Death's Ultimate Upgrade

Chapter 11: Blood on the Water

The hiss of pressurized gas cut through the canal gloom a millisecond before the arc-harpoon cleared the catwalk.

"Left!" Nyvara shoved Kaelion sideways into the sludgy canal wall.

The harpoon punched through the concrete inches from his temple, discharging a web of violent blue electrical arcs that boiled the filthy water around their boots. Steam hissed into the chill air, smelling of burnt oil and cooked moss.

"Too slow!" Kaelion growled, lunging off the slick masonry.

"I saved your head, you ingrate!" Nyvara vaulted over a rusted drainage baffle, her twin daggers snapping down into reverse grips. "Three on the catwalk, two flanking the sluice gate! Don't let them ground their wires in the pool!"

"I've got the flankers!"

Kaelion exploded forward. His boots tore through the chemical sludge, kicking up greasy spray. The world stretched, decelerating into jagged, hyper-vivid frames. He could see the lead scav-tracker—a jagged silhouette clad in patchwork hazard plating—scrambling to rack another barbed bolt into his heavy pneumatic launcher.

Kaelion saw the finger tighten on the release lever. He saw the metallic twitch of the locking latch.

Step, pivot, dip.

The bolt snapped past his ear, missing by a razor’s edge. Before the scav could cycle the chamber, Kaelion crossed five yards of open water and slammed his bare palm straight into the man's breastplate.

Crack.

The impact vibrated through Kaelion's forearm like a hammer hitting an anvil. The scavenger's makeshift chest piece caved inward, the hydraulic dampener behind the steel buckling instantly. The tracker flew backward, crashing into the rusted iron sluice with a wet, hollow crunch before slumping into the dark water.

"One down!" Kaelion yelled, rolling his shoulder. His knuckles burned, skin intact, but the deep bone beneath his wrist throbbed with a dull, sickening ache. "Feels like punching a bulk freight container."

"Quit whining and duck!" Nyvara’s warning came in a breathless shriek.

A weighted shock-maul swung out from behind a moss-covered conduit, aimed directly at Kaelion’s ribs.

He saw the attack coming. His enhanced mind mapped the arc, calculated the trajectory, and registered the jagged teeth welded to the maul's striking face. His brain told his torso to twist out of the way.

His boots, bogged down in three inches of dense industrial silt, disagreed.

THUD.

The maul slammed flush into Kaelion’s left flank.

The kinetic force didn't break his skin. The golden filament running beneath his epidermis flared blindingly under the impact, absorbing the direct shear force and keeping his ribs from snapping like dry twigs. But the raw kinetic energy didn't vanish—it plowed directly into his internal organs.

Air tore out of his lungs in a violent rasp. His vision flashed a brilliant, nauseating white.

"Kaelion!" Nyvara’s voice echoed as if from the far end of an exhaust tunnel.

"I’m... fine!" he choked out, tasting hot iron on the back of his tongue.

"You're an idiot who just took an industrial sledgehammer to the liver!" She bounded off the drainage pipe, her right blade burying itself into the neck seal of the scavenger who had struck him. She twisted the hilt, pulled the blade free with a wet hiss, and planted her heel in the dying man’s sternum to kick herself clear. "Move! Catwalk snipers are reloading!"

Kaelion dropped to one knee in the freezing current, clutching his left side. His skin wasn't pierced. There was no open gash. Yet inside his chest, his lung felt bruised to the core, burning with every agonizing intake of sulfur-tainted air.

The tissue doesn't tear, he realized, gritting his teeth until his jaw ached, but the shock wave still rattles the meat.

"Get up, Kaelion!" Nyvara shouted, throwing a flash-fuse onto the upper catwalk.

A sharp bang and a blinding burst of white magnesium light shattered the gloom above. The two scav-trackers on the metal grating shrieked, clutching their scorched visors and firing their harpoon guns blindly into the dark. Spikes chewed into the concrete ceiling, raining jagged chunks of rock into the stagnant water.

"Get up!" she repeated, grabbing the collar of his jacket and hauling him upright with surprising leverage. "More coming down the intake pipe! Zarek's bounty must have promised them half the lower district for our heads!"

"I'm up," Kaelion rasped, forcing his legs to straighten. The golden light beneath his skin flickered erratically along his ribs, pulsing with a deep, furious heat as his cellular structure worked overtime to repair the bruised marrow. "I'm up. Who's next?"

"The brute in the lock-gate," Nyvara pointed with a blood-slick blade. "He’s got an arc-shield."

A massive figure dropped from the ceiling access chute, landing in the canal with a concussive splash that sent a wave of dirty water crashing against their waists. The man stood nearly seven feet tall, his torso encased in heavy mining exo-frames, a crackling riot shield locked onto his left arm and a whirling rotary saw humming in his right.

"Bounty says alive preferred, dead accepted!" the brute bellowed, his voice distorted by a cracked rebreather. "Dead is a whole lot lighter to carry!"

"He's aiming for you," Nyvara said, dropping into a low combat crouch. "Draw his shield high. I'll take his hamstring hydraulics."

"No," Kaelion spat a glob of crimson into the water. "If you get close to that saw, you'll be diced before you hit the deck. I'll break the frame."

"Are you insane? You just took a blunt-force shock to the ribs and your eyes are bloodshot!"

"Then watch me do it with my eyes closed!"

Kaelion surged forward before Nyvara could grab him.

The brute laughed, revving the circular blade until the teeth screamed in a blinding blur of friction and sparks. "Come get ground down, stray!"

Kaelion didn't slow down. He read the swing before the brute even shifted his weight. The exo-frame's servos gave a high-pitched whine half a second before the arm moved.

There.

The whirring blade slashed downward in a diagonal cleave intended to split him from shoulder to hip. Kaelion sidestepped—barely two inches of clearance—feeling the rush of wind and flying rust graze his cheek.

With his right hand, he caught the scavenger's wrist—not the steel cuff, but the pressurized hydraulic cylinder driving the blade.

"What the—" the brute grunted, trying to force the blade down into Kaelion’s neck.

Kaelion squeezed.

The gold beneath his fingernails burned white-hot. Metal groaned under the impossible hydraulic pressure of his grip. The reinforced copper line burst, spraying hot synthetic fluid across their faces.

"My turn," Kaelion muttered.

He drove his forehead directly into the bridge of the brute's rebreather.

SMACK.

The steel mask shattered. The brute staggered backward into the canal wall, his rotary saw dropping uselessly into the mud. But the brute didn't go down—he roared in agony, swing his heavy shock-shield around like a battering ram, catching Kaelion square across the jaw.

The world tilted ninety degrees.

Kaelion crashed sideways into the water, the taste of blood exploding across his gums. His jaw felt unhinged, his teeth rattling in their sockets. His enhanced frame held the bone together, preventing a fracture, but the sheer concussive impact sent sharp, jagged needles of pain drilling straight into his brainstem.

"Kaelion!"

A silver flash cut through the dark.

Nyvara cleared the water in a single, fluid leap. She landed squarely on the brute's broad shoulders, wrapping her legs around his neck. Her left dagger found the exposed joint beneath his helmet, driving deep into the cervical harness.

The brute stiffened, let out a wet, gurgling choke, and collapsed forward into the canal, throwing up a massive spray of sludge as he hit the bottom.

Nyvara rolled off the falling giant, landing lightly on a concrete ledge, her chest heaving, her dark hair plastered to her forehead with sweat and canal filth. She wiped her blade on her pant leg and turned a fierce, furious gaze down at Kaelion.

"Get out of the water," she ordered, her voice trembling with adrenaline. "Now."

Kaelion pushed himself up on trembling palms. His left side felt like it was encased in a block of burning ice, and his jaw clicked nauseatingly when he breathed. "Did... did you get him?"

"I got him," she snapped, splashing through the shallows to reach him. She grabbed his arm, slinging it over her shoulder, and hauled him up onto the dry walkway. "You absolute reckless maniac. What were you thinking?"

"The reflexes worked," Kaelion muttered, leaning heavily against the concrete wall. "I saw every strike. I knew where the blade was going before he even swung it."

"And your body?" Nyvara demanded, her hand roughly probing his left ribs.

Kaelion hissed, recoiling from her touch. "Hurts. A lot."

"Of course it hurts!" she barked, shining her small palm-light over his torso. "Look at this. Your skin is completely unmarked, but there is massive subcutaneous hemorrhaging underneath. You're bruising in layers. Your body absorbed the full kinetic payload without bleeding out, which means your internal tissues took the entire brunt of the shock wave!"

"Better than losing an arm," Kaelion said through clenched teeth.

"Barely!" She pulled an emergency stim-injector from her tactical vest and jammed it into his trapezius.

Kaelion gasped as the cold, chemical cocktail flooded his bloodstream, numbing the violent throbbing in his jaw and ribs, though the deep exhaustion in his core remained untouched.

"That’s military-grade coagulant and localized pain blocker," Nyvara said, pocketing the empty tube. "It won't fix torn muscle fibers, and it sure as hell won't repair the metabolic damage from whatever that flare did to your DNA. If you take another hit like that from an iron bar, your liver is going to liquefy inside your indestructible skin."

"Good to know," Kaelion rasped, testing his jaw. It still clicked, but the sharp edges of the agony had dulled to a low hum. "We need to clear out. Those flash-fuses gave away our exact sector coordinates."

"Listen," Nyvara said, holding up a single finger.

From the far end of the canal conduit, past the shattered sluice gate, the low, mechanical rumble of motorized treads vibrated through the floor plates.

"Drones?" Kaelion asked.

"Worse," Nyvara whispered, her eyes hardening as she checked the charge on her sidearm. "Scav-haulers. Heavy scav-rigs. The rest of the pack knows we're bogged down in the ditch. If they seal the emergency spillways, they can flood this entire quadrant with chemical runoff in three minutes."

"Where's the nearest dry exit?"

"Three hundred meters north," Nyvara said, pointing toward a half-collapsed maintenance tunnel marked with a faded, corroded red glyph. "Old sector emergency route. It leads up into the sub-levels beneath District 9."

"Is it safe?"

"Nothing down here is safe, Kaelion," Nyvara said grimly, picking up his dropped combat blade and shoving it into his hand. "But my old squad used a maintenance bunk near that junction as an off-grid cache. If the locks haven't been scavenged, we can seal the blast door behind us and buy ourselves an hour."

"Then let's run," Kaelion said, taking a step forward. His boots felt like they weighed fifty pounds each, his internal organs protesting every stride, but the golden light under his skin steadily hummed, fighting off the trauma. "Before the next welcoming party arrives."

Nyvara didn't answer. She took the lead, moving through the ankle-deep muck with silent, predatory speed.

Behind them, the darkness of the Iron Ditch began to glow with the harsh, red optical beams of approaching heavy-tread scav-rigs, their engines roaring like hungry beasts through the flooded iron veins of the city.