Gilded Ashes

Chapter 415: Failed Incapacitation

She didn’t see the petal coming.

The thermal trace had her attention completely - that small, wrong, unevenly-heated human shape moving across the buildings far below, registering on her Chasmis as something strange – with heat signature, but no Eon signature. Her brain had committed every spare cycle of processing to figuring out what she was looking at. But the closing petal was right across her flight path while she was still thinking, and her body, which had been gliding through open sky, hit reinforced alloy at full launch velocity.

The impact was loud.

She heard it before she felt it - a deep, resonant clang that propagated through the petal’s surface and up into the upper atmosphere, the sound of a Phalanx-class body meeting a city-defensive infrastructure plate at roughly the worst angle either of them had been designed for. Kori bounced. Her shoulder took the first contact, the petal’s alloy denting inward by perhaps a few centimeters under the force of her arrival.

She grunted - a short, tight sound from the back of her throat, the kind of grunt a person makes from a minor inconvenience rather than a full impact that would shatter someone else’s bones. The ribs from the side-flat impact - which had already been mostly resolved by the amplification’s healing pull - re-protested briefly and then went quiet again. The petal’s surface continued sliding past her shoulder.

She slowed time.

The Chasmis opened beneath her hair the way it had opened on the apex of her earlier jump, the iris widening, the world stretching outward into perceptual elongation. The petal’s surface, which had been moving fast against her shoulder a moment ago, slowed to the pace of a graceful glacier. She had time. She had as much time as she wanted.

She rolled, her body twisting on the petal’s surface, her knees pulling toward her chest, her boots planting against the petal’s inner curve with the friction of a controlled landing. The petal had been designed to close at a specific angle, and the angle, by happy coincidence, was a precise launching slope for any body that could plant against it and drive itself off downwards. Kori had a body that could do exactly that.

She extended both legs at once, pushing off the petal’s surface with the full output of her amplified Eon channels, the petal flexing outward by another half-centimetre as it absorbed the launch force before snapping back into its original shape. Her trajectory reversed. The Chasmis released. Time snapped back to normal speed, and she was now travelling downward at a velocity that exceeded the upward speed Osamu had launched her with - every bit of momentum she had been carrying upward now redirected, focused into a single descending line that pointed directly at the moving figure below.

Over a hundred kilometres an hour she thought. Downward. Precisely aimed.

The figure was now clearly in her sights, no longer a thermal smudge against the plains but a specific human-shaped presence racing across rooftops at a speed that wasn’t possible for an unmodified body. Kori let the Chasmis open again - costly now, after two prior activations and the petal impact, but necessary - and the world slowed once more.

She studied her target.

The figure moved with the kind of athletic economy that Kori had only ever seen in special trained operatives. Every step was placed exactly where it needed to be. Every shift of weight was calculated to convert one form of momentum into another without losing any. The kind of agility that, in any other person, Kori would have attributed to extreme body reinforcement - the technique where a practitioner channeled Eon into their own muscles, bones, and tendons, multiplying physical output beyond biological limits. It was the closest thing the Phalanx had to a universal baseline. Every member of the unit used some form of it. Kenzo’s entire body ran on reinforcement. Osamu’s shield grip was reinforced. Plant girlie used reinforcement to control her vines and anchor her legs better. Kori herself was running reinforced calves right now to manage the descent.

The figure below should have been radiating reinforcement Eon. The trace should have been brilliant, visible to the Chasmis as a constant, sustained shimmering halo across the body’s muscle groups.

There was no trace.

The figure was moving at reinforcement speeds while producing no reinforcement signature. To the Chasmis, the figure looked like an object - a thing rather than a person, a piece of unattended physics travelling through a cityscape without any of the energy markers that should have accompanied its motion. It was the visual equivalent of watching a stone fly through the air with no hand to have thrown it.

...Except it had human heat. Flaring and with extremes far past the human limit, but everything about it was human.

Kori’s mind began processing the implications and then stopped, because she did not have time to finish processing them, because she was around... Three seconds from contact.

The Wardens had been deployed. The petals had been closed. Alteea had authorized two Phalanx for all-out engagement. The phrase no Eon signature had come through the static. And now, with the Chasmis open and the field of view focused on a specific target, Kori was looking at a body that violated everything she understood about how human motion was supposed to register.

Whatever this thing was, it had earned the response.

She prepared.

Her knives spun outward, each one held at extension for the brief moment necessary to stabilize her descent, the blades acting as counter-weights against her body’s natural tendency to tumble. Cold air gathered around her - not channeled into any specific technique, just summoned to her position by the residual amplification, a gust of frost-edged wind that pressed against her back and added another few metres per second to her descent. She began to spin.

The Chasmis held the world in its slowed state while Kori was focused on the figure’s current velocity, the figure’s trajectory, the estimated position in two and a half seconds, the angle of the rooftop the figure was about to cross, the exact spot forty-two centimetres to its left that would put Kori within reach of its legs without requiring her to terminate it.

She did not intend to kill.

But she did intend to incapacitate.

Whatever this thing was, alive was more useful than dead. She would land on her hands. She would drive one knife into the rooftop’s surface as an anchor. She would hold the other knife as a handle. She would swing her legs in a perfect horizontal arc beneath the figure’s stride, catching its ankles at the precise moment when both feet were off the ground, and she would carry the figure into a controlled tumble that would deposit it on the rooftop.

It was a pretty good capture plan.

Four metres to contact.

The figure was moving at around fifty-two kilometres per hour. Not a human limit. Not even close to a human limit - unreinforced human limit was somewhere around forty-two, three at max. With moderate reinforcement, you reached the figure’s speed by burning Eon at a rate that was visible from kilometres away. The figure was burning none.

Three metres.

Kori’s body completed the third revolution of her descending spin. Her grip on her knives tightened. Her Chasmis held the world at the slowed perceptual pace it had been holding for the last several seconds.

The figure turned its head.

It turned the head with the precise speed of something that had heard her - although Kori had made no sound that should have been audible from her current altitude and slowed-down time, and the wind was loud enough that even if she had made a sound, the figure should not have been able to localise its source. And beneath the hood, in the briefest moment of upward-tilted recognition, Kori saw a sharp jawline.

Female. Young. The kind of bone structure that belonged to a face Kori had not seen before and would certainly not forget after this.

Then the figure stopped.

It stopped completely. The fifty-two kilometres per hour of horizontal velocity simply ceased - not a deceleration through normal physics, not a controlled stop using friction or planted feet, but an instantaneous cessation that should have torn the figure’s body apart. Her trajectory hit zero in the space of a single frame. The rooftop beneath her boots cracked from the released momentum, the alloy roofing material splintering outward from the impact point in a small radial pattern.

She didn’t fall over. She didn’t even stagger. The momentum that should have killed her went somewhere else, dispersed in a way Kori could not see and the Chasmis could not detect.

And then the blades came out.

Both of them. From the harnesses at her back. The motion of drawing them was as smooth and as fast as anything Kori had ever seen on another body, the curved Damascus steel sliding free in a single motion that put both spike-tipped weapons into a defensive position in front of her chest before Kori had finished rotating through her own next revolution.

The time was slowed down. Her Chasmis was doing its work. Everything around – the splinters were moving with .1x speed, her fall looked like she was casually floating downwards, not crashing with insane speed. Even its cloak was fluttering, slowed down.

Yet the figure was moving as if Kori’s speed wasn’t even something to concern herself with.

She looked up from under the hood. Her eyes found Kori’s eyes. The blades pointed upward at the angle of an interception.

She had known where Kori was. She had known where Kori had come from. She had known when to stop and how to stop. And she had pulled her weapons into a guard before Kori’s downward arc even reached the final second of its descent...

With two more meters of distance to spare.

Kori had time to register every detail. She had time to recalibrate. She had time to understand, with perfect clinical clarity, that her capture plan was no longer viable, because the target had read her descent with flawless precision and was ready to intercept her, like this was just another routine thing for her.

Whatever was happening on the rooftop below, this was not going to be a capture.