Chapter 76: The Shield Takes Everything
Chapter 76: The Shield Takes Everything
The plan took us forty minutes and most of it was hers.
"You have made yourself invisible and put your weapon well outside the yard," she said, crouched over my notebook with a stick of charcoal. "So you are not the thing it looks at. Good. Then I am."
"You want to go in through the front."
"I want to go in slowly and be seen." She drew a line from the gate to the plinth. "It has lost five without knowing why, so it will spend its cheap animals first. Every one it sends me is one it cannot use against you. Your job is anything that leaves the yard or gets behind me. Keep the fight there and I will hold it."
She marked the loading lane between the workshop and the first storage unit. It narrowed to less than four metres near the doors.
"My aura stores force that enters through the shield," she said. "Not force that strikes my back, not teeth around the rim. The reserve is finite. When the seams fill, I release it or the pattern breaks. So if they spread, close this side and I will take the lane."
We moved my drop-net from the western gap and rigged it above the lane’s open flank, with a trip line across the widest approach. The workshop wall would close the other side. It wasn’t a cage. It only had to ruin the crescent for one charge.
"And the alpha?"
"The alpha comes last, when it thinks I am finished." She said that with no particular weight, as though describing a queue. "You will know when. Be ready to be useful for one second."
I got onto the builders’-merchant roof, a hundred and forty metres west, with the rifle. My other prepared trap—a spring-loaded run of scaffold pipe—waited across the alley behind me.
Ilyana walked to the pedestrian gate and opened it.
She lifted the latch and walked into the compound at the pace of a woman going to work. The first hound saw her at eleven metres.
It hit the shield head-on and she gave up nothing. Her rear foot slid perhaps four centimetres. The animal went sideways into the dirt, came again from the left, and found the shield waiting.
And along the surface of that shield, in the hairline seams I hadn’t been able to read, something pale began to fill.
The first two she endured. She kept the shield between herself and whichever one committed, turning with her whole body—controlled quarter-turns, feet under her, never crossed.
She isn’t fighting them. She’s collecting them.
The alpha stood up on the plinth and howled — two short, one long — and the four-hound group came round the storage units at speed.
That was my cue and I took it.
I put a round into the trailing animal of that group at a hundred and ten metres while it was in the open between the units, and I hit it in the hindquarters, which was not where I was aiming and which did the job anyway; it went down and dragged itself and was out of the fight. The other three broke formation for about two seconds at the noise.
Then they came at her anyway.
Five on one, then, and this is where I stopped being frightened for her and started being frightened of what I was watching.
They had a method. They didn’t all commit — two would go high and hard into the shield to hold her attention while a third came in low at her legs and a fourth tried for the back of her knees, and they cycled it, and it was a genuinely good tactic against a shield bearer with a sword, because a shield bearer with a sword eventually has to open up to kill something.
Ilyana never opened up.
She used the shield’s lower edge like a plough. When something came in low she dropped the rim and let it run into three centimetres of steel, and it came out of that worse than she did. When two hit high she rolled her shoulder into it. When one got round her right and reached her calf and took hold, she turned into it rather than away, and put the whole weight of the shield down onto the join of its neck, and it let go.
Her boots carved two dark channels through the gravel, but each time she drove forward until her heels returned to the marks she’d chosen. She gave them no ground. I watched those marks because counting was the only thing keeping me level.
And the seams in that shield went from a faint pale suggestion to bright white lines, and the shield began to hum in a way I could hear from the roof at a hundred and forty metres.
It’s storing it. It’s taking every single impact and keeping it.
On the plinth the alpha did something new. Three short, evenly spaced.
The five disengaged at once, backed off eight metres, and spread into a crescent.
That was the moment I understood the animal on the plinth was clever. Five hounds arriving across a hundred and eighty degrees could go around any shield ever made.
Ilyana moved first.
She advanced three measured steps into the loading lane. The workshop sealed her left. The storage unit narrowed the front. Two hounds curved for the remaining flank.
The lead flanker hit the trip line.
The drop-net fell between them and Ilyana. It would not hold a hound for long, but it forced both animals inward as they charged. The crescent folded into a wedge too tight to surround her.
Ilyana dropped her weight and brought the shield square.
The first two hit the metal. The next struck their bodies and drove them harder into it; the last pair crashed into the compressed mass from behind. Every line of force ended at the shield face.
The impact reached me as one flat whump, like a door slamming in a much larger building. Her boots ploughed furrows through the gravel without leaving the lane. The seams went from white to something my eyes couldn’t hold.
Full. She had said the reserve was finite, and the shield was full.
And then she gave it back.
She stepped forward into them and drove the shield out from her chest in a short brutal push that had absolutely no elegance in it at all, and everything she had absorbed in four minutes came out of the boss at once.
The three animals pressed directly against the shield stopped existing in any organised way. The two behind them left the ground, struck gravel metres away, and tried to rise on damaged legs. The nearest water tank rang like a bell.
The alpha came off the plinth. Not toward her — sideways, low, behind the tanks, out of my line.
When the dust came down, two ordinary hounds were still moving, both limping. A sixth lay where my bullet had dropped it near the units. Ilyana Crest stood in the lane with the shield seams dark.
She’s empty.
I had about four seconds to enjoy any of that.
The alpha’s head came up behind the tanks and it howled — a long note I’d never once written down — and something changed in the two heavy hounds that had never left the plinth.
They came off it together, and then they split.
One went south down the inside of the fence toward the vehicle gate. The other went north, past the generator house, toward the washed-out corner.
Neither of them looked at Ilyana. Neither of them so much as turned a head toward the woman standing in the middle of the yard who had just killed three of their pack.
Both of them were coming west.
It’s seen me.
It had. Somewhere in the last four minutes one of those animals had looked up at a roofline a hundred and forty metres away and understood what the noise and the flash were, and the flash had gone up the link, and the thing on that plinth had done the arithmetic.
It had left the shield alone and sent both of its elites out of the compound from two different directions, at the man who had been running its battlefield.