The sniper rifle kicked against Luca's shoulder.
Through the scope, the plasma bolt punched through the first creature's skull, kept going, burned through the second, the third, and buried itself in the canyon wall forty ters back. Three dissolving corpses in one shot. Luca shifted left and fired again. Two more dropped, their crystalline scales shattering into black dust that drifted sideways in the predawn air.
The rock formations below him pinched together at the bottom of the slope, creating a gap maybe eight feet wide, and the overflow creatures poured through it in a stream of glittering scales and red eyes. Level 15 lizards with mouths that split in three directions and a single red eye. One after another after another they ca.
Dawn had co to the Agua Dulce Mountains. Luca's rifle barrel was hot enough to blur the air above it. He'd stayed in his expedition suit instead of his armor; in the Arizona heat, the suit's water reclamation was the only thing keeping him from passing out. To his left, Emily's dual plasma blasters worked the gap from a wider angle, her dium armor already caked in dust.
Ryan had deployed the Poorwill drone hive within minutes of arrival. The feed on Luca's tactical goggles showed a 3D overlay with paths in blue, chokepoints in yellow, and zones in red that ant don't go here unless you want to die. Joey was behind them, hands deep in soone's ribcage. The guy was a combat dic whether he liked it or not.
Beyond the ridgeline, the steady thump of Apache rotors mixed with the distant boom of tank guns to the west. The military had been out there since before Luca arrived. From the sound of it, they weren't winning either.
Luca squeezed the trigger again. The bolt traveled the length of the narrow ravine and punched through four creatures before hitting the far wall. The ones in front dissolved. The ones behind tripped over dissolving corpses and piled up. Three seconds of blocked passage. Then the next wave pushed through.
We just need to hold.
He didn't say it out loud. Not yet. But it was already looping in his head because Emily had run the math back in Ajo. If Danny and Zoe and Chris had maintained speed from the Belt, if nothing went wrong, if Zoe flew the way Zoe always flew...
The Agua Dulce range was all bone and no skin. Narrow ravines between walls of rock that would push inward without warning, opening into dead-end canyons barely wide enough for a truck. Rocky outcroppings jutted from every slope. In New Hampshire, terrain hid you behind trees. Here, it hid you behind stone.
Gabriela Vega, having been born and raised in this area, was running the defense. Staggered formation and barricades at every approach. Every ti they pulled back, the next position was already prepped. Valeria was a ghost on the ridgeline, barely spoke, and never missed. Natalia, though currently being stitched together by Joey, was still shouting tactical orders between cursing at him (sothing about his mother and a goat) in rapid-fire Spanish. Chris better not try his moves out here. These three would eat him alive.
Jake, the fourth person on their team, was holding the eastern approach and kept his thoughts to himself as he operated energy turrets spread around the cliffs above him. Luca had caught the way his eyes tracked Gabriela when she moved between positions. The way he adjusted fire the instant Valeria called a new focus, not following but anticipating. The guy had it bad and didn't know it yet.
Luca wanted all of them on the Triumph.
His sniper kicked again as another creature dropped. The ravine ran thick with black dust, the residue of dissolved bodies catching the light.
The overflow ca in pulses. Twenty minutes of chaos, then five minutes of almost-quiet while the portal built up the next batch. During one of these lulls, Luca slung the sniper rifle across his back and dropped down from his shelf.
Gabriela was at the main barricade, reloading. Up close, she was maybe twenty-two. Dark hair pulled back, dust and sweat across her face, wearing a tactical vest over dium armor.
"You're him." She barely looked up. She was slotting a fresh energy cell into her rifle.
"Luca."
"I know who you are." The cell clicked ho. "We had a eting scheduled. Three days from now. With an IFC recruiter." She glanced up. "Nobody said anything about you showing up in person."
"Changed the schedule."
"Lucky us." She said with a smile. "Your people are good. That sniper work through the south ravine punched through eight of them in one shot."
"Narrow canyon helps."
"This is our backyard." She nodded toward the ridgeline where Valeria was barely visible against the rock. "Every ravine, every ridge. You live out here long enough, you learn where to stand."
She wasn't bragging. Luca heard what she was actually saying: everything he'd admired about their positioning ca from working in terrain they already knew by heart.
From sowhere in the convoy, music drifted across the rocks. Soone had a truck with a working sound system, and during the lull they'd turned it on. A norteño song with an accordion was blaring. The sound bounced off the canyon walls and mixed with the settling dust. It should have been ridiculous, a soundtrack to a battlefield, but it wasn't. Luca watched a sixteen-year-old kid reload his energy rifle while mouthing along to the lyrics, and he had to look away for a second.
Ryan jogged over with his tablet, the Poorwill feed showing the full tactical picture. "There's a rock formation on the east ridge. Blow it, and we block the third corridor entirely."
"There's half a case of dynamite in one of the trucks," said Gabriella.
"That'll work," Ryan replied as he made his way over.
Luca watched him go, then turned back toward Joey's position. Four wounded. Natalia was the worst, a deep gash across her ribs, but Joey had sealed it, using that Triage Shell he'd bought back in Tucson. Luca watched the gash close under Joey's hands, the compound knitting tissue in real ti, and Natalia's eyes went wide.
"Qué chingados es eso?" she said.
"TL9 bioweave," Joey said. "Stay down. Twenty more minutes."
"Veinte minutos? I'll be dead of boredom in five."
"You'll be dead of bleeding in two if you rip those sutures."
Natalia settled back, muttering. But she was watching Joey work on the next patient with suspicion. TL9 dical gear was magic to soone who'd been patching wounds with field kits for three years.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The ground shook, but it wasn't creatures. Sothing structural that Luca felt in his teeth.
Emily's voice in his earpiece. "Luca."
He was already looking south. A column of light rose from behind the ridgeline, maybe ten miles out, pulsing purple and green and a sickly yellow that made his eyes water.
"OP-131. It just blew."
The level 15 lizards in the ravine froze. Every single one, heads swiveling south, and Luca watched sothing he'd never seen in four years: the overflow creatures from one portal orienting toward another, as though they were receiving sothing. New orders on a frequency only they could hear.
Then they frenzied. The 15s surged forward with new aggression, scrambling over each other, and behind them the Class 31 creatures ca over the ridgelines. Twice the size, scales thick enough to refract the dawn light, jaws that unhinged in three directions.
Valeria, from above, flat and calm: "South ravine. Dozens. Bigger ones."
The first of the overflow monsters from the Class 31 portal crested the barricade, and Luca put a sniper bolt through its eye. It punched clean through. Emily's blasters caught the next one. Three more climbed over the dissolving bodies while a tide of frenzied 15s poured through beneath them.
The math was broken now. The 15s still died in one TL8 shot, but the 31s took three, four. Luca's sniper rifle punched through everything, but there was only one of him, and the volu had doubled. Below the ridgeline, A-10s were making gun runs on the flats. It didn't matter.
And then the ground between the two portals started changing. Black rock spikes punched up through the desert floor, crystalline and sharp-edged. A toxic green fog rolled through the lower ravines and where it touched the saguaros, the plants twisted and blackened and died in seconds. The air tasted wrong. Chemical. Like the System was updating the map while they were still standing on it.
Two portals. Forty kiloters apart. Each one protecting the other. Both producing faster than anyone could kill.
The fight changed from holding a position to losing ground slowly.
Level 31 creatures took four, five TL8 shots to drop where the 15s had taken one. The funneling helped. Creatures piled into the narrow ravines and his bolts burned through them in lines, one shot dropping a dozen when they stacked up right. But each wave pushed a little closer before it died.
Ryan blew the east ridge. The detonation echoed through the mountains, and a wall of rock collapsed across the third approach corridor. One less direction to defend. Gabriela stared at Ryan when he jogged back.
"That actually worked," she said.
"I asured twice."
"You had ti to asure?"
Ryan tapped his goggles. "Drones asured."
Gabriela repositioned her team without being told. She read the new threat pattern, moved Jake from the now-blocked east approach to reinforce the main ravine. Luca filed that away because that was exactly why he'd co to Arizona.
Then a wave of larger creatures hit the Desert Spark's Armored Personnel Carrier from two directions at once. Luca swung his scope toward the vehicle and watched claws find seams in the armor plating, jaws prying at panels, teeth grinding against steel. The creatures tore into it from both sides, peeling armor like foil. Nobody was inside, but everything stored in it was gone in seconds.
Gabriela watched it happen. Her jaw tightened. She didn't say a word. Luca knew that look. He'd worn it himself, back on Sandworth, watching things he'd worked for get destroyed by sothing bigger than him.
She turned away from the wreckage and fired three shots into the nearest creature.
---
Luca's goggles tagged the first elite before he saw it clearly.
[Crystalline Matriarch - Level 31 (Elite)]
Twice the size of the regulars. Armored scales, and two red eyes instead of one. When it scread, every creature in earshot surged forward.
Jake hit it first. His TL8 bolts sparked off the scales and did nothing. Luca put the crosshair on its left eye and fired. The bolt punched through the socket and out the back of its skull. It dropped mid-scream, and the surge died with it.
Three more TL9 rifles and this is over in an hour. Danny, Chris, Zoe. Sowhere between here and the Belt, flying as fast as the Triumph could push. He needed them on this ridge yesterday.
After that, the elites kept coming. [Basalt Wurms] that ca over the ridgelines instead of through the ravines, grinding through boulders, taking a full minute of concentrated fire to bring down. Corrupted variants warped by the toxic fog, one detonating in a spray of crystalline shrapnel that peppered Jake's position. The volu never slowed.
The grind took its toll.
Desert Sparks was running dry. They'd been fighting for hours before Luca even arrived, and Gabriela had swapped to a sidearm that was basically a flashlight against the things coming at them.
Luca pulled a C-Type power cell pack from the Kestrel's cargo and tossed one to Jake. Jake slotted it in and his rifle's ammo counter jumped from 03 to 99. The TL8 capacitor whined at a pitch the old gun wasn't built for. Jake fired. The bolt punched clean through a Class 31 creature that would have taken two shots before.
"Goddamn."
"Language," Joey said from the dical station without looking up.
"Shut up, Joey."
Luca distributed the rest across the line. Everything was finite. TL9 cells, armor integrity, weapon cooldown. Emily's dium armor was flashing amber. Ryan's was worse. Luca's expedition suit had a tear along the left shoulder from a close call that the Tomahawk had settled before it beca a closer call.
Joey had seven wounded. His hands were steady, but when he t Luca's gaze the look said everything. We can't keep this up.
On the western flats, a Basalt Wurm erupted beneath an Abrams and flipped sixty-eight tons of Arican steel end over end. Luca forced himself to look back at his own lane.
The main ravine position fell. Gabriela called the retreat, and Desert Sparks moved like they'd drilled it.
A five-person team on the south flank didn't. Luca triggered [Proximity Threat Map]. The overlay blood across his goggles, enemy positions flooding red, and there it was: five blue dots on the south flank, surrounded on three sides. Distance readout said forty ters too far. The dots winked out one at a ti. One of them held longer than the rest, firing until the red swallowed it. Luca's hand found the Tomahawk on his hip and stayed there, hanging limp. The System had shown him everything and none of it mattered. He should have seen the south flank thinning. Should have pulled them back before the barricade fell.
They lost the second line in ten minutes.
At the last position before the clifftop, Gabriela dropped beside Luca. "After this, we've got nowhere left to go."
"We just need to hold."
"Hold for what?"
"Sothing's coming."
She read his face. Then turned back to her team. "¡Aguanten!" she shouted across the rocks.
The call echoed back. From Jake, hoarse and imdiate. From the kid with the corridos. From Valeria, quiet enough that Luca almost missed it.
Hold on.
Emily found him during the next lull. She dropped beside him behind the rock shelf, and up close the damage was worse than he'd thought. Her armor had deep gouges along the left arm and back. Blood on her gauntlets that wasn't hers. Her ponytail had co half loose and strands of blonde hair stuck to her face where sweat and dust had turned to paste.
"You told Gabriela to hold."
"Yeah."
"Zoe's coming?"
Emily had run the math herself back in Ajo. She already knew the answer. In four years, Luca had never heard her ask a question she already had the answer to. She didn't do uncertainty.
She was asking now.
"She's coming."
Emily nodded once. She trusted Zoe.
Her hand found his for just a mont, a squeeze and a release, and then she was up and moving, blasters cycling, back into the fight before the next wave crested the ridge.
During the retreat, Luca spotted them on the western slope, hooves on rock. Coming fast.
Luca spun, rifle up, and a herd of wild horses ca thundering through the ravine behind them. His goggles tagged them automatically.
[Sonoran Mustang - Level 32]
The lead stallion, a massive bay with scars across its flanks, blew past Luca close enough to feel the heat off its body. A Class 31 creature lunged from the rocks and the stallion kicked it off the cliff face without breaking stride. The herd followed, ten, twelve of them, hooves cracking stone, shouldering through the firefight like it was weather. They charged straight up the ridge and kept climbing.
Level 32. Earth's apex. Wild horses running toward the high ground through Level 31 overflow creatures with nothing but hooves and fury and sheer stubborn refusal to die.
Ryan appeared at his shoulder, watching them go. He didn't ntion the saddles they'd bought in Houston.
They reached the clifftop, where the Kestrel sat waiting. Space for four, maybe six if they hung off the side. Next to it rested the two Roadrunners.
Joey had eleven wounded. Five more who never made it off the south flank. Natalia was back on her feet despite his orders, shooting one-handed, bracing her rifle against a rock pillar with her other arm strapped to her chest. The horses were already there, clustered on the western edge of the shelf where they'd run out of up. The scarred stallion stood between his herd and the drop, breathing hard, watching the ravines below with the sa look Gabriela had.
Emily's blasters were cycling on empty. She'd drawn her plasma sword, the blue-white blade humming in the morning air.
Below them, the overflow surged up the final approach.
Gabriela looked at him. Blood and dust and three years of desert survival in those eyes.
"How much longer?"
Luca looked east. The sky was bright now, full morning, clear and blue and empty.
Soon, he hoped.
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