Chapter 75 - Wings in the Gorge

Permit one-twenty was claimed at wicket two of the military quartermaster before eight in the morning, immediately following the payment of the fifty-scrip issuance fee.

The contract carried a bounty of forty-eight hundred clean Central Bank scrip, targeting a nest of three Ferrite Gargoyles that had entrenched themselves within the aerial cable works of Cable Gorge, a deep basalt canyon six miles south of the Capital's sixty-foot wall.

The terrain of the gorge dropped into an abyss one hundred and sixty feet deep and a hundred feet wide, crisscrossed by dozens of oxidized two-inch steel cables that had once ferried ore skips between the mountain rims.

The floor of the fissure was dry, blanketed in loose slag gravel and collapsed iron girders that formed a maze of natural barricades.

Maria descended along the stone slope with her forty-eight-pound black boiler steel greatsword strapped across her back, her iron boots striking the gravel in heavy, measured thuds.

Nicole took point, her black-scaled coat cinched tight, her twin long daggers cleared in their belt sheaths.

The newly specialized huntress was already moving under the direct influence of her class: the air around her boots seemed to generate zero friction against the gravel, and she crossed the broken ground in silent, fluid strides that failed to kick up a single grain of dust.

Dante brought up the rear, his brass focus ring on his right middle finger and the straps of his heat-resistant leather vest loosened across his back.

His mental interface logged proximity telemetry across his retina.

[Region: Cable Gorge.]

[Depth: -50 meters relative to ridge line.]

[Detected Entities: 3x Ferrite Gargoyle (Greater Tier 2).]

[Level: 28.]

[Health Points: 460/460 each.]

[Tactical Notice: Superior Aerial Mobility and High-Velocity Diving Assault.]

"They're perched on cable three," Nicole warned, pausing behind an overturned support girder.

She pointed an index finger toward the upper reaches of the chasm.

Eighty feet up, roosting atop an iron truss suspended by three heavy cables, sat the three gargoyles.

The beasts were winged quadrupeds ten feet long, their torsos plated in overlapping scales of black ferrite fused with oxidized lead. Their wings spanned thirteen feet, crafted from basilisk-leather membranes stretched over articulated iron ribs, their hind legs terminating in curved twelve-inch steel talons designed to impale prey on impact.

The tactical dilemma was plain.

Maria's greatsword reach from the floor was six and a half feet. Nicole carried her mechanical crossbow, but shooting upward against ferrite plates at an oblique angle degraded bolt penetration by nearly half.

A piercing shriek echoed down the gorge.

The lead gargoyle spread its iron wings with a sharp clatter of release latches, dropping into the void of the canyon.

The monster plunged in a vertical dive exceeding fifty miles per hour, its forward talons spread wide to pin Maria to the gravel.

Maria held her ground.

[Skill Activated: [Liquid Lead Stance].]

[Skill Activated: [Reactive Impact Carapace].]

The gargoyle slammed directly into the broad flat of the black boiler steel blade Maria hoisted along a rising diagonal.

CLANG-BOOM.

The impact released a concussive shockwave that blasted the surrounding gravel into a storm of black grit.

Maria drove her boots into the deck like an iron anchor, absorbing twenty percent of the kinetic load straight into the dense muscle of her thirty-two Constitution.

The gargoyle did not linger for a brawl.

With a frantic beat of its leather-and-iron wings, the beast rode the kinetic recoil to vault back into a climbing spiral, reclaiming fifty feet of altitude before Maria could bring the greatsword around for a counter-stroke.

The second gargoyle was already committing to a dive from the left, while the third vented a pressurized steam plume from the upper truss.

"They won't trade blows on the ground, Dante!" Maria roared, adjusting her two-handed grip with cracking knuckles. "They dive, strike, and bounce back to the cables!"

Nicole had already triggered her class skill.

[Skill Activated: [Ether Dissipation Cloak - Tier 1].]

[Mana Cost: 15 MP.]

[Nicole's Current Reserve: 60/75.]

The light wrapping Nicole's silhouette faded into matte shadow.

She vanished from the gargoyles' thermal vision in less than half a second, gliding through the shadow of the basalt wall without a sound, scaling a rusted angle-iron to seek a lateral firing line.

Yet the vertical distance was still far too great.

Dante took two strides into the center of the gravel clearing, looking up at the first gargoyle circling fifty feet overhead for its next run.

He evaluated the sheer hundred-and-sixty-foot walls of the chasm.

Line of sight to the Capital's observation towers was entirely severed by the canyon rims. No military radar scanned this dry rift.

Dante unbuckled the side straps of his leather vest with his left hand.

The official publication page is where the author publishes this chapter; this copy was taken without consent.

"Maria," Dante called out, his voice calm and resolute. "Prime [Devastating Cleaver] along a downward cut directly in front of you."

"The thing is fifty feet in the air, bighead!"

"Ready your blade."

Dante closed his gray eyes for half a beat, summoning his soul's intent with the full authority of Level 21.

Deploy: Winged Vestige.

The twin skeletal frames parted the slits in his shirt with a sharp, clean snap of expanding cartilage.

The ash-gray wings fanned out from Dante's back across their six-and-a-half-foot span, slicing the canyon draft with the heavy snap of canvas under sudden load.

Under the [Ash Veil], not a single golden spark leaked into the air. The rigid stone-like feathers held the identical lead-gray hue of the surrounding basalt, their edges ground into polished slate bevels sharp as blades.

Nicole, crouched along an iron truss thirty feet up with her crossbow aimed, froze her finger over the trigger.

The huntress locked up completely.

Her four amber slit-pupils dilated under the rim of her black-scaled hood, her jaw parting in shock that caught the breath in her throat.

The boy... has wings?!

Actual wings tearing out of his back?!

She watched Dante bend his knees against the gravel.

WHOOSH.

A stroke of the gray wings kicked up a blinding storm of dust across the canyon floor.

Dante's slender frame vaulted straight up with a violent vertical acceleration that closed the fifty-foot gap in under a second of pure flight.

He intercepted the first gargoyle right in the middle of its aerial banking turn.

The beast parted its iron beak in a startled shriek, snapping its forward talons to seize the boy who had materialized in its flight lane.

Dante made no move to evade.

Snapping his left wing across his torso in a fluid reflex, he locked the curved stone pinions into a solid bulwark squarely in the path of the oncoming talons.

CLACK.

The creature's twelve-inch steel claws struck the stone feathers with the dry clink of a cold chisel striking an anvil, failing to scratch the surface of the primordial mineral.

In the very millisecond the monster stalled in mid-air, Dante leveled the brass ring on his right hand straight at its chest from two feet away.

[Skill Activated: [Forced Transposition - Tier 1].]

[Mana Cost: 65 MP.]

[Selected Target: Alpha Ferrite Gargoyle.]

The spatial fold snapped shut in empty air.

The ten-foot, eleven-hundred-pound gargoyle vanished from the canyon sky and dropped to the floor, suspended three feet off the ground, directly in the path of Maria's readied stance.

Maria was already at the apex of her swing.

Her forty-eight pounds of black boiler steel roared down in an absolute vertical cleave, powered by [Seismic Rift] and [Devastating Cleaver].

CRACK-SHATTER.

The broad blade sheared through the creature's ferrite neck plate from collar to spine, bursting iron vertebrae and lead marrow in an explosion of dark blood that peppered the stone walls.

The gargoyle crashed onto the gravel split into two halves, motionless.

[-420 HP to target (Critical Concussion Damage).]

[Target Eliminated: Ferrite Gargoyle (Level 28).]

Dante did not hover idle in the chasm.

Banking his gray wings hard to the right, he stroked twice against the thin air and dove straight toward the second gargoyle attempting to launch from the upper truss.

He unloaded [Rain of Ether Needles] from above.

The twenty blue lances cored into the joints of the creature's leather wings, severing mechanical sinews and applying the slow debuff that forced the beast crashing down onto a basalt ledge twenty feet off the deck.

Nicole burst from the shadow of the beam that very instant.

Her [Dissipation Cloak] dropped as she vaulted onto the fallen monster's back, twin straight-bladed daggers plunging downward with the full leverage of twenty-nine Dexterity.

[Critical Point Piercing] found the seam between the nape plates.

Both blades sank to the iron crossguards, puncturing the core in an azure detonation of static discharge.

[-290 HP to target (Critical Sneak Strike).]

[Target Eliminated: Ferrite Gargoyle (Level 28).]

The third gargoyle attempted to claw its way up toward the canyon rim, but Dante, gliding at superior velocity down the center of the rift, cut off its climb with a lateral wing bank and loosed a [Piercing Aether Dart] point-blank into the beast's right eye.

The monster lost all lift, spiraling downward until its skull slammed into the rocks of the dry stream bed.

Maria closed the distance in three strides, brought her greatsword down onto its cranium, and ended the engagement with the sharp crunch of shattered bone.

[-260 HP to target.]

[Target Eliminated: Ferrite Gargoyle (Level 28).]

Silence reclaimed the canyon, broken only by the settling of dust over the gravel.

The interface flared with glowing gold text.

[Sector Engagement Concluded!]

[Experience Received: +1,620 shared EXP.]

[Dante Miller has reached Level 22!]

[Maria has reached Level 23!]

[Nicole has reached Level 23!]

Dante drifted down in a smooth flare, touching his boot soles to the gravel beside the first carcass with scarcely a sound.

He willed the trait to retract.

The twin gray wings drew inward with subtle clicks of cartilage, sliding beneath the slits in his shirt and disappearing under his skin until only the two satin lines remained across his shoulder blades.

Nicole dropped from the stone ledge slowly.

She walked into the clearing on rigid legs, her crossbow dangling loose in her left hand, all four amber eyes fixed on the pale, five-foot-eight youth dusting his sleeve.

She stopped two paces from him, staring at his back as if expecting the stone feathers to burst through the fabric again at any moment.

"You..." Nicole's voice rasped, faltering mid-breath. "...you have actual wings, Dante?"

Dante smoothed the collar of his leather vest, buttoning the side straps with unhurried calm.

"It is a primordial mutation of my soul," Dante answered in his usual matter-of-fact tone. "It manifested when I broke Level 15 on the First Continent. I use the basilisk bone plate housing the Primordial Iron Core across my spine to choke the etheric signature so the Citadel's scanners stay blind."

Nicole kept staring, the chitin mandibles along her jaw clicking in sheer conceptual vertigo.

First the Planar Transit to the Earth rain forest.

Then clean currency and food that didn't come out of a furnace.

And now a slender human boy who unfurled stone wings in the middle of a canyon and flew faster than a Level 28 gargoyle.

Maria rested her forty-eight-pound greatsword across her shoulder with a smirk, giving Nicole a nudge in the ribs with her elbow.

"Told you the bighead had his tricks, girl," Maria said in her mocking drawl. "Now stop staring at the boy's back like you're looking at a ghost and help carve out the cores from these three iron buzzards. We have forty-eight hundred scrip to collect at the quartermaster before lunch."

Nicole exhaled slowly through her mouth, dragging her gloved hand through her dark hair, a faint, disbelieving smile touching her lips for the first time all day.

"You two are completely insane," Nicole murmured, drawing her boning knife and walking toward the alpha's carcass. "Completely insane."

"Insanity yields practical results, Nicole," Dante replied, pen already in hand, logging the serials onto the permit parchment. "And today's practical result is another level in the bank and a heavier coin purse in our safe.”