Chapter 134 - 132 — First Contact I

**POV: Jace**

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Everybody who has written about that says the same three words. *It gets fast.*

Nobody who has written about it has found a way to put down what it is actually like, and now that I have seen it I do not think there is one.

There is no wind-up. There is no lean, no drop of the shoulder, no gathering.

A thing that was walking at the speed of a man in no particular hurry covered twelve metres of ash-covered street, and my eyes did not lose it, and my body still received it about a third of a second after it had already happened.

---

And it did not run into me.

That is the part I had not prepared for either, because the word everybody uses is *charge* and a charge is a thing you can get off the line of.

It stopped at four metres with both feet planted and put the polearm out.

> **[Warden — Level 18.]**

---

The hook came across at the height of my sternum on a shaft two and a bit metres long, and it came from a standing position, which meant the whole of that reach arrived without the thing crossing any of it.

I had both gauntlets up already.

For about a fifth of a second I intended to take it on the forearm faces.

That is what I have done with everything for five weeks, and I have two hundred and forty grams a side of a metal that does not break.

Then Mercer’s voice arrived, in the shape of a sentence about bones.

I went under it instead.

---

It took the stall behind me.

Two burned posts and the counter between them, which was stone and about a hand thick, and the hook went through the counter rather than into it.

The stone came apart in three pieces and one of them travelled nine or ten metres and landed somewhere in the ash behind Hana.

That is not a swing. That is what a swing does when whatever is behind it is not made of muscle.

I have never been hit by anything that would have done that and I have been hit by a great deal.

---

> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**

Six metres came up around me and I did what I have done with that Ability since the day I got it, which is put my attention on the thing in front of me without using my eyes.

There was nothing there.

Hana, four metres back on my right. Sokolov, five and a half behind her.

And a Warden standing inside three metres of me, moving, bringing a polearm back through its own grip, and my detection had no more to say about it than the wall did.

---

Living creatures only.

I have known that for five weeks. I have said it out loud to five people in a room with a map table in it.

I had not once considered that the most dangerous thing on this floor might not qualify.

That is nine days of reading and a Status panel and not one person in eleven hundred replies had written it down, because everybody who has been in here already knows and nobody remembers being the person who did not.

> **[Androphagos: no signatures.]**

I shut it and did not waste the rest of the minute.

---

"It is not alive," I said.

"What?"

"My detection does not see it. It sees you two."

Hana took about half a second with that and then she was moving, out and left, keeping her distance and getting the angle rather than getting closer.

"Then you have eyes," she said, "same as the rest of us. Anton."

---

Sokolov did not answer her and did not need to.

He put one hand out flat at about waist height and closed it, and something happened between the Warden’s left boot and the paving under the ash.

The leg stopped.

The rest of it did not, and for about a half-second the whole thing was leaning off a foot that had become part of the street, and I saw the bronze in the hip work against itself trying to sort it out.

Then it started coming free.

Not slowly. The ash around that boot began to move.

"Two seconds," Sokolov said.

---

> **[Talaria activated.]**

Four metres, which is nothing, and I was inside the polearm before it had got its foot back.

There is a place under the left arm where four plates are gone and the bronze is open to the air. Rings, and a segmented column.

It is about the size of my two fists together and it is the only part of that thing I have any business touching.

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

Three seconds. Right hand, everything from the hip.

> **[Mana: 270/270 → 264/270.]**

---

The adamantine went into bronze and the bronze did what Mercer said it would.

It did not shatter and it did not spread. It took the whole of that in one place and went in, and one of the rings came out of round, and the segmented column bent about fifteen degrees and stayed bent.

The arm above it dropped four inches and stopped being able to come all the way up.

I had about a third of a second of being pleased about that.

---

Then it let go of the polearm with the other hand and came for me.

Not a strike. It opened the hand and came at my chest to take hold of me.

It did that with its leg still half fixed and its shoulder bent, and it did it fast enough that I went backward on instinct rather than judgement.

The fingers closed on the front of my armour and took about a third of it away.

> **[Health: 500/500 → 462/500.]**

I got out of it with my feet and a great deal of luck and put five metres between us.

---

That is what I had wrong about them, and I had it wrong because of a sentence on a screen.

*Almost like moving statues.* That is in the guide. It is accurate about the patrol and it is a lie about the fight.

That thing gave up its weapon, in the middle of an exchange, because a grab was better than a swing at that range. Nothing that is being operated does that.

---

It backed off two paces and brought the polearm up into a hold with one hand, and the head came round, and the slit was black again.

So there is a gap.

Committed attack, then something like three quarters of a second where it is putting itself back together. Not long. Long enough to be real, and it is the only part of that cycle where it is not deciding something about me.

---

"Neck," Hana said, from my left, and she had not moved any closer. "When it turned after you. Third plate down on the left of the collar is sitting proud."

"How proud."

"Enough that I can see a line under it and I am nine metres away."

She had a short blade out and low and she was not doing anything with it, and she had been watching the whole of that fight from outside the reach of it rather than being brave in the middle.

That is worth more than the blade.

---

It came again and it came the same way, and this time I knew the shape.

Slow adjustment. Shoulder. The head stops turning.

I moved on the head and not on the colour, and the hook went through the air where my ribs had been, and it was committed, and it had to finish.

"Anton."

"Yes."

He caught the shaft.

Not the thing. The weapon, at the end of its own follow-through, when the Warden had started to pull it back and the shaft was out at full extension with nothing braced behind it.

Two anchors, one on the haft and one on a stall post, and the polearm stopped in the air.

---

The Warden did not try to lift it. It locked its good hand, threw its entire body weight backward off the hips, and the post tore out of the ground in a spray of splintered wood and dry stone.

That took about a second and a half and I did not need a second and a half.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 264/270 → 258/270.]**

I came up the side it could not bring its left arm across, got my left hand on the top of the shoulder plate to have something to be attached to, and put the right one into the proud plate at the collar.

The plate went.

What is under it is more bronze and something that is not bronze, and the second one went into that, and the third one did not need to.

---

It came down across the stall row and took two more posts with it.

Then the orange went out.

Not all at once. It went the way a filament goes, down through the cracks in the chest from the top, and the last of it sat in one fracture near the hip for two or three seconds and then that was gone as well.

Nothing came up. No panel about a drop, no light, no thing left on the ground. It lay there with the ash already starting to gather along its upwind side.

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**

>

> **[EXP: 1,125/1,300 → 1,215/1,300.]**