CHAPTER 58: THE DEATH OF PIKE [1]

The machine yard held its breath.

Sunlight slashed through broken roof panels, laying hard white rectangles across wrecked forklifts and heaps of twisted rebar.

Every breeze set dangling chains chiming faintly, a wind-bell orchestra for rust and ruin. Beneath a buckled gantry crane, Ethan’s hand hovered in the air, palm down, fingers splayed, the silent order that meant wait.

Pike stepped into view with four survivors in a diamond around him. Soot and blood had turned his field jacket the color of old ash. The scar that the Behemoth’s heat had carved along his jaw had puckered into a permanent snarl.

But despite all these, he walked like a man who still owned the ground, gray eyes quartering the yard with a hunter’s patience.

Then, he suddenly stopped.

His head tilted, not to a sound but to a wrongness in the air that no one else but him could have detected. Predator’s Instinct tightened the lines at the corners of his eyes.

He frowned, then...

"Spread," he murmured.

His men didn’t question, experience told them not to.

They simply moved, not perfectly as fear made their steps stumble but they obeyed, fanning to angles that would have chewed a less careful enemy to pieces.

One, stocky and scar-striped, laid a palm to the gutted cab of a truck as energy crackled under his skin, his ability [Resonance Shock] flaring before it faded.

Another’s shoulders bulked and tensed as [Body Reinforcement] took hold.

A third cupped heat between his hands until it pulsed orange, [Short-range Pyro Burst], ripening for a throw. The fourth simply raised his rifle; there was something cold and mean about his steadiness that said he didn’t need tricks.

Pike squinted at shadow, at light, and even at the motion of dust.

"Something’s off," he said, then he scowled. "They’re here".

High in the crane, Holt’s cheek lay welded to the stock, breath thin, pulse slower than a metronome.

Across the yard, Reid’s hands trembled where they cupped his rifle.

His fever was not fully gone, the pain a steady throb, but when he settled into his scope, the world tunneled until one target filled it and time itself loosened enough to let the bullet think.

Mira lifted her hands, and the air bent.

Sound shifted, footsteps muffled where they should have echoed. And then, a heat shimmer crawled across Pike’s left flank where there was no heat at all.

"...!"

His gaze snapped that way. "Left...!"

"Now," Ethan breathed, and dropped his hand.

Holt fired first.

BAM!

The man with the pyro burst flinched as the scope star shattered in front of his eye.

He reeled reflexively, the molten charge detonating in his own palm instead of across the yard. His scream ripped through the machine bones and cut off as he pitched backward into a snarl of rebar.

At the same time, Reid’s shot rode the wake of Holt’s, clean and controlled, inevitable as it took the rifleman through the clavicle.

He dropped to a knee, rifle clattering, breathe ragged.

It was at this moment that Kara surged from behind a slab of rusted plate, her spear a black flash. She met the reinforced soldier square, the butt of her weapon crashing into his jaw, then reversed and drove the blade for his ribs.

He caught the haft with hands like vices as bone density met body reinforcement in a grinding stalemate.

Jonas came in low and mean, a battering ram with blood in his teeth.

His fist hit the shock-user’s wrist before the resonance could build.

CRACK!

Something in the man’s arm popped, and the follow-up hook broke teeth, followed by a knee that drove the air out of him.

Jonas moved like the pain in his own ribs was a rumor he refused to believe.

"Welcome to apocalypse ER!" Travis called from cover without looking, voice too bright in the death-noise. "No appointments, walk-ins only!"

At that moment, Mira’s wind finally rose, a pressure that slid grit across sightlines and tugged at trajectories by inches.

Holt shifted nests, swiftly ghosting to the second perch he’d marked while the first drew Pike’s eye.

Then, Ethan Shadowstepped.

BZZZ!

The yard dulled.

Sound narrowed.

His boots didn’t touch the world; his body blurred forward, a silent smear between glints of shrapnel and the flare of Kara’s spear.

Phantom Mirage peeled away to his left in its final usage, a sprinting double that drew the rifleman’s panicked shot and Holt’s deliberate second. The illusory Ethan ran straight at Pike who didn’t flinch.

Predator’s Instinct read the world’s true threads and ignored the false.

Snorting, Pike pivoted as he brought a knife from nowhere and caught the real Ethan’s gauntlet on the blade as spikes bloomed around bone.

CLANG!

Steel kissed steel, and sparks spat.

"Gambler," Pike said, voice low. "I told you clever breaks against will".

He rolled his shoulder and levered, turning Ethan’s power aside with the economy and brutality of a battlefield veteran.

Whoosh!

The knife kissed Ethan’s throat! Too close, right before he Shadowstepped again, reappearing behind a pillar, breath ragged and jaw clenched.

"Keep him moving," Ethan snapped, voice rasped over comms that were just words thrown into open air. "Don’t let him set a line!"

Kara twisted inside the reinforced soldier’s grip, every tendon like a wire rope. Then, she slammed her forehead into his nose, bone against cartilage.

Blood burst and he staggered.

Capitalizing on his weakened grip, her spear slipped free and cut a bright line across his thigh.

"Argh...!" The soldier groaned in pain.

While Kara still tussled with her opponent, Jonas was more brutal as he finished the shock-user with a hook that drove his head into steel and left him sliding down, hands open, fingers twitching.

And then, he turned toward Pike without waiting to watch him fall.

The rifleman, Reid’s first target tried to stand, but... too late.

BAM!

Reid’s second bullet found his knee. He screamed and stayed down as Mira’s wind whistled a warning.

The pyro burst man, burned by his own ability but not dead dragged his ruined hand along asphalt until sparks spat again.

His eyes were full of desperation and madness.

He raised his other palm, teeth bared as Ethan’s Mirage snapped into his face and vanished as the pyro flinched.

While he flinched, the real Ethan slipped in from the right and crushed his wrist with the Gauntlet.

Crack!

Bones crackled like dry sticks as the man dropped, sobbing in a world of pain. But ruthless, Ethan capitalized as a heel to the temple put him somewhere he could no longer kill.

Three down, one crawling.

And just like that, all of Pike’s men were eliminated! Brutal.

Pike stood alone in the middle of the yard, a scarred wolf in a ring of wreckage. But unlike what they expected, he didn’t show fear or despair.

Rather, he laughed.

It was a shredded sound, like it had been melted and poured back into his throat, but it held shape. "You think this ends with me on my knees?"

"Hahaha, you’ll have to do more to kill me bastards!"

Pike moved...