Chapter 158: Skill

/Nia’s Third Person POV/

Nia had seen three of these in her last life, all three from a long way off through a scope.

Everyone she’d known who had seen one from closer than that had stopped seeing things shortly after.

So she looked at it properly while she walked.

A person should know what’s about to kill them.

Seven feet and change, black from the ground up.

The same stuff every shambler grows under its skin had come through the skin on this one and kept going until there was no skin left, and what is left is armor like that of a knight’s, hard and dark, without a trace of shine on it.

It had the shape of a man stretched a foot and a half past where a man should stop, arms too long, fingers too long, every finger ending in a claw the length of her hand.

The head was a smooth plate with no mouth and no nose, just two eyes set deep into it, purple, and they were on her.

-Klang-!

Its foot came down on the concrete three meters from her boots, iron on stone, a sound she had only ever heard from far away, and this time it went through the loading bay and into her spine.

She knew what it could do by heart, and none of it came from Nikki’s notes.

Half a Tank’s strength in a body a third the size, claws that go through concrete, a ten-meter jump, a climb up any wall it liked, and nothing a person could carry in two hands that made it flinch.

Worse, a mind as smart as a seven-year-old.

It dashed the instant she cleared the door. Three meters in one leap, the concrete bursting under its feet, and she went under the swipe so low her shoulder brushed the ground, the wind of the claws passing over her spine close enough to lift her hair. She came up on its far side with the axe already moving.

-Klang-!

The axe bashed into its head with everything she had. The ring came back up the handle, rippled into her elbows and her teeth, and the edge that would have split a car door did nothing to it at all.

But it staggered, one step sideways, to catch itself. Then it did what she had never seen one do, because nobody she’d known had ever managed to hit one hard enough.

It stopped, put its other hand up to the place she’d hit, and tilted its head at her, slowly, a kid’s tilt, aimed at the first person who had ever slapped it.

Then the front of its head split open.

The plate over its jaw cracked along the seams she had only ever seen open through a scope, and the whole front of its head peeled back from chin to brow.

Inside was a face, sunken and purple and wet, the armor grown into the skin of the jaw and the forehead so that the face lived inside the plate and could never come out of it, and it howled at her.

-HRAAAAAAAAAAH-!!!

The sound bounced off the bank’s and the bay’s walls and went through her chest plate into her heart.

And Nia was scared, properly scared for the first time in a month, but being scared had never once slowed her down. In her own opinion, that was the only useful thing about her.

"Oh, you’re ugly~" she told it, backing off along the wall while it shut its face. "You’re even uglier up close."

Behind her, the tank Nikki had just bought pulled out and headed down the street, just as the bird came over the bank’s roof to put its first canister into the front of the horde on the avenue.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nikki’s shape go out of the side of the bay at a run with the cat in his pocket.

She let all three of them go without turning because the Knight had begun walking toward her. And it was no longer in the mood for playing with its food.

-Klang-! -Klang-!

Don’t try to win, he’d told her, just don’t lose. Easy words, from the man with the magic shop.

"Alright, tall, dark and handsome..." She took the axe in both hands and smiled at it with everything she had. "Let’s dance~"

With that, Nia ran toward the parking lot. Fighting it on open ground was basically suicide, even with the enhancers.

It went through the first car she put between them, one arm going into the engine block to the elbow, with the whole front of the car coming apart around it, and she was already gone from behind the car by then.

That was the only way this worked. It was faster than her by a margin she didn’t want to think about, and stronger by a margin she couldn’t. But it had exactly one thing wrong with it, a thing she’d noticed from four hundred meters away two years ago and never once had the chance to use.

It put its whole body into every lunge, all of it, like a kid running at a thing it wants, and a body in the air can’t turn.

So she never moved until it left the ground, and it landed where she’d been every time, looking for her as its head turned.

Its swings were too fast to dodge if she waited to see them, so she didn’t wait. She watched the shoulder, the hip, the foot that planted before the arm came round, and she moved on the plant instead of the swing, the marksman’s habit of reading a body before it moved.

And she stayed close to it, closer than common sense allowed.

Outside its reach, she was a thing to leap at. Under its arms, they were too long to bring the claws around onto her, so it had to step back to swing, and every time it stepped back, she swung the axe into it and moved.

-Klang-! -Klang-! -Klang-!

The forearm, the side of the skull, the back of the knee, and all three got her nothing but a ring, a stagger, and a second howl with the face opening and shutting.

It climbed once, straight up the bank’s stone front, its claws digging into the stone, twenty feet in a second and a half, and dropped on her from above.

She was gone from under it before it left the wall. A thing that climbs to drop on you has told you exactly where it’s going to land.

The one it nearly got her with was the low one.

A backhand out of a crouch, no shoulder in it to read, and she took it on the plate over her ribs at the very end of the swing.

The glancing hit still threw her four meters into the side of the loading bay and opened her suit from armpit to hip. When she finally got up, her left side was wet, and every single breath caught halfway in.

"Cheating..." She spat, and the spit was red. "That one was fucking cheating."

It came at her again, she went under it again, and the claws that missed her back by the width of a hand took the SR-25 off her shoulders in two pieces, the stock going one way down the concrete and the rest going the other.

Nia stopped, for about half a second, and looked at the halves of her rifle. She was angrier about the rifle than about her side, which she knew was stupid, and which didn’t help.

"Oh, you did not..."

Overhead, the bird was working the avenue with the chin gun now, the napalm gone in along the front of the horde in a line of orange from wall to wall.

At the edge of the fire, the dead piled up against their own burning front rank, thousands of them leaning at the bank with the heat on their faces. The last thing they’d been told still stood, and fire had never once stopped them.

-BOOM-!

Then the fifty cal went off, from somewhere high up and a street over at most, and a fourth-floor window on the block across the road came apart.

The Knight’s head snapped toward that window before she’d finished flinching from the sound.

Its whole body went still with one foot lifted, the purple eyes glaring at the block instead of her for the first time since the doors had opened.

Within seconds, the bird’s chin gun swung off the avenue and onto the block, leaving one long, tearing line down its side.

She could have run right then. There were three full seconds where it wasn’t looking at her at all, and she stood in them with the axe up and her side bleeding and watched it want to go, every line of that body pointed across the road at the thing it belonged to, and held where it stood by whatever the Witch had told it to do.

It had been told to keep her.

So it turned back, and it came at her angry, and angry was faster.

The next minute was the longest of her life, longer than any minute of either deployment, and nothing landed either way for the whole of it.

The axe rang off it nine more times and left nothing. It went past her eleven more times by a hand, by a finger, by the sleeve of the suit.

She was running out of tricks and breath while it was running out of patience, and it had never had much to begin with.

Her side stiffened, and every breath was shorter than the last.

A lamppost stood in the middle of the forecourt, steel, set in concrete, between the bay doors and the fire.

It lunged at her one more time. And this time, she’d been waiting for that lunge, standing still a whole half-second to buy it, and when it left the ground she went sideways round the post with the grapple gun already in her grip.

Putting the muzzle on the block across the road, she fired.

-Thunk-!

And the hook went across its path at chest height and into the wall of the block opposite, the claws biting, the System taking up the tension in the same instant, and the Knight hit the cable at full speed like a dog hitting the end of a lead.

-TWANG-!

The post bent and the line sang. The Knight stopped in the air with the cable across its chest and came down on its feet a meter short of her with its arms still reaching, and for one breath it stood there looking down at the thin steel thing that had told it no.

She used that breath on the post.

She circled the post, launcher in her fist and the line paying out behind her.

Then she got the wire around its arm as it swung at her. Around its legs, while it tore at what it could reach.

The cable cut into the black armor where it wound tight but went no deeper. Twice, three times, the claws passed her face, close enough to take the breath from her lips.

The System held the line at a tension that turned every one of its lunges into another turn round the post.

By the fourth turn it couldn’t lift its arms past its shoulders. By the sixth it went down on one knee, and out on the avenue the whole tide turned its head at once, every one of them, away from the bank and toward the block across the road.

The Witch had just changed its mind about where it needed them.

And it roared at her from a meter away.

-HRAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-!!!

The armor covering its face came open from chin to brow, the purple sunken thing inside it screaming at her with the plate peeled back around it.

And the moment it did, the Glock 20 was already in her hand. She’d been waiting for the face the whole time.

-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!

Five rounds of ten-mil into the open face from a meter: the eye, the mouth, the other eye, and it bled the same color as everyone else.

The Knight went down onto both knees, howling with its mouth full of blood, thrashing with enough strength that the cable groaned around it.

Nothing that went through the armor, not even in her last life, not once.

What killed them was the shock going through the armor into the organs, and the bird had nineteen HE rockets and four Spike ER missiles on its racks.

And that stun meant it wasn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable few seconds.

Those few seconds of that thing standing still were all she needed.

"System." Nia keyed the chest set with her thumb, backing away from it with the pistol still up and her voice shaking with the adrenaline. "... Empty the missiles. All of them. Put every last one on this asshole."

Overhead the bird’s nose came round.

"Cut."

The line parted at the launcher, and she ran.

She ran with her side open and no breath to spare, straight down the forecourt away from the post, counting her steps under her breath as she’d counted rounds her whole life, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, while everything the bird had in its racks above her shot out with a sound that covered the whole street and-

-KRA-BOOOOOM-!!!