Chapter 753: A lesser three horn
Chapter 753: A lesser three horn
Diana had the fragment hovering exactly six inches from his temple when his teeth finished changing.
Then the rest of him went with it.
"Where is Callum Albright," she said again.
Darius’s grin split wider, wide enough that something in his jaw popped audibly, and the sound that came out of him next wasn’t a laugh exactly. It was something underneath a laugh, the precursor to one, and his skin started moving.
She’d read the file. Everyone had read the file. A long time ago, Darius Mercer had touched a Harbinger during a containment breach and tried to copy what he found there and the copy had gone wrong somewhere in the process, the DNA settling into him incomplete and corrupted, one arm locked permanently into something that wasn’t fully human anymore. They’d called it the thing that ended his EDF career. They’d called it the thing that made him bloodthirsty, after, when the people who studied him tried to explain why a man who used to be reckless became something closer to feral.
Knowing that and watching it happen in real time were different things.
His skin went grey first, the change spreading from where the changed teeth sat outward across his face and down his neck, the texture of it thickening, hardening, the smooth give of human tissue replaced by something denser. His shoulders widened. His spine extended. Where his back had been flat a horn pushed through, then a second beside it, then a third, the bone tearing through skin that had already stopped being skin.
Diana’s shield arm dropped a fraction. Just a fraction. Just long enough.
"THREE HORN," Darius screamed, and the voice that came out of his changing throat was deeper than his own, the resonance of it shaking dust off the warehouse rafters. "DO YOU KNOW HOW LUCKY I AM?"
He grew. Not slowly. All at once, his body filling out into something seven feet and climbing, grey hide stretching tight over muscle that hadn’t existed a second earlier, and his left arm, already half-Harbinger from the original incident, simply finished the job the rest of him was now doing too.
He kicked her.
Diana got the shield up half a second late and the kick caught the edge of it and sent her through the cracked wall she’d put him into earlier, through it and out the other side, through the warehouse’s exterior siding, and into open air.
She hit the roof of the next building over and rolled twice before she stopped.
"HOMELESS," Darius screamed, somewhere behind her, his voice carrying through two collapsed walls like they weren’t there. "RELEASED FROM PRISON, NO MONEY, NO BED, WANDERING THE OUTER DISTRICTS LOOKING FOR A SETTLEMENT THAT WOULD TAKE ME IN." He came through the hole he’d put her through, the warehouse wall crumbling further around his new shoulders. "AND WHO DO I FIND OUT THERE." He laughed, the sound wrong now, layered, something Harbinger underneath something human. "A HARBINGER. WANDERING THE SAME ROADS. MY LUCK, RIGHT? MY ABSOLUTE LUCK."
Diana pushed herself up off the roof. Her shoulder screamed where she’d hit the building. She rolled it once, testing it, and brought the Shoal Shield back up.
"You’ve never been lucky a day in your life, Darius," she said.
He came at her across the rooftop in a sprint that ate the distance in under two seconds.
She got the shield up in Coral Fortress configuration and he hit it with a spinning kick, his whole body rotating through the strike, and the impact drove her three meters back across the roof, her boots tearing furrows in the surface material.
BOOM.
The Living Reef absorbed most of it. Most. She felt the rest in her teeth.
He didn’t stop. He followed the kick with a combination, three punches landing on the shield in rapid succession, his left fist leading every time, the Harbinger arm carrying weight the right one couldn’t match, and Diana held her ground through all three and fired Tidal Rebound on the third.
The rebound caught him mid-stance and sent him backward, off the roof entirely, falling two stories to the alley below.
He laughed the whole way down.
He hit the ground and the impact cratered the pavement and he came back up out of it like the fall had cost him nothing, already running back toward the building, finding a fire escape and climbing it three rungs at a time with both hands and one of his new horned legs, moving like something that had forgotten what exhaustion was supposed to feel like.
Diana met him at the top.
"This is my favorite," he said, grinning with a mouth that had too many teeth in it now. "Do you know that? Every transformation I’ve ever done. Every species. This one’s the hardest. The body fights you the whole way through, every cell screaming that it’s wrong, and you have to just." He flexed the Harbinger arm, the muscle in it rolling under grey hide. "Push through it. Make it yours anyway." His eyes were wide, manic, genuinely happy in a way that had no business being attached to what was standing in front of her. "And the strength on the other side. God. The strength."
"Where’s Callum," Diana said.
"Why do you care," Darius said, and swept his tail at her ankles.
She hadn’t accounted for the tail. Harbingers had tails. He’d grown one with everything else and she hadn’t been watching for it and it caught her across both ankles and dropped her flat onto the roof.
He was on her before she’d finished falling.
She got the shield between them on instinct alone, both hands, and his fist came down on it with the full weight of his new mass behind it.
BOOM.
The roof beneath her cracked in a spiderweb radiating outward from the impact point. Her arms screamed. The shield held, the Living Reef working overtime, but she felt the force traveling through it into her shoulders, into her spine, into the roof itself, and a section of it gave way entirely, both of them dropping through into the building below in a shower of debris.
They hit the floor of an empty storage room together, Diana on her back with the shield still between them, Darius straddling her with both fists already coming down.
She fired Tidal Rebound point blank.
Everything she’d absorbed in the last thirty seconds released at once into his chest and he left the ground entirely, launched backward through a support column that snapped clean through, the building groaning above them as the structure registered the loss.
Diana rolled to her feet. She was breathing hard. Her shoulder was screaming.
Darius got up out of the rubble laughing, dust and concrete chips falling off his shoulders, and this time he didn’t slow down to talk first.
He came at her low, a tackle, his shoulder driving into her midsection before she could fully reset, and the impact carried both of them backward through a stack of empty shipping containers, metal screaming as it folded around them, sparks showering off torn edges.
Diana hit a wall of corrugated steel and felt it buckle behind her.
She brought her knee up into his ribs. Once. Twice. He grunted on the second one but didn’t let go, his good hand closing around her shield arm and yanking, trying to pull the Shoal Shield away from her entirely, and for a half second the orbital fragments scattered wide and undefended.
She headbutted him.
It hurt her more than it hurt him, her vision sparking white at the edges, but it bought her the half second she needed to wrench her arm free and bring the shield up between them again before his next swing.
His fist found her ribs anyway, a glancing blow but enough to drive the air out of her lungs, and she staggered sideways into a stack of crates that collapsed under her weight.
He was on her again before she could fully recover, grabbing a fistful of her jacket and hauling her upright, and the look on his face had shifted, something colder underneath the manic joy.
"You’re slowing down," he said.
"So are you," Diana said, and it was true. His punches were getting heavier but slower. His healing was working overtime keeping his transformed body intact and that cost something, even for him, even with Harbinger biology underneath the rage.
He swung wide. She ducked under it and drove the shield’s edge up into his jaw.
The impact snapped his head back and she didn’t let him recover, following with a second strike to the same spot, the orbital fragments breaking off and hammering into his exposed throat in quick successive hits, and he staggered backward through another row of containers, the metal collapsing around him in a cascade of noise.
She went after him.
He grabbed a container lid off the ground, three hundred pounds of dense scrap metal, and swung it at her like a club. She caught it on Coral Fortress and the metal crumpled against the shield’s surface, useless, and she drove forward through the wreckage of it and grabbed him by the back of his thickened neck.
She smashed his head into the side of a container.
Once.
Twice.
The metal dented inward with each impact, his grey hide splitting at the temple, dark blood running down into his eye.
He drove his elbow back into her sternum and she lost her grip, stumbling back, and he turned on her with the bloody side of his face twisted into something furious.
"YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THAT TO ME," he screamed, and charged.
She didn’t get the shield up in time.
His shoulder caught her full in the chest and they went through the storage room wall together, out into the open warehouse floor proper, rolling across concrete strewn with broken pallets, and he ended up on top, both fists raining down, one after the other, the twisted Harbinger arm doing most of the damage, the other one that was turned but also proper and not as skewed was landing in support.
Diana got the shield between them on the third hit and the Living Reef absorbed it but her arm was screaming now, the bone deep ache of something that had taken too much in too short a time, and she felt the edges of her control fraying.
She drove her knee up into his groin.
It worked exactly the same on a three horn as it had ever worked on anyone, apparently, because he doubled over with a sound that had nothing manic in it at all, just pure animal pain, and she shoved him off and rolled to her feet and hit him with the shield’s full edge across the side of his head while he was still bent double.
He hit the ground.
She didn’t stop. She grabbed him by the horn nearest his crown and dragged him across the concrete toward another row of containers, his claws scrabbling uselessly against the floor, and slammed his head into the metal hard enough that the entire container shifted on its base.
"You think this makes you a three horn," Diana said, dragging him back and slamming him into the next container in the row, the impact loud enough to ring across the entire warehouse floor. "You’re not. You never were." Another impact, his knees finally starting to buckle. "A three horn doesn’t get tired. A three horn doesn’t bleed like that."
He grabbed her ankle and yanked.
She went down hard, the back of her skull cracking against the concrete, white light exploding across her vision, and he was on her again immediately, straddling her, both hands closing around her throat this time, the Harbinger grip crushing in a way that made her vision tunnel at the edges.
She drove the shield up between them and activated Coral Fortress at point blank range, the expansion shoving him backward off her entirely, and she gasped air back into her lungs and rolled away, coughing, her throat already bruising.
He came up laughing again, weaker, wetter, blood running freely from his split temple and now his mouth too.
"Feels real enough to me," he said.
He came at her one more time, a wild overhand swing with everything he had left behind it, and Diana let it come, watched the wind-up, read the wide telegraphed arc of something that had stopped fighting with discipline and started fighting purely on rage and exhaustion.
She stepped inside it.
The Tidal Rebound fired the moment his fist connected with the shield, every ounce of force he’d put into the swing returning to him doubled, and he left his feet entirely this time, sailing backward across the warehouse floor and through the last standing wall before finally, finally coming to rest in a crumpled heap against a support beam.
He tried to get up.
His arms shook under his own weight, the body that had been running on stolen biology and pure obsession finally hitting whatever limit even Harbinger tissue had, and he made it halfway to his feet before his knees gave out again.
Diana walked over slowly, every step costing her something, her shoulder screaming, her throat bruised black, her ankles aching under her gear, her breath coming in ragged pulls.
She extended both hands and her null field caught him as he tried to push himself upright a second time, his half-raised body freezing mid-motion, fist clenched, one knee still on the ground.
She crossed the last distance and put a hand on the shield, the orbital fragments forming a tight ring around his frozen head, one fragment stopping six inches from his temple.
Shade descended through the broken roofline above, unmasked just enough that she felt his presence without him ever once stepping in, exactly as she’d told him before they came down here.
"Don’t fuck with me," Diana said. "Where’s Callum."