Chapter 29 - The Shards of the Mask

The cloth wrap cinched around Dante's left arm was already soaked in a red patch four fingers wide.

He kept his body crouched low against the boiler's inner curvature, his right hand clamped over the dressing to dull the burn of the graze. His health bar had settled at twenty-six points, but the numbness deadening his left bicep bled into his fine motor control.

"He lost his brass optic," Dante whispered rapidly, holding tight to the mental schematic he had constructed of Crane Tower Four. "The dart's impact sheared the scope mount and vaporized the iron rail. Without magnification, his accuracy with that heavy rifle drops by half beyond a hundred yards."

Maria knelt beside him, her forty-pound greatsword unbuckled from the rear harness, gripped firmly two-handed by the leather-wrapped hilt.

"Are we breaching that tower?"

"We approach along the western support girder," Dante pointed toward the bottom edge of the hatch. "There's a cast-iron drainage flume running beneath the scrap conveyor that ties directly into the crane's foundation. If we crawl through that pipe, his sightline from the gantry is blocked by the conveyor plates."

"What's the gap?" she asked, her tone as rigid as an iron plate.

"The tower stands six hundred feet tall," Dante closed his eyes for half a second, calculating the variables of his newly scribed soul skill. "[Forced Transposition] demands an unobstructed fifteen-meter line and sixty-five Mana. I have to reach the mid-tier staging platform on the crane to rip that bastard off his perch and drop him directly onto your edge."

Maria flashed a grim half-smirk, her knuckles cracking beneath the leather glove.

"Fifty feet is a light sprint for me. Call the drop."

Dante extended his right hand toward the mouth of the boiler.

Angled Runic Barrier.

The sheet of azure light did not rise vertically. It slanted upward at a sixty-degree pitch from the threshold, forming an inclined awning of solid energy shielding the ten feet of open catwalk leading to the iron drainage flume.

"Move!"

Maria charged out of the hatch in a low, explosive sprint.

Her two hundred pounds hammered the metal deck in three heavy strides, diving into the dark mouth of the conduit before the dust from the displaced tarps could settle. Dante trailed right behind, sliding across the iron floor on his side, hunching his back to protect his wounded arm.

An iron-sighted rifle shot hammered the upper slope of Dante's Runic Barrier.

BANG-PING.

The half-inch slug struck compressed ether with a deafening crack. The barrier shivered, shedding motes of blue light that dissolved into the air, but held firm against the kinetic shock, letting Dante scramble into the dark flume with his heels scraping rust.

[-25 MP to maintain barrier.]

[Dante's Current Reserve: 405/510.]

The interior of the flume reeked of stagnant runoff and sulfur slime.

The conduit was cramped, barely four feet in diameter. They advanced on all fours, dragging their knees along the pitted iron. Maria took the lead, sliding the greatsword along the floor before her, her greaves scraping the pipe walls with dull thuds drowned out by the thundering valley pistons outside.

One hundred and sixty feet of crawling later, the flume emptied into a service junction at the base of Crane Four's western pylon.

The tower was a towering lattice of riveted steel girders, with four massive diagonal pylons converging toward the operator cab high above. Every hundred feet, a grated iron catwalk ringed the frame, interconnected by vertical steel ladder rungs.

The sniper was no longer on the summit.

He had descended to the third tier of beams, two hundred and fifty feet up, where the crane's counterweight manifold formed a natural breastwork of half-inch cast iron.

He had abandoned his scopeless long rifle on the upper deck.

In his gloved hands, he held a double-barreled lever-action carbine, a mid-range trench gun designed to chamber heavy lead buckshot packed with mining black powder.

The left side of his face was bleeding profusely from beneath the rim of his iron half-mask. The searing heat of Dante's dart had scorched his leather cowl and embedded jagged brass shards into his cheek, forcing him to keep his left eye squinted shut so the blood wouldn't blind him entirely.

He caught the scrape of metal on iron at the base of the western pylon.

They came up through the conveyor flume.

The man spat a thick glob of blood through the lower vents of his mask. He knew that if he allowed them onto the primary ladder, his vertical advantage would dissolve in the tangled web of girders.

He drew two cast-iron cylinders from his toolbelt.

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They were improvised fragmentation ordnance fashioned from hollowed pressure gauge housings packed with blasting powder and one-inch steel ball bearings, primed by manual friction matches.

He struck the primer match against the rusted iron girder.

A yellow spark hissed down the short fuse.

Leaning out over the catwalk railing two hundred and fifty feet up, he hurled the iron canister straight down the ladderwell where Maria's head was just emerging.

"Look out!" Dante shouted from the ladder foot.

Maria saw the black cylinder tumbling through the void between the structural girders.

She made no move to retreat into the drainage flume.

[Unshakable Stance] planted the heels of her heavy boots into the iron brackets of the ladder. She hoisted the forty-pound greatsword vertically with her right hand, using its four-handspan-wide flat as a solid steel shield covering her face and breastplate.

The ordnance detonated twelve feet above the tip of her weapon.

BOOOM.

The shockwave of compressed blasting powder rocked the tower's framework, choking the air in black smoke and the acrid reek of fresh sulfur.

Scores of steel ball bearings peppered the flat of Maria's blade with a deafening barrage of ricochets. Three stray bearings skipped past the edge, one glancing off her left greave and two ripping deep gouges through the meat of her right thigh.

[-18 HP to Maria.]

[Maria's Health Points: 142/160.]

Maria didn't even wince at the sting in her leg.

Blood welled hot through her denim pants, but the dense, corded muscle tissue of her thirty-two Constitution clamped down around the lacerations through pure muscular compression.

She snatched the second falling cylinder out of the air with her free left hand, intercepting it before its fuse burned down, and whipped the iron bomb back toward the heights with all thirty-three points of Strength, right at the girder where smoke was curling.

The sniper had to throw himself flat against the grated deck to avoid being shredded by his own ordnance.

The canister detonated thirty feet above his head, blowing out two crane ventilation louvers and showering him in soot and shrapnel that battered the twin barrels of his lever-action gun.

Dante capitalized on the distraction of the blast to vault up the first sixty feet of the iron ladder.

He didn't need two good hands to climb.

[Instant Anchor Scribing activated.]

[Mana Cost: 30 MP.]

With the algorithm hardcoded into his cognition, Dante had no need for physical chalk. He slapped his right palm against the tower's master beam, and a glowing sapphire ring flared instantly across the rusted iron, providing an arcane launchpad that catapulted his light frame twenty feet straight up onto the first diagonal crossbeam.

The gap between them and the sniper had collapsed to a hundred and thirty feet.

The masked man dragged himself upright, his left shoulder bumping hard against the crane's winch drum. His carbine had jammed with grit from the blast, so he tossed the dead weapon to the catwalk deck and drew an eight-inch octagonal-barreled heavy six-shooter in brushed steel.

He leveled the long muzzle downward, firing blind through the gaps in the iron grating.

BANG. BANG.

The heavy rounds gouged sprays of rust inches from Maria's head as she ascended the diagonal struts with the terrifying agility of her twenty-six Dexterity. With the greatsword sheathed across her back, she used both hands to haul herself along the angle irons, leaping from truss to truss with a heavy cadence that set the whole crane humming.

Dante hit the intermediate platform, exactly seventy feet below the sniper's redoubt.

The youth was gasping for air, left arm crusted in dried blood, his lungs working overtime, but his mind functioned with the razor clarity of thirty-four Intelligence.

He stood balanced on a one-foot-wide steel beam.

The sniper leaned out over the upper catwalk railing to level his third revolver shot straight at Dante's forehead.

Their sightline was clear. No steam drifted between them.

The gunman slipped his forefinger over the trigger.

Dante did not retreat. He raised his right arm straight up, extending his index finger directly toward the eye slits of the iron mask.

Distance resolved on Dante's retina: twenty-one linear meters.

Still beyond the fifteen-meter ceiling of [Forced Transposition].

Well within range of my dart.

Dante spared no Mana.

[Casting: Piercing Aether Dart.]

[Mana Cost: 50 MP.]

[Dante's Current Reserve: 325/510.]

The blue radiance surging from Dante's fingertip was no flickering spark. It was a needle-thin spear of hyper-compressed energy, flaring with a brilliance that illuminated every rusted rivet on the tower.

The bolt lanced upward, crossing the expanse before the hammer of the man's revolver could finish cocking backwaard.

CRACK-SHATTER.

The aether bolt struck the dead center of the sniper's iron mask.

Half-inch cast iron could not withstand fifty points of focused Mana concentrated into a two-millimeter impact vector.

The mask shattered into four jagged chunks of twisted metal, unveiling the face of what appeared to be a young man in his early twenties, possessing pallid skin lined with chemical burn scars, an arachnid mouth, and alien, multi-faceted eyes that resembled spider clusters, yet unlike anything Dante or Maria had ever cataloged.

The concussive force snapped the man's head back violently.

The heavy revolver tumbled from his gloved grip, plummeting through the open framework to vanish into the abyss below with a distant metallic chime.

The gunman fell on his back across the grating, both hands clutching his shattered nose and lips mangled by flying iron shards, letting out a guttural howl of agony that rattled along the support beams.

Dante lowered his right arm, panting hot breath through his teeth with a sharp ache flaring in his newly mended collarbone.

He looked up.

Maria had already scaled past the intermediate platform.

The girl blew past Dante without pausing, her right hand drawing the forty-pound greatsword from her back in one seamless, savage sweep that parted the air with a clean ring of steel.

"My turn," she growled through clenched teeth, her brown eyes flashing with that same dark, smoldering rim Dante had witnessed within the Black Smelter.

She dug her boots into the final ladder rungs, charging up the remaining fifty feet toward the disarmed man sprawled on the catwalk above.