My health bar looks like a bad bank statement.
I look at it the way you look at a bad bank statement — noted, not helpful to dwell on — and I move. Staying in the Herald's footprint is how I ended up thirty feet from where I started against a concrete divider, so I change the footprint. I run east, toward the building on the corner with the missing front wall — four stories of exposed floor plates and open sightlines and enough structural concrete left to mean something.
Vorthex tracks me.
Not turning, exactly — orienting. The whole body adjusts the way something adjusts when it has decided you're interesting enough to keep watching. I reach the building and go up the exterior without the fire escape, through the exposed first floor, up the internal staircase that's still intact on the north side, and I come out on the third floor with a sightline to the Herald's full profile and thirty feet of elevation.
Vorthex stops moving.
It's watching the building. Watching me appear in the open third floor. The head lowers to my level — the neck extending, which brings the neck junction to roughly my elevation, which I note and file immediately.
It's waiting to see what I do from here.
I'm going to find out what it does when I do it.
Seven throws. Systematic.
Not trying for damage — trying for information. I throw the hatchet at the shoulder junction and watch where it deflects and what the plates do when they're struck there. I throw the security baton at the lower plate boundary, the ricochet angle, and watch how the deflection moves. I throw the revolver — no rotation, end-over-end — at the ribcage-equivalent and watch where the impact goes and what the tissue underneath does in response.
The Herald lets me do this.
That's the thing. It lets me. It deflects each throw without moving from position, the limb movements small and exact, and it watches what I'm learning the same way I'm watching what I'm learning.
We're both studying.
Fourth throw: left shoulder junction. The plate boundary there is tight — two overlapping systems with a gap I can feel through the Weapon Sense more than I can see it. The hatchet finds the gap's edge and skips off at an angle that tells me the gap runs further back than it presents from the front.
Fifth throw: neck junction, same seam the rebar found. The combat knife is smaller than the rebar, lighter, and from this angle I can see the seam more clearly. The knife finds it and goes in and Vorthex's head moves — not a flinch, not pain response, a managed response, the head moving to close the seam against the entry.
It knows the weak point too.
Sixth throw: below the ribcage-equivalent. The area I've been reading as abdominal is lower than that — further south on its body, and when the rebar spear-throw lands there the response is immediate and different from everything else. Not managed. Reflexive. The whole midsection contracts around the impact point and the Herald takes one step backward.
There.
Seventh throw: same spot, same approach. Bigger reaction. Both rear limbs shift their weight simultaneously, the entire body accommodating the impact rather than absorbing it locally.
Three weak points. Shoulder junction to draw focus. Neck junction as the primary target. Abdominal as the flinch point — the thing that moves its center of gravity, disrupts its balance, creates the windows.
I mark all three and start building the sequence.
I run it three times.
Lead to the shoulder — the hatchet, cycling fast, two throws at the shoulder junction in quick succession that force the limb guard up. The guard coming up draws the neck junction open by two degrees. Follow to the neck — the rebar, spear-thrown, the seam it's already found once. The impact there closes the junction again but the recoil opens the abdominal zone. Close to the abdomen — heaviest thing available, full commit, everything behind it.
First run: the shoulder hits, the neck hit deflects because the guard doesn't come up the way I predicted.
Adjust. The guard comes up when the shoulder threat is credible. Two hatchet throws aren't credible. Three might be.
Second run: three shoulder hits cycling fast — the hatchet retrieved and thrown, retrieved and thrown, retrieved and thrown in under four seconds, the class making the retrieval instantaneous. The guard comes up on the third. The neck junction opens. The rebar goes in clean and deep and the Herald's head snaps back.
The abdominal throw lands.
Full-body flinch. The mass of Vorthex transmits through the ground as it responds — not a step, a lurch, the whole body accommodating an impact it couldn't fully manage. For one second the Herald's weight is distributed wrong, the rear limbs taking more than they should, the front limbs slightly raised.
There.
I stare at it.
Third run, same sequence. The Herald has adjusted — it knows I found something, it's managing the shoulder guard differently now, the response to three hatchet throws changed. I add the baton, ricochet off the building facade to the Herald's right, which makes the shoulder guard respond to a threat that isn't coming from the direction it's guarding against. The guard comes up wrong. The neck opens more than before.
The rebar goes in.
The abdominal close lands.
The Herald goes to one knee.
The ground shakes. Everything in the city shakes with it. Dust and glass fall from every damaged building in the block. Something structural collapses two streets over.
One knee.
I'm breathing hard, chest working, health bar still low, and I'm staring at a Named Tier entity taking a knee in a ruined intersection and I let myself feel that for exactly one second.
Then Vorthex decides it's done being studied.
It hits the building.
Not me — the building, the structure I'm standing in, and three floors stop existing in the time it takes me to start moving. The third floor becomes the ground floor becomes rubble and I'm running before the structure makes its decision, bench cycling while I'm still inside a building that's currently deciding to be a different shape.
I throw the javelin straight up through the collapse to create a gap in the falling debris. Stupid, improvised, shouldn't work. Works. I throw the crowbar at a support beam on the way out and the ricochet opens an exit angle I didn't have. I lose my footing on the rubble slope where the third floor used to be — catch myself with the arm that isn't throwing, pull up, find ground.
I come out of the building's collapse and I'm fifteen feet from Vorthex's foreleg and there's no space and no angle and no time.
I throw anyway.
The hatchet from my left hand at the shoulder junction point-blank — less than the distance it needs to achieve the guard response, too close for the ricochet setup, too close for anything I've planned. The hatchet hits the shoulder junction dead on and the impact is different at this range, the class putting everything into the shortened arc, and the plate shifts.
Not breaks. Shifts. The junction seam moves two millimeters.
Two millimeters is information.
Two millimeters means the plate is not fused to the underlying structure. Two millimeters means there's play, and play means cumulative damage is doing something underneath the surface that the Herald's managed responses have been concealing.
I'm already moving when its limb comes down where I was standing.
The fight stops being puzzle and becomes chaos and chaos, I discover, fits my fighting style better than structure does. I have no form to break. I have no trained response pattern that can be read and anticipated. Every throw is an improvisation and improvisation is the only mode I know and in the space between Vorthex's planned attacks and my unplanned responses the sequence lands — once, twice, three times in under a minute, the Herald unable to predict the variations because the variations aren't calculated, they're just what my arm does when it's given a window and a target.
Third landing of the full sequence. Shoulder, neck, abdomen.
Vorthex staggers.
Not a managed response. A stagger — the weight going wrong, the front limbs catching against the ground, the massive head dropping two feet lower than its baseline.
I hear Alice from somewhere behind and to the left: "Neck junction. The seam is compromised. The plate edge is exposed on the upper left side."
She's been reading it in the Lattice while I've been reading it through the throws. She found the same answer from the other direction.
I look at Darian.
He's moved up. He's in the engagement radius — he's not in the Herald's attention, he's in the spaces between, doing what he said he wouldn't and came anyway. He catches a fast-mover I hadn't seen on my left flank, handles it with his hands, looks at me, shrugs one shoulder.
I don't tell him to leave. We both know how that goes.
The Herald rights itself. It's hurt. Not critically — it's still enormous, still moving, still capable of ending all three of us with one committed strike. But it knows it's hurt and it knows I found the sequence and something in its behavior shifts, the patience giving way to something more like urgency.
Less evaluating. More committed.
I look at my bench. Thirty-four weapons. Every one of them earned.
The Herald looks at me with the cold intelligence of something that has done this on other worlds and knows what the end of this looks like and has decided to make the end more expensive.
I've been in this fight before, I think. I just didn't know it was real.