Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

Above that, the Anathema's body was untouched. And from the upper part of its back, the tendrils came.

Six of them. Each one as thick as a small building. They emerged from the Anathema's back in arrays of three, sweeping out in long, weighted arcs across the city's half, smashing into buildings with the casual force of severe geological events. Every time a tendril made contact with a structure, the structure toppled like a castle made of playing cards. The tendrils didn't grip. They didn't crush. They simply moved through, and whatever had been in their path became a big pile of rubble.

Osamu was the one keeping that from killing them.

He stood twenty metres in front of Kori, his shield drawn from his back, the curved disc of layered Luminite alloy held in both hands and angled toward the tendrils' trajectories. The shield was the only one of its kind - a defensive instrument that wasn't really a shield in the conventional sense, but a Luminite-channeling broadcaster that could project barriers across distances that ordinary shields couldn't dream of. When Osamu held the shield up, a translucent dome of Eon-reinforced air formed in front of him at the distance of his choosing. The fields could absorb impacts that should have flattened entire buildings.

Kori had personally watched him hold off a tendril strike with the shield extended at four hundred metres. The dome had cracked. The wall behind it had not.

He had been doing this for seven hours.

His face had blood running down the left side of it. His armour was torn open across the chest. His knees were locked into a stance that he had not been able to break in over an hour because every few minutes another tendril came for the area he was covering and he had to absorb the strike before any of them could die. He was not speaking. He was conserving his breath for the work.

Kenzo was the one making it hard for the Anathema to do anything.

He stood somewhere on the western flank, a quarter of a kilometre from Kori's position. She couldn't see him directly - he was below her line of sight, in a depression in the rubble - but she could feel him. Every few seconds, the ground shook. Not normal shaking. The ground shook the way ground shook when a Phalanx hit it deliberately, the kind of impact that registered as a seismic event two cities over. Kenzo was driving his hammer into the bedrock, and the bedrock was answering with a wave that propagated upward through the Anathema's lower body and disrupted its concentration just enough to keep its consumption rate at survivable levels.

He had been doing that for a few hours, too.

Plant girlie was holding the eastern flank with vegetation. Osamu was holding the centre with the shield. Kenzo was destabilizing the foundation with earthquakes. And Kori was keeping the lower body chained.

The Old Fart - Phalanx Four, the senior member of the unit, actual headmaster of the Lotus Academy - had gone somewhere thirty minutes ago and had not come back. Probably still alive, probably still operating, probably doing something they would all be grateful for in retrospect.

The Leader had also gone somewhere.

He was the only one Kori called by his title rather than a nickname. He was the only Phalanx she had ever met whose presence on a battlefield changed the situation simply by being there.

Above them, the sky had a yellow tint to it.

The cloud cover, normally white-grey, had taken on the colour of accumulated smoke and Eon discharge. Every fire in the eastern half of the city was contributing. Every Eon technique they had used had left a residue. The whole sky was a dull, brassy yellow, and the sun behind it was a dim, sour disc that didn't quite illuminate anything.

This was what the Phalanx looked like when they were winning.

"OSAMU!" Kori suddenly shouted.

He didn't answer. He was holding the shield. A tendril was coming. He had less than a fraction of a second.

"OSAMU, I NEED A LAUNCH."

He glanced at her. Briefly. The kind of glance that said please, not now.

"I NEED IT NOW."

The tendril arrived, shield going up instinctively. The dome formed in front of Osamu at a distance of two hundred metres, and the tendril struck it with the force of a falling tower. The dome held, then cracked. Osamu staggered backward two steps and re-anchored himself in the rubble.

The tendril withdrew, and in the few seconds he had, Osamu turned to her.

"What!?"

"I need a launch."

"What do you mea- NO!!"

"Osamu -"

"I'm holding the centre6."

"It's working but it's not winning. We need to take the head. The head can't be reached from the ground. I need to get there and I need a throw."

"No."

"Osamu -"

"I said no."

Kori would have argued more. She had a list of arguments queued - three of them, each one progressively more reasonable than the last. But Osamu had turned back to face the next tendril, and she didn't have the time to make the case. The chains in her hands were starting to thin from the duration of the channel, and she could almost feel the Anathema considering whether to break her chains in the next minute or two.

She gritted her teeth, then let the chains drop.

Dropping to the ground, they thickened - she pushed a final burst of Eon into them as she released, locking them into the ground, in a state that would hold the lower body for another five or six minutes without active channeling. It was a technique she had developed for exactly this kind of situation. It cost her almost the rest of her reserve to set up.

She was now operating on the bottom third of her Eon capacity.

"KENZO!" she shouted.

The ground shook in response. A pulse - Kenzo acknowledging the call without breaking rhythm.

"I NEED A LAUNCH!"

The next pulse came two seconds early. Kenzo had heard her. The pulse after that came two seconds late. He was on his way.

She ran.

Across the rubble, down the slope of the collapsed apartment block, past two craters that had been someone's living room before the Anathemas have arrived. The ground was uneven and littered with debris. She didn't slow down. The Phalanx didn't slow down for ground. Her balance was too good for that.

Kenzo met her in a clearing between two destroyed warehouses.

He was bleeding from his forehead, from a tear in his shoulder, and from at least three places on his lower body that she didn't have time to catalog. His hammer was now on his back – not floating, like usual, but secured in the harness he'd designed to allow him to use both hands while still keeping it within reach, and without using Eon. He was grinning.

Kenzo always grinned during operations. It was a coping mechanism. It was also the most reliable indicator of his stress level - the wider the grin, the more trouble he was in.

His grin was the widest she had ever seen it.

"YOU NEED A LAUNCH," he said. Shouting over the ambient noise.

"YES!"

"OSAMU SAID NO?"

"OSAMU SAID NO."

"OSAMU'S A BUM."

"OSAMU'S A BUM," Kori agreed.

She presented her left leg. Ankle out, the same gesture she would use eleven years later on a rooftop in Neoshima. Kenzo grabbed it with one massive hand. The grip was different from Osamu's - coarser, less precise, the grip of a man who could absolutely throw her but who had less of a refined technique for it.

"ANGLE?" Kenzo shouted.

"FORTY DEGREES UP, EAST."

Suddenly, Kenzo let go.

"What!?" Kori asked, trying to cover the explosions happening around them.

"Wouldn't it be better if I launched you with the hammer!?"

After a few seconds of not-so-careful consideration, Korri nodded, ears the faintest shade of pink. "…Yeah."

Kenzo didn't waste anymore time, after seeing the barrier right above them almost crack, from another tendril hit. He gripped his hammer, pearl-white Luminite gem inside the core flaring brighter than ever before.

Kenzo's grin somehow widened further. He gripped the hammer better, the ground beneath his planted foot cratering immediately. He gestured Kori to jump as high as she could.

Kori looked at him with a slightly doubting look, as if being launched with a hammer was less dangerous than a human centrifuge.

She crouched, gathering her remaining strength for this last act that would hopefully finish the nightmare.

She leaped, twisting slightly in the air.

Right below her, Kenzo twisted his foot, an swung the hammer with all his might, in a wide crescent carrying the force of a mountain.

Kori's legs made contact with the hammer's head. She used the launch, combining it with an Eon-enhanced leap.

Kori flew.

The trajectory was higher than Osamu's would have been. Her body extended into the launch trajectory. Her knives - already drawn - caught the air on either side of her, the curved blades acting as crude stabilizers as she rose through the smoke-y air toward the Anathema's upper body. The thing's head was still around ten metres above her at the peak of her arc. She wasn't going to reach it from the launch alone.

But the Anathema's tendrils - the ones still emerging from its back, the ones that had been threatening Osamu - were within reach.

Her body rotated as she rose, the spin generating the angular momentum she needed for the slash she was preparing. Her arms locked. Her shoulders set. The technique she was about to execute was one of her signature moves - a full-body rotational slash with both knives extended, her holding the chain instead of the handle, the kind of attack that could open a tendril like a fruit if she could land it on the right part of the upper body and follow through with the right amount of Eon.

She'd done it in training only a few times – its destructive potential far too great. She'd never done it in combat. The opportunity hadn't come up.

The opportunity was here and now.

Her body reached the apex of the spin. Her hand muscles locked on the chains, already hurting her palms. The knives came around. Her grip tightened. The Eon in her channels surged forward toward her hands, ready to release through the blades in the final fraction of a second before contact.

She was about to land it.

She was about -

Her peripheral vision caught a motion.

To her left. Below her. One of the tendrils she hadn't been tracking - one that hadn't been there a milisecond ago, one the Anathema had grown during her ascent, faster than anything recorded history of Phalanx engagement - was already moving.

Her eyes widened.

The tendril swung right for her.