wall of the chamber.

My attack had given Kito an opening, however. He canceled his previous transformations and changed his arms into mantis blades, using one of them like a crutch as he moved, dragging his crushed leg behind him. With several quick hops, he reached the fake Piotr, who hadn’t noticed his approach, and threw himself onto the creature’s back.

Kito clung there, pressing one blade across the clone’s torso while using the other to seize the arm permanently fused to the bat. He forced it backward and drove the serrated edge of his blade into the clone’s elbow.

“Do it!” Piotr shouted at him, clutching his own bleeding elbow. “Fucking do it! It’s our only chance!” he screamed while Kito looked at him with a sad, apologetic expression. “Do it, for fuck’s sake, or that clone is going to kill all of us!”

Urged on by the real Milo, Kito braced himself harder and, centimeter by centimeter, forced the blade deeper until it cut through skin, severed tendons, and began tearing through muscle and bones.

The arm hung there for a moment, partially severed and suspended by a few stretching strands of tissue, but eventually those gave way as well, and the detached limb hit the membrane beneath them with a wet slap.

At the same time, Patricia was already running toward the real Piotr, who was clutching the stump of his arm and staring down at the severed limb lying beneath him, still gripping his baseball bat.