Will held up his hands, quickly backpedaling into his subservient posture. "No. No, no. Not you. Keep slicing."
Zeraya deadpanned, studying him closely. "Twenty percent of the gross for a mule who argues with his own hallucinations."
Elyas slung a stretchy arm around Will, laughing loudly. "Don't take it personal, brother! She doesn't like anyone, except me!"
Zeraya fluidly threw a throwing knife. It embedded itself exactly half an inch into the glass between Elyas's heavy boots. The Raider yelped, leaping back.
"Gate is hot!" Zeraya announced, turning back to the temple doors. "Let's go break the bank."
The main temple doors slid open, revealing the courtyard. A Cyber-Shogun rode a massive mechanized centipede-horse, its legs clattering like machine-gun fire against the stone. Drawing a nodachi blade, the heavy edge hummed with unstable Glitch energy.
The Shogun emitted a massive suppressing aura. The air turned suffocatingly heavy, aggressively draining the team's stamina and threatening to paralyze their limbs with raw corrupted mana.
Will raised the thermal scope.
He wasn't looking for predatory intent or emotional architecture. He was looking at the monster the way he looked at everything — for the thing underneath the surface that explained the surface. Through the scope the Shogun's internal rhythm was visible as a heat signature, and what he saw made him frown.
The blade was cold. The legs were burning.
The power wasn't internal. It was flowing up from the centipede's legs into the nodachi in a continuous kinetic chain, the blade essentially a receiver. No legs, no power. It was simple once you saw it.
"It has no internal battery!" Will shouted over the screeching of the Shogun, stepping up to the front of the backline and pulling multiple vials from his rig. "The blade draws power from the centipede's legs. Break the rhythm and the blade dies!"
YES, Khan roared. THERE. That's it. That's how you read a battlefield, boy. You saw what they couldn't see because you were watching instead of swinging. THAT IS HOW I CONQUERED CHINA.
"Raven, prep the barrage!" Zeraya commanded, instantly adopting the intelligence. "Target the legs. Tyson, you're the anvil, take the charge. Elyas, grapple!"
Raven grumbled, clutching her stomach. "I need a juice box before I fire."
"Drink your canteen!" Tyson barked, stepping directly into the Shogun's path.
"Shut up, Tyson!" Raven snapped, pulling a quick swig of water.
The Shogun roared, a digital sound that shook the very foundation of the pagoda. Lunging forward, the centipede-horse's legs tore through the architecture.
Will initiated the execution. He threw a massive barrage of health potions and Glitch powder clouds directly over his team. The chemical explosions completely neutralized the boss's suppressing aura, washing away the paralysis and temporarily overcharging the Raiders' stats. To the team he looked like an incredibly expensive, highly prepared mule blowing through his entire high-tier stock to keep them alive.
That was fine. That was the performance. The performance was load-bearing.
Tyson didn't retreat. Slamming his heavy boots into the glass, the earthen magic flared outward. He collided directly with the Shogun's charge, his massive body absorbing the impact of a thousand pounds of charging metal. Tyson skidded, his boots carving deep trenches in the glass, but he held as the anchor.
"NOW!" Zeraya roared.
Raven raised her hands. The air split with the sound of a thousand tearing pages. Spectral arrows glowing with sickly necrotic green fire rained down from the neon sky. They bypassed the Shogun entirely, hammering directly into the centipede-legs.
The mechanism screeched. Sparks showed the room as the segmented legs fused together. The nodachi blade's glow flickered, dimmed, and died completely.
Elyas saw the opening. Launching himself through the air, he stretched his arms and wrapped the Shogun's head in a steel-like grip.
Will did not plan what happened next. He didn't have time to plan it. The team's buffed attacks were generating massive kinetic force, the air around them practically vibrating with the overflow of it, and something in Will's body understood the physics of the situation before his brain finished processing it.
He felt the excess kinetic energy the way you feel heat radiating from an open oven — real and physical and there. He let it flood into the kinetic bracers on his wrists without thinking about whether he should. His skin split. A forearm bone snapped under the pressure with a crack he felt in his back teeth.
[UNBROKEN] swallowed the agony and kept him functional.
He faked a catastrophic stumble under the weight of his canvas pack, dropping hard onto his knees, and brought the kinetic bracer crashing down into the glass floor to catch his weight.
The borrowed energy discharged straight into the foundation.
A localized devastating tremor rippled outward from his fist. The glass floor completely shattered beneath the heavy Shogun.
The monster vanished into the abyss, taking the broken centipede legs with it.
The temple groaned. The dust settled.
Will stayed on his knees, panting heavily, performing exhaustion over actual exhaustion. His right arm dangled at a sickening angle. He breathed in. The air tasted of copper and the specific flavour of a problem that had been solved at significant personal cost.
He quietly secured the 50,000-chit A-Rank core, hiding it beneath a pile of scrap metal in his satchel, just as heavy boots crunched across the shattered glass.
"Where is it?" Elyas demanded, his manic energy spiking as he scanned the empty floor. "A Shogun that size drops an A-Rank core, minimum. That's a fifty-thousand chit payout!"
Zeraya stepped up beside Will, pale eyes narrowing as she looked from the abyss to his battered rig. In the PATH, an unclassed mule standing next to missing loot was usually a dead mule.
Boy, Khan said, his voice dropping to something urgent and hot, if you have a lie ready, now is the time. And it better be a GOOD one.
Will didn't flinch. He looked at Zeraya, then at the abyss, then back at Zeraya. He let the silence run exactly one beat — long enough to look like a man too exhausted to lie quickly, which was the best possible cover for lying quickly.
"The localized gravity well collapsed," Will said, pushing his voice into a flat exhausted register. "The core was tethered to the centipede's primary housing. When the foundation broke, the mount's dead weight dragged it down into the void."
He held Zeraya's gaze and did not blink and did not add anything.
[LUCK CHECK: PASSIVE]
[Conviction absolute. No intervention required.]
Elyas blinked. The volatile manic tension drained from his heavy shoulders like air from a punctured tire. "Ah, damn it. Gravity drops. Can't fight the physics. Easy come, easy go, brother."
Raven groaned, kicking a stray piece of rubble into the abyss. "Whatever. The Guild pays us the flat rate for the Gate clear anyway. Let's just go."
WHAT, Khan bellowed in Will's skull, absolutely furious. THEY BELIEVED IT? JUST LIKE THAT? YOU HAVE THE CORE RIGHT THERE IN YOUR SATCHEL AND THEY JUST— boy I have conquered NATIONS with less audacity than that lie. I am genuinely impressed and deeply offended simultaneously.
Zeraya looked at his dangling arm, then at his face. Her eyes lingered a fraction of a second longer than they should have, her instincts clearly fighting something she couldn't quite name. She didn't offer a hand. Instead she stepped closer, shielding him from the view of the team.
"You're a weird mule, Will," she said, her voice softer than he'd ever heard it.
"I'm just a guy carrying heavy bags," Will rasped, fighting the raw agony that [UNBROKEN] was holding at arm's length by sheer stubbornness.
"You're an idiot," Raven said, walking over and lightly kicking his boot. "But you're a useful idiot. We get paid, then you get a real medic."
Elyas helped him up, laughing his booming laugh. "You didn't break the record, brother. You survived. That's a different kind of profit."
Will looked at his team. Filthy, blood-soaked, exhausted. The most dangerous people in the PATH, and they had no idea what was in his satchel.
He had the core. He had the route.
And, Khan said, the fury fading into something that sounded almost like pride, you have something I never had.
Will adjusted his collar, hiding the fresh damage. What's that.
A face nobody suspects.
The neon sky flickered. The temple began to dissolve around them. Will followed Zeraya into the dark.