Cole watched the demon close on Mack and tried to think of something, anything, that could turn this around. Problem was, no amount of wanting a solution actually produced one. The harder he dug, the more the same answer kept coming back: fucking nothing.
Whatever solution this fight had, Cole wasn’t going to find it in the few seconds Mack had left. So he settled for the next best thing and decided to buy a few more of those seconds, deferring the problem to his future self.
That narrowed it to one move he could actually afford. Earth manipulation ran cheap, at least theoretically. Unfortunately, the material under him was something closer to concrete, no doubt closer in difficulty to bending rebar barehanded than folding a sheet of paper.
Still, he set his feet and worked on it anyway, first tracking the demon’s stride and timing the spot where its lead foot was about to come down.
Then he scraped the bottom of the barrel and funneled every last drop of mana into it. The concrete started to surrender to his influence, but only grudgingly, slow as fuck – which was the one thing he couldn’t afford, not with the demon right on Mack’s ass.
And naturally, the worst of the exhaustion caught up to him right then. The headache from before came roaring back, worse than ever, this time accompanied by a gushing nosebleed that sent hot blood running over his lip. Of all the times for it.
Worse than the pain, he’d forced the spell past the limit his body could safely sustain, well aware of the price. The only thing that mattered right now was whether that hole finished before the demon’s foot came down where it stood, and against that, a nosebleed and a little gray matter was a price he’d pay every time.
It took nearly popping his eyes out, but Cole did it: the floor caved with maybe a half-step to spare. After all that, after near enough bleeding himself dry over it, the damn thing finally dropped in right where he’d called it.
Its lead foot dropped straight into the pothole Cole had opened beneath it, sinking nearly to the ankle before the leg could find purchase. Momentum carried the rest of it forward before the limb could pull free, tipping the whole mass out over the trapped point. If it had been some poor bastard out for a morning jog, the stumble might have meant a scraped palm, a twisted ankle at most.
Too bad for the demon, then, that it weighed a couple tons and had hit the failure point at a dead sprint. At that point, it was less a question of balance than momentum. Like a runaway truck with its front tires completely blown, the mimic had already committed to a direction. Whether it wanted to or not was of no consequence.
Mack read the collapse at the same time Cole did. He cut right, clearing the demon’s path by inches. The Alpha Mimic pitched past him with one arm thrown out to catch itself, but it was a bit late for that.
Its shoulder hit the wall first, followed by its head, the impact hammering through the concourse hard enough to shake dust loose overhead.
Concrete burst out around the point of contact. A web of cracks spread from the crater, running up the wall and down toward the floor. The mimic crumpled awkwardly against the wall for a moment, its damaged arm folding underneath part of its weight before it started pushing itself back upright.
Miles swooped in to take advantage of the opening, stepping into the lane and putting a rapid string of shots into the arm Mack’s plasmaball had carved open earlier. With the demon sufficiently distracted, Mack put some distance between himself and the fight.
That arm, at least, had not come through the fight as invincible as the rest. The first impacts snapped chips from the brittle edge of the wound. The next few bit deeper into the exposed gel beneath, kicking dark flecks across the wall behind it. The demon let out a low rumble that did not sound like laughter this time.
Pain, maybe. At the very least, it sounded much closer to pain than anything they’d gotten out of the thing so far.
Cole would have enjoyed the discovery a hell of a lot more if it had come with a way to exploit it. The damage wasn’t exactly impressive, but it was more damage than anything else they’d managed so far. Miles kept on the wound anyway, slamming rounds into the damaged arm as fast as he could keep them on target. Of course, it wouldn’t stay down forever. A moment later, the Alpha Mimic planted its other arm against the floor, shoved itself upright, and swung toward Miles.
He broke off at once, angling away from Mack to drag the demon with him. Oddly enough, it worked. Cole would’ve gone after Mack instead. Even in his depleted state, he was by far the biggest threat in the concourse. The Alpha Mimic apparently disagreed, electing to pursue the man who’d pissed it off most recently.
While Miles bought himself a little more room, Cole tried to push himself upright and nearly ate shit for the effort. His vision squeezed down at the edges, the headache still pounding behind his eyes in time with his pulse. The blood running from his nose had yet to stop. Spitting a mouthful of blood onto the floor, he fumbled another mana potion from his kit.
He knew before he opened it that this was a bad idea. There had to be a limit, and whatever it was, he’d probably crossed it sometime before he started trying to liquefy concrete through a migraine. The thought didn’t stop him, though. Nothing else within reach looked any more useful, so he thumbed the cork loose and knocked the potion back.
Predictably, his stomach rejected it almost immediately.
Cole doubled over and vomited blue across the floor, losing the potion in a hot rush of bile before it had time to do him any good. And apparently that was just the start of things. A vicious cramp seized his gut a second later and nearly put him on his knees. He caught himself against his thigh, coughing until his throat burned, eyes watering hard enough to blur the concourse in front of him.
Well, shit. So much for that.
The potion slicked across the concrete in a useless smear, accomplishing exactly nothing beyond making everything worse. His mana remained stubbornly empty, which would’ve been bad enough on its own if the headache pounding away behind his eyes hadn’t stuck around too.
Finding out the hard way wasn’t ideal, but at least now Cole could confirm that the potions weren’t worth a damn. Unfortunately, the added nausea made the whole situation worse, introducing a rolling sickness to the list of problems he didn’t have time to deal with.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and forced himself upright anyway.
After a moment spent getting his bearings, Cole looked back down the concourse and found Miles still running with the mimic closing from behind. Just before it could get within reach, Miles planted and cut hard across the width of the concourse, as if he were juking someone in the NFL.
By every previous measure, the mimic should have matched it just fine.
Instead, the demon blew straight through the turn. Its foot planted, but the knee didn’t hold. The leg folded inward under the change of direction, sending the mimic lurching wide while Miles cleared the angle clean. It dragged one hand across the floor to keep itself upright, claws tearing a ragged line through the concrete before it finally caught its balance.
Weirdly enough, the first thing Cole thought of was Derrick Rose – specifically, the crash induced by his ACL tear. Something similar had to have happened to the Alpha Mimic, most likely when it hit the little magic pothole from earlier.
When the mimic’s foot dropped through the concrete, the leg had to have stopped while the rest of the body kept going. With that much mass moving that fast, something in the joint must’ve lost the fight. ACL, MCL, whatever the hell passed for either in a thing made of gel and substrate. The name mattered less than the result.
That gave Cole an idea, which he forced out through a raw throat.
“Torn ACL!” he yelled. “Bullfighter!”
Miles got the memo and started juking the shit out of the demon like he was prime Barry Sanders in the open field. The demon must not have realized how bad its knee was, because every lunge it went for only dropped it back onto the bad leg.
Ethan read the play and went after the other leg, spawning a fresh pothole right where the good foot was about to come down.
The Alpha Mimic fell in, its good leg now buried up to the knee. Jammed and out of room to bend, the leg took the full brunt of the creature’s forward momentum and snapped clean in half like a fence post taking a car at full speed. The body folded right over the break, the head whipping straight down and cracking into the floor like a meteor strike.
Mack channeled everything he had left into a plasmaball – or rather, given its relatively small composition, a plasmabolt. He sat on the shot until the demon dragged itself upright and put weight on the fresh break, then launched it straight at the fresh injury.
Cole landed a round in the same spot right before the demon slapped a protective hand over the joint, but between the bolt and the bullet, one round was all he needed. The knee buckled the second it bore weight, dropping the whole mass back to the floor.
Cole retargeted, pivoting to the original bad leg, but the demon adapted quickly. It folded in on itself, hauling both knees up to its stomach and clamping its arms over its chest, all to guard its weakest points.
He fired anyway – head, back, anything exposed – just to keep the thing balled up and pinned. The others joined in, rotating their fire so the shots never stopped coming.
Every shot chipped off larger and larger chunks, which was pretty damn interesting because an hour ago they couldn’t have scratched the thing even with a diamond drill. And it wasn’t like their guns had gotten any stronger since, so the bigger flakes coming off it now suggested the demon was getting weaker. Like everyone else in the room, it must’ve been burning through its mana, running low enough that its defenses had started to falter.
“Pour it on!” Cole called. “Don’t give it a second!”
Every hit shaved another sliver off the demon’s figurative health bar, microscopic on its own but adding up all the same. The only thing was, their ammo was a finite resource.
It didn’t take long to find out the hard way. Cole and Miles ran out first, the two of them having burned the bulk of their rifle ammo on the cultists earlier. Now, it was true that switching to one’s pistol was always faster than reloading. But faster didn’t mean instantaneous, and the second or two it took to drop the rifles and bring the revolvers up was a second or two too many. The Alpha Mimic saw the opening and took it, springing upright and bolting for the concourse – toward the cultist massacre, toward the subway exit beyond.
It blew past Elina, paid no mind to Graves and Vale laid out helpless and ripe for the taking, and kept going until the exit swallowed it from sight.
Cole would’ve liked to call that cowardice. The thought had a nice shape to it, and after listening to the thing talk down to them like livestock, he’d definitely earned the right to be petty. Unfortunately, the truth was less satisfying and a lot more useful. The Alpha Mimic was smart enough to recognize a losing battle, smart enough to fall back and keep them from putting it down for good.
The funny part was that the retreat probably helped Cole’s side more than it helped the demon. Between the critically low reserves – ammo and mana alike – and the state of their heaviest hitters, they’d have been in for a rough overtime.
Instead, it gave them breathing room. At this point, Cole wasn’t in a position to complain.
Neither, apparently, was he in a position to maintain consciousness. His brain somehow figured out the fight was over and allowed all the accumulated strain to flood his body.
“Fuck…”
Cole stumbled backward, vision blurring up for a split second before it all went dark.