The Trap at the Soccer Field

  In the two years since Alicia had joined the Neuroprotection Center, the Mishima Family had developed a specific relationship with her name. They used it the way people use the names of problems that have not yet been solved, with a combination of frustration and ongoing intention. Binoshi had been defeated three times. The third time had produced a silence from his side of things that was longer than the first two silences, and longer silences from people like Binoshi tended to mean they were being more careful rather than less active.

  Morokana had taken the empty desk two seats from Alicia's and filled it with the organised clutter of a man who thinks in systems. His summons were mechanical, constructed from components he understood completely and had built himself, and his knowledge of the Mishima Family's methods had proven consistently useful in the particular way that someone who has been inside a thing understands its edges better than anyone observing from outside.

  The case that came in on a Tuesday afternoon was unusual in its specificity. A monster had been sighted on the central soccer field in the third district, and the unusual part was that it appeared to be doing nothing. No attack. No movement toward populated areas. Just presence, large and still in the middle of a field that had been emptied by the time the report reached them.

  Lyra looked at the feed for a long moment. "Alicia. Morokana. Jack. I want eyes on this before anyone touches it."

  The field had the particular silence of a space built for crowd noise that currently contained none. The monster was at the center circle, which felt like a choice even if it wasn't. It was large and wrong in the specific way of things that have been assembled from components that did not originally belong together. Something of a donkey about the face. Something of a cat about the body. It sat motionless and looked at nothing in particular with eyes that were present but not tracking.

  Jack found his elevated position on the bleachers' upper tier and settled into it with the focus of someone who has learned that stillness is a skill rather than an absence of action. His voice came through the walkie-talkie at the measured frequency of someone who is watching everything and saying only what matters.

  Alicia raised her sword and moved toward the creature.

  Morokana caught her arm. The grip was firm and the expression on his face was one she had learned to pay attention to, the specific look of a man who has seen a particular kind of wrong before and recognises it from a distance.

  "Wait," he said.

  He approached the monster alone and slowly, with the careful posture of a man doing an inspection rather than an approach. He crouched beside it. He stood up. He stepped back.

  "This is a hybrid," he said. His voice had the quality of someone reporting something they wish they could un-know. "A forbidden construction. They've used human lives in this. There are people in there, Alicia. Were people. The Mishima Family has been running experiments that we only had theoretical evidence of until right now."

  The walkie-talkie produced a sound that was not Jack's usual measured frequency.

  It was a scream, abbreviated, the kind that gets cut short by something interrupting the person making it.

  "Jack." Alicia was already moving.

  "Go!" Morokana reached for his summon. "I'll hold whatever this thing does when it decides to do something. Get to Jack!"

  A Deadly Exchange

  She reached the bleachers' upper tier in time to find that being in time meant being thirty seconds too late for the version of events where Jack was fine. He was on his knees, his rifle on the concrete beside him, and Binoshi was behind him with a dagger against the line of his throat, and the wound in Jack's back was doing what wounds in backs do when they aren't attended to, which was getting worse.

  Binoshi looked at Alicia with the patience of someone who has planned this and is waiting for the planning to bear fruit. "One more step is a choice," he said. "And the choice ends this boy."

  "Alicia." Jack's voice was even, which was more alarming than if it hadn't been. His face was the colour of someone who is allocating all available resources to remaining conscious and has none left for colour. "Just kill him. I mean it. I'm telling you to."

  "Quiet," she said. To both of them.

  Below, the field had stopped being empty. Cartel soldiers came from the access tunnels under the bleachers and from the maintenance gates at the far end and from places that suggested they had been there already, waiting for the moment when both of Neuroprotection's field assets were separated and occupied. Morokana's summon had the creature at the center circle contained, but contained was a temporary state that required continuous maintenance, and now there were guns making that maintenance more complicated.

  From the smoke that the cartel's entry had produced, a figure emerged with the specific energy of someone making an entrance they have been planning. He was not shooting at anyone. He didn't need to. He walked through the chaos of his own people's operation with the comfort of the person who designed it.

  "Morokana," Doctor Waruyama said, in the warm tone of a teacher encountering a former student at an unexpected venue. "I've been looking for you for quite some time. I built that thing in the center of the field specifically to bring you here. The location was chosen for the sight lines." He glanced around with genuine appreciation. "I think it worked rather well."

  Morokana, who had taken a shot to the side from a cartel rifleman and was bleeding through his jacket, looked at Waruyama with an expression that had no warmth in it. "That thing has human lives in it."

  "Former human lives," Waruyama said, with the distinction of someone who finds the difference meaningful. "Art requires sacrifice. You of all people should understand craft."

  "I used robots," Morokana said. "I used worms. I used things that were already constructed for the purpose. I did not use people."

  Waruyama pressed the end of his staff against the bullet wound in Morokana's side, and the pressure of it communicated a precise amount of additional pain. "The line you drew between acceptable and unacceptable is a line you drew yourself, for yourself. Don't use it to measure me." He leaned in slightly. "Though perhaps you would like to become more familiar with my methods from the inside."

  Morokana's summon fired. Waruyama's monster deflected it. The two constructs engaged each other with the grinding efficiency of machines that have been built to do this, and Morokana pulled himself behind the bleacher structure and managed to keep breathing.

  Above, the situation had a structure. Alicia could see it clearly, which was the specific torture of situations with clear structures that you cannot move without breaking the thing you're trying to protect. Binoshi wanted his brother. His brother was in a Neuroprotection holding facility. Jack's life was the currency of the negotiation.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  She told Lyra over the walkie-talkie.

  Lyra's response was a silence that communicated everything she thought about the situation, and then: "I'm on my way."

  The exchange took twelve minutes to arrange and three minutes to execute. Lyra's team brought Binoshi's brother to the field perimeter. Jack walked toward Alicia, each step slower than the last, his hand pressed against the wound in his back. Binoshi's brother walked toward Binoshi. The distance between them closed symmetrically, two people moving toward opposite ends of a scale.

  When both of them had reached their respective sides, Binoshi untied his brother's wrists. He looked at Alicia. He smiled in the way of someone whose planning has arrived at the next phase.

  "Twin Devil Phaoh," the brothers said together.

  The two monsters that descended onto the field were the same ones she had fought separately before. The same armored construction, the same axe blades, the same intentional menace. Together they had a weight that their individual presences hadn't conveyed.

  The cartel opened fire across the field. The Neuroprotection team answered it from their positions, and the soccer field became a space with too many simultaneous events happening in it, each one requiring the full attention of someone who could only be in one place.

  The Last Stand of Morokana

  Waruyama produced a syringe from somewhere in his coat. He found a cartel soldier who was close enough, held the man's arm with the practiced grip of someone who has done this in worse conditions, and injected him. The transformation was not slow. The soldier became something that had a wolf's head and a kangaroo's body and the specific aggression of a thing that has just discovered it is much larger than it was a moment ago. Waruyama made three more of them with three more syringes and the four creatures moved into the Neuroprotection team's position with an appetite that was not figurative.

  Jack raised his rifle from his elevated position and made the shot count, which was harder than it sounds when you are bleeding from a wound in your back and the target is moving. One of the wolf-beasts stopped moving permanently. The other three identified the origin of the shot and redirected their interest.

  Lyra moved to put herself between Jack and the beasts and was intercepted by Binoshi's brother, whose blade found the side of her armor and found the gap between two sections of it, and Lyra went down on one knee with a wound that wasn't fatal and was also not irrelevant.

  Alicia was in the street by this point. The Twin Devil Phaohs had driven her there through a sequence of axe blows that she had absorbed and deflected and been thrown by in varying proportions, and she was operating on the particular fuel of someone who has moved past the point where the body's standard objections carry much authority. She was bleeding from three places and her shoulder was making structural complaints she was filing away for later.

  On the rooftop of the bleacher facility, Jack and Binoshi were conducting a conversation in the language of sniper fire, each shot meeting the other in the air between them with a small hot collision that sent sparks out in both directions. It was the kind of fight that exists entirely in lines of sight and fractions of seconds, and watching it from below was watching something that moved faster than the eye could usefully track.

  Jack ran dry.

  The reload was a sequence of actions that took a specific number of seconds, and Binoshi's bullet was already in the air before the sequence was complete.

  Morokana stepped in front of Jack.

  The impact moved through him in a way that bullets move through people when they find something they weren't looking for, and he went down with the controlled slowness of someone trying to manage the process of going down. Jack caught him with one arm and his rifle with the other, and his face did something that had nothing calm in it.

  He reloaded. He raised the rifle. He made the shot that entered Binoshi's shoulder with a precision that the situation did not obviously allow for but that grief, in its specific productive form, sometimes makes available. Binoshi left the rooftop in the uncontrolled way of someone who had not planned to.

  Binoshi's brother saw it happen. He was in the middle of a sword exchange with the injured Lyra, and his attention shifted in the fraction of a second that attention shifts when something worse than your current problem makes itself known. He moved toward the building. Lyra put her body between him and the building, which cost her another wound and was worth it in the specific arithmetic of the situation.

  Jack's shot found the killer's side. Not lethal, but enough. Lyra drew both swords. The killer swung and she was already moving across the line of the swing, and the cross-cut she delivered was final in the way that cross-cuts delivered at that speed and angle tend to be final.

  Binoshi's brother sat down on the concrete and did not get up again.

  In the street, Alicia was alone with the last Devil Phaoh, and alone was the accurate word because everything she had left to fight with was already committed to staying upright. Her breath was coming in intervals that were slightly too long, and her sword arm was making it clear that it was doing this under protest, and the monster in front of her had not meaningfully suffered from the last twenty minutes of the fight.

  Then Morokana's mechanical summon arrived in the street.

  It moved like something that has been given a final instruction and is in the process of completing it with the last available resources. It interposed itself between Alicia and the monster and fired what it had, and the recoil of the shots moved through its frame in ways that its frame was not designed to accommodate anymore, and the Devil Phaoh's axe found the summon's chest in a blow that drove through the casing and reached the components inside.

  The summon's arm changed into a drill. Slowly and with the specific deliberateness of something that has made a final decision, it drove the drill through the monster's stomach. Both of them stopped moving simultaneously, the machine and the demon settling into the rubble with the particular finality of things that have used everything they had.

  Alicia stood in the silence that followed.

  The last monster looked at her. Then something behind her caught its attention, and the monster went very still in the way that things go still when they encounter something that their own instincts recognise as larger than themselves. She didn't turn around. She could feel it behind her, large and warm in a way that had no temperature, a presence rather than a thing, a shadow that was gold where shadows are usually the absence of gold.

  The monster's eyes read her eyes, and what they found in her eyes was not what they had been tracking for the past twenty minutes.

  The lion was looking out.

  Alicia raised her sword.

  She did not choose the words. They arrived through her in the way that the lion's roar had always arrived through her, through a channel that bypassed the usual processes.

  "Shine, my sword of hope. I call upon your power. Leon Gladius."

  The sky made a decision. The clouds went dark with the completeness of things that have been waiting to be useful. The sword lit from the inside with something that was not fire and was not electricity but was the thing that both of those are approximations of. She swung.

  The lion left the blade and met the monster with the totality of what a hungry lion brings to a meeting it has been moving toward for a long time. The monster did not fall. It did not collapse. It became light and then it became the absence of light and then it was simply no longer a problem that needed solving.

  The sword hit the concrete.

  Alicia's legs made the assessment that they had been ignoring for some time and revised their position, and she began to fall.

  The Heir of Astralinum

  High above the street, above the smoke and the sirens beginning their approach from the north and the sound of Neuroprotection personnel calling to each other across the field, a portal opened in the air with the quiet of something that does not require announcement.

  Three figures stood in it, robed in the thick fabric of people who travel between places where climate is not the relevant variable. They looked down at the girl falling toward the pavement below, at the sword she had released, at the golden afterimage still fading from the space the lion had occupied.

  One of them exhaled slowly. "We've been looking across six systems," they said. "And she's been here the whole time."

  "She's been ready for longer than she knows," said the second.

  The third was quiet for a moment in the way of someone organising many things simultaneously into a statement that can hold them. "We will call her back when the time is right. She is not finished here yet." A pause. "Our princess of light. The Heir of Astralinum."

  The portal closed without ceremony. Below it, the first Neuroprotection responders reached the street and found the girl on the concrete, the sword beside her, and the space where the monster had been, which was now just space.

  The sirens came closer. The city, which had learned to absorb a great deal in two years, absorbed this too, and waited to see what came next.