Chapter 496 | Sixty Percent Is The New Concrete Breaker [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 496: 496 | Sixty Percent Is The New Concrete Breaker [CASTLE BONUS]

The third one came at her from the left, which was stupid, because Sloane had already decided the left was hers.

She caught his wrist. Pivoted hard. Planted her heel. Then she dumped every ounce of stored charge she had straight through her palm into the center of his sternum.

The detonation lifted him off his feet.

Through the support pillar. Not into it. Through.

Concrete exploded outward in a spray of dust and rebar. His body sailed backward like a ragdoll thrown by a child. He hit the far wall with a sound that made one of the staffers behind her gasp. Then he slid down and didn’t move.

Sloane stood there. Arm still extended. Ears ringing. Dust settling around her boots like ash.

One very inconvenient thought sat right at the front of her skull.

That was too much.

She’d thrown that punch at sixty percent. Maybe fifty-five. She knew her body the way other people knew their own phone number. Knew exactly what sixty felt like in her shoulder, her hip, the twist at the base of her spine when she committed to the release. Sixty percent bruised ribs. Sixty percent knocked people flat and kept them there for a while.

Sixty percent did not put a grown man through reinforced concrete like wet paper.

She flexed her fingers. Amber sparks jumped along her knuckles. Not the usual flicker. This was brighter. Cleaner. The heat coming off them was wrong too. Hotter than it should be. Easier to hold than it had any right to be.

Her breathing was fine. Her stamina was fine. She should have felt that release. The drain. The familiar pull in her chest that told her she’d spent something real. There was nothing. Just the sparks and the heat and the body across the room that wasn’t getting up.

"Okay," she said out loud. To nobody. To the empty mezzanine and the dust still swirling through the broken pillar. "Okay. Sure. Fine."

She was going to have a very long conversation with Lukas Belmont about whatever the hell he’d done to her. Later. After she finished killing everyone in this building who deserved it.

Behind her, pressed into the gap between a vending machine and a stairwell door, three people in support-track jumpsuits stared at her like she’d just walked out of a myth.

"Stay there," Sloane told them. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Don’t move. Don’t be brave. Don’t try to help. I’m handling it."

"There’s more of them," the woman in front said. Her voice shook but she got the words out anyway, which Sloane respected more than she had time to say. "On the mezzanine. Six, maybe seven. They came out of the grey stuff."

"Great." Sloane rolled her neck until something popped. The sparks along her knuckles flared brighter. "Six or seven. Love that for me."

The mezzanine ran along the north face of the sector like a balcony hanging over the collapse zone. All steel grating and flimsy safety rails. The men scattered across it had made the deeply stupid assumption that height was the same thing as advantage.

Sloane took the stairs four at a time. Felt the charge building in her calves without thinking about it. The way it always did when she stopped trying to control every piece of it. She came up onto the grating already committed. Already moving. Already too fast for anyone up here to do anything useful about it.

The first one turned. She detonated the floor under him.

The grating buckled. Folded inward like tinfoil. Swallowed his legs to the knee. He screamed. She hit him across the jaw with a right hook that had maybe ten percent on it and he stopped screaming. She moved on.

The second one had a gun.

Which was almost cute.

Sloane closed the distance in a single burst that left scorch marks on the grating behind her. She reached him before his brain caught up with his eyes. Tapped the barrel of the gun with two fingers and a controlled release that blew the weapon clean out of his hands along with two of his fingers.

He screamed too.

She felt exactly nothing about it.

Because he’d brought a firearm into a building full of teenagers and he’d pointed it at her like that was going to change how this ended.

The third and fourth tried to flank.

She let them.

Then she dropped low, slammed both palms into the grating, and released a shockwave that traveled outward in a perfect ring, and the whole mezzanine bucked like the deck of a ship, and both of them went over the safety rail with their arms flailing.

Twenty feet down. Onto rubble. Sloane didn’t watch.

The fifth one had an Aspect, at least. Something with density, because when she hit him her fist stopped dead against his forearm and the impact rang up her elbow.

"Oh," Sloane said. "You’re the real one."

"You’re a kid," he said through the mask.

"I’m eighteen and I’m the second highest combat score in my entrance cohort, so honestly, read the room."

She hated that she was talking. That was a Lukas thing. She’d caught it off him like a cold.

He came in heavy and slow and she gave up ground on purpose, backing along the mezzanine, letting him swing, letting him miss, letting him get comfortable with the idea that he was pushing her. Every coach she’d ever had had told her she had no patience for defensive engagements, that frustration made her escalate, that escalation burned her Overclock timer.

Every coach she’d ever had had been correct.

But Lukas had spent two months getting knocked down on a mat in her mother’s basement and standing back up, over and over, refusing to quit at a thing he was objectively bad at, and something about watching that had rewired a piece of her she hadn’t given permission to be rewired.

So she waited.