Chapter 263 | Cardamom and Cordite [PS BONUS]
Chapter 263: 263 | Cardamom and Cordite [PS BONUS]
The desk hit the spot where Camille had been standing approximately half a second after she wasn’t standing there anymore.
I’ll give her this. The girl was fast.
Camille threw herself sideways into the bathroom alcove as a hundred and fifty pounds of institutional walnut smashed into the wall where her ribs had been, cratering the drywall and sending a shower of plaster dust across the hallway. Two of my constructs released the desk on impact and reformed at my flanks while the other two held position near the ceiling, tracking both ends of the corridor.
From the east stairwell, Percy’s voice came through the earpiece with zero stutter. "She’s in the alcove. Four feet in. She can see both directions but her firing window is compressed to a thirty-degree arc from that position. You have approximately six seconds before she recalibrates."
Six seconds. More than enough.
I pushed off the wall and sprinted down the west hallway, boots hitting the impact matting in rapid succession. The corridor was narrow enough that my constructs couldn’t fan out to full extension, so I kept two tight against my body and sent the other two ahead, one skimming the ceiling and the other hugging the baseboard.
Four seconds.
Orange light bloomed from the alcove. Camille came out shooting.
The first rivet punched through the air where my head had been a quarter second earlier, the hardened nail construct traveling with enough velocity to make the air snap. The second one curved mid-flight, bending around the wall of the corridor in a trajectory that should have been physically impossible and absolutely was not because Camille Ortega could adjust her projectiles after firing them.
The curve caught me off guard. I dropped flat and the rivet screamed past my ear close enough that I felt the heat of it against my skin. The construct embedded itself in the far wall with a sound like a railroad spike being driven through sheet metal.
"Rivet trajectory adjusted approximately seven degrees from initial vector," Percy reported through the earpiece with the clinical tone of someone reading a weather report. "She’s compensating in real time. Straight-line approach is not viable."
Yeah, no kidding.
I rolled sideways against the wall as a third rivet punched through the space I’d been occupying, this one aimed lower, designed to catch me if I’d gone prone. Camille was reading my movement patterns after three exchanges and already adapting her firing solution.
This girl was the real deal.
I sent the ceiling construct forward in a feint, the amber arm sweeping down toward the alcove entrance like a grasping hand. Camille responded exactly the way a trained combat specialist would, pivoting her fire to intercept the incoming threat. Two rivets punched through the construct simultaneously, the orange nails shearing through my amber projection hard enough that I felt the feedback travel up my spine and settle behind my eyes as a sharp throb.
But the feint bought me two seconds. I used them to close fifteen feet of hallway in a dead sprint, keeping low, keeping my profile tight against the left wall.
Twenty feet from the alcove.
"She’s regenerating. Both palms active. Volley incoming in approximately one point eight seconds."
I didn’t have one point eight seconds to think about this.
I activated Blitz.
The world compressed. The fluorescent lights stretched into horizontal lines as my body covered the remaining twenty feet in a duration that my conscious mind couldn’t meaningfully track. The hallway blurred past, the matting compressed beneath my boots, and then I was inside the alcove and Camille Ortega’s brown eyes went very, very wide.
We occupied approximately nine square feet of recessed bathroom doorway. Her back pressed against the tile wall. My momentum carried me forward until our bodies were separated by inches. The six rivet constructs she’d been generating flared bright orange at both palms, aimed at a target that was no longer at the end of a forty-foot hallway but instead close enough to smell.
And she smelled like something warm. Cardamom and brown sugar and the metallic undertone of Aspect discharge that clung to her skin from years of generating those nail constructs.
Her eyes locked onto mine above the half-mask. Brown and sharp and absolutely furious.
"You do not get to be this fast."
"Apparently I do."
Camille fired point-blank. I caught her right wrist with a construct and wrenched it sideways, redirecting the rivet volley into the bathroom tile behind us. Three orange nails punched through ceramic and embedded in the wall pipe, and the sound of pressurized water hissing through new holes filled the small space.
Her left hand came up and I caught that wrist too, pinning both arms wide with two constructs while the other two formed a barrier across the alcove entrance. We were chest to chest in the doorway, her back against the wall, my constructs holding her spread like I was framing her for a Renaissance painting.
The position registered in approximately twelve places in my brain simultaneously. Her white shirt had come untucked from her charcoal skirt during the dodge and a strip of toned brown stomach showed between the fabric and her waistband. The deep orange accent of her costume cut across her torso in a line that drew the eye from collarbone to hip. Her chest rose and fell with rapid breathing, pushing the fitted white fabric of her compression top to its engineering limits with each inhale.
I was not looking at any of this.
I was extremely, aggressively not looking at any of this.
"Let go of me." Camille’s voice was low and dangerous and approximately six inches from my face.
"Can’t. You’ll shoot me."
"Obviously I’ll shoot you. That’s the exercise."
"Which is why I’m not letting go."
She tested the construct grip on her wrists and found it locked. My Spectral Reach held firm, the amber arms maintaining their restraint at a fraction of my actual strength output. Camille strained against them for two full seconds before recognizing the futility and switching tactics entirely.
She headbutted me.
I saw it coming because Percy screamed "INCOMING" through the earpiece at a volume that momentarily deafened me. I tilted my head left and Camille’s forehead caught my right cheek instead of my nose, which still hurt like absolute hell but didn’t break anything.
The impact knocked me back half a step. Her right wrist twisted free from the construct while my concentration wavered, and a single rivet materialized in her palm with the speed of a snake producing fangs. She fired from three inches.
I let go of her entirely and threw myself backward through my own barrier constructs, feeling the rivet graze my left shoulder through the compression suit. The fabric tore. The hardened nail caught just enough material to redirect my fall and I hit the hallway matting on my back, rolling immediately to the side as two more rivets punched into the floor where my chest had been.
"She’s pursuing. Corridor approach from the south. ETA your position four seconds."
I was already moving. Hands on the matting, boots finding purchase, body upright and backpedaling down the hallway toward the west stairwell. Camille emerged from the alcove with orange light blazing at both palms and an expression that communicated very specifically what she thought about delivery boys who got lucky.
The compression top of her costume had shifted during the struggle. The fitted fabric sat lower across her chest than its designer had intended, and the deep orange accent line that ran from shoulder to sternum had pulled to the left in a way that revealed additional territory along the right side of her neckline. Specifically, the curve of her breast swelled above the fabric edge, the skin smooth and warm-toned in the fluorescent light, and the top of something dark and lace-trimmed was visible at the boundary where fabric met flesh.
The construct on her left arm must have snagged the collar during the release. That or gravity had opinions about structural engineering that the costume department hadn’t accounted for.
Camille hadn’t noticed yet.
I noticed.