Free Web NovelChapter 56: Predator Silhouette
The light was wrong before anything else. It had no source. It cast no shadow. It was the color of teeth under ultraviolet, a flat fluorescence that made his own hand look borrowed when he raised it.
Beneath his shoes a single sheet of frosted glass extended past where the horizon should have ended, and the glass was cold through the soles, cold like something alive had been keeping it that way. The air burned with rubbing alcohol and something beneath it, something organic and sweet, the way a wound smells before it’s been cleaned.
Sheila’s Shade looked like it was already waiting for him with its weight forward and eyes locked on him.
The realm wanted him to run. It adjusted itself to have what no other realm so far had. Or rather, what it didn’t have. No corners, no walls. Simply an endless horizon in any direction he could run off to and be happier instead of facing it.
He stepped toward the Shade instead.
The white snapped at once.
Heavy thick walls made of pitted concrete and industrial glass arose around him immediately. The air above them constricted as a final ceiling made its place known, dropping down until Ash’s hair was just brushing it.
The air between the walls compressed and detonated outward in a shockwave that drove through his ribcage and popped both ears in the same instant. He staggered one step before his feet reset.
The temperature lurched. The white light shifted to a deep emergency red that covered every surface.
The pressure held. He felt it in his sinuses, then his lungs, then under his eyes.
The wall’s history was beginning to show. Old dark streaks at chest height, rust brown and flaking, the iron smell still faintly present underneath the alcohol. Drag marks at the floor. Five parallel grooves, the width of fingers.
Sheila’s Shade was already attacking him.
It drove an elbow toward his sternum with full commitment that it wouldn’t need to plan for a follow-up or counter. Ash stepped inside the line, his elbow catching the attack. The impact ricocheted across his upper body, but he was able to absorb it and send it back.
The Shade didn’t reset or resist. A palm strike came toward his throat. He caught it on his forearm and rolled the force sideways. Its wrist cracked against the block and bent backward past its range.
He closed the distance and drove an amplified strike into its center mass. The Shade moved back a step, heels cracking two lines into the frosted glass floor to stop the momentum.
The walls dissolved.
The pressure between them dropped as the expansive air came back. Ash stumbled two steps due to sharp differential. Ash looked at either side of him, seeing bright openings leading to nowhere.
The exit is open. The exit is correct.
He held his position.
And the walls came back down again.
He doubled the gravity at its center of mass. It hit the floor mid-stride, both hands catching on the ground, the follow-up strike going nowhere.
The walls dissolved while the Shade was on the floor.
The expanse pulling back in time just to reveal exits while it struggled below. The space was telling them both to run, with only one able to.
It pulled one hand free of the floor.
Then it cracked one. It took its own weight without adjustment.
The Shade pushed against the gravity field, shattering it entirely as it finally got back on both feet. The Shade reached Ash, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him into the wall.
The wall collapsed under the impact, only for another wall to be immediately summoned in its place. His back found it, and the concrete above his shoulder cracked and dusted from the force. Its elbow found his temple in the same instant.
The hits were becoming heavier with each one.
He spiked his processing to triple rate.
The Shade’s body slowed to a third of its pace. The strike it was releasing became legible two seconds before it landed.
He hit the Shade in the collarbone. It’s head snapped to the side from the kinetic force and came back, eyes locking onto him before the impact had finished traveling through the neck.
The Shade had not registered pain. It had only registered a momentary displacement. Ash struck the openings before the Shade finished constructing the guard it needed. The Shade moved like a piston knocked off its track.
Every strike was technically perfect. None of it changed it’s output.
Each impact was a single input producing the same response.
Continue.
The Shade had only ever operated under one setting. freewёbnoνel.com
Ash was winning every exchange. But he was losing the fight.
The walls opened wider. The exits brighter than any prior configuration. Everything the accelerated read rendered was the same instruction.
You have the information. You have the openings. The exit is the rational choice.
He stood in the open.
He didn’t move toward the exits.
The walls closed.
They opened again immediately, the realm’s configuration changing with each breath Ash tried to catch.
The Shade was crossing toward him at full output.
He had a complete read and a defensible argument for stepping out and approaching this differently.
He sat down, placing both hands flat on the floor, eyes kept on the Shade.
The walls slammed shut in a single breath and the air compression hit him from four directions at once, a shockwave that was worse seated because there was nowhere for his body to absorb it. Every system reported in the same register at the same volume.
Get up. Move. Move now.
He didn’t.
The Shade reached him.
It drove an elbow toward his jaw. He took it across the cheekbone. The bone held. His head moved with the impact and came back.
He stayed.
The Shade hit him again. Full commitment to the sternum, a strike that should have put him on his back. The force spread across his ribs. He leaned into the load and stayed on his knees.
He stayed.
A hook to the side of his head. His ear rang with a tone that had no source. His vision blurred at the edges and cleared.
The protection he had finally gave in.
He felt it in the way the impact arrived. The first hits had dispersed properly through his body. This one didn’t. The fist drove straight into the bone, the sound registering inside his skull a half-breath before the pain did.
His equilibrium collapsed in the same instant, the room doing a slow sick roll, the floor tilting, his stomach climbing into his throat. A heat built inside his ear canal, slow and specific, the blood now running freely, soaking the collar of his shirt, dripping onto the glass beneath him. Each drop made a sound he could hear with his good ear, a soft wet tap like a leak in a ceiling.
The next hit landed on his ribs and didn’t ride out across his torso. A rib detached from the cartilage. He breathed, and the breath came up short, the lung pulling against an angle it had not been pulling against thirty seconds ago.
He stayed.
The Shade hit him.
He stayed.
It hit him.
He stayed.
The configuration held. The red light around them stabilizing.
The Shade looked at him.
I didn’t want to be this, she said.
Ash stayed still. The blood at his collar pooled and stopped pooling.
The Shade raised one hand into a fist, just above Ash’s skull, before unclenching it.
I didn’t build this. I woke up and it was what I was, and everyone around me already knew before I did.
The walls began to soften. Not collapsing. Releasing. The concrete losing definition.
I learned to stay out of corners, it said. I learned to move through the center of rooms so there was always somewhere for them to go.
The light was no longer red. It was the color of a room with the lamps off and morning a long way out.
You didn’t run.
"No," Ash said.
Why not.
The walls around them were slowly dissolving. Not being replaced, but receding entirely.
"Because I know what I’m reading," he said. "And it isn’t what your nervous system says it is."
The realm didn’t become a place to fight or flight. It only began to slowly hold a simple room shape. A large ceiling, floor and walls that weren’t meant to lock either of them into a deathmatch.
[ Ding! ]
[ Extraction Successful. ]
[ You have extracted the A-Rank Talent: Predator Silhouette ]
[ Predator Silhouette — Violently hijacks the fight-or-flight response of anyone perceiving the user. Manipulates peripheral vision specifically, presenting the user as an active threat stimulus before conscious processing engages. ]
The common area crashed back into existence.
The chairs. The bank of windows. Alexis still mid-gesture, voice rising into the next line of her invented monologue, a fraction of a second past where she had been when Ash made contact.
His knees gave. His right hand caught the table edge on the way down and left a bloody line across its surface, a wide wet smear that dragged from the table’s lip to its center. The split skin on the back of his hand pulled wider with the impact.
Ash had not registered the damage inside the realm. His own adrenaline making up for the lack of a built body. His left lung pulled against the wrong angle and the breath came up short, each inhale ending in a wet hitch where the detached rib ground against its stump. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth, fresh copper over the dried smear on his chin.
His right ear still leaked, the blood having soaked through his collar and into the shoulder of his shirt, the fabric now a dark wet burgundy against the original grey. His left eye had swollen nearly shut, the lid puffed and purpling. His right hand had become a body part that didn’t look like a hand, the back of it split open, bones visible and shifting, fingers at rest in positions that belonged on a medical study.
Alina was there for him before the floor was.
Her arm went under his and locked him upright against her side. Her other hand found the part of him still intact. He could feel her surveying his injuries before saying or doing anything rash. ƒгeewebnovёl.com
"Can you walk for me?" she said, low. "Two steps only. Then two more."
Alexis’s voice reached him muffled.
Sheila was still seated. Her phone was face-up where she had left it. Her teammates were turned toward Alexis.
She looked at her sleeve where his hand had been.
"Why did you touch me?" she said.
Sheila did not look at the blood or at the angle his right hand was at. She looked at her sleeve, and at no part of him.
Alina did not answer for him.
The room’s attention was fully held by Alexis who was talking about a game of thrones. Alina threaded between the tables, hiding Ash as much she could from the background vision of onlookers.
They got out to an empty corridor.
Alina got two more steps out of him before his weight became hers entirely.
"You’re not heavy," she said, mostly to herself trying to correct a falsehood. "We’re going to the south stairwell."
He turned his head against her shoulder. His mouth filled with blood. He worked enough of it out to speak, staining his teeth and drooling out the left side of his mouth as he opened it.
"Alina."
"Don’t."
"Can I still fight in the next phase?"
