The System That Hates Its Owner

Chapter 6: Nothing Between Us

"Run," the hunter said, finally unfreezing. "Get her out of here, I'll hold it…"

"With what?" Ethan snapped. The hunter's hands were empty. No weapon, no visible ability flaring to life, nothing but a man in guild colors staring down something four times his size.

"I don't know yet. Run anyway."

"You said command's not clearing anyone to fight, either."

"Command's not here." The hunter's voice cracked on the last word. "Go. Now."

Ethan ran.

He didn't get far. The street behind the evacuation line dead-ended into a collapsed section of scaffolding, metal and concrete piled too high to climb with a child in his arms and a case on his back. He turned, already knowing what he'd see, and saw it anyway … the thing from the breach, closer now, close enough that its shape stopped being a shape and became teeth, claws, a hide the color of old bruises catching what little light the streetlamps still gave.

Lily made a sound against his shoulder that wasn't quite a scream. He didn't blame her.

"Behind me," he said, setting her down against the scaffolding, putting his own body between her and forty feet of very bad odds. "Stay right there. Don't move, no matter what happens."

"You're not a hunter," she whispered.

"No," Ethan admitted. "I'm really not."

The monster's head swung toward them, nostrils flaring, something in its posture shifting from searching to certain. It had found what it wanted. Ethan had delivered enough packages into dangerous blocks to recognize the specific stillness that came right before something decided to move.

It moved.

He didn't have a plan. He didn't have gear, an ability, or even a weapon better than the pavement under his boots. What he had was twenty-five years of watching things he couldn't afford to fight and learning, out of necessity, exactly which half-second gave you the best chance of not dying in the next one.

He grabbed a loose length of scaffold pipe and swung it into the first claw that reached for him … not to hurt the thing, he knew better than that, just to buy a half-second, to redirect four hundred pounds of momentum by three inches instead of letting it land clean.

It worked, barely. The claw caught his shoulder instead of his chest, and pain exploded through him bright enough to turn the whole street white for a moment.

He didn't go down. He didn't let himself. Twenty-five years of getting back up after smaller hits had taught his body that lesson before his mind had a say in it.

"Ethan!" That was the hunter, somewhere behind him, voice cracking with something between fury and helplessness. "Move, I can't get a clean shot with you in the…"

"Then get one!"

The monster reared back for a second strike, and Ethan realized, with the strange clarity that sometimes showed up right before things went very wrong, that there wasn't going to be a half-second this time. He'd used his one good trick. He didn't have another.

He put himself in front of Lily anyway.

The claw came down.

It felt like the street itself had decided to hit him … a weight and a heat that didn't belong in the same sensation, tearing through his side, lifting him off his feet before dropping him hard enough onto broken concrete that the impact and the wound arrived at his brain in the wrong order, pain first, understanding second.

He heard Lily screaming his name, real screaming this time, not the small frightened sound from before.

He heard the hunter shouting into his comm, something about a man down, something about backup, the words arriving distorted and slow, like they were traveling through water instead of air.

He tried to get up. His body declined the request.

Blood was doing something it shouldn't have been doing this fast, warm and wrong and spreading faster than he could track, and somewhere above him the monster was turning back for a second pass, unhurried, like it already knew this part was finished and was only deciding how to spend the time it had left.

Get up, Ethan told himself. Get up, she's still right there, get up…

His body didn't answer. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, gray creeping in from the edges, the sound of the street fading into something distant and unimportant, like a radio playing in another room.

This is how it ends, some small, terrifyingly calm part of him observed. Powerless, bleeding out on a street, for a delivery job.

The last thing he registered clearly was Lily's face above his … she'd crawled to him, she wasn't supposed to move, why wasn't she staying where he'd told her … tears cutting clean lines through the dust on her cheeks, her small hands pressed against a wound they were never going to be able to close.

"Don't," she was saying, over and over, the word breaking apart each time. "Don't, don't, please don't…"

At least she's still breathing, he thought, and let the gray finish closing in. At least I did that much.

Something shifted, deep inside the dark he was falling into … not a sound, not quite a presence, something colder and older than either, uncoiling in a place that had been empty his entire life.

A single line of text bloomed across the inside of his vision, stark and silent, indifferent to the blood, indifferent to the screaming, indifferent to whether he lived long enough to read the rest of what it had to say.

[SYSTEM ACTIVATED.]