CHAPTER 59: THE DEATH OF PIKE [2]

Pike moved.

WHOOSH!

He moved without warning; no telegraph, all training.

He went through Kara’s guard, blade kissing her forearm as she parried, but his foot already hooked her ankle, throwing her off balance all in one movement.

Kara caught herself on the spear haft and rolled clear of the follow-up slash by a breath.

Then, Jonas met him.

There were men you could break by hitting them, Pike wasn’t one. He flowed around power, used it, and redirected it.

He let Jonas’s first punch graze his ribs and drove a knife under it toward the liver. Jonas twisted, and took the cut in muscle instead. It bled, but he didn’t slow down as his eyes burned with hatred and determination.

This was the man that almost killed him!

But skill roared louder than rage and emotion...

Bam!

Pike’s off-hand cracked into Jonas’s ear as light burst behind his eyes, his balance skating. For a moment, Jonas saw stars.

Pike stepped in to finish, knife rising...

Reid fired.

BAM!

The bullet shaved a curl of leather from Pike’s shoulder holster. It wasn’t a hit, and it wasn’t meant to be.

Pike’s Instinct flared at the near line of death, and he rolled right to avoid the impact. It bought Jonas half a second; half a second was enough.

Jonas’s fist found Pike’s ribs, hard. Something gave.

CRACK!

Pike grunted, but his eyes became even colder.

He fought like a rabid dog with a soldier’s schooling, knife slashing, boots stamping, elbows finding nerve and bone, every motion part of a kill calculus that he’d run a thousand times.

Holt’s shot took a chip out of the knife’s spine as sparks fanned.

"Blind," Mira whispered, and the wind obeyed as dust lifted in a cutting sheet and blew full into Pike’s eyes.

He didn’t blink, he simply closed his eyes and moved by Instinct, feeling the line of the fight like a blind man reads braille.

His knife kissed Ethan’s gauntlet again when Ethan came in from the left, then nicked across the back of the hand as Ethan withdrew, drawing blood.

Travis wisely kept quiet this time.

Pike’s last soldier, the rifleman whose knee Reid had ruined dragged himself toward cover, fingers clawing but Kara’s spear pinned his jacket to the asphalt.

Her boot pressed down on the haft; she didn’t look away from Pike.

"Stay," she told the man and he stayed.

"Pin him!" Ethan barked. "Holt, anchor! Mira, break his rhythm! Kara, Jonas, drive!"

Kara darted in.

Her spear slid a shallow furrow along Pike’s thigh.

In response, he snapped a backhand with the knife that would have hamstrung her but she jumped it by an inch, landed light, before driving the butt of her spear into his knee.

He staggered, weight shifting as he winced slightly in pain.

Ethan Shadowstepped into that shift, Gauntlet blooming as he hammered Pike’s shoulder.

BAM!

This time, it connected fully as flesh and reinforced discipline met steel and will, forcing Pike down to one knee.

But he quickly came up laughing, blood on his teeth. "One tyrant down," he croaked, "another born."

"No," Ethan said softly, and for a heartbeat the Wheel’s gold washed his irises darker. "Just an end". He snarled.

Pike lunged at Ethan.

His knife flashed.

Ethan’s Shadowstep was still on cooldown, and the usages for Phantom Mirage were exhausted. The blade slashed for the throat, but...

CLANG!

Kara’s spear shaft jammed between blade and neck.

Wood shrieked, then splintered as the knife skated. The tip of the knife bit skin and drew a bright, ugly line but it wasn’t deep. Pike adjusted mid-motion, going for the eye...

But then, Jonas hit him like a truck.

The punch carried all the weight Jonas had been saving for this exact moment as dense muscle drove through shoulder and into skull.

BAM!

Bone met bone with a sound that wasn’t a crack so much as a report.

Pike’s head snapped left and the knife flew. He staggered two steps and found a forklift’s carcass with his ribs as he coughed blood and groaned. He slid down it, smearing blood.

He tried to rise, he really did.

Predator’s Instinct thrashed for a surviving line, but it found none. Every path out ended in red.

Ethan walked in, Gauntlet loose at his side, breathing harsh. Pike’s eyes fixed on him, gray gone glassy. The scar pulled his mouth into that ruined sneer.

"You think you’re better," he rasped amid the pain. "You’ll be me by winter. Quarantine cages, commanders with smiles. You’ll do what I did, kill for drops, kill to keep order."

Ethan didn’t answer.

You couldn’t argue a man out of the only truth he’d ever worshipped.

Holt’s rifle never wavered. Reid’s did, but that was fever and pain, not doubt.

Kara stood tall, blood running down her forearm into her palm, spear tip low and ready.

Mira’s wind hung like a held breath. Travis’s hands shook over his kit, not because he feared finishing a man but because he feared failing to pull one of his own back if this last lunge took someone with it.

Pike laughed again. It curdled into a cough that painted his teeth.

He reached for the knife that wasn’t there, then for the air, then for hate.

Jonas stepped in. His face had no grin now, no swagger, just a quiet, heavy resolve.

"This is for the ones who never made it to the bridge," he said.

Pike bared his teeth to spit, maybe curse, threaten, or even bless himself with one last venom.

But Jonas didn’t let him as drove his fist one last time.

KACHA!

The blow landed above the ear, where skull was a bowl, not a shield.

Pike’s head rocked as the light in his eyes tore loose and guttered. He slid sideways into a pool that was already his, blood feathering along the cracks in the concrete like dark rivers finding old beds.

Silence reigned.

The yard’s chains chimed once, like a bell struck and left to sway.

Ethan’s chest heaved. The Gauntlet dissolved, spikes folding away into bone and thought. For a long second, the only sound was the group’s breath and the high, thin whine of heat rising from metal.

Holt lowered his rifle first.

It made no sound, but the motion let the world exhale.

Reid sat down more than he crouched, back to a dead tire, eyes on the body like he was waiting for it to break the rules and stand again.

Kara wiped her bleeding forearm with the hem of a ruined sleeve and looked past Pike to some distance that was not the quarantine and not the past. Mira released her palms, and the wind that had been held tight spilled out in a tired sigh.

Travis swallowed, throat working. "Apocalypse ER," he said softly, humor failing him, then finding its legs out of sheer stubbornness. "Open. Uh... mostly for us."

"Medic," Jonas said without looking away from the corpse, "I’m going to need new ribs before we celebrate."

Travis sniffed. "I’ll put in the order with the Rift. One set of deluxe ribs for the gentleman who just punched a skull into pudding."

No one laughed. Not yet, not here.

Ethan stepped closer to Pike and looked down at a man who had made himself a blade and called it a doctrine.

He wanted to feel triumph. Instead, he found something tauter, sadder, something harder to name, a relief edged with the knowledge that the first tyrant was never the last.

Behind his eyes, the Wheel flickered, curious, like a witness leaning in. Ethan blinked the glow away.

"Collect yourselves," he said, voice low. "We move in five."

"Drops?" Jonas asked, toneless, because in this world even victory had a ledger.

"Later," Ethan said. He didn’t look at the place where the System might have already inscribed rewards in light. Not yet. "We’re not done breathing."

They stood together in the ruin, battered and alive, while the yard’s chains finished their slow, mournful sway.

Blood thickened in the heat. Flies came. And somewhere beyond the yard, the city ticked and clicked, remembering other hunts.

Pike did not move.

The tyrant’s shadow lay flat against rust and dust and pooled red, and the sky above them, rifting and restless offered nothing but the absolute quiet that follows an ending.

It was not peace.

But it would have to do.