Chapter 520 | Look At This. I’m Incredible. [GT BONUS]

Chapter 520: 520 | Look At This. I’m Incredible. [GT BONUS]

Twenty-two voices answered her at once and the plaza got significantly worse for everybody who deserved it.

Camille didn’t bother with the illusions. She went straight at the boy.

Eleven rivets left her palms in under two seconds, and it wasn’t a kill pattern, it was suppression geometry, a fan spread designed to close down lateral movement and force a target backward into a wall of their own making. Two high to make him drop his chin. Three at ankle height to eliminate the sidestep. Four center mass to make backpedaling the only remaining option, and the last two placed exactly where a person would move to escape the first nine.

I’d seen her do this to Petra’s crystalline walls. I’d seen her do this to me, with her back against wall and her mouth six inches from mine.

Camille Ortega does not miss.

Her Precision Read swept his defensive geometry and mapped it in three seconds flat, and I watched her face as it came back, and I watched it come back empty.

No stress fracture. No overcommitted stance. No load-bearing weakness in the way he held his weight, because he wasn’t holding his weight anywhere in particular.

Thatch’s fire ate two rivets out of the air, just consumed them, orange constructs going into black flame and coming out as nothing at all. The other nine passed through the space where he had been standing and buried themselves in the tile behind him, and he had not moved. Not dodged, not blocked, not blurred. He had simply failed to occupy the location that all available physics said he occupied.

Camille’s jaw locked so hard I heard it from thirty feet away.

"Fine," she said, and regenerated both palms in the two seconds she always takes, and started walking forward instead of back. "Fine. Okay. New problem."

That’s the thing about her. Tell Camille something is impossible and she’ll thank you for narrowing the field.

Sloane put detonation eleven into Nexo’s chest and the creature’s foot came down two inches from my hand, and I finally got my elbow underneath me and shoved and made it to one knee before my vision went white and dumped me back onto the tile.

Four percent. My body was a spreadsheet with every cell in red.

Nine minutes, said the interface, in that flat register it uses when it has stopped finding me entertaining.

Nine minutes was a long time. Nine minutes was four hundred years. Sloane was going to burn through whatever new ceiling she’d been handed and then she was going to keep going anyway because that’s the only setting she has, and Camille was going to walk into a lake of black fire looking for a fracture that didn’t exist, and Felicity was holding up the entire visual field with an Aspect that had no mass and cost her more than she’d ever admit out loud, and none of them were leaving. Not one of them was going to leave. They had all done the arithmetic that Percy did at eleven forty-nine, the nine percent and the sixty-one percent, and they had all arrived at the same answer independently and then run toward it.

Which meant I had to get up, because the alternative was watching.

I got my palm flat on the tile. Pushed. My shoulder made a noise that belonged in a butcher’s shop.

Then the entire dome turned gold.

It came from above, from the upper mezzanine forty feet over the plaza, a wash of light so complete and so sudden that every shadow in the Crucible died at once. Emergency red vanished. The rain in the flood sector lit up like falling glass. Every surface in a two-hundred-foot dome went bright and warm and legible, and after two hours of fighting in a wound-colored dark I could suddenly see the floor, the ceiling, the bodies, the exits, all of it, everything.

Hiro Sato stood on a collapsed section of the upper walkway with his chest panel wide open and his arms spread and his hair somehow still perfect.

He’d come through a maintenance hatch in the dome ceiling. Fifty-foot drop onto broken steel, in a suit built for photographs, because he had spent three weeks cataloguing sight lines and access points in every single building he entered and the Crucible had not been an exception to that, and I was going to have to be nice to him about it for at least a month.

He hadn’t fired a beam. He’d opened the aperture as wide as Corona goes and flooded the whole space with coherent light, area denial in reverse, turning the room from a dark place where twenty-two students were guessing into a lit place where they could work.

Every horn on Nexo’s head came up and pointed at him.

Thatch turned too, the tapping stuttering into a new rhythm, and Felicity’s illusions caught the new light and multiplied off the reflective surfaces until the plaza held a hundred phantom students instead of forty.

Hiro looked down at twelve feet of white anatomical impossibility, and I watched him be delighted and correctly terrified in exactly equal measures.

"Hey," he called, and his voice carried across the dome with the projection of a man whose father directed theater. "Don’t look at me. Look at me. Look at this. I’m incredible."

Then he narrowed the aperture to a two-foot column and fired.

The beam came down like a dropped sun. It crossed forty feet in no measurable time and struck Nexo across the shoulder and upper chest, and the light was so bright I lost the creature entirely inside it, just a white silhouette in a white column with the tile beneath it going from grey to orange to running liquid.

The sound was a sustained shriek of atmosphere getting displaced faster than it could move.

Sloane threw herself clear and skidded to a stop beside me, dropping to one knee and putting her hand flat on my sternum, and through the bond I got the whole unfiltered feed of what she was carrying underneath the rage. Terror. Absolute, specific terror, the kind she would never let reach her face.

"Sixty seconds," she said. "You have sixty seconds and then you’re standing up."

"Bossy."

"Yes."

The beam cut out. Hiro’s Corona guttered at the edges from a sustained burn nobody had ever asked him to hold that long, and the light dropped back to something merely blinding, and in the middle of the plaza the tile had become a glass bowl eight feet across.

Nexo stood in the center of it.

The shoulder where the beam had landed was scorched black across the white, the bands running through it darkened and split, and one horn had melted at the tip into a drooping curl.

It tilted its head up at the mezzanine. Then it started walking toward the stairs.

Hiro’s grin went off his face like someone had wiped it with a rag.

"Okay," he said, considerably quieter. "That’s the wrong reaction to that."