Chapter 28 - Ballistics and Ether

Striking their camp inside the hollow boiler demanded forty minutes of hard labor.

Maria used an open-ended wrench to back out the thirty pressure clamps securing the vulcanized tarps, rolling the heavy fabric into two long bundles bound with rubber strapping. Dante finished lashing the four rucksacks atop the pine pallet: two were crammed with one hundred and thirty pounds of copper cores and refined brass ingots, while the other two held the remaining dehydrated rations, hand tools, and conductive chalk kits.

The day was clear by Piston Gorge standards. The steam fog had settled into the lower troughs of the drainage channels, leaving nearly a thousand feet of visibility between the structural trusses.

"Grab the end of the line," Dante said, slinging the strap of the first copper pack over his right shoulder.

Maria was already outside the circular boiler hatch, standing on the narrow iron catwalk leading to the cliffside ladder. Her brigandine was buckled snug to her chest, iron greaves strapped to her shins, and the forty-pound greatsword locked into the diagonal harness across her back.

Dante took his first step past the boiler rim, hefting the second rucksack with his left hand.

The warning came without an audible report.

A dry crack, faster than the mechanical rotation of the valley gears, sliced across the catwalk.

CRACK-THWACK.

The half-inch hardened lead slug whipped past an inch from Dante's jaw.

The round failed to center his chest only because he had pitched his torso forward at the precise millisecond of the trigger pull to hoist the pack strap off the deck. The bullet tore through the left sleeve of his heat-resistant leather vest, shearing away a strip of skin and meat before slamming into the boiler's four-inch steel rim.

The impact of the heavy rifle slug against cast iron threw off a spray of orange sparks, shedding a jagged metal ricochet that whined into the chasm below.

[-8 HP to Dante.]

[Dante's Health Points: 26/34.]

Dante staggered back two stumbling paces, his left arm going numb from the searing graze as hot blood ran down his fingers.

"Dante!"

Maria reacted before the echo of the gunshot could even reverberate off the canyon walls.

[Rapid Intervention activated.]

The burst of her twenty-five-foot dash turned the girl into a moving rampart of muscle. She didn't waste motion reaching for her sword. Seizing the collar of Dante's vest with her right hand, she dragged his frame inside the boiler cylinder with the full leverage of her thirty-three Strength.

The two of them tumbled together across the pine pallet floor.

A second round slammed into the exterior rim of the hatch the instant she cleared the doorway.

PING.

The slug punched a crater the size of a teacup into the cast-iron threshold, spraying hot metal shavings over the rolled tarps in the corner.

"Stay down!" Maria bellowed, pressing Dante's head against the floorboards as she shifted her mass against the curved hull, where four inches of solid steel guaranteed impenetrable cover against armor-piercing fire.

Dante held his breath, clamping his right hand over the gash on his left arm to stem the blood dripping onto the pallet.

The pain was sharp, but his thoughts remained ice cold.

With thirty-four Intelligence and twenty-six Wisdom, ballistic data resolved across his retina automatically.

He inspected the impact crater left by the first shot on the exterior rim of the boiler hatch. The gouge in the metal was an oblong oval, dipping downward at a forty-two-degree angle, its molten lead lip curled strictly toward the south-southeast.

Elevated firing angle.

Approximate range: eight hundred feet.

Elevation: six hundred feet above our catwalk level.

The profile of Crane Tower Four, the same rusted iron superstructure he had studied through the steam haze two days prior, snapped into his mind with the precision of a surveyor's map.

"It's the crane," Dante ground out, blood seeping through his sleeve. "Top of hoist tower number four. Concealed behind the ventilation housing."

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Maria drew the greatsword from her back with a dry scrape of leather. Her brown eyes were pinned to the circular hatch, her jaw clenched so hard the muscles along her cheeks twitched.

"Who is the bastard?"

"Not a construct," Dante grabbed a strip of clean linen from his pack and whipped it tight around his wounded arm, tying the knot with his teeth. "Constructs don't field bolt-action rifles chambering hardened lead. It's a person. A poacher or a Legion scout."

"I'm climbing that tower and breaking both his legs," she shifted her weight to stand, knees flexing to vault across the external gantry.

"Don't move!" Dante yanked hard on the strap of her greave. "He sits eight hundred feet up with an anti-material barrel. Step one foot onto that open catwalk and he'll core your breastplate before you reach the first rung of the ladder. His lane of fire commands our entire doorway."

Maria growled low in her throat, banging the hilt of her sword against the wooden pallet in frustration.

"So we sit trapped like rats until our rations dry up?"

"No," Dante closed his eyes slowly, feeling his reserve of five hundred and ten Mana burning within his soul core. "He thinks he has us pinned because he thinks a Summoner's effective range caps at fifty feet."

High up in the superstructure of Crane Four, the man in the iron half-mask worked the bolt of his rifle.

CLACK-CLACK.

The spent brass fifty-caliber casing kicked clear of the receiver, landing with a light clink onto the gray tarp stretched over the catwalk grating. He drove the bolt forward with the heel of his gloved hand, feeding a third armor-piercing cartridge into the brushed-steel chamber.

He never took his eye from the brass optic.

The sniper vented a slow breath through his mask vents, an edge of irritation prickling his chest.

Missed by an inch.

He had spent five days logging the operational rhythm of their redoubt. He knew the boy was the weak link: unarmored, physically sluggish, possessing a frail build that would crumple under the hydrostatic shock of a heavy slug through the torso.

His plan was simple: drop the boy on the threshold, bait the girl into panic to retrieve the corpse, and put two rounds through her knee joints the moment she stepped out onto the catwalk.

Yet the youth had leaned forward at the exact instant of the sear break.

The marksman tweaked the vernier ring of his optic, pinning his crosshairs over the circular boiler hatch eight hundred feet down.

His vantage was impregnable.

He commanded a six-hundred-foot vertical vantage above their catwalk, sheltered behind half-inch steel ventilation cowling and camouflaged by a tarp matching the rust of the master girders. Scaling the crane tower required crossing three flights of exposed external stairs squarely within his field of fire.

If the girl tried a rush with her sword, he had a clear sightline to empty his magazine into her skull. If they stayed holed up inside, the ambient heat of the canyon and lack of water would do his dirty work within forty-eight hours.

He needed only to wait for thirst or desperation to present the first silhouette at the hatch.

He rested his gloved finger against the two-stage trigger, breathing in the measured cadence of a hunter who owned all the time in the world.

Steam drifting from the canyon floor washed over the boiler entrance for three seconds.

When the greasy vapor thinned, the sniper spotted neither a rifle barrel nor the reflection of the girl's cuirass.

He saw a spark.

It was not the reddish flash of igniting propellant, nor the yellow plume of an automaton's torch.

It was a pinpoint of azure radiance, condensed to the width of a needle tip, burning in the shadows on the left flank of the hatch.

The man frowned behind his iron half-mask.

What does this runt think he's doing at that range?

Tier Two magic had no reach at two hundred yards. Every veteran hunter on the Plain of Iron Souls knew that mid-tier casters needed to close within thirty paces before their bolts unraveled in the sulfur-heavy atmosphere.

Only those entities can break that ceiling, and even then... it's been ages. There's nothing that kid can do-

The blue pinprick didn't expand.

It simply vanished.

In the following millisecond, the sonic boom of high-pressure air displacement detonated in the sniper's face.

ZUUUM-CRASH.

The projectile of concentrated ether suffered no ballistic drop on its ascent.

Driven by Dante's thirty-four Intelligence and eighty Mana dumped into a single pressurized lance, the [Concentrated Aether Dart] spanned eight hundred feet in less than a quarter of a second.

The strike struck the cast-iron crane railing exactly four inches to the left of the brass scope.

The impact was so devastating that the two-inch iron rail vaporized in a cloud of blinding sparks and molten slag.

The concussive shockwave of detonating ether sheared the scope clean off the receiver, spraying shattered optical glass and scorching brass shrapnel across the left side of the sniper's mask.

"Argh!"

The sniper dropped the rifle onto the metal deck, slamming back against the ventilation housing with gloved hands clawing at his left eye.

The heat of the arcane detonation scorched the leather of his hood, and blood welled thick from beneath the rim of his iron mask, dripping onto the gray tarp.

He stared at the slagged section of railing beside his head with his good eye wide in absolute shock.

The iron glowed white-hot, venting smoke thick with the reek of ozone.

That shot came straight from the boiler.

He calculated my firing vector from the angle of the ricochet.

He knows the exact girder I'm lying on.

The man swallowed dry, his heart hammering against his ribs with a violence he hadn't experienced in over a decade.

His positional superiority had dissolved under a single lance of blue light.

He dragged his mangled rifle close with one hand, crawling sideways across the grating to break line of sight with that circular hatch far below.

The hunt had unraveled before his first spent casing had even cooled upon the iron of the plain.