Chapter 55: The Lance Through The Roof
Lance moved his sword and a couple of ice spears moved with him. As he parried a talon, one of them flew into the Flockhunter’s wing and went through it, and the wing came apart along the bone in a way that was not pleasant to look at.
The creature lost its balance and Lance immediately capitalized on that. He spun and clashed his sword against the talon a second time, but this time with more force on his end, driving the limb wide and leaving the whole ribbed length of the thing open to him.
Ice spilled from his other hand and formed a cage before the Flockhunter could wave its way out of the man’s perimeter. With that, his sword found purchase straight in the creature’s torso, and Lance wrenched the blade back out with dark-violet gore spilling downwards over his boots.
He was covered in sweat and stains of blood from every slaughter. It had dried into the creases of his knuckles and gone tacky on the grip.
He glanced around himself. There were only very few Heroes who were managing to hold their own. But the rest were struggling, only managing to dodge death by a hair’s breadth, it was as though they were good at staying alive more than slaughtering beasts, and the ones still upright spent every movement they had on not being where a talon was.
’If I want to be paranoid, I’d say they’re just stalling... those insufferable bastards!’
Aide Lance had had his fill with the Agencies, but of course, he was merely the president’s aide, he didn’t have the power here. Not on a road with four agency badges on it and his own authority written on paper somebody else had signed.
But more importantly, Lance was studying the behavioral pattern of the birds.
He looked up.
The flock had stopped attacking. That was the thing nobody else on the road had registered yet, because heroes measure a fight by what is coming at them, and nothing was coming at them.
The Flockhunters had simply gone up. They had climbed out of everyone’s reach, and now they were turning, wide and unhurried, in a slow wheel over the woodland with the light coming off their backs.
He watched two of them peel away from the wheel and take a wide, patient orbit around the convoy specifically. They were not flapping. They held the air and let it carry them, and each pass came in a little lower and a little tighter than the one before it.
’Are they trying to learn which shells have food in them?’
Monster behavior was quite simple in nature. It was not to say, though, that someone could not take advantage of such a simple behavior to achieve their goals.
’Right... shouldn’t birds like this be omnivores in the first place.’
More than attacking the heroes, perhaps they cared more about supplies, and the structure of the convoy had somehow convinced them that that was where their answer lay.
Inside the middle car, Theo’s Genesis Eyes were pulling apart the same picture, and the panels came faster than he could read them.
[Skill Use Detected: Hunter’s Lock]
[Skill Use Detected: Hunter’s Lock]
[Skill Use Detected: Hunter’s Lock]
[Skill Use Detected: Hunter’s Lock]
[Skill Use Detected: Hunter’s Lock]
[Skill Use Detected: Hunter’s Lock]
They kept coming. Theo stopped counting them at nineteen and then found he could not stop counting them.
He dragged his sight down off the sky and made himself follow one of the lines, the way the eye let him do now, tracking the intent rather than the animal, and the line came down out of the wheel and bent past the lead vehicle and past the heroes and past Jupiter Lady standing in the middle of the road with her hands on her hips, and it settled, gently, like a hand laid on a shoulder, on the roof of the transport van at the back of the convoy.
The one with the array in it.
The one with Thall in it.
Theo’s hand hit the cabin channel.
"Lance. The van. Get something over the van."
To his enormous credit, Aide Lance did not ask a single question.
"All units, the van at the rear, cover it. Now."
Half of them moved. The other half were from four different agencies who had come here to be seen and had four bodies on the road and a camera drone somewhere over the treeline, and they did not move, because a man from the Association had said it, and not their own.
Then the flock folded.
There was no signal. That was what Theo would remember afterwards, in the dark, when he had time. Nothing screamed and nothing called and no lead bird broke first. All the Skyshriek Flockhunters simply stopped being separate things and became one thing with different parts, and the whole shape of them tipped over at the top of the sky and came down.
[Skill Use Detected: Echo Wing Formation]
[Skill Use Detected: Heavenfall Dive]
The first volley was not the birds. That was the second thing Theo would remember. The birds threw first.
Their primary feathers came off them at the top of the dive, hardened and white and a metre and a half long, and they came down at an angle that had nothing to do with where anybody was standing, and then, halfway, they changed their minds.
A hero threw himself sideways with two metres to spare and the lance corrected in the air and took him through the thigh and pinned him to the road.
Another man in a plated suit had time to raise both arms. The lance went through the plate at the shoulder, through him, and eight inches into the asphalt underneath, and he stayed on his feet because he had been nailed upright.
A woman got hers through the calf and went down screaming, and the sound she made was the only sound on that road, because the birds were still not making any.
Lance did not dodge his. He broke it. He put a slab of ice into the air a metre in front of his own face and let the lance bury itself in that instead, and the ice cracked from edge to edge and held, and he was already moving before the pieces came down.
’Break the path,’ Theo thought, wildly, from behind glass. ’That’s what it meant. You can’t run from it. You put something in the way.’
Then the second volley came for the van.
Theo saw it leave. He saw white lances off the birds at different altitudes, all of them converging on one aluminium roof with a woman under it who could not wake up and a doctor beside her who had ridden along because he had wanted, very badly, to be useful.
Jupiter Lady got two of them.
She crossed forty metres of road in the time it took Theo’s heart to finish one beat, and she caught the first out of the air and slapped the second off its line with the back of her wrist, and for one second, one absolutely traitorous second, the boy who had spent twenty-one years of his life loving her felt his whole chest go up like a flare.
The third lance hit the road beside the van and stood there quivering.
The fourth went through the roof.
The sound it made was small. That was obscene. It punched through the skin of that van with a noise like someone dropping a spoon, and then every alarm in the vehicle went off at once, and a thin white vapour began to pour out of the hole it had left.
Coolant. From the array.
It came out fast and then slower, and it did not rise. It sank. It spread flat across the roof and ran off the edges in slow white ropes toward the asphalt.
Inside the middle car, Theo went very quiet. His hands stayed where they were on the channel. The panels were still stacking themselves up in front of him and he was not reading one of them.
Estea lifted her gaze and put it on him, only on him, and held it there. But before either of them could say anything, something strange happened.
Sesan was standing up. The Queen of Nelfihmr rose off her seat and put one hand flat on the window, and the glass under her palm went white from the inside out, and the temperature in that cabin dropped so far, so fast, that Uthed’s breath came out of him in a cloud and did not fade.
She was not looking at the birds.
She was looking at the van.
[Warning: Constitution reversion accelerating]
[The Frozen Sea: 9.99% → 11.4%]
[Warning]
[Warning]
’No.’
Theo did not remember deciding anything.
He grabbed Sesan by the wrist with one hand and hauled the door handle with the other.
It was still locked.
So he broke it.