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"You said people have been disappearing down here?"
"Five that I know of," Skye said.
Daisy shrugged. "Dealers, muggers, rapists. Not exactly a loss."
Kade bit back the urge to point out that a pickpocket living in a sewer didn't have much room to judge. But kicking someone's last shred of self-respect felt unnecessary.
The booming was getting louder. The camera feeds on his Optics showed whatever it was heading straight for them.
Kade drew his pistol. Both girls flinched.
"Relax. Stay here. Whatever you hear, don't come out."
He left the alcove and walked toward the sound.
Once he was out of the girls' line of sight, the Sensory Gauntlets deployed — silver-gray metal rippling from bracelet to elbow on both arms. Then he pressed the M1911 flat between his palms and pushed AllSpark energy into it. The pistol dissolved and reformed — steel and gunpowder replaced by white composite casing and glowing blue pulse channels. The Colt was gone. The Pulse Pistol was back.
Against an unknown creature in a confined space, he wanted the best weapon he had.
The Tactical Optics fed him a constant stream of data — night vision overlaying the tunnel in green, distance markers tagging every wall, pipe, and junction. He saw the thing before it saw him. X-ray picked up its outline around the corner: massive, humanoid but wrong, moving on two legs with a gait that was too fast for something that size.
It came around the bend.
A lizard. That was the only word for it. Eight feet tall, covered in dark green scales, with a jaw full of teeth and claws that gouged the concrete with every step. It was wearing a white coat — a lab coat, torn and stretched across its enormous frame — which would have been absurd if the rest of it weren't so terrifying.
Kade didn't hesitate. He didn't try to talk to it, reason with it, or search for the tortured human soul trapped inside the monster. That was Professor Xavier's job — a man who could freeze his enemies in place and then leisurely read their minds. Kade didn't have that luxury. What he had was a gun and a lifetime of training that said: if the target isn't human, shoot first.
The Pulse Pistol's muzzle lit up blue.
The first burst caught the Lizard square in the head — five rounds of pulse energy detonating on impact with the force of small grenades. The creature's skull snapped back, flesh tearing, scales shattering.
But it didn't die.
Its arms came up to shield its face — impossibly fast, faster than anything that size should move. The remaining rounds hammered into its forearms as Kade emptied the magazine. When the last shot fired, the damage report was ugly but not fatal: one arm blown apart at the elbow, the other shredded to the bone, and a massive crater in the side of its head.
And the wounds were already closing.
The destroyed arm was regrowing. Muscle fibers knitting together, scales forming over raw flesh. By the time the Pulse Pistol finished its recharge cycle, the Lizard had recovered most of the damage.
Kade opened fire again.
This time the creature launched itself upward — claws digging into the sewer ceiling, scaling the concrete like an insect. It charged at Kade from above, upside down, jaws wide.
This was not a smart decision. A fully recharged Pulse Pistol tore the ceiling apart around it — chunks of concrete raining down, support structures cracking. The Lizard grabbed at the disintegrating surface, caught nothing but rubble, and crashed to the floor in a heap.
"I've never understood why monsters climb walls in movies," Kade said, already firing again. "It's slower than running."
The tunnel became a war zone. Pulse rounds detonated in rapid succession, the concussive blasts echoing through the concrete tubes until the air itself seemed to vibrate. Dust and pulverized stone filled the passage like fog.
The magazine ran dry. Through the haze, the Tactical Optics showed the Lizard lying motionless on the ground.
Kade reloaded. Kept shooting.
He wasn't stupid. Every isekai protagonist who'd ever been killed by a "dead" enemy was a cautionary tale burned into his memory. Playing dead was the oldest trick in the book, and Kade intended to keep firing until there was nothing left to play dead with. The sewer was reinforced concrete — it could take a nuclear test, let alone pulse rounds. He'd keep going until the thing was vapor.
If the Lizard turned out to be like Deadpool — capable of regenerating from a single surviving cell — then Kade would accept his loss gracefully. Losing to a cheater wasn't shameful.
The Lizard was playing dead.
But it had apparently never encountered someone willing to keep shooting a corpse with this level of enthusiasm. After the third full magazine cratered its body, it let out a roar of pain and rage — and bolted. Still bleeding, still regenerating, but running at a speed that should have been impossible for something that badly injured.
"Three full magazines," Kade muttered, staring after it. "That would've scrapped a tank. What are you made of — Soviet steel?"
He started to pursue, then heard footsteps behind him.
Skye and Daisy had come out to watch.
"I told you to stay put."
"We... what was that thing?" Skye asked, eyes wide.
"Nothing. Just a gecko. Big one."
Both girls looked at the tunnel behind him — the walls cratered and scorched, chunks of ceiling on the floor, the air thick with concrete dust. The aftermath looked like someone had fired an RPG into a parking garage.
Neither of them believed a word of it.
"Look, it's not safe here. I'd strongly suggest you leave. Soon."
He turned and followed the blood trail.
The Lizard bled green.
Bright, vivid green — splattered across the concrete in thick streaks that glowed faintly under the Optics' enhanced spectrum. Easy to follow. The creature had been too badly hurt to be careful about its retreat.
Two hundred meters. Three hundred. The tunnel system twisted and branched, but the blood never lied. Left turn, right turn, through a junction, down a slope.
The environment changed. The abandoned, dry sections gave way to active sewer lines — the air thickening with the smell of everything a city flushed away and forgot about. The floor was slick with dark water and things Kade refused to identify. He kept his expression blank and pushed forward.
After several more turns, the blood trail vanished.
The wounds had healed. Completely. The Lizard's regeneration had caught up with the damage.
Kade stood in a passage so dark that even the Optics struggled to render useful detail. Night vision painted the space in washed-out green: a large chamber, maybe fifty square meters, where several tunnel lines converged.
No Lizard.
But the chamber wasn't empty.
Dozens of points of light stared back at him from the darkness. Not reflections. Not bioluminescence. Green. Bright green. Arranged in pairs.
Eyes.
Dozens of them.
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