Chapter - 335
The mountain groaned. It was a deep, tectonic sound, a bass note felt in the teeth rather than heard by the ear. Above them, the Warner Chateau, a fortress of stone and ego that had dominated the peak for fifty years, finally surrendered to gravity and high explosives. The foundations cracked with a sound like a gunshot, and the entire structure began to slide.
Millions of tons of rock, steel, and snow detached from the peak. The avalanche wasn't coming; it was here.
"Put them on!" Rick roared, shoving the collapsible skis into Sharon's trembling hands. "Boots lock in automatically! Just step and click!"
Sharon fumbled with the high-tech gear, her fingers numb inside her tactical gloves. "I don't know how to ski! I grew up in Detroit!"
"It's just falling with style!" Rick yelled over the roar of the collapsing mountain. He stepped into his own bindings. Click.
"System," he thought, panic clawing at his throat. "I need a skill book. Fast."
[Shop > Sports > Winter]
[Skill Book: 'Olympian Downhill Racer']
[Cost: $500,000]
[Purchase?]
"Yes! Hurry up!"
[Purchase Confird. Integrating...]
The knowledge slamd into his brain—edges, carving, tucking, weight distribution. He grabbed Sharon by the harness of her tactical vest.
"Follow my line! Don't fight gravity! Lean forward!"
"Rick, the mountain is moving!"
"Then move faster!"
Rick pushed off. He didn't glide; he dropped. The slope was forty-five degrees of pure ice and packed snow. He accelerated instantly, the wind turning into a scream in his ears.
He glanced back. Sharon was sliding, flailing, but the skis' expensive gyroscopic auto-stabilizers were doing the heavy lifting, keeping her upright. Behind her, a wall of white death, hundreds of feet high, was consuming the ledge they had just stood on. It was a tsunami of snow, devouring trees and rocks like they were dust.
"GO! GO! GO!" Rick scread into his comms.
They tore down the face of the Alp. It wasn't skiing; it was survival. Rick carved hard left, spraying a rooster tail of ice, dodging a jagged rock outcrop that would have snapped him in half. Sharon followed, screaming the entire way, a continuous, high-pitched wail of terror, but she stayed on his tail.
They were outrunning the snow, but they weren't alone.
From the valley floor, blue searchlights pierced the night. Valerius's air support had arrived. Two sleek, tilt-rotor gunships, painted in the grey urban camo of the Iron Legion, rose to et them like angry wasps.
"Hostiles at twelve o'clock!" Sharon yelled, her voice breaking.
The lead gunship opened fire. A rotary cannon chewed up the snow twenty feet in front of Rick, sending geysers of ice into his face.
"They're herding us!" Rick realized, wiping slush from his goggles. "They want to slow us down so the avalanche buries us!"
He needed to take out air support while moving at eighty miles per hour on two sticks of carbon fiber.
He checked his Inventory.
MP7s? Useless at this range.
C4? No delivery system.
The Fulton Balloons.
He still had them. He'd lied to Nadia about needing to offload the weight. He had two heavy-lift recovery balloons sitting in his pocket dinsion.
"Sharon!" Rick yelled. "Get close to !"
"Are you crazy?!"
"Do it!"
She carved toward him, terror making her movents jerky. They were side-by-side, hurtling down the mountain, the avalanche roaring like a freight train fifty yards behind them.
Rick reached into his Inventory. He pulled out one of the black Fulton Sky-Hook backpacks. He didn't put it on. He ard the helium canister. He slapped a brick of C4 onto the harness with a glob of adhesive putty. He set the tir for ten seconds.
"Watch out!" Rick yelled.
He pulled the ripcord on the balloon.
FWOOMPH.
The heavy-lift balloon inflated instantly, a massive black sphere shooting upward on a high-tensile tether. Rick held the pack for a split second, letting the line go taut, feeling the jerk of lift, then released it.
The black balloon shot into the sky, dragging the weighted pack straight up into the path of the diving gunship.
The pilot saw the black shape rising too late. He banked hard right, but the balloon tangled in the port side rotor blades. The tether snapped like a whip. The pack swung up into the intake.
BOOM.
The C4 detonated inside the engine housing.
The gunship shuddered, vomited a stream of fire, and spun violently. It lost lift, careening sideways—directly into the path of the second gunship.
CRASH.
The two tal birds collided in mid-air, a tangle of rotors, fuel, and fire. They exploded, raining burning debris onto the snowfield ahead.
"Strike!" Rick roared.
But the victory was short-lived. The explosion had shaken the snowpack in front of them. The ground dropped away.
A crevasse. A massive, gaping fissure in the glacier, twenty feet wide and God knows how deep.
"JUMP!" Rick scread.
"I CAN'T!" Sharon shrieked.
Rick activated Predator's Focus. Ti slowed. The edge of the crevasse rushed toward them. The avalanche was biting at their heels. He saw Sharon's form; she was leaning back, terrified. If she hit the lip like that, she'd fall in.
He reached out. He grabbed her harness.
He didn't jump for himself. He threw his weight into her, shoving her forward and up, adding his montum to hers.
Sharon flew over the gap, landing hard on the other side and tumbling in a ball of snow and limbs.
Rick hit the lip. He launched, but the snow crumbled under his ski. He lost power.
He sailed over the black void. He wasn't going to make it. His fingers scrambled for purchase on the air.
He reached into his Inventory.
[Item: Monofilant Tripwire (Spool)]
He grabbed the spool. He threw the weighted end at a pine tree on the far side.
Thwip.
The wire wrapped around the trunk. Rick gripped the spool with both hands, his gloves tearing.
The wire went taut. It humd. It held.
Rick swung like a pendulum, slamming into the snow wall on the far side, ten feet below the lip. The impact knocked the wind out of him.
Above him, the avalanche arrived.
It poured over the crevasse like a waterfall of concrete. A million tons of snow thundered over his head, burying the void, burying the sky, shaking the earth.
Rick hung there, dangling by a razor-thin wire, suspended in the dark throat of the glacier, while the mountain tried to bury him alive.
He waited. One minute. Two. The roar faded to a rumble, then a hiss, then silence.
He was alive.
"Rick?" Sharon's voice ca over the comms, panicked and tearful. "Rick! Answer !"
Rick groaned, pulling himself up the wire, his muscles screaming. "I'm here. Just... hanging around."
He climbed out of the crevasse, clawing his way onto the fresh snow. The world was white and silent. The Chateau was gone. The gunships were smoking wrecks in the valley.
Sharon ran to him, tackling him in a hug that nearly sent them both back into the hole. She was crying, shaking uncontrollably.
"I hate you," she sobbed into his neck. "I hate you so much."
"I know," Rick said, patting her back, staring at the ruin of the mountain. "Let's go ho."
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