Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Fourteen (3.5/6)
Stun Pike Party
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday! Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.
“Diamond Skin?” Tattie guessed, eying the looping sigil.
The design tore a long sweep from his elbow to the small bones flexing below his hand. Brax finished it with an eye winking blood on the underside of his wrist, narrowly avoiding the brittle nest of veins clustered there. The cuts were sure and precise—nothing like the hurried mess he’d carved before arriving on Digath.
“You know it was always my favourite trick,” he said.
“I remember.”
Brax whispered the familiar words of power across his flayed and bleeding skin. They were words dusty with memory, an incantation that summoned warm summer nights and Rakkonian meadows alive with the shrill hunting calls and fierce glow of a teeming multitude of lumechirps. The biofluid pooling across Brax’s flesh shimmered and hardened. He flexed an arm bulging with tight muscle, breathing shallowly as his hand grew three times larger. When he compressed his fingers into a hard fist, the skin was dark with straining veins.
“We need to move,” Tattie said.
Beyond them, five lines of marching husks filled the entire width of the boulevard. As they grew closer, the front line grabbed stun pikes from their belts and booted them up in perfect unison. A thin whine split the night-quiet street, followed by a smell like smoking meat.
“I’ve never seen them use pikes. We must have really pissed them off.”
“You should use Diamond Skin, too,” Brax said. “With the power you’re drawing, you could dose your whole body.”
Tattie imagined herself glowing beneath a glaze of hardened skin, every limb swelling until her muscles jumped and twitched. She would be an unstoppable colossus, a monumental goddess with granite fists. She began to pull up her magick, concentrating on the hard knot of blood and tech that quivered in the deepest parts of herself, reaching for it, calling it to the surface. It escaped from her pores. Her forehead beaded with scarlet sweat. Blood ran in rivulets down her chest and pooled in her socks. She shook her head at Brax, coating him in a fine spray of shining red.
“I’m too juiced. I’m producing blood as soon as I use it. If I summoned Diamond Skin, I’d turn my own flesh to pulp.”
“Finally,” Brax said.
“Finally, what?”
“Finally, I get to be the hero for a change.”
He grinned at her and began sprinting towards the husks, his massive right fist held high.
Tattie thought quickly, conjuring the only defense that made sense while she was leaking this amount of plasma. She drew her hands up in front of her face and willed more blood out of her skin, casting it before her to fashion a sticky net of trembling scarlet. It surrounded her, a bright shield that rippled and breathed. Extracting the blood felt like ripping hair out from the roots, strand by agonised strand. Each droplet was a burning ache, every tiny molecule a screaming slash. She wanted to sink to her knees and press her face against the cool pavement, but she broke into a run, chasing to overtake Brax before he took a stun pike to the face.
Brax slammed into the husks at full pelt, punching one in the jaw and grabbing another by the collar. He turned the woman around and threw her into the line behind, toppling five husks who fell stiff as grey bowling pins.
“Minimal maiming, right?” Tattie shouted into the fray.
Brax didn’t respond. He was busy clearing a path through the scattering husks, using his bulging arm and boulder-hand as a makeshift battering ram. A flurry of stun pike thrusts deflected from his fortified skin like hailstones glancing from a roof. Tattie moved into step behind him and was instantly surrounded. The dough-faced automotons reached to pin her arms to her sides, but were repelled by the shivering plasma shield. It scalded the flesh of their grasping hands, blackened their palms, and set the tips of their ragged nails to smoking. A pike stabbed uselessly at her stomach, the glowing tip peeling back and melting away when it touched the bloody mesh enclosing her.
Brax ploughed through the final line, and they ran to the bridge together, breathless and sweating. Mycil Bridge was an ugly suspension of steel and concrete slung across a dirty street. It sweltered twenty metres below, drowning in stinking birchprout and littered with low-slung factories. Tattie stopped when they were halfway across, turning to survey the husks at their backs. Many of them lay crumpled on the ground, faces weeping blood into the asphalt. Others milled around seeming confused, as though their nanotech was malfunctioning. Still, a good number had gathered themselves and were reforming into a tight unit, ready to stride across the bridge in pursuit.
“Why are you stopping?” Brax said.
“I need to draw the blood back. This hurts like a bitch.”
Tattie lifted her hands, made a sign in the air, and began sucking the juice back inside, ordering it to refill her screaming veins. Dismantling the plasma shield was infinitely worse than constructing it. Most of the blood seemed to make a beeline for her eyes and mouth. Her eyes swam with scarlet tears, the orbs flaring with a bright, scalding pain.
“Are you okay?” Brax asked. His face greyed as he watched her, one corner of his mouth twisting.
“I’m fine.” Tattie swiped at her nose with the back of one hand, lifting away glistening plasma streaks.
She immediately regretted pulling back the shield when a robotic tattoo sounded from the other side of the bridge—the unmistakable sound of booted husk feet.
“Shit, there’s more coming.”
Brax ran to the side of the bridge and used his gargantuan arm to pull himself up onto the thin railing. He stood for several moments, swaying against the swampy breeze rising from the street below as he strained to make out the approaching shapes, then jumped down and ran back to Tattie.
“Another husk patrol. A larger one, coming down the hill. They’ll be here in five minutes.”
“Bloody fantastic. I thought we were home free.”
“We can fight through them again,” Brax said, punching his mega fist into his palm. From the agonised expression that flashed across his face, Tattie guessed he wished he hadn’t.
“No, there are so many we’d pile up casualties. They’re people. Noctarans. I don’t want to murder anyone.” Tattie glanced back at the disheveled unit they’d left behind, an audacious plan forming. “Stay here and guard this side. If the smaller unit reaches us, push them back.”
Her eyes were still wet and streaming, and her nose throbbed as though it was scalded, but she dug inside herself for the thrumming knot of swarming power, wrenching at it until it pulled loose with a rush of sweaty plasma that pooled in her ears and flooded from her open mouth. Trying not to look at Brax, certain the sight of her would repulse him, Tattie knelt in the centre of the bridge and plugged her hands into the asphalt.
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Content Warnings
Description of blood, description of cutting/self-mutilation, mild swearing