Chapter 78 Cost of Winning

Chapter 78 Cost of Winning
I didn't wait. The moment I had the full picture — two Hunters closing, Ryan down from the tail strike, Kira hit and not moving, the submachine gun empty and no time to reload — I made the calculation in under a second and moved. I activated Shadow Step. The ability pushed my agility past its baseline, the system pumping something into the body's response chain that wasn't quite adrenaline but felt like it. The world didn't slow — that was a myth, the dramatic movie version of enhanced speed. What actually happened was that my own movement became more exact. Every step landed where I put it. Every adjustment happened before the thought completed. I came in fast on the right Hunter, blade up, targeting the neck. The Hunter read the angle. At two meters it opened its mouth and the tongue — dense, muscular, nothing like what the word tongue was supposed to mean — shot out like a compressed spring. It hit the flat of my blade and knocked it wide. The blade caught the Hunter's shoulder instead of the neck, biting into bone, stopping there. The Hunter opened its mouth again. I saw what was coming. I twisted left. The tongue missed my face by four inches and hit the truck door behind me with a sound like a bat hitting a side of meat. I drove the blade deeper into the shoulder joint, working it toward the socket, trying to find the separation point. "Ryan!" I called out. "Get up if you can! Right flank!" --- Ryan had taken the tail strike across his chest. It had sent him into the side of the truck and he had gone down. But he was moving — I could see him in my peripheral vision, rolling to his knees, one arm pressed against his ribs, his face the color of old paper. He got to his feet. The second Hunter was going for Kira. She was down — she had taken a claw swipe across her left shoulder trying to pull Nathan clear of the first attack — and she was on one knee with her pistol up, putting rounds into the second Hunter's face at point-blank range. Every shot was rocking the thing's head back but not enough. The skull structure on a Hunter was dense, layered, built to absorb frontal impact. She needed the side of the skull. The ear cluster. The soft point. "Kira! Left!" I called. She shifted her angle and fired. The Hunter's head snapped hard to the right and it stumbled. Two more shots from her pistol, tight grouping, and it went to one knee. Ava hit it from the other side with three rounds from the submachine gun — she had reloaded while I was in close on the first Hunter, the fastest reload I had seen from anyone in the group — and the combined pressure of five bullets into the same quarter of its skull was finally enough. The second Hunter dropped and stayed down. --- The first Hunter twisted on the blade still embedded in its shoulder. The movement was designed to break the grip — I had seen it before in later loops, the Hunter class's instinctive response to being locked. It worked. The blade torqued out of my hand as the Hunter spun, and suddenly I was inside its reach with no weapon and six hundred pounds of evolved killing biology turning to face me. Its claw came down. I got my right arm up. The impact hit my forearm and drove it into my chest. The force was enormous — I felt things move in my ribs that shouldn't move, a grinding shift that sent white noise through my vision for a half-second. The protective gear held the skin intact, no infection, but the bones underneath it were not in the same configuration they had been a moment ago. I went backward three meters and hit the road hard. The world tilted. I stayed on the ground for exactly one second. One second to let the white noise clear enough to function. Then I was sitting up. Ryan appeared on the Hunter's left. He was moving wrong — one arm not swinging freely, the ribs on that side compromised — but he was moving. He hit the Hunter across the back of the skull with the bat, full force, both hands, everything he had. The sound it made was significant. The Hunter staggered. Nathan came in on the other side with his blade — smaller, faster, working the joint at the right shoulder where my blade had already found the bone — and drove it in hard. The Hunter's right arm dropped. Partially severed. Still attached but not functional. The Hunter pivoted toward Nathan. "Down!" I called. Nathan dropped flat. I had the submachine gun in my left hand — my right hand was wrong, the grip wasn't there — and I came up to one knee and fired from two meters. The barrel was almost touching the Hunter's chest. At that range marksmanship didn't matter. What mattered was the rounds going in and going in fast. Twenty rounds. The gun ran dry. The Hunter's torso was Swiss cheese. Dark blood everywhere. The legs buckled. It dropped onto its side, still trying to reach me with its remaining claw, and I came forward and put three pistol shots through the side of the skull. It stopped. --- I stayed on one knee for a moment. The road was very quiet. I did a damage assessment. My right hand — I could flex the fingers but not grip. Two, maybe three bones compromised. My ribs — the left side, at least two cracked, the grinding sensation with every breath that said something was sitting where it shouldn't. My left arm was functional. My legs were fine. Manageable. Nothing that immediately killed me. I looked around. Ryan was sitting against the second truck's rear wheel. He had one hand pressed flat against his left side, breathing through his teeth, eyes open and tracking. Cracked ribs on that side. He had taken the tail strike direct and it had done work. Kira was standing. Her left shoulder was wrong — the claw had caught her there and the arm was hanging at a bad angle. Dislocated, probably, on top of the fractured ribs she had been managing since the biker fight. Her face was the kind of still that people achieved through complete commitment to not showing pain. She met my eyes. "I'm functional," she said. "Your shoulder—" "I know what it is," she said. "I'll deal with it."