Chapter 159: Precious

/Nikki’s First Person POV/

[All of them?! Four Spike ERs at two hundred and seventeen and a half grand a pop, plus nineteen rockets... That’s over nine hundred thousand Credits of missiles... on one Knight...]

Then all that math stopped mattering. Her channel was still static, and Nia doesn’t empty a helicopter’s racks at one target unless she’s out of every other option.

On second thought, she absolutely does.

"System. Get me over the bank. Now," I barked, already hanging half out of the door.

The bird tipped over the road so hard I had to grab the doorframe with one hand and Tikki with the other, and the bank came up under the skid.

There was no forecourt left anymore, just a crater three meters across and deep enough to stand in, with cars from the parking lot lying around it on their sides and burning, and black smoke hanging low over it all.

Across the road, the whole city was jammed into the streets around the block I’d just left. The front of it was pushing at the walls, and the rest was still pouring in down the main road from both ends.

[They’re still doing the last thing the Witch told them, pushing at a building with nobody alive in it... When that runs out, they’ll go for the loudest thing in Marlow, and that’s this bird... Two minutes, maybe. Less if I’m unlucky, and I’m never lucky.]

I couldn’t find her in the smoke, and I was still looking when Tikki found her for me.

He came out of the pocket onto the door sill with his ears forward and his whole body pointed at one spot at the edge of the crater, just as he had on the hotel roof, and I followed his nose down to her.

Nia was on her feet at the edge of the crater, the axe hanging from one hand and the other pressed to her left side, looking down into the hole at a black shape lying at the bottom of it.

She was alive, and I breathed out properly for the first time since the stairwell.

"System, down to two meters and hold it," I ordered, one boot already on the skid, while Tikki went back into the pocket. "Anything that comes near her gets the chin gun."

I dropped the last two meters before the bird had finished settling into its hover and hit the ground at a run. She turned when the downwash hit her and grinned at me with blood on her teeth.

"RADIO’S DEAD..." she yelled, way louder than the rotors needed. "I’M NOT~"

Her chest set hung off the front of her plate in three pieces, the antenna snapped off, with the casing split open from landing face-first on it.

"You’re shouting," I shouted back.

"WHAT?" She tilted her head at me, frowning at my mouth.

[Deaf... The blast cooked her ears... Great. Perfect. At least she can’t hear me panicking.]

"You’re bleeding!" I pointed at her side, where the suit hung open from her armpit to her hip, and her hand was doing a bad job of keeping the red in.

"NOT MINE~" She beamed at me, with her fingers going redder by the second.

"It’s literally coming out of you!" I grabbed her wrist to look, and she let me.

Tikki leaned out of the pocket over my shoulder, took one sniff of her side, and turned his head back to me with his ears flat against his skull.

"Mea."

"I know, booger..." I already had the Shop open. "I’m on it."

-Ding!

{

Accelerated Healing Stim: 100,000 Credits.

Delivered.

}

-Pssht-!

I put it into her thigh through the suit before she could argue, and she yelped at it louder than she had at anything the Knight had done to her.

"OW!" She slapped my hand away, far too late. "YOU COULD’VE WARNED ME!"

"You wouldn’t have heard me." I tapped my ear.

She thought about that for a second, shrugged with one shoulder, then pointed the axe down into the crater. "LOOK AT HIM..."

The Knight lay on its back at the bottom of the hole, arms thrown out.

But its armor still didn’t have a single crack.

Nineteen HE rockets and four Spike ER missiles had come down on it in pretty much the same second, and still every inch of black armor was whole.

But all its limbs were bent at angles limbs absolutely do not go, and blood was seeping from every seam. It ran out of the split along its jaw, out of both eye slits, and out of the joints at its elbows and knees, dark and thick, pooling in the dirt under it.

[She did it... She actually killed a Knight... she did with enough ordnance to level a good chunk of a city... but still, damn...]

Tikki went down into the crater before I could grab him. He walked the whole length of it from its feet to its faceplate and began sniffing the seam over its jaw.

"Dude..." I jabbed a thumb at the road. "We have two minutes-"

He ignored me, sat down on its chest, and gave me the flat "Mea" that meant I was allowed to touch it now.

[Customs inspection... on a Knight... in front of eighty thousand dead... Yep, that’s my cat.]

I slid down into the crater, put my palm flat on its chest next to him, and it went.

-Ding!

{

Item: Variant Infected Carcass (Knight).

Stored.

Inventory: 10/10 slots occupied.

Suggestion: Consider investment in Inventory Slot expansion.

}

[...Nine hundred thousand Credits worth of my missiles... and I didn’t even get a penny... You know what? Fair.]

"I WANT THE FIRST KNIFE!" Nia yelled down at me, bouncing on her heels at the edge of the crater.

"You’ll get the first knife," I promised, and meant it.

"AND A RIFLE!" She jabbed the axe at me for emphasis. "IT CUT MY RIFLE IN HALF, NIKKI!"

"I believe you!" I yelled back up at her. "Grab that rifle... it was a two hundred thousand credit bespoke piece! I’ll repair it!"

She knew exactly what I’d just put in my Inventory.

She’s the only other person here who remembers what a dead Knight was worth.

Last life, you could pry the plates off one and grind them into blades, ugly crude things, but they never broke, and they barely ever dulled.

I once watched a man trade a working truck for one hatchet cut out of a Knight’s forearm, and he walked away thinking he’d gotten the better deal, which he had.

And now I had a whole one, head to toe, in my Inventory, with a System that had a Crafting tab, an imagination polished by years of reading NovelPhoenixs, and capital in the hundreds of millions.

I was going to have a field day with this.

By the time Tikki and I climbed out of the crater, the road had filled from end to end.

The last of them had reached the block, and all of them were pushing at its walls, doing exactly what they’d last been told, with nobody alive anymore to tell them anything else.

Then the ones at the front, the ones that had been there longest, stopped pushing. Their heads came up one after another and turned toward the rotors.

[They’ve finished... The last order’s done, the leash is off... and the only thing left in their heads is noise.]

"In!" I shouted, while the bird dropped its skid to knee height.

Nia went up into the cabin on her own, one-handed, with the axe in the other hand. She would rather bleed out than let anyone lift her into the cabin. I went up right after her with Tikki clamped to my collar.

"System. Low and slow," I told the bird, leaning out of the door to watch the road. "Down the avenue to the river, slow enough that they can keep up."

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: acknowledged.

Altitude: 8 meters. Ground speed: 4 km/h.

}

The bird went down the avenue at the height of a second-floor window, and the city came after it.

I sat in the door and watched eighty-some thousand of them turn away from the block and follow the noise, filling the avenue behind us from wall to wall, and for the first time all day, Marlow did what I told it.

At the river, the bird climbed, turned west, and left them all standing on the bank looking up at an empty sky.

Somewhere over the water, the stim gave Nia most of her hearing back. And she was still shouting everything at everyone.

The tank was on the first rise outside the city, three kilometers west, parked on the crest with its turret pointed back at Marlow and four people sitting on the hull.

The bird put down in the grass beside it, and Mr. Norton was off the hull before the rotors had slowed, gloves already on, bag already open.

He didn’t say a word to her at first. He knelt beside his daughter where she sat in the cabin door, cut the suit away from her side with a pair of shears, and looked at the wound for three long seconds without any expression on his face at all.

"The stim is working..." he announced, and threaded a needle. "Two ribs cracked, and a gash to the bone... You were lucky."

"I WAS GOOD!" Nia protested, far too loud for a patient.

"You were loud," Mr. Norton replied, without looking up from the needle.

Between stitches, his left hand kept going back to her shoulder.

He’d been terrified for an hour in a steel box, and none of it came out of him except that hand.

Kara came down off the hull and looked me over from my boots to my face, checking for holes.

"Are you hurt?" Her arms were folded tight across her chest.

"Not a scratch." I held both arms out to prove it.

"...Good." Only then did she look at Nia’s side and hand Mr. Norton his gauze without looking at me again.

She’d been worried sick about me, and she’d rather have died than say so in front of Nia.

"Big bro..." Leo had his hand on the tank’s hull like it might run off. "What happens to the-"

"It goes in the Inventory." I put my palm on it.

-Ding!

{

Inventory full.

}

[Right... The Knight took the last slot...]

"System..." I sighed at the tank that wasn’t going anywhere. "Five more slots."

-Ding!

{

Inventory Expansion x5

Slot 11: 100,000 Credits

Slot 12: 200,000 Credits

Slot 13: 400,000 Credits

Slot 14: 800,000 Credits

Slot 15: 1,600,000 Credits

TOTAL: 3,100,000 Credits

Confirm?

}

[Three point one million for five boxes in my head... and I’d have paid double.]

"Confirm."

The tank went into slot eleven, and Leo looked at the empty grass where sixty-three tonnes had been, then at me.

"...Right," Leo managed.

[Dude really is turning into a Pokemon...]

"What went in the tenth one?" Nora asked.

"MY DATE~" Nia yelled from the cabin door, while her father sewed her side shut. "TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME!"

Mr. Norton’s needle stopped for exactly one second, then kept going a little faster than before.

We were in the air twenty minutes later, all six of us and a cat, flying west with the sun going down in front of us.

Nia fell asleep in the door with the axe across her lap before we’d cleared the first ridge.

Tikki had the pilot seat, sitting up with his nose to the glass, watching the ground go by.

[Thirty-seven million in the account... six hundred and sixty-eight bars in two trailers... thirty million a day from tomorrow... four months of Nia’s doses... and one whole Knight... in short, lucrative.]

Leo went quiet after the first hour, when the fields under us started turning into ones he knew. Then he moved up behind my seat and stayed there, one hand on the back of it, watching.

Tikki saw it first, as usual. His ears came up, and he put one paw flat on the glass.

Below us were dead fields under the snow, with shapes standing in them.

Past the fields were a steeple and a silo, and past the silo was a farmhouse with smoke coming out of its chimney, and every one of those shapes was facing it.

Leo’s hand came down on my shoulder hard enough to hurt.

"That’s ours..." His voice cracked halfway through. "That’s our chimney."