Chapter 371: We Escaped With Most of the Rental

The divider had blocked the passage, but it hadn’t grown a roof, and I was finally shaped for something more useful than making a landlord reconsider his furniture deposit.

I pressed against the nearest crate stack, lifted my upper body and spread my wings just enough to see above the steel frame. The movement pulled at my side, but it gave me a clear view of Lukas, Rex and the empty loading strip behind them.

Old Mate’s display opened before I could spend the advantage on a complaint.

[System: Seven thousand EXP and twenty-five IP if you get both of you back to the crawler and clear the pursuit. No bonus for making the white suit cry, although I’d enjoy a photograph if the opportunity behaved itself.]

I would settle for getting my friend out before you developed a souvenir list.

Rex still held the release token between his fingers. His hand was less than three meters from my raised head, and the space beside my lower length remained clear.

Mine Now took the small metal token before he noticed what I had selected.

His eyes shifted toward me. I activated Backdoor Bludger with one opening on the visible strip behind Lukas and the other at the clear end of my own passage, less than ten meters away.

"Behind you, Lukas, and move before he finishes admiring himself."

My friend turned and ran through the opening. Rex caught his sleeve but lost the fabric when Lukas kept going, leaving a strip of torn cloth in his hand and an expression I intended to treasure later.

I dropped from the crate stack as the first guard reached its corner.

The portal remained open long enough for Lukas to clear it, but I couldn’t move its endpoints or pretend the next three minutes didn’t exist. We ran toward the public lane with a locked route behind us and very ordinary bodies available to the people following.

A guard swung the butt of his weapon around the passage entrance. I twisted away from the strike, then caught my wing edge on a broken metal bracket while squeezing between two empty crates.

The sharp pain arrived before the anger. Red material tore along the outer edge, and I folded the wing immediately rather than pretending a new slime body made damage an aesthetic choice.

Lukas dragged a loose wooden screen across the passage behind us. It wouldn’t stop Rex, but it forced the nearest guard to shove it aside instead of reaching my tail.

We crossed the freight lane beneath a row of public loading cameras. The four stagehands we had freed stood near the watch vehicle that had finally arrived, talking over one another while an officer checked their notice copies.

The officer called for everyone approaching to keep their weapons lowered.

Rex appeared at the shed entrance and stopped his guards with a raised hand. His expression had already changed into the concerned face from the company posters.

"A disagreement over damaged equipment," he called. "My staff may have handled the appointment poorly."

I didn’t waste the opening by returning for an argument. Lukas held up the dispatch copy, told the officer where the locked enclosure was and kept moving toward the brothel yard with me beside him.

The witnesses and cameras had changed what Rex could do without damaging the useful part of his reputation. They hadn’t made him weaker, and I refused to mistake the difference for a victory.

[System: Keep going, you crimson speedbump. You can tell everybody how charming you were once nobody’s close enough to improve your jaw with a boot.]

At the workshop, the mechanic checked our token against his record and unlocked the crawler bay. The replacement bearing was fitted, leaving a final two-hundred-credit balance after the inspection deposit.

I paid while Lukas loaded our bags. The keeper inspected my damaged wing and directed us to a nearby treatment booth instead of offering the sort of enthusiastic guesswork that made small injuries expensive.

A medic cleaned the torn edge, checked my older side pain and charged another hundred eighty credits for treatment and supplies. He told me to rest the wing, keep the dressing clean and return if the damage spread or movement became worse.

None of that sounded as impressive as an evolution announcement, but it was considerably more useful than bleeding on the rental seats.

The older worker brought Lukas his forgotten water bottle. She told him he had already provided enough dramatic arrivals for one visit, then asked him to come back with a better story about how he had left.

He promised to try. This time he didn’t turn the promise into a performance. I liked him better when the confidence belonged to him instead of whatever someone had poured into his glass.

We drove out through the guarded gate and joined the freight traffic leaving Rattlewash. Nobody followed close enough to make the first mile feel like another trap, though I watched every reflected vehicle until the town roofs disappeared.

The objective completed beyond the last production truck parked along the road. My EXP reached twenty-five thousand, and my IP rose to five hundred thirty-five.

Lukas let out a long breath while I settled carefully against the passenger padding.

"Next stop, we pick somewhere whose main attraction is a bed."

"That was technically what we did, which made the results difficult to use as guidance."

Lukas checked the saved recordings at the next straight stretch, then asked whether I wanted food or sleep first. I told him to stop presenting my basic needs as rival political parties, and he opened the snack bag without making me choose.

I settled against the padding while the road widened ahead, trying to enjoy the simple fact that nobody currently had a hand around my throat.

At the next relay station, Lukas checked the weather board while I received a message from Cherry.

She had attached an advertisement running through Rex’s public channel. It called our escape the opening episode of his newest series, and beneath my face sat a clear photograph of our crawler’s identifying marks.