All-Chemical Spider #109
The docks' geography announced itself in the air, the smell of brine and iron settling into his chest as he came off the residential rooflines and found the wider spans of the warehouse district opening below him.
He read the area on the swing, letting the arc carry him east while his sense mapped the ground -- loading bays sealed with corrugated sheets, crane frames standing against the grey sky with nothing left to lift, the canal running behind the eastern row with its black water sitting still enough to reflect the amber of the few lights still burning along its bank.
He found the geography he was looking for a half-mile in.
A row of buildings set back from the canal, the frontage on the water side broken into recessed bays where the loading doors had been, and above them a cat's cradle of old gantry tracks that still ran between the buildings on elevated rails, rusted but present, their spans high enough to give him angles in three directions.
He dropped to the canal path and walked the frontage, his sense reading depth and vacancy behind each sealed door, and when he found the bay he wanted -- third from the east end, its approach visible from two directions, its back wall up against the canal with no road access behind it -- he went up the face of the building beside it and crossed the gantry rail to the bay's roof edge and looked down at the approach.
Good angles. One entry. Overhead cover.
He dropped in.
The spray can came from inside the web carrier -- one of several items he'd gathered from Cheetah's house -- and he painted the concrete floor in a single mark, a broad X in red at the center of the bay, the paint catching the light bleeding in from the canal.
He looked at it and went back up.
The gantry rail gave him a line across the gap to the roof of the facing building, and from there an overhang above the canal where the structure extended over the water on old brackets, and he settled into the angle above and behind the marked bay with the canal beneath him and the approach visible from the height, and he went still.
Past midnight and the area was doing what areas like this did at this hour -- the sound of the city arriving at distance, the water moving in small increments below, a sound somewhere north that might have been a lorry and might not.
He pulled up the interface.
🕷️
[Totem redeemed!]
Select two Bonus Rewards:
1. Bundle of Cash - a little something to keep you going during this time crunch.
2. Totem Icon - for your navigation needs and a chance to collect your next totem faster.
3. Mystery Reward
4. KILL MILESTONE: 63/120 - on select, the system extends its hand. Time is limited by totem rarity. Valid only if milestone is completed.
🕸️
He held it open and felt the 13% sitting in him, Constantine's grin spreading in the back of his skull with the book blazing and the scrap of coat the only thing he'd come away with.
He let the feeling arrive and settle and hardened around the center of it, the way iron hardens when it cools, and what was left when it was done was not rage -- it was a fixed point, a bearing, something he'd be using later.
He dismissed the cash first. The suppliers had their proof of funds and the market account was active; the system needed to update that reward for something that pulled weight.
He looked at the totem icon and felt the pull of it -- guaranteed percentage, steady path, close the gap Constantine had torn open and move toward the number that ended this. The obvious choice.
His eyes moved to the mystery reward.
He counted back through what it had given him: a suit, then a suit repair, then symbolic extraction. Three pulls, three results, and a pattern running under them -- equipment, then equipment serviced, then a tool that changed how he used the equipment.
His mind pulled up the memory of Etrigan's runes blazing gold in the navigation thread during the fight in Blood's study, the hunger that had come with it and the question he hadn't answered yet.
If the demon itself was a totem, did it represent a rarity higher than epic?
A legendary totem would need a mechanism to consume it, the same logic as symbolic extraction enabling epic-level collection. Only the system could provide such a tool.
He selected the mystery reward.
🕷️
[Mystery Reward Obtained]
Classic Spider-suit repaired!
🕸️
He watched the interface update and the suit's damage close itself in a slow progression, the tears from Cheetah's claws sealing, the material restoring its color from shoulder to hem, and he sat with the result without comment because comment would cost him something he wasn't spending.
He held his breath. His muscles coiled. He didn't move.
Not even as a blade came through his shoulder from behind and stopped an inch from his neck.
His sense had registered the weight on the gantry rail above him two seconds before the drop, had mapped the landing on the bracket to his right, had tracked the footfall that weighed almost nothing, and had given him the full geometry of the strike before the blade arrived at his skin.
He remained still.
The interface was still fading at the edge of his vision, his hands rested on the bracket and the blade an inch from the suit's collar.
He read the figure behind him: weight distribution of someone who had trained until weight became a choice, grip on the blade that neither gripped nor held but simply was, the blade an extension and not a tool.
"You," said the voice behind him, low and carrying nothing wasted in it, "what are you."
Jake moved his neck a fraction to the side, not enough to look and not enough to matter.
"Woman," he said, "if that blade even grazes my newly repaired suit, I will turn your whole body inside out before you draw your last breath."
A breath passed.
The blade retracted, rising away from his collar in a controlled arc that withdrew fast, without touching, the clearance so exact that any other hand on any other night would have caught the fabric on the pull. His sense registered the control in it as religiously refined expertise.
"I despise men who cannot back up their claims," the voice said. "Show me you are what you mean."
Jake rose from his squat, his hands coming away from the bracket, and turned to face the canal without turning to face her.
"You're putting your life on the line," he said. "By challenging me."
"Your words," she said, "make me want to discipline you further."
He felt her weight leave the bracket -- felt it in the absence of it, the way the metal stopped carrying anything -- and then she was in the gap between them, and his sense received her as a set of velocities rather than a body, the attacks cycling through their lines before any single one committed, changing aim through the arc, a pattern that didn't hold its shape long enough to map on the first pass.
He moved.
Three steps backward in sequence, reading the pattern by accumulation rather than prediction, his feet finding the bracket edges without looking for them, and she came through the air with her legs switching their configuration mid-flight and turned to face him on the way down, bringing her strikes in from the angle his steps had opened, and he moved through each one with his hands rising to the lines and deflecting rather than blocking.
She landed in a low forward stance, left hand extended with the sword sheathed, her center of gravity already loaded for the next sequence.
He looked at her face for the first time.
She was lean and precise and her face had the quality of someone who had lived in their body for so long that nothing in it existed by accident -- cheekbones sharp, eyes steady and dark, a calm in them that had nothing to do with stillness and everything to do with certainty, her black training attire sitting close against her frame without restricting anything, the sword's handle positioned across her back with the ease of something she'd been wearing since before Jake had been doing what he was doing.
Everything about what he read from just looking at her told him who she was, without a doubt.
"Is that the opening of the best martial artist in the world," Jake said.
Her eyes held his for a moment, and then the corner of her mouth moved, and she switched her stance -- right hand forward now, weight redistributed in a single smooth shift, her forward hand open and her sword hand dropping to her side.
She drove her body at him.
Jake widened his stance, and raised his hands.