Chapter 75: The Woman With Only a Shield as Her Weapon
Chapter 75: The Woman With Only a Shield as Her Weapon
[Summon selected.]
[Physical manifestation initiated.]
[Manifestation Duration: 01:00:00.]
She arrived facing away from me, crouched, and completely ready.
That was the first thing — she wasn’t caught mid-anything. She came through in a braced stance behind a shield the size of a door, low, weight settled, absolutely still, as though she had been holding that position for some time and intended to hold it for much longer.
Then she straightened, slowly, and turned round.
She was thirty and tall—taller than me—with broad trained shoulders under scarred plate, mail, and a padded coat whose sleeves had been cut back to expose muscular forearms. Ash-blonde hair braided flat to her skull framed a strong, handsome face: high cheekbones, a firm mouth, and level grey eyes that seemed incapable of being hurried. The layered armour did not erase her femininity. It shaped a full chest, drew tight at a powerful waist, and flared over strong hips and heavy thighs built to absorb impacts that would put most people on the ground. She was beautiful in the severe, solid way of a fortress made human, and my body noticed even while my mind was still evaluating the shield.
And the shield.
It came up to her collarbone and it was nearly as wide as she was — a great rounded slab of dark metal with a boss in the centre like the face of a hammer, and hairline seams running through the surface in a pattern I couldn’t read. There was nothing on her hip. No sword, no axe, no hand-axe, no knife on the belt. A shield, and armour, and nothing else at all.
[Summon Grade: B.]
[Race: Human.]
[Age: 30]
[Native Advancement: Unresolved.]
[Manifested Level: 14.]
She looked at the room. Then at the sill and the daylight beyond it. Then at me.
And then she said nothing.
Most people reacted to an interdimensional abduction immediately. Liora had fallen on me and said "oh." Aria had put a sword under my chin. Vaelora had demanded answers. This woman stood in a burnt-out shop in a dead world and waited, with a completely level face, for me to explain myself.
I discovered that I fill silence when I’m nervous.
"You’ve been summoned," I said. "Across dimensions. It’s a class I have—Blind Call. It rolled a grade band and selected a summon. This Call selected you; I didn’t choose you specifically. There’s no ritual, and nobody sold you to anything."
Nothing. She waited.
"You’ll return to the exact instant you left. Not a minute after — the same instant. Whatever you were standing in front of will still be there and nobody will have seen you go." I made myself slow down. "I can’t hold you. There’s no contract and no compulsion. If you decide to spend the whole time sitting against that wall you can, and I’ll sit here with you, and then you’ll go home."
She shifted the shield onto her back with a practised roll of the shoulder. It was the first thing she’d done since turning round.
"How long?" she said.
Her voice was low and unhurried and gave away nothing whatsoever.
I told her the duration on the timer.
"What did it take you from?" I asked.
"A prepared hunt," she said. "A solitary beast. Powerful enough that I had spent nine days arranging the ground before I raised my shield. I was waiting for it to enter the ravine."
"You’ll return to that instant."
"Then it can wait a little longer."
"Then talk faster," she said, and sat down on an upturned crate.
So I gave her the whole situation, and she let me get all the way through it without one interruption, which I found more unnerving than being interrupted.
The compound: two hundred metres by a hundred and forty, water tanks, workshop, generator house, and the only defensible fence line I’d found in nine kilometres. The pack: thirteen when I arrived, eight now, two of them noticeably heavier and closer to the alpha. The alpha itself: Level 16, evolved, on the plinth, and the reason none of this was simple.
"It commands them by voice," I said. "Different howls for different groups — I’ve got six of them written down. And it has some kind of sensory link. Not constant, not everything. When one of them notices something, understands it, the alpha gets a flash of it."
Her eyebrows went up perhaps a millimetre.
"You are certain?"
"It stood up when a scout four hundred metres away with no line of sight lifted its head at a ditch. Four separate times over two days. Once it turned its head toward exactly the direction a hound was looking, half a kilometre off." I shrugged. "I can’t prove it. But I’ve built a week of work on the assumption and the assumption’s held."
"And the five you killed."
"Traps and a knife, in closed rooms, before any of them worked out what they were looking at. That was the whole method — kill it before it recognises me, and the link gets nothing." I turned the notebook round on the floor so she could see the patrol map. "Which worked, and then it stopped working, because the alpha’s noticed. Fives instead of threes. Nothing goes out alone. It’s stopped using two of the circuits entirely and it’s started pushing pairs west, toward the buildings I’ve been using."
She looked at the notebook for a long time.
Only later did I understand how much one omission mattered. I never asked where her weapon was. I never said can you manage eight of them with that or what do you fight with. It wasn’t tact. My class had put a B beside her name, and I’d watched a B-grade hold a ruined corridor with a bullet through her shoulder. I knew what the grade meant even when I didn’t understand the method.
What I saw was a heavily armoured specialist with the most defensible piece of equipment I’d ever laid eyes on, at the exact moment I needed somebody who could stand still in front of a pack.
"I need help," I said. "That’s it. That’s the ask. Eight hounds and an evolved alpha, and I can’t do it alone, and I’ve spent a week making it as survivable as one man can make it. You can say no."
Ilyana Crest looked at me.
It went on for a while. Her face did nothing at all, which I’ve since decided is not coldness so much as a very deep habit, and I sat there and let it.
"You have not asked," she said, eventually.
"Asked what?"
"Anything."
"...I don’t know what that means."
She stood up, and rolled the shield back down off her shoulder onto her arm in one motion, and said, "Ilyana Crest. Show me your preparations."
[Summon Identified: Ilyana Crest.]
That was the entire negotiation. No payment, no terms, no future obligation, no questions about what she got out of it.
We went out with two hours of light left and I showed her all of it — the three units, the wedged fire door, the pit with the ply over it, the wire, the sight lines from the burnt-out shop, the washed-out fence at the north-east corner. She went into each one, looked at the doorframes, put a hand on the bench I’d dragged across the entrance, and came out without comment.
At the third one she stopped and looked west across the scrub at the compound.
"This is good work," she said. "It is also finished."
"Finished."
"You have taught it that things which go out alone do not come back. It has changed its behaviour twice in three days on that lesson." She pointed with her chin at the plinth, just visible between the tanks. "The next thing it learns will be worse. If it concentrates the pack behind that fence, your rooms are worth nothing and neither is your knife."
"That’s what I’ve been thinking."
"Then we do not wait for tomorrow." She looked at the sun, which had another two hours in it, and then at me. "How long can you shoot for?"
"Twenty seconds on the sights before it starts wandering. Eighty-three rounds. The hospital cost me twenty-eight."
"That is more than enough," Ilyana said. "You will not need to hold anything for twenty seconds."