Chapter 13: Combat Contribution Verified
Chapter 13: Combat Contribution Verified
I ran.
I couldn’t outrun it—I’d known that since I saw it accelerate. I wasn’t running to escape. I was running twelve metres to a specific patch of floor, and I only had to be faster than it for the first four.
I made it into the oil. My boots went out from under me, and I took the last two metres on my hip and elbow, and came up hard against the freezer frame with the CO₂ extinguisher already in my hands, because I’d left it there ninety seconds earlier.
The Lurker charged into the oil at full speed.
Its claws found no purchase at all. Its jaw scraped the linoleum, and its whole enormous body slewed sideways with a noise like a piano falling downstairs, and it slid at me—still fast, but skidding and blind-angled—with its mouth open.
I pulled the pin, jammed the horn toward the gape of it, and squeezed.
The extinguisher emptied in a white roaring cone. CO₂ at that range is not gentle. It went into the open mouth and over the nostril slits and across both eyes, and the Lurker’s scream broke into a strangled coughing convulsion. It jerked its head away, snapping at nothing. Frost crusted the soft grey tissue around its eye. Its nostrils clamped shut.
Blood, heat, movement, smell. I’d just taken away two and a half of them.
"LIORA!"
She was already there.
She came in low along the freezer wall on its blinded side and went under the jaw—the soft pouch where the throat met the skull, the part it couldn’t plate because it needed to swallow. Her first knife went into the guard, and she left it there and used it as a handle.
The Lurker started to twist toward her.
It would have got her. A hundred and fifty kilos of head coming around at that distance would have broken her body in half.
I dropped the extinguisher and got both hands on the length of broken retaining strap still hanging off the collapsed rack frame beside me—a two-metre nylon band with a steel hook—, and I threw the hook over the ridge of its upper jaw and hauled.
I have never been strong. I didn’t turn its head. What I did was give it a reason to pull in a direction that wasn’t Liora for about a second and a half, while it decided which of us was the emergency. My boots slid in the oil. I braced against the freezer frame and hauled with my legs, and my back and the entire remaining contents of my willpower, and the strap burned through my palms, and I screamed something that wasn’t a word.
A second and a half was enough.
Liora’s second knife went into the frost-blinded eye and kept going.
The Lurker stopped.
Not dramatically. No shudder, no roar. Its legs simply stopped receiving instructions, and four hundred kilos of scavenger came down on the wet floor and lay there, one back foot twitching for a while afterward like a machine nobody had told.
I sat down in the oil and the glass and the blood. I couldn’t feel my hands.
[Class-Assisted Kill Confirmed.]
[Host remained within combat range.]
[Combat contribution verified.]
[Experience transferred.]
[Level increased.]
[Adrian Vale has reached Level 4.]
The windows stacked up in the corner of my vision, blue and silent and about as emotionally invested as a receipt.
Combat contribution verified. I nearly dislocated both shoulders holding a monster’s mouth shut, and I got contribution.
I opened the allocation panel and put two points into Strength and one into Vitality, because I had nearly died from being weak and I did not need a strategy meeting about it.
Strength: 5
Vitality: 5
Agility: 5
Intelligence: 8
Spirit: 5
Charisma: 100
It felt like standing up too fast in reverse. My breathing evened out. The tremor that had been in my hands for eleven days dropped to almost nothing, and my grip stopped feeling like a suggestion.
It did not heal my split palms or the gash under my ribs. It did not teach me how to fight. I was still a man who had won by pouring cooking oil on a floor.
But I could breathe.
[Active summon synchronisation complete.]
[Manifested Level: 3 → 4]
[Attribute and energy ceilings increased.]
[Existing injuries unchanged.]
[New energy capacity: Unfilled.]
[Duration added: 10% of unanchored D-grade Level 1 duration — 01:30.]
[Remaining timer capped by current unanchored maximum.]
[Manifestation Remaining: 06:48]
"Something happened," Liora said. She was leaning on the freezer frame with her weight on her right leg, blood to the ankle. She rolled her shoulders, and her eyebrows went up. "Something happened to me."
"You went up a level. You’re synced to me." I got my legs under me, fell, and managed it on the second attempt. "And you got about a minute and a half more time."
"Only a minute and a half?" She looked at the corpse. "For that? Insulting."
Then two more windows opened, and I stopped moving.
[Resonance updated.]
Desire: 94 → 95
Trust: 17 → 24
Resonance: 3% → 5%
[Preservation threshold reached.]
[Signature Status: Fading → Preserved.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 5% after an eligible D-grade roll.]
[Permanent contract: Not established.]
[Direct Summoning: Locked.]
"What," Liora said, watching my face. "What is it? Your eyes just did a thing."
She couldn’t see them. That was one of the rules I’d learned since she arrived—the timer, the grade, the three numbers quietly measuring what she thought of me. All of it was mine alone, and there was something obscene about that which I had not yet finished thinking about.
"Your signature," I said. "It’s preserved. Your coordinates, sort of. Where you are in the stack of everything." I rubbed my face and left a smear of blood on it. "It doesn’t mean I can summon you—it says that in actual words. It means that if another Call rolls D grade, you have a five-percent chance of being selected instead of a stranger."
Her tail had stopped moving entirely.
"Slightly," she repeated.
"Slightly," I said. "I’m not going to sell it to you as more than it is. I might be able to find you again. I can’t promise it. I’d be lying, and you’d know, and then you’d have to kill me, and you’re already limping."
Liora laughed. It came out cracked in the middle.
"Gods, you’re a terrible salesman," she said, and pushed off the frame, and started going through the corpse.
The Lurker left four things behind.
Several back plates had come loose at the crushed seam—palm-sized, greenish, absurdly light for how hard they were. A front fang had snapped clean at the root, twenty centimetres of curved yellow-white bone, still warm. A gland at the base of the throat had ruptured under Liora’s knife and stank of ammonia and rot; she pulled a face and said it was worthless.
And in the ruin of its chest cavity, packed among tissue that steamed in the cold air, there was a stone.
It was the size of a plum, dark, and perfectly smooth, and when I picked it up the light in the store bent slightly around it in a way that made my eyes water.
I focused on it deliberately. That was the only way this ever worked—you had to ask, in a specific stupid interior way, like clicking on something.
[D-Grade Rift Core]
Type: Dimensional resource
Condition: Stable
Compatibility detected: Dimensional Summoner
I stared at that last line for two full seconds.
"Adrian." Liora’s voice, flat and unteasing. "Timer."
Six minutes. Right.
We took what mattered. Dense food. Two bottles of water and a third clipped outside the pack. Painkillers and sealed gauze from the wrecked pharmacy shelf. Three Scalejaw plates and the fang, because they were compact and Liora said someone in this world would pay to learn what an armoured monster looked like from the inside. We left the gland. We left most of a fortune in bottled water because I could carry eighteen kilos before my knees started editorialising.
Then we went through the service door, into the corridor behind the freezers, and shut it behind us.