Chapter 51 - Friction and Gravel

The interior courtyard of townhouse forty-two was sheltered from the street wind by its thirteen-foot walls of dark basalt.

Across the slag cobblestones, Dante had laid out a thick, thirteen-foot-wide vulcanized tarp, its corners weighed down by twenty-pound iron blocks to keep it from skidding over the stones.

Maria was not wielding her forty-pound greatsword this morning.

She wore only black compression shorts and a reinforced athletic top, her bare feet planted squarely on the tarp, her hands wrapped in raw cotton tape halfway up her forearms. Sweat coated the tanned skin of her broad back and shoulders, dripping onto the floor with every bob and weave she threw into the empty air.

Dante stood four paces back, dressed in sweatpants and a loose gray shirt that left his neck and arms unhindered.

He wore the brass ring on his right middle finger, though the blue quartz focal stone sat dark and unlit.

"One more time," Dante said, his voice carrying its usual analytical calm. "Without using [Lead Impact]. I want to gauge the response threshold of my micro-barrier against a mid-speed grapple charge."

"Mid-speed for me is a full sprint for you, bighead," she answered, popping her knuckles with a dry snap. "If I drive in with my shoulder locked, you're going to end up embedded in the stone wall."

"I have twelve Constitution now," Dante adjusted his footing on the canvas. "I can take the deceleration. Come straight in."

Maria didn't wait for a second invitation.

She bent her knees, dug her toes into the vulcanized fabric, and launched forward.

She didn't trigger [Rapid Intervention], but her baseline acceleration backed by twenty-six Dexterity cleared the twelve-foot gap in under half a second. Her two-hundred-pound frame drove forward with her right shoulder dipped, targeting the center of Dante's chest in a standard infantry takedown tackle.

Dante reacted with the reflex of someone who had spent the last week drilling short-range triggers.

[Skill Activated: [Instant Anchor Scribing].]

[Mana Cost: 30 MP.]

The ring of sapphire light did not manifest on the ground. He projected a flat plane of force two inches off the deck directly into the path of Maria's lead step, forming an ether step-plate right in her stride.

Maria had already anticipated the trick.

She had seen him pull that exact feint against the Hydraulic Piercer back in the gorge. Rather than planting her full weight on the barrier, she skimmed the outer edge of her foot along the force field to vault laterally, torquing her torso mid-air with agility that defied her bulk.

She landed on the tarp, clearing the ward on his right flank, reaching her open left hand out to snare the collar of Dante's shirt.

Dante attempted to pivot back on his heel.

Yet the physical disparity between nine Strength and thirty-three Strength permitted zero margin of recovery within three feet.

Maria's wrapped fingers latched into the fabric of his collar. At that precise instant, her right foot, slick with sweat, caught a stray smear of mineral grease that had dripped from the workshop chains near the edge of the mat.

Her heel lost purchase completely.

The momentum of her two hundred pounds carried forward on raw inertia, dragging Dante's light frame down with her by his shirt.

Dante tried to deploy a cushioning barrier against the floor, but their physical collision scrambled his Mana projection vectors instantly.

They slammed together onto the vulcanized rubber with a heavy crash that dragged the iron anchor blocks several inches through the gravel.

THUMP.

The impact drove every ounce of air from Dante's lungs in a silent wheeze.

When all motion ceased, the courtyard locked into dead, absolute silence.

Maria had landed directly on top of him.

Her knees were driven into the mat on either side of his hips, pinning his legs beneath her muscular thighs. Both her hands, wrapped in raw cotton tape, were planted on the canvas right beside his ears, bracing the bulk of her upper body so she wouldn't crush his ribs against the stones.

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Her face hovered less than four inches from his.

Her breath, hot and ragged from the exertion of their drill, washed straight over his neck and chin. A damp lock of her short brown hair brushed against his left cheek, carrying the distinct scent of lye soap and sun-warmed skin.

Dante's hands, which had flown up in pure self-defense during the tumble, were planted flat against her bare waist, right above the waistband of her compression shorts.

His slender fingers sank slightly into the dense musculature along her ribs, feeling the raw, solid heat of thirty-two Constitution pulsing beneath her damp skin.

Neither of them moved.

Maria's brown eyes were wide, staring dead into Dante's gray pupils.

For three seconds that felt like an eternity within that walled courtyard, the only audible sound was the faint hiss of street steam pipes and their ragged breathing colliding in the air between them.

The memory of their conversation inside the ore gondola, Tali's squeal asking about seven years of dating, and old Jabor's raspy chuckle flashed through both their minds at the exact same millisecond.

Blood rushed to Dante's face with the force of a hydraulic ram.

His pale skin burned scarlet in a heartbeat, his ears scorching beneath his dark hair as he registered the full, unyielding weight of her frame pinned over his chest.

At that exact moment, Maria's cheeks caught fire.

The flush overtook her tan skin in a wave, washing down her throat and coloring the collarbones visible beneath her athletic top. She blinked twice, her mouth opening and closing without producing a syllable.

With a violent heave of her arms, Maria shoved off the canvas with so much force the fabric groaned beneath her palms.

She sprang backward in an uncoordinated scramble, tripping over her own heels and landing hard on her rear across the cobblestones six feet away.

"Get... get out of the way, boy!" she hollered, her voice cracking an octave higher than normal in unvarnished panic.

Dante sat bolt upright on the mat, dragging air violently into his aching lungs.

He tugged frantically at the collar of his gray shirt, keeping his head ducked low so his dark fringe shielded his flaming face, staring intently at the tips of his socks.

"Traction failure!" Dante blurted out, words tumbling over each other loudly in the open yard. "The mat gathered mineral grease residue from the spare drive chains! The coefficient of friction plummeted below point-two, and the sudden deceleration compromised our footing!"

"Yeah! The grease!" Maria snatched her towel off the ground with a furious yank, scrubbing her face and neck with unnecessary violence to hide the deep flush burning her cheeks. "It was the damn old grease from the bench! I told you to scrub down this floor with solvent before laying down the rubber!"

"I did use solvent!" he snapped back, his voice still reedy with mortification. "Machine oil seeped straight into the fibers of the weave!"

"Then throw the damn tarp out!" she shouted, stomping over toward the courtyard's iron water spigot, her heavy footsteps crunching against the gravel. "This garbage is useless for drills!"

She cranked the valve handle wide, shoved her entire head beneath the gush of freezing water, and stood there for fifteen seconds, letting the cold blast wash the heat from her temples.

Dante stood up from the mat on shaky legs, slapping dust off his trousers.

He cleared his throat three times, staring at the dark basalt wall as if analyzing the most fascinating geological formation in existence.

He pulled the first sheet of paper he could reach from the coat draped across the bench, unfolding the contract with both hands to fake complete, unyielding concentration.

"Permit one-oh-eight," Dante said loudly, pivoting the subject with the subtlety of a sledgehammer falling onto an anvil. "The hot-slag gallery. The intake clerk said the posting opens at nine."

Maria yanked her head from under the stream, shaking her soaked hair like a hunting dog.

She grabbed the towel, roughly drying her face as she marched back toward the workshop door without meeting his gaze.

"Right! The hot slag!" she answered with frantic haste, her pitch still elevated. "Three thousand scrip bounty! We need that coin for my harness straps!"

"Exactly," Dante slid the paper into his pocket, keeping his eyes pinned to the workshop floorboards. "Three thousand scrip in clean tender. We can look at that plate cuirass on the way back."

"Great! Perfect!" She snatched her forty-pound greatsword off the rack so fast the tip clipped the doorframe, shearing off a sliver of gray paint. "I'm throwing my leather pants on and heading right down!"

"I'll grab the canvas packs," Dante answered at the same frantic pace.

They tore up and down the townhouse stairs in under five minutes, lacing boots, cinching buckles, and strapping toolbelts with an urgency that suggested an incoming air raid.

Neither uttered the word tarp.

Neither acknowledged the three seconds where Maria's two hundred pounds had pinned Dante to the deck, and neither mentioned the red heat still burning at the tips of their ears.

When Maria shoved the iron side gate open to step out into the street of the Boilermakers' Village, the cold morning air struck their faces like a welcome gust of relief.

She hitched the greatsword's harness with a sharp tug, looking down the avenue where the first electric streetcars were starting their morning runs.

"Pick up the pace, Dante," she said, her voice steadily regaining its customary practical edge. "If we miss that three-thousand-scrip permit because of idle chatter, I'm making you carry the venom sacs by hand the entire way back."

"We won't miss the permit, Maria," Dante replied, clicking the double padlocks shut with the brass key. "The bureau is ten minutes out at this stride."

They struck out along the rail avenue with synchronized, hurried steps, leaving the quiet courtyard behind and diving headlong into the deafening roar of the Capital's forges, pretending with all their might that nothing on earth mattered that morning except monsters and coin.