Wade had barely managed to enter the building before he was racing out. On the way out, he had seen the pudgy guy from earlier in the week, the one who had grabbed Shilloh's shoulder. He was part of a jostling, panicked crowd who didn't even notice when one of their numbers fell.
He lunged forward with superhuman coordination and strength. It knocked several of the bystanders reeling against a wall. Still, he managed to clear space around the fallen person before they were trampled.
Wade looked down, scanning for damage, and paused when he saw, of all the fucking people in the world, Kora.
He stared at her in shock. But he shook it off and hauled her to her feet.
"Move to the exits!"
She started weeping and looked like she would have wrapped herself around him if it wouldn't require her to release the phone she was clutching to her chest like a magic talisman.
She had no visible injuries but appeared unsteady on her feet. Maybe a twisted ankle or—
"Son of a succubus," he breathed, staring at an even more impractical set of high heels.
He shook his head and left without a second glance. Suicide shoes. He had said it once, and he would say it again. Those things were goddamn suicide shoes. There were not a lot of positives about crypto attacks, but at least between this and the upcoming trip, he could put off any outing with Kora for a couple months, if not forever.
As he ran to engage the threat that he had sensed moving outside the building, a litany of questions built up in the quiet corners of his mind. This made no sense. None at all.
Wade knew how many limb steelers there had been in the forest. He had checked after the first run-in. Hell, he had even killed one who had been building up a lot of bird wings. So there only should have been two left.
It shouldn't have been possible, but he saw three in front of him and knew that at least one other had been sighted. If he had even suspected this could happen, he would have been carrying thermal grenades and all sorts of other weapons. Instead, Wade fought with Walker, his enchanted long sword, and paid dearly for it. This was not the right weapon for the job.
That was why, when he saw Shilloh, he had been forced to jump toward her rather than take more strategic actions. Or, that was at least what he would tell Jasque. In truth, he had very few coherent thoughts or memories from the moment he saw her until a few exchanges into his fight with the limb steeler.
Without Cici, he found himself having to boost his reflexes to levels that strained his abilities. Simple things like strength he could manage. But reflexes required finer control and strained his capabilities when he had to upgrade his physical capabilities at the same time.
Thorns like daggers slashed at his body, and he could not avoid them with dodges alone. He was forced to bring his sword into play. Which severely limited his ability to apply to offensive enchantments.
Plus, the thorny limbs were heavy. Moving them aside was like tossing around long, floppy, heavy leather tubes full of water using a stick.
The only bright spot was that Shilloh was far behind him by the truck, and he was dancing through a mostly empty parking lot. As far as terrain, it was better than the courtyard or the buildings. Still not the best, though.
The cars were okay cover, but Walker was an indiscriminate weapon to attack with. It was not meant to be used in cities. Plus, he had to constantly keep track of civilians. He had only been fighting this creature for thirty seconds and already felt the burden of tracking where all the children and officers were. It made his brain feel like it was overheating.
The distraction, bad battlefield, and limitations of his weapon let the limb stealer give him a bunch of small cuts. He was also making wild dives to safely more often than he wanted to. The damn thing kept switching from the almost human limbs to Mosquade arms and back. The rushed transition made the stolen appendages less evenly spread around the core.
Theoretically, that left him openings. Little spots where a few of the strange quasi-human arms were clustered too close and left corresponding sections of its core unprotected. But he was not a mage or an idiot.
He wasn't diving in; that was suicide. The long-distance attack Walker could produce would hit buildings across the street or the other important infrastructure around them. So Wade had limited ability to use those openings. It only took cutting the waterlines during a fight once to learn what a horrible idea it was. Especially considering they were in a commercial district with many restaurants and electric lines nearby.
In an urban fight like this, fire was too likely for him to start collapsing buildings, cutting power lines, or damaging pipes buried under concrete.
The crypto's pneumatic spears launched once again from its reeds, and he pruned them both by a foot before diving away behind a jeep to avoid the dangerous lashing as they retracted. It annoyed him to no end. But there wasn't any other good option but to fight one foot at a time.
It was the thrashing. Everything else he could manage. Just in general, tentacles were one of the worst things to fight. Human martial arts were not meant for them. Some people would argue the point, but nothing with tentacles moved like a human would with traditional soft weapons. With all the whipping speed and unpredictability of a thrashing fire hose, it was unmanageable without magical augmentation.
As if to prove his point, one of the vines somehow lashed across both tires of the car he was hiding behind, making loud pops. They would have maimed him if his feet weren't lucky enough to have been hit by one of the few smooth stretches of vine.
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"Son of a succubus," he snarled, up on his feet and sprinting just out of range, knowing he might need to reverse course at a moment's notice if the vines finished retreating.
What could he do without outing himself? A freak of nature like Jasque would sway through unscathed, calculating each angle and somehow getting the creature to tie itself into a single neat knot or some bullshit like that. Wade, however, wasn't calculating shit.
To underscore the point, he was once again forced to throw himself into a frantic leap to get out of the danger zone as the creature tried to move closer to him.
By the time he got to his feet, the vines were almost reloaded. He was once running backward, sword raised, hoping he would get to the correct range before they fired, wondering if he could fall to the side faster than the reeds could launch their deadly payloads if not.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a very small two-person vehicle. He jumped low to the ground, got behind it, and then used the cover to sprint a few more yards before turning around just as the plant monster got a clear avenue of attack on him again.
Pure luck had gotten him outside the beast's range, but there was no time to cheer. If he didn't start circling to the side and baiting a shot he could chop, then he would be a smear on the asphalt.
He wanted to check on Shilloh but couldn't.
That situation burned at him. He was good—damn good by any reasonable measure—but he wasn't a freak like Jasque. And this was not how he was meant to fight.
Some part of him wanted to bring out Cici and let the spear's magic protect him so he could do something decisive, something more in line with his actual training. But he was in public so, obviously, he couldn't.
"I fucking hate tentacles," he snarled. There just wasn't anything he could do about it. His cover was unsuited for this fight and would die if he dove in.
In the few moments he had been in the market, he had seen that firsthand. A part-time Blightbane had been in the building. The man was old, with a leather coat and big beard that was the kind of gray you saw in dirty snow next to busy streets.
He had been wearing a stylized bear mask and throwing tables with supernatural strength. Then, two thorny spears had shot out and stabbed him through his chest and thigh. When they went limp and retracted, it had shredded the man so violently that blood and chunks had splashed on the ferns of the crypto's main body.
The leaves had only been red for seconds before absorbing the blood. All the while, those greenish human arms had torn the rest of the body into small pieces that were carefully pressed into the main body like seeds gently poked into the dirt.
That's what would happen to the Wade Raslow he was pretending to be. So he stayed at the edge of the creature's range, baited it into firing, and slowly shaved down its vines while they were rigid. He'd take six inches, or a couple feet, and then haul ass away before they went into the thrashing phase.
Give him time and he would safely be able to engage the main body without fear of projectiles. It would be simple to prune the remaining stolen limbs until it was nothing but a ball of grass.
As it was, he had one lucky go where he could sever a few of the not-quite-human arms. But it was pure chance and cost him far too much magic to pull off again.
All of this happened in less than a minute and a half.
Behind him, he heard Shilloh shout out a string of obscenity as she ran away. It was impossible to look back to check her progress. Even wondering if she was injured was too much distraction.
Instead, he carefully kept himself alive. The game was simple but hard. Step a few inches into its range, bait a firing, slash with his sword and dash. All the while waiting for a moment of opportunity where he could leap to the side, clear a lane of fire, and use the giant magic crescent of force from his long sword.
A few of those would be game-changers. But he had municipal infrastructure and civilians down range.
It was a horrible balance. Walker was not a surgical tool, but he needed to put the crypto down before more of them could team up on him.
As soon as he didn't need to interpose himself between the creature and Shilloh, he would—
Two more Limb Stealers tore out of the building, one much smaller and the second with black tips on the edges of its leaves. They rocketed through the air like giant green cannon balls. While in flight, the Mosquade arms retreated, and the main bodies crashed into the ground, small snouts they had stolen from woodland mammals replacing the limbs to scent the air.
In that moment, the murderous duo looked like oversized gardening installations—just globes of ancient, dinosaur-looking tropical forest growth. Hell, devoid of context, the greenery might have even brightened up the place. Then Mosquade arms rippled out.
Wade blinked at the three monsters facing him. The situation was, as the sages would say, real fucking bad.
Frantically, he thought of every weapon he had strapped to his body. But there was no clean solution. The other witnesses were still in the building and courtyard. A few Banes with enhanced speed might make it in time to help, but he didn't know for sure.
Jasque was probably still a minute or more away, and that was forty-five seconds longer than he was going to live if all three attacked while he had nothing but a sword and a cover identity.
His body moved before his mind had finished processing. He set his feet, preparing a massive sweep of blade and the surge of magic that would damage all the buildings behind the beasts, but might keep him alive.
Except none of the limb stealers spared him a second thought. They all threw themselves around him, like river water around a rock.
Training spun him around, keeping his weapon between him and the threats. He had a prime view of all three creatures landing, their limbs slowly drifting into a symmetrical configuration the longer they kept them out. All the hands were pawing and grasping toward the retreating figure of Shilloh. Even the Mossquade hands bearing false heads gnashed their teeth as six reed-like cannons lined up on the fleeing woman.
What he did next was the sort of move that would be considered genius if he survived, and idiocy when he (probably) died.
The three leafy mounds had not lined themselves up in a neat row. So, if he dived low, he could slice upwards with Walker's magical attack and kill one, maybe two, without wrecking buildings.
He could try to cut the power lines and measure it so they fell on his opponents. But it would only harm two at max, and they were plant creatures. High odds that they were less susceptible to electrocution than he was.
The smart move was to hold back. Killing one of them at the cost of his life was trading a king for a pawn. No smart tactician would even consider it.
Luckily, as Shilloh had pointed out, Wade was excruciatingly aware that he was not the smartest of people.
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Do we need more Nikko and/or Kora
