Chapter 91 – Not Who, but What

  “There it is,” said Cole, sighting through his rifle at a narrow gap between two massive, obsidian statues several kilometers away. Above it, the prismatic marker for the staircase wavered in the air. Another day of slinking through the sprawling, labyrinthian ruins and avoiding what monsters they could had brought them within sight of a grand, circular structure that reminded him of the Colosseum in Rome. If the building had been ten stories of black obsidian and ringed with statues of dragons.

  “Where the hell did the big guy find that?” asked Howie, peering through a pair of binoculars. “Looks like an arena for kaiju battles.”

  It very well might have been, but the absence of a mist gate similar to the one on the previous floor suggested that whatever guardian typically lurked in the black colosseum currently wasn’t at home. Which was good, because they’d barely survived the last one and there was no local lord with a team of over-leveled goons coming to clear this one out.

  Cole lowered his rifle and turned around. The rest of his team was arrayed behind him on the roof of a building. Ideally, he’d wait a few more hours to keep an eye on the place. Beth was eager to keep climbing, which he didn’t give a shit about. But their heat resistance potions were starting to wear off. And that, he very much cared about. He was starting to drip sweat as the heat went from Texas to Arizona to Qatar. Heat he could handle. Heat while being out of water was another matter. Their surveillance was going to have to get active.

  “Nona,” said Cole, waving her over. She approached at a crouch, careful not to expose herself over the structure’s crenelations. Cole made a knife-hand to the north. “You take the left-side. I’ll take right. Half-klick in each direction, then we come back. If you lose radio, come back sooner. No one stays out of contact from here to the stairs.”

  Nona nodded and scrambled back toward the collapsed edge of the ruin so that she could slide down and sneak off.

  “Just the two of you?” asked Artian.

  Cole tightened his prismatic ape skin cloak. “We’re the best suited to staying stealthy. The rest of you wait here with Beth until we get back.”

  Beth scoffed and gestured out. “It’s right there. We can see it’s only got a few monsters. Let’s just go.”

  Roxy put a hand on her shoulder, but Cole sidled over. “Yeah. We’ve got a great view of it,” he said. He pointed out a tower to the south. “So does the balcony of that tower. So does the roof of the building five-hundred meters past it. So does that temple’s bell-tower. And that genie put us down for hours. Other challengers, or worse, could have stolen a march while we were asleep. Anyone watching is going to see us once we break cover and enter the plaza outside the arena. And if anyone in any of those positions has something that can hit us at range, we’re toast before we hit the gates.”

  “Lady Black,” said Artian, “Believe me, no one is more eager to leave these blistering streets than I. But my companions were, to a man, killed by enemies clever enough to wait until their guard had dropped. One cannot fight enemies both fore and aft.”

  Cole had seen that, himself. Impatient soldiers from another squad ready to move up and secure a compound, not realizing Glefa lurked in structures outside the perimeter with eyes on the entry control points. Fire from the front and rear resulted in six injuries and three pine boxes before Cole’s squad could gain fire superiority and maneuver to assist.

  Beth still didn’t look happy. Being on her own, not integrating into any group beyond the absolute periphery hadn’t yet cemented her lack of foresight’s potential to cause her comrades harm. In her head, she was still the hero clawing her way through hell and it would take more than one genie to completely unfuck that mindset. He met Roxy’s eyes, briefly, and she nodded. The squad’s resident mama bear didn’t need to be told to keep an eye on Beth. She hadn’t been more than three meters from the girl in the last day.

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  Brushing past the pair of them, Cole nodded to Howie and Besson, who would hold this position. A break in the crenelations let him drop down, and from there, he dashed across a narrow street and scrambled up the side of an adjacent structure thanks to enhanced strength and his meteoric middle finger to the concept of gravity. A covered sky bridge led south, across a canal of magma where serpentine forms swam through the molten rock. The heat coming up made his breath catch in his throat—more intense than anything he’d felt since they downed those potions. How long before the air itself became harmful to their health?

  On the other side of the bridge, Cole ascended a squat wall and crouched in the corner of a tower, angling his rifle across at the balcony of the spire he’d pointed out to Beth. The deep shadows of the recessed interior were laid bare thanks to his Acuity, and he spotted movement that caused him to tense up. But a few moments later, several leather-winged creatures the size of eagles took flight from the spire, heading further south, away from him. He let out a breath, dropped down to the south side of the wall, and moved on.

  “Spire clear, continuing,” he mumbled into his radio.

  “Good copy,” came Roxy’s voice. “Nona reports her side clear so far.”

  For good measure, he kept an eye on the looming tower as he crossed through its shadow. The second location he’d pointed out was another half-klick around the perimeter. What might have been a mansion or a banquet hall sloped where the interior had likely crumbled in, looking as though a giant had stepped on the foyer. But the rooftop nearest the arena looked like it was at least in decent shape, and had a stone arcade giving it cover from above as well as a solid vantage point.

  Cole vaulted from one roof to another, over the top of what looked like a person-sized dinosaur, as it clawed at the ground below. He held his breath as his boot skid on loose sand ground down from the stone of the structure, listening to the creature start to sniff the air on the street below.

  While the ambient noise in the city was fairly high, thanks to the hiss and crackle of baking air and the rumble of churning magma, using even his quieter pistol with the silenced barrel would carry at least a couple-hundred meters. But the creature, healthy sense of paranoia of its own, took off down the street and vaulted a magma canal closer to the central plaza before disappearing down an alley.

  Cole relaxed and started to move across the rooftop—but stopped. Something buzzed against his senses. Barely perceptible, but unmistakably there. Like a tripwire that felt like the building potential of an ability being used as he approached the threshold. Every bone in his body was telling him not to take another step further. He moved laterally across the rooftop, skirting the edge of the sensation, never passing over its vague promise of threat. Whatever this thing was, he didn’t know if it was tied to this rooftop, creating a perimeter, or spanning half the city. And he had no way to know.

  Or did he?

  This thing is junk, he remembered Beth saying about his LF analyzer. That’s not how my abilities work at all.

  Cole’s enemy marking let him see their presence not through vision alone, but also through a Lewis Field connection. Well, whatever this thing was, it had to be connected to someone or some thing through the Lewis Field. Could he adjust his ability to detect something hostile other than enemies themselves?

  “I’ve encountered some sort of boundary spell,” said Cole. “Unclear who set it up or why. Investigating.”

  “Be careful,” whispered Roxy, as though whoever was on the other end could hear her through his headset.

  He crept along to a more covered corner, then thought, conceptualizing his intent before burning his ability. Don’t show me who—show me what. What is hostile to me, here?”

  Slowly, a red haze began to spread out ahead of him. It expanded into a crescent moon that curled away on each side of him, wrapping a point somewhere to his 11 o’clock. The area itself gave off a feel of vigilance and anticipation, like a dead-fall trap waiting for an animal to wander in and set it off.

  “Definitely something here,” said Cole. He skirted the edge of the boundary of the tripwire. Monsters snuffling below weren’t setting off whatever this spell was, so he had to assume it was tuned for humans, specifically. Moving another hundred meters showed him enough of the curvature of the area to triangulate where the epicenter probably lay, and it lined up with the rooftop arcade vantage he’d pointed out to Beth. Cole looked around for high ground to the east and spotted a worn statue. He descended from the roof and scrambled across the ground until he reached it, climbing up as he willed his cloak to take on a black, glassy appearance to match its texture.

  The statue, what he took for two leaders embracing, had a depression in one of the crowns that he settled into, taking his snakebite rifle off his pack and peering through the aperture sight. The rooftop arcade seemed to swim closer through the pinhole, filling his entire field of view.

  Time to see who was trying to set a trap. And maybe see about turning it on its head.