The Undead Spider #103
The clock tower sat a mile and a half behind him, its face reading an hour he hadn't bothered to memorize. The morning was that pale grey before the sun commits to anything.
Jake moved through it at rooftop height, the navigation thread running a line through his peripheral vision pointing behind him. Jake let the distance between him and the tower accumulate without hurrying it. There were things he needed to settle before he chased. Things that had a way of becoming problems if he let them sit.
He pulled up the progress tab on a thought.
🕷️
[Progress Tab]
Completion: 15.5%
Totems redeemed: 10
Time Bank: 05:02:35
Kill Milestone: 00:00:00
System Tools: Symbolic Extraction? Disabled.
🕸️
He did the arithmetic without stopping his swing -- five times sixty, add to two times sixty, then the remaining thirty-five minutes -- and arrived at four hundred and twenty hours, fifty-five minutes. He held the number in his head for a breath and then pushed it aside, because the timer structure was a distraction from the thing that actually mattered, which was that he was at fifteen-and-a-half percent completion with no clear ceiling on what a full run would cost him.
Ninety days wouldn't fix that. Neither would three hundred. What fixed it was getting to a hundred percent and making the system irrelevant, and he had cleared barely enough to prove the mechanism worked.
He thought about the coat briefly, the way it had settled over Constantine's shoulders, and estimated what it would have been worth in the system's language. Epic item, almost certainly. Three percent, if the system read the weight of what it carried.
He'd let it walk through a portal in the hands of a man who'd earned it, and he had no particular feeling about that beyond the arithmetic. He'd make the time back elsewhere.
The navigation thread ran northwest. He was heading southeast.
He noted this without adjusting his course, because the thread was pointing against what he'd already decided to finish first. The estate. Loose ends had a habit of becoming ambushes and he'd survived enough of those to prefer the version where he chose the terms.
He came around the shoulder of a building and saw them below him before his sense had fully formed the warning.
Three men in a narrow cut between two rows of buildings, moving against the current of the morning's early foot traffic. A woman with a shoulder bag walked to wherever she was going at this hour, head down against the cold, not seeing them yet, and an older man ahead of her who had and had made himself small against the far wall.
The three had the loose, practiced arrangement of people who did this often enough to have positions. Two angled wide. One moved up the middle. The one in the middle had his hand inside his jacket.
Jake dropped off the roofline.
He came down behind the leftmost one and his forearm found the man's throat in the descent, taking them both down to the stone. The sound of it was brief and the man didn't get up.
The one on the right had his gun out before Jake reached him, the shot going high and wide as Jake's hand came under the barrel and redirected it skyward. Then the dagger was in his other hand -- manifested from his palm on the thought of it, the blade cool and responsive -- and he drove it into the space below the ribs at an angle. The man folded around it and went down.
The third one was running.
Jake fired a web line and it caught the man's ankle and pulled, dropping him hard against the stone. He closed the distance and crouched over him and the man turned over and raised his arm to fire. Jake's palm came down on the wrist and pinned it and he looked at the gun until the man stopped struggling. The dagger sat against the man's ribs, not moving, its dark residue coiling in the morning light, and he held the position until the gun hand released.
He took the weapon and stood.
The woman with the shoulder bag had stopped at the corner and was looking at him. The older man had gone. Jake watched her take in the scene -- the three men on the ground, the hood, the mask. She turned and walked away at a pace that was careful not to become running.
He dissolved the dagger back into his palm and let his breath out through his nose.
The kill Milestone didn't display on the progress tab but he knew the last number by heart. Sixty, add the recent three, the total moving toward the milestone that would matter. One hundred and twenty. The number sat in him and he looked at what he'd just done and understood the temptation clearly enough to recognize it as one.
A run, timed right, would get him there. The milestone reward was another symbiote, a genuine upgrade. It could change the arithmetic on an encounter with the League, and the League was coming regardless of what he chose.
That was the structure of what he'd been doing since Gotham. They would arrive on their terms or he'd arrive on his. He knew which version he survived.
But Star City sat in his memory like a scar he was still working out the shape of -- the heat he'd accumulated, the attention, the chain of events that had each seemed manageable right up to the moment they collectively weren't. He'd moved too fast and hit too hard without clearing a lane first, and the result had been an exit he hadn't liked.
He wasn't doing that again.
He stood a moment longer, then checked the navigation thread, confirmed his bearing, and went back up to the rooflines.
London's geography opened under him as the morning light found its first strength -- the curve of the neighborhood running south of his line of travel, the density of the older city giving way to broader streets and older buildings as he moved eastward. He moved through it and let the distance become thought.
The dagger came into his hand on a pull and he held it across two fingers as he swung, watching the blade in the low light, and then the thought arrived whole: the axe had been Nergal's totem. A demon lord's weapon, carried across an entire arc of pursuit, used to split the man who'd been hunting Constantine across half of London.
He let the blade rest in his palm and said it aloud, the words pulled from the interface logic he'd been using since the beginning of this.
"Register totem."
The interface responded.
🕷️
[Totem collected!]
Category: Common
Reward: +12h to your Time Bank
Redeem totem to receive reward? (Y/N)
🕸️
He held the thought for a moment and then let his breath out, something in his chest releasing that he hadn't realized had been held. He'd expected errors. Corruption flags.
That it read Common made sense when he traced it -- the dagger was a fraction of the axe, the axe was the vessel and he had dissolved it into his hand, and the system was reading what he actually held rather than what it had come from. The same logic as the thorn from Ivy's rose. A fragment of something larger, registered at the fragment's weight.
He had seventeen days. Seventeen days was enough to move on Constantine's coat if he could find the man before he went to ground somewhere difficult.
It was enough time to think through what the navigation thread had been doing when it pointed at Etrigan -- that gold shift, the hunger that had come with it, the question of whether the demon was a totem to be collected or something else entirely, something the system had a different category for.
And if he moved right, kept his exposure controlled, managed the heat rather than generating it -- seventeen days was enough to end this before it ended him.
He looked at the dagger in his palm, and felt through the mechanics of what Constantine had done to him. The weapon had given him a way to act inside a space that Death couldn't reach.
With this, with the spell holding, she'd have to work to find him, and work meant time, and time was the one resource he'd managed to accumulate.
Lobo was the sharper problem. He was a hunter who could track him. But without last-known-position logic and Death's network to feed him coordinates, he was manageable.
Everything was manageable if Jake didn't blow the lane open before he was ready for what came through it.
He told himself this and believed it, and the navigation thread went steady as the estate's roofline came into view through the morning haze -- a Georgian spread set back from the road, broad-faced and heavy-windowed.
He came down to street level two buildings back and walked the approach, his sense reading ahead, finding the weight of the place and the stillness of the grounds at this hour, and then he went up the side of the exterior wall and through a first-floor window and dropped into the living quarters.
The room was furnished with heavy wood and heavy fabric. He stood in the morning light coming through the tall windows and let his sense map the building around him, reading for presence, for movement, for anything that didn't belong to the silence of an empty house.
He had half a breath of it.
She came through the far wall.
Not through a door -- through the wall itself, or near enough that the distinction was academic, moving at a speed that his sense registered as a shriek of incoming before his body had processed the direction.
He went sideways and she was already past him and the claws caught his chest on the turn, three lines opening through the suit in the opposite direction of the existing marks.
The impact drove him back into the heavy sideboard against the far wall and the thing buckled under his weight and the lamp that had been sitting on it for decades hit the floor.
He stood against the collapsed sideboard with his hand pressed to his chest, the suit holding the damage closed, and he looked at her.
Cheetah stood in the center of the room with her shoulders forward and her breathing high, and she looked at him with eyes that had nothing of the predator's patience he remembered from their first meeting -- no composure, no game, nothing held back for later.
The spine he'd broken had healed into something that moved, but the way she held herself told him it hadn't finished the work. She favored her left side by a fraction she didn't choose.
"Where," she said, each word landing with its own weight, "is it."
"I broke your spine," Jake said.
"Where is it."
He pulled his hand from his chest and looked at the blood on it, three lines of it across his palm, and he closed the hand and looked at her. "I broke your spine," he said again, and the surprise was real enough that he wasn't hiding it, "you heal fast."
She crossed the room and he went up -- hands finding the ceiling beam, his feet leaving the floor before she reached him -- and she came off the floor after him, her claws raking the beam where his feet had been, and he swung off it and came down behind her and she was already turning, faster than a healed spine had any business being, and he took her elbow and used the turn's momentum and sent her into the heavy armchair in the corner.
The armchair didn't survive it.
She came out of the wreckage at speed and he met her with both hands, catching the wrist below the claws and turning with her force, and for three seconds they moved through the room in the locked way of two bodies that were each too fast for the other to simply overpower, furniture going over around them, a mirror on the far wall coming off its mounting and the glass spreading across the floor in a long silver fan.
She got a claw through his guard and it opened his forearm and he let her have the step backward it bought her and used the distance to fire a web at her throat.
She tore it before it fully set, which told him the speed was still there, the recovery from the spine incomplete but not slow. She came at him again from low and he dipped under it and drove the dagger out of his palm and into her shoulder.
She screamed something that wasn't language and the force of her going backward took a section of shelving off the wall with it, books spreading across the floor in a loose fan around her.
She was up before the books settled.
Her left claw dragged behind the rest of her, and she felt it, he could see her feel it, the way the fury in her face got a different quality when she registered the limit.
He fired three web lines in sequence and they caught her at the wrist, the knee, the ankle, and he pulled the third one hard and she went down and he was on her in the same motion, his knee on her lower back, the dagger manifested and planted in the floor beside her face, its blade half an inch from her cheek, and he leaned his weight through the knee and waited for her to stop moving.
She didn't stop immediately.
She fought it for longer than the position justified, her free arm pushing against the floor, her claws scoring the boards. He held the weight steady and watched her work against it and felt something in his chest that was not pity and was not contempt.
"I came here to kill you," he said.
She stopped pushing.
He leaned forward, his forearm coming down to add to the pin. "I came here to finish what the last visit started."
She turned her head as far as the position allowed and looked at him with one eye, the fury in it undimmed by the dagger beside her face or the knee in her spine.
"Give it back!" She snapped her jaw at him.
He studied the side of her face and the set of her shoulder and the way she kept trying to break free.
Memories arrived in the back of his skull uninvited.
His spine. His fingers. The cold of the vat and the long dark before he surfaced from it, everything he'd lost between going under and coming back.
The pheromone rose.
He turned it over and felt the weight of it.
She was still breathing hard beneath him. Still angry.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"You've got spirit," he said, and he heard the edge in his own voice, a brightness that hadn't been there when he came through the window, something the fight had brought up.
He pushed her hard on the floor, and watched her head come up and her eyes find him, the fury in them hot and undiminished.
It reminded him what such fire could do when guided. With a damaged spine and broken fingers, he had still managed to rob a bank and bring down a police helicopter, and still kept fighting.
"With devotion," he said, pulling the dagger from the floor. "you'll be of great use to me."
Arc comes to a conclusion! Thanks for reading. Read ahead in Patreon.com/mimiclord