Snow drank the noise and handed it back as a hiss.

They'd punched a hole in the rush. Miners staggered through - white-faced, blood-slick, refusing to lie down. Gravers limped behind them, blades dull with use. The line re-formed, thin, elastic, angry.

Shapes shook loose from the trees again.

Raizen flowed left and met the first three like he'd been waiting his whole life to make those exact cuts. Keahi set a hinge in the center and refused to move. Lynea's fragments took thin, mean bites out of anything that overreached. Hikari's staff stitched the gaps shut.

Arashi slid to the right pocket, the one where everything ugly liked to slip through.

"My turn now. Get ready."

His good hand found the grip. The pistol woke with a low green purr, Luminite core flickering like a heart that knew what came next.

The first Nyx came in too clean - human outline, just wrong enough to make your stomach argue with your eyes. He sighted, breathed once, and tapped.

The shot wasn't a bullet. It was a thought: pressure pinched into a bead, Eon bullets. Green flashed along the seams of the pistol. The Nyx's chest unstitched and forgot to be a chest.

Another behind it. Another. He walked the muzzle through a lazy arc and wrote three fast points of light across three silhouettes. Bodies came apart like someone had erased a line.

"Right lane's open" he called, too calm for the mess. "Keep the train moving."

A miner stumbled past, jaw set in the way of men who'd run out of ways to be brave and picked this one anyway. "Thanks" he muttered without looking. Arashi didn't answer. He didn't like to talk to gratitude when his hands were full.

"Above" Ichiro said, voice level now that the panic had burned out of it.

Esen's ring boomed overhead - shockwave falling like a hammer.

The treeline cracked.

A heavier Nyx shouldered out. Taller. Chest with a form similar to armor plates like a bad habit learned too young. It swung an arm grown into a blunt breaker and hit the snow hard enough to make powder leap.

Arashi lifted the pistol, shot it in the sternum, and learned something depressing. The green flicker spidered across the plating and went out. The thing rocked and didn't care.

"Plated one's not impressed" he said. "I'll make it impressed."

Another pair rushed low. He spun the pistols in his palms, and double-tapped. One lost a knee; the other lost interest and fell into Raizen's space, where it was instantly killed

Static clawed his ear. "-ashi - don - rea -" Alteea, trying to be a line in a place that ate lines.

"Alteea's STILL knocking" he tossed toward Raizen.

"Didn't you already shut that thing off?" Raizen said flat, blades already answering a new attack with something stronger.

Arashi flicked a small knuckle lever on the twin pistols' spine. Overcharge woke - hum deepening, light in the body of the gun climbing from flicker to glow. The grip buzzed against his palm like a cat.

He sighted on the plated chest and didn't pull the trigger.

"Low right" he told Ichiro. "Give me a wall two hands high, short spin."

IA slab of hard snow and frozen earth lifted like a trick. Arashi fired not at the Nyx, but at the slab.

The shot hit, sang, ricocheted hard left, and buried itself into the plating under the arm. The armor took it, but the joint didn't love it.

The Nyx stuttered. He had a window as thin as a coin. He took it - three shots stitched up into the hinge where plate tried to be shoulder. Green flared. Something gave.

It swung anyway. The mass came at his skull like a door hating a face.

Arashi threw himself backward, boots carving weird lines in the snow.

"Left hip" Raizen called.

"On it."

Two tight taps chewed the plate on left hip until it forgot how to be load-bearing. The Nyx stumbled, one leg a little late to the party.

Lynea's fragments whispered down and shaved a strip off its ankle. Hikari went in, staff low, a neat jab that pinned it for a breath.

"Thanks for the dance" Arashi said, and shot it through that breath. It stopped moving the way a machine stops: all at once.

He pivoted and found motion - always more motion - on the edge of his lane. Three of the simple, more human-looking ones, fast, heads tilted like they were listening. He didn't wait to be introduced. He wrote three green dots in a triangle shape in the air where their chests would be, and then put the triangle into them.

They came apart in order, polite as dominos.

"Arashi!" Lynea called, cool as winter, "up."

He didn't ask why. He went.

A low wall grew under his heel. He sprang, boots skimming their own shadow. Another slab arrived midair - Ichiro's doing - offering something to kick from. Arashi took it, twisted, leveled the gun down.

Below him, a small, feral Nyx went left then right then tried to murder. He let gravity add mean to his aim and shot it in the base of the skull. The thing stumbled three blind steps and remembered it didn't have a head.

He hit the ground short, pain through the wrap in his bad arm reminding him of the scar. He bared his teeth and kept moving.

The slope bucked. A barbed tail wrote an ugly S through the air where his ribs had been a split second ago. He ducked without dignity and fired into the tail's root. The barbs dimmed. The creature screamed without a mouth - sound like glass being scratched - and rushed anyway.

"Step" Ichiro said, the word too calm for how his hands shook.

The ground complied - small rise under Arashi's boot. He bounced, shot in the same motion, and took the thing's knee clean. It crashed with fury and no technique, which wasn't as comforting as it should have been.

The gun in his hand was singing now - core warmed up, charge responsive, recoil trying to write its own story in his wrist.

"Cooling?" Hikari called without looking.

"Nah, I don't care about overheating." he lied, because his hand still worked and lying to friends was faster than fixing physics.

Two Gravers blundered through his sightline, dragging a third who was busy trying to keep his inside on the inside. Arashi shot around them - around their fear, their bodies, their future - threading the green pulse through moving lives to hit the life that shouldn't be living.

A heavy one shoved through the treeline - thicker plates, long arms ending in flat paddles. Its chest was a bad idea someone had layered until it looked like a solution. He hit it twice in the plating and got a shrug for his trouble.

Arashi thumbed the lever up again. Overcharge deepened - hum lowering into his bones, grip hot. Really hot.

"Give me something" he told Ichiro.

Ichiro built a small, mean ramp at a petty angle.

Arashi fired into the ramp. The shot took the angle like it had been born for it, kissed the underside of a plate, and went shopping for Nyxes.

Lynea's voice in his ear, precise: "Two on your lef-."

"Seen."

He slid left, dropped to a knee, and wrote a quick figure eight in green between the two. One lost its shoulder; the other lost interest in locomotion. He moved before he watched them fall. The trick to living was not crowning your moments.

A hum behind him that wasn't his gun - Esen's ring detonating another pressure-pulse into a trough Ichiro had carved. The blast broke over three bodies like a wave. Two dissolved. One came apart wrong and tried to figure itself out. Raizen ended it with a cut that took fifty percent less thought than breathing.

"Arashi" someone tried again - Alteea's voice clipped into tatters on a line that refused to honor rank. "coo - dinates - if you -"

He didn't answer. Not now. Not while it cost attention he needed for the next piece of the world trying to kill him.

The next one arrived fast.

A compact Nyx with a fluted ribcage sprinted low and then jumped high, both arms turning into thin, ugly blades. It aimed for his face like that was personal.

Lynea drew a field in the air.

A platform - thin, perfect - flashed into being where his next step would have been. He took it without thinking, felt it sustain his legs, felt the gift of one more meter of height at the exact right moment.

He jumped.

Up close, the thing was all wrong - like a man that had been mirrored until the broken mirror got bored. He met it midair, jammed the muzzles into what passed for a face, and pressed the triggers with all of his might. The gun whined an octave higher.

Boom.

The green flare wasn't light. It was more like an explosion. The recoil ripped up his arm and got a curse out of his teeth. I don't think I have to explain that the Nyx's head absolutely blew up. The body crumpled in on itself and hit the slope with a sound that wished it had been threatening.

Arashi landed badly, ankle sliding sideways. Pain spoke. He ignored it and took two quick backward steps because living sometimes means retreat.

"Show-off" Obi's voice would've said, if Obi had been there. Arashi said it to himself anyway and grinned like a man who didn't know better.

On the left, a miner tripped. The plated Nyx - another one, there were always more - lunged for him, paddles up. Arashi fired three shots in a row, tight on the wrist joint, walking green up to the tender spot. The limb went flying. Raizen's blade arrived like punctuation and turned the rest of it into a confession.

"Breathe" Hikari told Arashi as she slid past, already closing the next wound she could reach.

"I'm hilarious when I breathe" he said, and proved it by breathing.

The pistol's glow calmed a notch.

"More" Lynea warned, and there they were - too many silhouettes, too fast, the mindless river that kept finding new banks to destroy. They stepped forward to meet them because stepping back felt like losing.

"Give me a corner" he told Ichiro.

A low wedge grew at his toe, angled mean toward the press. He banked a shot off it, then a second, then a third, threading the path through the crowd like sewing; he wasn't trying to kill - just to stall. To make lanes. To buy breaths for the people who needed them.

"Left - left - now" Ichiro called.

He obeyed. A limb smashed the spot he'd been in and broke itself on the ramp. The Nyx screamed in its quiet, glass-on-pavement way. He shot the tail's base again on principle and because it felt good.

"Still not impressed" he told the Nyx. It didn't understand insult. Most things didn't when you were busy killing them.

Green light stroked up his forearm. He could feel the cores in both pistols now - heat like a fever you volunteered for. Overcharge again would pull on him. He filed that fact and didn't pull yet.

He'd need it later.

On his left, Lynea's fragments drew short, savage lines across a lean Nyx's midsection - distraction enough for Hikari to spear down and finish it. On his right, Keahi split a charging body and didn't slow down.

"Nice" Raizen said once, passing through the living geometry to end a thing that had walked into it.

"Tell Kori I did my homework" Arashi said, and nearly laughed at his own joke, but now was a stupid time to laugh.

The treeline swelled with silhouettes - more of them, heavier, uglier, a rhythm the body recognizes as too many.

"Raizen" he said, quiet enough that only a man who'd learned to listen for trouble could hear. "They're not running out."

"No" Raizen agreed.

Arashi rolled his shoulder, set his jaw, and pulled the lever up a notch he didn't like.

"Fine…" he said to the slope, to the sky, to the green in his hand. "The more, the merrier"

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.