Episode 67: Shards
Toby's SUV came around the corner of Diamond Plaza hard, headlights cutting through the neon haze, tyres leaving dark lines on the asphalt as it surged toward them. Lucius didn't wait for it to stop. He was already moving to the passenger side, Sol's unconscious frame across his shoulder — the weight of him not slowing Lucius down but registering in the muscles of his right side, a steady hum of strain left over from catching the car.
The air above the plaza shrieked.
Drakon was a dark blur against the neon, wings tucked into a terminal dive, talons aimed at the junction of Lucius's neck and Sol's shoulder. Clinging to the morphbreed's harness, Airlock unleashed a shimmering, violet-tinted vacuum sphere intended to collapse the air around the extraction point.
Miguel didn't wait for the order. He was a lateral blur, three glowing quarters leaving his hand in a flickering, amber-orange arc. The first two coins caught the vacuum sphere mid-flight, the thermal energy detonating the compressed air in a harmless, concussive pop ten feet from Lucius's head. The third quarter hit Drakon's obsidian scales with the force of a shaped charge, the explosion rattling the creature's leathery wing and forcing him into a violent, mid-air correction that sent him spiraling toward the decorative light poles at the plaza's edge.
Lucius didn't even look up. He hauled the rear door of the SUV open and loaded Sol inside with the particular efficiency of someone moving something that does not want to be moved.
"Kit." He kept his voice flat. "Autonomic shock. Keep him stable until you reach the floor."
Kit had already moved into position before the instruction finished. His hands found Sol's neck, checking pulse, the blue latex gloves clinical against the hero's collar. He gave one sharp nod and said nothing else.
Lucius straightened. "Toby. Hannah and the others are one block ahead, north side. Pick them up and don't stop for anything. Big Boys Tower. Go."
Toby shifted into gear without comment. The SUV roared past Lucius and disappeared into the haze of the district, heading for the retail shadows where Charlotte and the others were waiting.
Lucius turned back to the street.
Drakon had retreated to one of the decorative light poles at the plaza's edge — fifteen feet up, wings half-folded, crouched on the steel housing with the patient, watchful quality of something that had decided to wait for a better angle. Airlock was on the ground, thirty feet back, suit still leaking faint traces of violet gas from the earlier impact, eyes sharp and recalibrated. Not finished. Just readjusting.
Miguel had moved to Lucius's left without being asked. His hands were already running warm.
"I'll take the one with the wings," Miguel said. "You take the human air conditioner."
Lucius was about to respond.
The city made a sound like a glacier coming apart.
He didn't think. He grabbed the back of Miguel's collar and hauled him backward — hard, off his feet, two full strides out of the line — as the street lamps dissolved.
The glass hit where they had been standing.
It came from above and to the east, a high-speed hurricane of microscopic razor fragments that swept across the plaza intersection in a single obliterating pass. The decorative facades of three storefronts became structural frames in under a second. Every parked vehicle on the north side of the street shed its windows simultaneously.
Drakon's reaction was pure reflex — both obsidian wings snapping forward to form a shield, the leathery surface screaming as the glass tore across it. He held.
Airlock was not in a position to shield anything. The localized cyclone caught his flank, shredding through his pressurized containment suit and opening his shoulder in a deep lateral cut. He let out a sharp sound and stumbled, blood and the faint trace of violet gas bleeding together into the night air.
"I was hoping to catch all of you at once."
The voice came from above. A figure stood at the edge of a lower commercial roof — three storeys up, EOD-pattern armour with heavy padding at the joints, the kind of equipment that acknowledged its wearer operated in close proximity to things that cut. He looked down at the four of them with the unhurried interest of someone arriving to a situation he finds slightly beneath his expectations.
He raised one hand. From across the plaza, the broken glass from sixty floors of office windows that Lucius had carved during his descent began to rise. Thousands of fragments, catching the neon and the news chopper searchlights that were already banking over the rooflines, ascending in a slow reverse snowfall that was nothing like snow.
"Quick reflexes," Shrapnel said. "Genuinely. Bravo." He sounded like he meant it, which made it worse. "I'm going to need you to die, though. So — which way did the Gipson girl go? Tell me that and I'll keep it brief."
Nobody answered.
His armour chimed. He reached into his chest rig, pulled a reinforced phone, glanced at the screen, and sighed with the specific irritation of someone whose schedule has just been rearranged.
"Never mind. Tracker updated." He pocketed the phone. "So I don't need the answer anymore." A pause. "But you're still in my way. So I'm going to have to kill you regardless." Another pause. "Spoiler — it will not be brief."
Miguel had picked himself up off the pavement during this. He looked between Shrapnel on the roof and Airlock bleeding on the street and spread his hands.
"Hey. Are you lot not working together? You just took out your own people." He sounded genuinely offended on principle. "Have some honour."
Shrapnel laughed. The sound was sharp and without warmth. "What makes you think I know these people? I don't care about their employer. I'm here to become Absolute." He swept both arms forward. "Nothing personal."
The rising glass accelerated.
"Move," Lucius said. "Neither of us has shields for this."
They ran.
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The north side of the plaza became a blender.
Lucius vaulted the hood of an abandoned taxi, boots finding grip on the wet asphalt. Miguel used a light pole to swing himself over the leading edge of the debris field, his body clearing the cascade by half a metre, landing in a forward roll that brought him up running. Behind them, the glass wave erased the taxi's paintwork and everything attached to the storefronts on the east side of the intersection.
They made it to a concrete pylon at the mouth of an alleyway and stopped, momentarily out of Shrapnel's direct sightline.
Lucius's breathing was even. He looked back around the pylon's edge.
Shrapnel was no longer on the roof.
He had fused a platform of compressed silica beneath his boots and was moving through the air on it — surfing, genuinely surfing, a mass of razor glass trailing behind him like the tail of something that had decided the sky was more convenient than the street. The searchlight from one of the news choppers found him and the cameras on the ground found the searchlight and within approximately four seconds the situation was on every broadcast channel in New Kong.
@NK_Live: Explosions near 4th and Diamond Plaza — is that a man on a glass board??? #NewKongChaos
The people who had not run were filming. Which was most of them.
Miguel dug into his tactical pockets. He came out with three quarters, two AA batteries, a handful of gravel, and the specific expression of a man who has done this before and finds it reasonable. The moment the objects touched his palms the bio-thermal cells activated — the metal and stone running amber-orange, humming with stored heat that was building toward something considerably less benign than warmth.
He looked at Lucius.
Lucius looked at the roof position Shrapnel had vacated. Then at the airspace he was now occupying.
"Go," Lucius said.
Miguel stepped out from cover alone, dropped into a low stance, and threw.
The first glowing battery hit Shrapnel's glass barrier at speed. The detonation was spectacular — a thermobaric shockwave that sent molten glass raining across a thirty-foot radius and lit up the plaza in orange for one very long second. The second hit the reformed barrier an instant later. The third hit the structural seam between two fused panels and the whole barrier cracked laterally.
The news chopper banked to get a better angle.
"You're going to have to work harder than that," Shrapnel called through the dissipating smoke, already pulling new material from the street below to patch the damage. He sounded mildly inconvenienced.
Above him, Drakon had stopped retreating.
He folded his wings and entered a steep dive — directly toward Shrapnel's position, talons forward, the air screaming around the obsidian scales. Behind him, Airlock had been dragged into the air by Drakon's harness at some point in the chaos, one hand pressed against his bleeding shoulder, the other already building a vacuum sphere aimed at the glass-surfer from above.
Three angles of attack. Shrapnel read all three.
He raised both hands. His zone expanded to its limit. Every shard of glass Lucius had knocked loose from the skyscraper earlier — thousands of pounds of it, still scattered across the surrounding blocks — answered the pull. It compressed inward in a tight sphere around him, layer upon layer of rotating razor material.
Then he detonated it outward.
The omnidirectional blast hit everything within thirty metres simultaneously. The sound it produced was not an explosion — it was something more continuous and more terrible than that, a sustained mechanical roar as the debris field expanded in every direction at speed.
Drakon took the worst of it.
He twisted mid-dive, turning his back to the blast, the heavy obsidian scales absorbing the first layer and the leathery wing membranes taking the second. The glass shattered against him. But there was simply too much of it — shards found the unarmoured joints of his wings, the ventilation slits along his side, the gaps between scales at his shoulder joints. He let out a sound that was not a roar and not a scream and fell out of his dive in a chaotic, uncontrolled tailspin, Airlock spinning with him, the two of them disappearing below the roofline in a direction that suggested the landing would be complicated.
Miguel had made it into a steel industrial dumpster.
He had the lid down when the wave reached the alleyway. The sound of it on the outside of the dumpster lasted approximately four seconds and rearranged every loose object in the alley into new positions.
Then silence.
Shrapnel descended into the alley on his board, trailing glass, unhurried. He pulled up beside the dumpster, looked at it, and grabbed the lid.
He threw it open.
Miguel looked up. His face had gone a specific shade of pale that his usual expression did not visit.
Above him, suspended on the air, was the accumulated mass of Shrapnel's entire payload — thousands of fragments, compressed, aligned, vibrating faintly with the potential energy of something waiting to be released. The neon from the plaza entrance caught it and turned it into something that was almost beautiful from exactly the wrong angle.
Shrapnel smiled.
"This is going to hurt you a great deal," he said, and raised his hand.
The gun barrel pressed into the back of his right knee.
Shrapnel's brain processed the sensation. Then processed what the sensation meant. Then produced the specific understanding that in the time between the glass detonation and reaching the dumpster, he had entirely lost track of the second bodyguard.
That understanding arrived slightly too late.
Lucius pulled the trigger.
The gun's report in the enclosed alley was definitive. The round shattered Shrapnel's knee joint in a single clean event. His control over the zone collapsed — the suspended glass lost its structural tension and cascaded to the alley floor as ordinary, inert debris, raining harmlessly against the dumpster's exterior.
Shrapnel's hands went to his knee. He didn't hit the ground — Lucius's backhand caught him first, knuckles connecting with his temple precisely at the moment his balance failed, driving the back of his skull into the brick wall with a sound that removed all remaining questions about his continued consciousness.
He folded to the alley floor and stayed there.
Miguel let out a breath that he had apparently been holding since the lid came off. He climbed out of the dumpster, landed on the glass-carpeted ground, and wiped his face with the back of his hand.
"Not going to lie," he said. "That was close."
Lucius was already holstering the weapon. His eyes were on Shrapnel's chest rig — specifically the reinforced phone pocket, still closed, the screen dark.
"We need to move."
"Right, yeah." Miguel shook out his hands. "The winged guy and the leaking one are probably still—"
"Forget them."
Miguel stopped.
Lucius crouched and pulled the phone from Shrapnel's rig. The screen had locked. He looked at it for a moment — not at the lock screen, at the notification still visible above it. The tracker alert. The updated position.
He stood.
"He stopped asking us where she was because the tracker updated," he said. "If his position feed refreshed that means the route is already compromised." He pressed two fingers to his earpiece. "Toby. Charlotte. Sitrep."
Static.
He tried again. Same result — the faint empty hiss of a channel with nothing on it.
Miguel's face had changed. The residual energy from the fight was still in his posture but something underneath it had shifted into something quieter and less comfortable.
"Jammed?" he said.
"Or worse." Lucius was already moving toward the alley exit, his eyes on the skyline. The upper floors of Big Boys Central Tower were visible above the rooflines from here — the blue-white interior glow faint against the broader brightness of the district, but present. Steady. "This isn't a bounty hit that happened to find a good night. It's coordinated. Too many moving parts, too clean a timeline."
He stepped over Shrapnel's body and broke into a run.
Miguel fell into step beside him without needing to be asked. The plaza was still lit with phone screens and news chopper searchlights. The two of them moved through the edge of it and north, toward the tower, toward the silence on the comms, toward whatever was waiting.
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TO BE CONTINUED