5-7
When Qi Zhen was initially being trained, the masters of Sublime Titanium had run into a problem. Since time immemorial, the recitation of mantras had been a crucial part of qigong. Even in combat, the use of the voice could bring about a state of hypnotic mental focus, necessary for the projection of qi. But Qi Zhen’s voice was just a speaker, and a mantra would have no purpose if Qi Zhen could just generate the soundbite and loop it. Their development had slowed to a stop for several weeks before they themself had determined what would allow a computerized brain to achieve the same flow state.
So it was that as Qi Zhen faced the insubstantial mist-Pretender, they began to test various sequential integers for being prime numbers, starting just north of ten to the hundredth power, outputting the computation as smooth white noise. Their qi flared, flowing out of the central batteries in their abdomen and concentrating in the hands and feet as a golden glow.
Xia are unique in being able to exorcise malevolent spirits by punching the absolute fuck out of them. While Gilead brawled with the cameraman, Qi Zhen put that ability to good use.
The first few blows caught the mist-Pretender off-guard, tore through its form with gentle efficiency. But though it was weakened, its mass visibly shrunken, those opening blows did not destroy it; and once it adapted, Qi Zhen soon discovered that their power was only buying them time.
The problem was that the Mantis style was designed, above all else, to catch and redirect, to latch onto the foe and twist them into themselves. Turn a single opponent into five or six foes, each one too foolish to avoid accidentally striking his own comrades. But this was impossible with a creature made out of mist: it could simply pass through itself, and Qi Zhen couldn’t grab hold anyways. So while the mist-Pretender was more than capable of slipping in and draining their power, Qi Zhen was reduced to a clumsy boxer.
They needed some way to turn this around, a way to finish the fight for good. Easy enough against a human opponent—simply strike a weak point, the heart, the liver, a major blood vessel—but against homogenous gas? There were binding techniques for immaterial spirits, but even if those applied against Pretension—impossible to know—none of the ones that could be managed at 38% reserves were fast.
Dozens of simulated courses of action ran through Qi Zhen’s computer, each one terminating with their destruction. Except for one: run away. Make space. With five minutes, they could set up a qi array and trap the gaseous Pretender in it easily enough.
Without Qi Zhen backing him up, Gilead would be dead twenty times over by then.
An acceptable loss. The two of them were outnumbered, and neither of them could use their Pretensions. From what Sara had said about Gilead’s “episodes”, the team would probably be better off without him in the long-run. But would a xia really run away and give up so easily?
“Qi Zhen!” shouted Gilead.
“Fighting!” they replied. Was this really how Gilead acted? If Qi Zhen were as distractible as a human, that could have killed them!
“Nazil Raaşak!” was Gilead’s reply.
Qi Zhen did not, strictly speaking, know Arabic; not in the way they knew Chinese or English, with instantaneous recall and an understanding of wordplay. However, their data stores did include translations for several dozen languages, Arabic among them. With about a tenth of a second’s delay, Qi Zhen kindly informed themself that what Gilead had just shouted meant, approximately, “Get your head down!”
As Qi Zhen was collapsing to the floor, pulling themself faster than gravity with a trick of qi, they realized the cleverness of the trick. What was the chance that either of these attacking Pretenders spoke Arabic? Not high. And certainly the eagle didn’t speak the language, because it proceeded to dive at full speed right through the empty air where Qi Zhen’s head had just been.
The narrow alleyway blocked the eagle’s movement in three directions, and at maximum velocity there was no time for it to pull up. Gilead had already dropped, hiding his body behind his shield like a pangolin, leaving the eagle with only one target to interrupt its momentum: the dumbfounded Mr. Lasers.
It was a violent collision, made much worse when the cameraman looked up in surprise and set the eagle fully on fire. The Buddha himself would struggle to maintain focus with a hundred kilos of partly roasted poultry flapping in his face, giving Qi Zhen enough spare time to pop back up and drag Gilead along with them. “This alleyway is awful. We’re getting out of here.”
Qi Zhen lightened their body and poured qi into their synthetic muscles, pushing their strength far enough to heave Gilead’s armored form fully off the ground as they leapt over a nearby row of buildings. With scarcely more than two words exchanged, they agreed to make their way back to the main road.
“How did you know the eagle was coming?” Qi Zhen asked as they ran. “It was behind you.”
Gilead wiggled his shield in Qi Zhen’s direction. “Heardest thou of Perseus and Medusa?”
Indeed, the metal of the heater shield which Gilead had been using (ever since he had taken it from the wall of Ruthven’s trophy room) was reflective, if only vaguely. How had an oaf such as him had the ability to think up such a trick, and in the middle of a fight at that?
Qi Zhen dragged that thought into the file marked “For Later”, as it seemed that Gilead’s one good trick had not successfully defeated all of the enemy Pretenders. Mr. Lasers, though even more melted and cracked than previously, and with several charred feathers sticking out of his gaps at odd angles, was still able to lurch around the corner and open fire.
Qi Zhen’s superhuman reflexes came in handy; the instant they saw his first finger, they were already grabbing Gilead and throwing both of them into a nearby wall for cover. Worse, somewhere behind them, the tell-tale whistling of the gaseous Pretender was approaching fast. Qi Zhen laid down the law.
“I’ll defeat Mr. Lasers,” they said in their own halting Arabic. “That should be easy for me. Go to the main street, but make sure the wind is following you, because I can’t fight him.”
Gilead nodded. “Luck to thee, Qi Zhen.”
Qi Zhen was too focused on the fight, and their own dwindling reserves, to respond. But they knew they didn’t need Gilead’s luck anyways. Gilead immediately broke out into a run, hooking around the street in order to draw the gaseous Pretender’s attention, while Qi Zhen advanced steadily towards Mr. Lasers.
A beam of pure heat struck at the exact center of Qi Zhen’s chest, setting off several alarms as the composite began to darken. “Tell me, camera,” they said. “Do you have any idea the melting point of titanium-carbon composite? It’s higher than yours.”
Qi reserves were at 27% capacity. Armed only with their fists and the knowledge that Gilead was safe for now, they let out a shout and charged.
…
Sara needed to get that sword out of her right the fuck now. More than anything, more than she needed to defeat Boxcutter, more than she needed to keep Zahra safe, she needed to not have this cold metal blade pumping electricity into her body. But no matter how carefully she tried to do it, it was impossible to touch the blade without cutting herself.
In the back of her head, Sara was still categorizing. This was a familiar sensation, a compulsion ability, forcing her mind to prioritize removal of the blade at all costs. A perfect trap: force the enemy to wound and wound and wound until they fell to the floor in a bloody heap.
But self-knowledge wasn’t enough for alcoholics, and it wasn’t going to be enough against a Pretension. Sara kept trying, and kept cutting.
All around her, the brawl between Boxcutter and Vilena continued. The shadows of the enclosed space meant that Vilena could turn into mist, and that kept her from getting too messed up, but Boxcutter knew the layout of the library inside and out. Made sense; the library was her friend. It was a game of cat and mouse, except the mice were quickly forming into a swarm large enough to strip the cat down to the bone.
If pulling the sword out of herself wasn’t going to work, maybe Sara could push it out. Her First was heavy, after all, a body made of warping clay, and a sharp blade should have little friction. Probably. Sara had never gotten into knives. She found a records desk, chest-high, and pressed the jutting hilt of the sword firmly against its side. Slowly, careful not to move it horizontally or vertically, she let more and more of her body’s weight press onto that hilt. If ordinary physics applied, the weight would make it slide fully through her and clatter to the ground.
Then, all she would have to deal with was the fact that her First Pretension had a limited duration, one which would cause her near-instant death as soon as it ran out. Zahra could do much, but her power could not resurrect the dead. She’d tried.
Not that ordinary physics applied in this situation. Sara found herself awkwardly planking against the desk, her entire weight pressed down against the sword, and it did fuckall. The blade remained exactly where it was. Even when Sara jiggled around, hoping to shift it to somewhere the friction was less severe, it refused to move. The Pretender—Sara had forgotten for a second that this sword was, in fact, a stocky dutch fellow—got to decide whether he could be shoved around or not.
Then Sara remembered something else, which was that she was facing a wall in the middle of a fight against an opponent that could conjure copies of herself wherever she pleased. Boxcutter must have had the same idea at the same time, because Sara had only halfway completed her frantic pivot when, sure enough, a Vilena clone began to form right in front of her.
Sara had the initiative, and the newborn clone had not even a fraction of a fraction of a second to catch its bearings before Sara sent a bomb-powered punch directly into its face. It whipped back, neck looking about to snap, but didn’t go down: stupid vampiric toughness. It lunged at Sara with an inhuman screech, trying to grapple her into submission.
Opening its mouth had been a mistake. In the heat of the moment, Sara jammed her hand into that gaping maw, then let it detonate, sending a fine mist of blood right into her eyes. Blind and dazed, she pressed the advantage, getting her hands around the ruined, gore-soaked remnants of the clone’s throat. Both of them fell forward, her from aggression and it from blood loss, giving Sara the leverage to start pulling its head clean off. Detonating chunks of her elbows, the spine broke and the stringy flesh tore away.
Sara wiped the blood away from the depressions where her eyes would be. Odd that they could still be blinded like that. Odder still was the resistance she felt as she dragged herself back onto her feet, like she was having to pull through something. What? She looked down. There was a deep, gory depression carved into the clone’s collarbone area, and a matching stain on the hilt of the Pretender sword.
In the seconds before the compulsion returned and Sara carved a deep gash into her wrist, a plan emerged. The library was a confined space, festooned with shadows and dense with cover.
And Sara was a walking talking demolitions team. “Vilena, if you can hear me, stay out of the way!”
She took out everything in her path, obliterating rows of shelving with chunks of explosive, including the ones that the sword carved off of her. Clones of Vilena continued to pop up, but Sara never stayed in one place for too long, and another aspect proved to be of her advantage. Sound. Explosions are weaponized sound, the only difference between a blast wave and an ordinary noise being magnitude. In the confined space of the library, the noise built to a deafening roar. Sara’s hearing was protected by her Pretension’s ineffable nature, but Boxcutter’s was not, leaving what clones she could summon dazed and confused.
After not too long at all, Sara was fairly sure she had identified the original. Impossible to tell for certain, but who ever needed certainty? The real Boxcutter, still wearing Vilena’s face and clothes—the latter suspiciously disheveled—sat crouched atop a stepladder in the corner, surveying the library from above.
Before Sara could jerk the ladder out from under her, Boxcutter parkour-hopped to the ground. “Awww, ya found me!”
Sara didn’t have anything to say. It turned into a fistfight. Boxcutter was stronger, a little faster too, but she could still feel pain when she got hit, and with her micro-detonations, Sara could hit like a freight train. She had the skill, too, she’d been fighting longer, fighting without having a numerical advantage. Most importantly, she had the terrain: Boxcutter was backed into a corner, and didn’t quite seem to realize how badly that was fucking up her ability to properly defend herself.
With one heavy mitt hand, Sara managed to catch Boxcutter’s right hook, then pin that hand against the wall. She got kicked in the legs and crotch a few times for her trouble, but Boxcutter couldn’t escape.
“I happen to be good friends with the woman who’s body you’re stealing,” Sara said. “And I happen to know that a stake through the heart is one of the ways to kill a vampire. Lets see if this works.”
Sara did exactly what she had done with the clone: the hilt of the lightning sword Pretender was sticking out of her chest, and with its power keeping it in place, when it touched the center of Boxcutter’s sternum, the bone creaked. Boxcutter bared her teeth, maintaining a stoic shell… for about five seconds. Then she started struggling. With her strength, she should have been able to shove Sara back, but every time she tried Sara just detonated some of her back, pushing in further and further.
Boxcutter’s sternum popped, fountaining blood, but she wasn’t dead quite yet. “You’re gonna try to use my own friend against me? Dumbass, do you think he’s that stupid?”
Sara could have pointed out that the dutchman clearly didn’t like Boxcutter that much, seeing as he’d allowed himself to crush her sternum.
Instead, Boxcutter took hold of the hilt of the sword. Sara relinquished the grab to seize Boxcutter’s wrist, so Boxcutter brought both hands to bear. In such close range, Sara couldn’t use her bombs. She pressed hard into Boxcutter’s hands, succeeding only in turning her wrists to one side.
“Let’s see how well you can fight when you’re in two pieces!”
Boxcutter shoved down, and the sword carved through the explosive matter of Sara’s body with ease. Just like she’d hoped. Boxcutter’s slice was uneven, her wrists out of alignment, meaning that when Sara juked to the opposite side, the cut became woefully uneven. Instead of passing through Sara’s pelvis and bifurcating her, the sword swept out of her body on her left side below the ribs, finally allowing her to escape it.
More than twenty-five kilograms of high explosive thudded to the ground, and Sara wasn’t dead. She would be, though, if she couldn’t set that bomb off and grow its replacement before her Pretension ran out. And Boxcutter had the sword, electrical arcs dripping to the floor as she held it in a low centered stance, far more confident with the blade than the librarian had been.
Sara hadn’t thought this far ahead. She had one arm, no plan, and a serious vulnerability against slashing weapons.
But Sara wasn’t going to need to think too far ahead.
“First Pretense: I Am Subhuman.”
Boxcutter had just enough time to jerk her head in the direction of the sound before a metric ton of purple-scaled muscle came crashing through the wooden walls of the library, roaring up a storm. Sara backpedaled frantically.
“The one with the sword isn’t the real one—”
Another Vilena clone appeared behind Sara, grabbing her and trying to press a hand over her mouth. The mouth she didn’t have. “—it’s a copy, there’s a Pretender who can copy people!”
Gilead let loose a hideous hissing roar of spite, charging across the ruined library. “Thou darest insult my beloved? Changeling, glamour-weaver, I shall have your head!”
Boxcutter had just enough time to raise their guard before Gilead was on top of them, coiling over himself in a strange serpentine whirlwind of claws and teeth. His recklessness belied his understanding of the situation, that he thought the sword could not cut his scales. He was wrong.
While Gilead’s natural weapons tore into Boxcutter’s enhanced frame, she slashed with the lightning sword across the muscle of Gilead’s shoulder. The scales did much, turning a deep cut into a shallow slash, but electricity jumped into the wound, sending Gilead screeching and howling and twisting away. Sara’s teeth would have gritted if she had any, and she struggled against the clone holding her in place, but it was all futile; nobody ever places money on the one-armed wrestler, let alone when her opponent is stronger than she is.
Gilead gave ground, but only a meter: he had the reach advantage, after all, both from his size and from his serpent’s power to lunge. As he and Boxcutter dueled, it quickly became apparent that something had changed. This was only his third time taking on this form, and already Gilead’s movements were becoming more fluid, his ability to feint more natural. He was fighting the same way he fought in his Zeroth.
Of course, Boxcutter was taking full advantage of her First as well. Clones continued to harry Gilead’s flanks, attacking his tail and back legs whenever he dared focus too intently on the foe before him. That, at least, was something Sara could help with: whenever one appeared she would be sure to shout out a warning, giving Gilead the crucial half-second necessary to duck out of the way or, in an incredible display of non-humanoid acrobatics, spiral up and around, turning flank into front in a single intricate motion.
Nevertheless, Gilead could not avoid taking on injury. His crocodilian skull and wiry withers became crisscrossed with dim red lines, each one oozing blood, and the constant electrical shocks left trembles in every muscle. Boxcutter was badly beaten too, strips of dislocated flesh swaying as she fought, but stolen vampiric vigor kept her going.
And Gilead’s First Pretense had a far shorter duration than almost any other First that Sara had seen. Would he be able to withstand the fight once he had reverted to human size? Sara wasn’t sure, and she didn’t want to test it.
There was one other thing, besides her voice, that the clone grabbing hold of Sara couldn’t pin down. Her connection to all things explosive remained, ticking away in the back of her mind. And there was quite a large bomb sitting on the floor.
Sara narrowed down her vision, forgetting about all other things besides for three points: the location of her severed left half, the location of Boxcutter, and the location of Gilead. How many wounds Gilead took because he no longer had his early warning, she did not know nor care; there was only one way that this fight was going to end. Time and again, Boxcutter passed right by the bomb, or even stood atop it, but every time Gilead quickly followed her, putting himself too much at risk.
Sara was faced with a choice: to detonate when Gilead was still in the blast radius, or not detonate at all. Sara was never one to leave a bomb un-exploded: she pushed on the mental connection, and the whole world was consumed by noise.