Hidden Class

Chapter seven:Scorched Plating

The sound got louder before it got clearer, which Kade decided was probably not a good sign.

He followed it through two blocks of what used to be a residential street, houses with their roofs peeled back like the lids of tin cans, front yards full of the same fine gray ash that seemed to settle over everything a kill left behind, and by the third block he could hear, underneath the growl-groan sound, something wetter, more rhythmic, a sound his body understood as chewing before his mind caught up and confirmed it.

He stopped at the corner of a house with half its siding gone and looked around the edge of it.

The thing in the yard beyond was bigger than anything he'd seen since the sky broke, low and heavy on four thick legs, its body somewhere between a boar and something that had never existed before that morning, tusks curved and yellow, hide the mottled gray-brown of old bruising. It had something pinned under one foreleg, feeding, and Kade made himself not look too closely at what the something was, because it didn't matter now, and looking would only cost him focus he needed.

SALVAGE: PROXIMITY DETECTION ACTIVE. TARGET ANALYSIS AVAILABLE.

He hadn't known the ability could do that. He held still, crouched at the corner of the ruined house, and let his attention settle on the thing the way the rectangle seemed to want him to, and a smaller window opened at the edge of his vision, easy to miss if he hadn't been looking for exactly this kind of surprise since the warehouse.

TARGET: TUSKBACK BOAR (MINOR THREAT).

ESTIMATED COMBAT VIABILITY: LOW FOR SOLO ENGAGEMENT.

NOTE: TARGET CARRIES RECOVERABLE MATERIAL. QUALITY: MODERATE.

Low for solo engagement. Kade read that twice, in case the rectangle was being generous, and decided it probably wasn't, given that every other assessment it had offered him so far had erred toward blunt honesty rather than comfort.

He thought about walking away. It would have been the reasonable thing, the thing Halden would have told him to do, the thing that kept a man with no combat ability breathing another day in a world that had already made its opinion of his class clear. But he thought, too, about five for five, about a class the whole warehouse had laughed at that had never once failed him when he actually asked something of it, and about the particular ache of being the person a group left behind without meaning to, and wanting, for once, to arrive somewhere on his own strength instead of catching up to someone else's.

He didn't have a weapon. He had Scorched Plating, one use, untested outside the quiet of a mattress store the night before, and he had whatever the last five fragments had given him that he hadn't yet found a use for.

He also had, sitting near the edge of the yard, half buried in ash and rubble, a length of rebar not unlike the one that had given him his first fragment, snapped clean at one end into something almost like a point.

It wasn't a plan so much as the outline of one, but Kade had built a career, before the sky broke, out of making a shift's worth of impossible logistics work with whatever was actually sitting on the floor, and this didn't feel, in its bones, all that different.

He moved low along the side of the house, keeping the boar's bulk between himself and its head for as long as the angle allowed, and closed the distance to the rebar without triggering more than a flicker of attention from the creature, still absorbed in its meal. He closed his hand around the metal, felt its rough, cold weight settle into his palm, and thought, deliberately, the way he'd thought yes to the fusion the day before, Scorched Plating. Activate.

Heat bloomed under his skin, not painful, closer to standing too near a fire on a cold day, and a faint shimmer he could just barely see out of the corner of his eye settled over his forearms, the parts of him he'd be using to hold a piece of scrap metal against something with tusks built for tearing.

The boar noticed him at eleven feet, head coming up fast, small black eyes finding him with a speed that made his whole plan feel, for one very long second, like the worst idea he'd had since the sky broke.

It charged.

Kade did not run. He'd thought about running, in the half second between the boar noticing him and the boar committing to the charge, and dismissed it fast, because four legs would outrun two every time on open ground, and the only chance he had was the same chance he'd had his whole working life: knowing exactly where to stand so that the thing barreling toward him hit the part of the plan built to take the hit.

He planted his feet at the last possible moment, angled the rebar low, and let the boar's own weight do the work his body alone never could have managed, driving the sharpened end up under its jaw as it lowered its head to gore him. The impact threw him sideways, hard, his shoulder catching the dirt in a way that would have dislocated something if Scorched Plating hadn't dulled the worst of it into a deep, manageable ache instead of a fracture, and the boar screamed, high and furious, rearing back with the rebar still lodged in the soft place under its jaw.

It didn't die. Kade understood, scrambling backward across the ash-covered ground, that it wasn't going to die from one lucky strike with a piece of scrap metal, and that the next several seconds were going to decide whether five for five stayed a number worth being proud of or became the last number he ever counted.

The boar came again, slower this time, favoring the side of its jaw where the rebar still hung, and Kade, out of options that involved metal, did the only other thing he had.

He grabbed a fistful of ash and loose rubble off the ground and threw it, hard, into the thing's small black eyes.

It wasn't elegant. It wasn't the kind of move that got sung about in whatever stories people would eventually tell about the early days of the collapse. But the boar flinched, head jerking sideways, and in the half second that bought him, Kade closed the distance instead of retreating, grabbed the exposed end of the rebar still lodged in its jaw, and drove it the rest of the way through with both hands and the full, desperate weight of his body behind it.

The scream that followed was shorter than the first one. Then the boar's legs folded, and it went down into the ash it had been standing in, and didn't get back up.

Kade knelt there for a long moment, breathing hard, both hands still locked around a length of rebar buried in a creature that could have killed him in the first three seconds if his aim had been an inch wrong, and let himself feel, just for that moment, something he hadn't let himself feel since the sky broke.

Not triumph, exactly. Something quieter than that. Something closer to proof.

The boar dissolved into ash the way everything did, and his rectangle flickered, patient, unhurried, exactly the way it had flickered over every piece of wreckage he'd stopped for that whole long, lonely day.

KILL CONFIRMED. SALVAGE TRIGGERED.

FRAGMENT AVAILABLE: [BRUTE FORCE — MODERATE].

RECLAIM?

Moderate. Not damaged, not this time. He looked at the word for a long moment, the first fragment the rectangle had offered him that didn't carry the qualifier he'd started to associate, quietly, with his entire class.

Yes, he thought, and closed his hand around what was left of the ash, and felt something new settle into place behind his sternum, cleaner than anything that had come before it.

Five for five had just become six.