Chapter 46: For I am vengeance! I am the night! I am-
The climb from the ladder to the roof felt lighter than it had felt on Day Two, which had less to do with the ladder and more to do with how much of my body was operating today without pain compared to that morning.
My chest still complained under the plate carrier, but complaining and functioning were separate categories of experience, and today they were both operational.
Climbing the last of the ladder, my gaze fell on the emergency stairwell’s roof access and on the concrete wall that stood exactly where I had put it two days ago, a full poured slab covering the door, sealing it shut along with everything past it into permanent isolation.
The banging from Night One had gone quiet now, either because the stairwell had emptied or because the wall didn’t let the sound come through.
Either way, that little point of failure was absolutely secure now.
The Ascender sat in Inventory now, fully repaired from the beating it had taken on Night One, restored to factory tolerances with the fresh push bar and window mesh I had commissioned, ready to redeploy whenever I needed something that the eleven tons of armored RV was the right solution for.
Solar array still running, water tank still holding, and the twenty planting beds along the northern edge had gained roughly half a centimeter of growth since yesterday, which was tremendously insignificant progress, but still the exact kind of insignificant progress that would keep salad on our plates through winter if nothing else.
I walked to the center of the roof, turned around, and squared up on the balcony-facing edge.
The rope highway ran off my right side, still tensioned, still anchored, still the most sensible way out.
But I wasn’t feeling sensible today.
I checked the direction of travel against the target rooftop’s line, checked the projected altitude profile, the distance I’d need to cover, the angles, the needed speed, doing more math than I’d ever done for anything else in my entire life.
Because today was the first time I was going to do it across ten stories of open air, over a public road, carrying a passenger.
[Okay... this isn’t jumping off the bed anymore... This is the real thing. It has to be perfect!]
Tikki, blissfully unaware of the crisis unfolding inside my head, merely chirped once and adjusted his paws.
While I drew one slow breath and sprinted.
[Come on - Come on - Come on...!]
The world immediately went sideways during the tiny fraction of a second gravity still owned me, while my inner ear filed the exact same resignation letter it had submitted every time I’d ever fallen off anything.
Then Telekinesis caught me from every direction.
And my straight vertical drop bent into a long descending arc while the sprint’s momentum carried me forward over the balcony while Telekinesis stole just enough of gravity’s authority to keep me airborne.
[Holy shit, this is working!]
I was actually gliding.
Every meter I traveled forward cost me another slice of altitude because gravity was still very much in charge. Telekinesis was simply negotiating better terms for me.
My body was moving through the air somewhere between the pace of a parachute’s descent and the pace of a fast glider, the flight path bleeding steadily but slowly, roughly at a 40-degree angle, my forward vector holding true against the wind because the wind at this altitude was being mercifully cooperative somehow.
The balcony passed underneath me in a flash of concrete railing and two very wide pairs of eyes belonging to two people who had come out onto the balcony to see me off.
Kara’s mouth opened, and Nora’s mouth opened, and then the balcony was behind me as I glided over the road that sat ten stories below me, with the wind having a field day with my hair, my jacket, and every loose piece of equipment I was carrying.
Tikki, on my shoulder, did not appreciate what was currently happening to him and wanted the responsible party to reconsider immediately.
"WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAA!!"
My own heart was in my throat the whole time while I gripped the M110A2’s handguard to keep it from hitting me on the chin.
But I was also grinning like an absolute maniac.
[Working. It’s working. It’s actually working!]
The eight-floor building came up ahead at a rate my altitude curve could not clear at the current angle.
I needed either altitude or a redirect, and I already knew which one I was going to use because I had rehearsed this specific scenario in my head for hours straight.
I pulled the grappling launcher out of the Inventory in my right hand, and I aimed it up at the tall steel support structure holding the eight-floor building’s rooftop water tank, and squeezed the trigger.
-Disssh-!
The hook flew across the intervening gap and buried itself in the tank support framework while the System ran its stability check inside of a second and cleared me for retrieval, and then-
-Woosh-!
I straight up zipped to it.
Now, under normal circumstances, this would be the point where the cable’s sudden retraction ripped my arm out of the shoulder socket.
But this was also the point where physics got respectfully cheated.
Because Telekinesis was already holding all of my weight. So as far as gravity was concerned, I was a feather~
Within a second, rushing winds snapped at my face and the clothes as I crossed over the 8-story building, and just as I was about to crash into the water tank, I disengaged the hook.
The cable retracted itself back into the launcher automatically, but my body kept the momentum of the zip’s upward angle, still shooting through the air straight at the metal framework.
But I still wasn’t done cheating physics.
I applied a small Telekinesis correction and went a little left, threading past the water tank support structure by roughly two meters, and the very second, the 8-floor roof passed beneath me, and I kept going into the open air on the far side of it.
[HOLY SHIT!] My mind detonated as I glided above the building I had been about to land on, with more altitude than I had started with, at a speed that would carry me well over the next full block.
Tikki had stopped screaming somewhere in the middle of the pull.
His eyes, when I turned my head sideways to look at him, had gone as wide as I had ever seen them. His ears were still fully pinned flat against his skull. His claws were still very firmly dug into the skin of my shoulder at multiple points.
But his mouth was closed, and his head was turning to track the rooftops passing beneath us in a way that had ceased to be purely terror.
The next block passed under us in less than five seconds.
But my altitude was dropping again.
Directing myself towards the road, going straight in the middle of the line of apartment buildings on both sides, I let myself descend below the building’s height before once again pulling out the Grapple Gun and aiming at the edge of the roof of a building to my left.
-Disssh-!
Hook flew, claws bit, cable tensioned, all in the same rhythm as before. And once again, I was zipping up to the sky, with the wind screaming in my ears despite the ear pro, while a whoop came out of my chest before I could think about stopping it.
"I’M FUCKING BATMAN!" I couldn’t help screaming to the world.
Tikki, whose ears had partially unpinned during the last glide, snapped them right back down against his skull.
While the entire time my mind was looping-
[I’M BATMAN. I’M BATMAN. I’M BATMAN...!!!]
The next zip and glide covered three full blocks before I needed to grapple again, and the one after that covered four blocks, and the one after that covered five.
All the while, the city rolled beneath us. The same streets that damn near gave me panic attacks at the thought of traversing in the previous timeline.
But now, it was no longer the same city.
Every rooftop was now a highway. Every water tank was an anchor point for a superhero zip. Every construction crane, antenna array, and that taller adjacent building was a new piece of terrain in a movement grid that had just opened itself up along a vertical axis.
The city itself had not changed at all. But I might as well be traversing through it as though the Earth’s gravity had been switched with Mars’s.
I looked down at the streets, the same streets I had spent years navigating with armored vehicles, desperate cover routes, and constant infected calculations.
And I looked at them from meters up in the sky, gliding past them at speeds only Variants were ever going to match, all the while grinning the way I could not remember grinning at anything since somewhere in the first year of the previous timeline.
"Alright, crackhead. Ready or not... For I am vengeance! I am the night! I am-"
"Mea."
Comments