All-Chemical Spider #111
She came.
Before had been a question, each strike a line thrown out to see what came back. This was the answer.
Her spear-hand drove at his throat and his sense screamed and he dropped his chin and slipped inside the line, leaning forward, counter already loading in his shoulder--
Her elbow was already there.
It caught the pocket of air he'd moved into and found his jaw instead, and before the shock of it moved through his skull her knee drove up into his sternum and the air left him in a sound he hadn't made since the vat.
He shot two web lines and pulled himself sideways before she could build on it.
She let him go.
His feet found the gantry rail and he hung there for a breath with his jaw singing and his sternum trying to remember its job. She stood below him with her hands at rest and her eyes on him, reading something in the way he was standing that he didn't know was visible.
He dropped.
She baited the mechanical arm and he knew it and swung it anyway because there was no other answer, the punch going out fast and heavy.
She slid inside his forearm -- a single step, her body turning along the inside of the strike like a door swinging on a hinge -- and her elbow hit the joint sideways.
Pain, real pain, traveled the length of the arm and found the shoulder, and then her hand drove into the armpit in a compact strike, two knuckles leading, and something deep in the joint stuttered.
He fired a web at her face on reflex.
She turned her head and let it pass, and her hands were already rising.
The straight blasts came short and fast and from the center-line, and his hands rose to meet them, finding the rhythm of her strikes, riding the sequence -- and then she wasn't there.
She dropped below his guard in a single compression of her frame, both palms driving in from low, and the impact hit his ribs and his liver simultaneously, and his back leg was gone before he registered the sweep.
The canal path came up and met his spine and the sound of it traveled through the stone.
He was up before she could follow, web lines firing in three directions, and he yanked himself into the air and hung above her from the gantry, breathing through his teeth.
"Ptff," he breathed.
She looked up at him. Her breathing was even.
He picked up a section of corrugated metal from the roof debris with a web line and threw it. She went over it without looking up, a lazy back-arch that her spine accomplished without consulting the rest of her, and landed facing him as he came down on the next swing.
He threw another piece, low, and swung hard at the opening it should have made.
She stepped over the low piece and flowed around his swing and drove a stomp into the stone between his feet, and he felt the vibration in his legs and rooted against it, his weight dropping, his stance going rigid -- and she changed.
Her heel hooked his front ankle and her palm hit the opposite hip at the same moment, and the strength he'd locked into his stance turned on him like a lever finding its fulcrum, and he went over hard.
The slam cracked the stone under him.
He pulled himself out of it fast, rolling, shooting two lines that yanked him clear, and came upright with the dagger in his hand, and the blade grew in his grip -- the form shifting through his palm, the haft extending, the weight climbing until it had become something larger and heavier and he brought it around in a wide arc at her approach.
She jumped.
Not back -- up, her feet leaving the ground and clearing the swing as it passed below her, and she came back down on the other side of it already moving.
He drove the axe into the stone.
The impact cracked outward in a radius and she moved around it, her feet reading the fractures as they spread, not breaking rhythm, each step landing ahead of the next split in the surface, her body fluid through a geometry that should have scattered her footing.
He pulled the weapon back into his palm before the follow-through completed and the weight vanished and she reached for the added mass and found none of it, and for a moment her hands closed on where it had been.
He swung at the gap.
She wasn't in the gap. She was inside his reach, her frame close enough that his elbow connected with her shoulder before he found the angle for anything useful, and she took the contact and rolled with it and came up along his side, and her hands began.
Short, fast, overlapping. His sense fed him the lines and he moved to answer them and found each answer leading into the next strike, her hand replacing her foot replacing her elbow, the geometry cycling faster than his body resolved the read, and she was pressing inward with each exchange, her frame entering his space and not leaving it.
He shot a web at the wall to his right and yanked.
She moved with the pull.
He shot left and she was already there, her shoulder at his ribs, her hip at his hip, moving in the same direction he'd yanked himself, her body matching his course from inside his own radius and her strikes finding him in the transit -- his shoulder, his kidney, the side of his knee -- and it landed wrong, all of it wrong, because she was too close to be an opponent and his sense was reading her and finding nothing that read as outside.
He pushed off the stone with both legs and gained the air.
She had his wrist.
She came up with him, her weight swinging off the grip, and the scissor closed around his waist before he processed the mechanic -- her legs locking, her torso rotating, and the arm she wanted was the possessed one, and she had it, and the angle she found with it was the angle the joint wasn't designed for.
He shouted -- one syllable, involuntary -- and fired three lines in every direction at once, pulling in all of them, the opposing tensions yanking them both apart, the joint grinding through the last degree of travel before she let it go.
He came down hard and stood.
His arm hung at his side with the sensation of static from elbow to wrist and his sense was running at a volume he couldn't filter and she landed across the stone from him and straightened her collar with two fingers and was still.
He fired at her.
She moved and the web passed her and he fired again and she read the angle and moved around it and she was coming toward him and he fired twice more and she was between them, inside the shots, her frame merging into the space his attacks had been aimed at, and her hands were in his guard and moving faster than the guard could answer.
She hit him everywhere.
Not sequences -- everything, overlapping, her hands and elbows and knees cycling through points on his body that weren't connected to each other by any logic he could map.
His sense was trying to answer all of them and answering none of them fully, and the ground came up -- she'd swept something, he hadn't felt which leg -- and her palm drove him the last distance and he hit the stone and felt the shockwave move through him and the after-ring of it in his teeth.
He couldn't find his arms for a breath.
Her foot pressed down between his shoulder blades, not hard, a statement, and her voice arrived at his ear from close.
"You lack technique, meta."
He was up before she finished the word.
He yanked himself sideways with the first web line his hand could throw, not knowing where it anchored, rolling onto the stone and pushing to his feet and standing -- staggering one step, holding the second, holding the third.
His sense was screaming at everything.
Every surface, every angle, every piece of air with movement in it, and he fired a web at nothing and fired another at the dark above the canal and his body kept giving him the signal that she was everywhere and his eyes couldn't confirm it and he turned and shot at the building face and his sense was not calming down.
She had been so close for so long that the space she'd occupied inside his guard felt like a wound she'd left behind when she withdrew, and his sense was mapping the ghost of it, her entire geometry still running in his nervous system like a sound that kept going after the source stopped.
"Now," her voice said, from somewhere he couldn't locate, "you're completely blind."
He turned. She wasn't there.
He turned again. The darkness behind the gantry gave him nothing. His sense gave him everything and it was all wrong and he shot two lines at the water and one at the roof and stood with his hands up and his heart crashing and the signal blaring with no target to give it.
He didn't feel the hand.
It closed around the back of his neck from behind, and the blade arrived at his throat before he moved, and her mouth was at his ear.
"I have already killed you seven times."
He reached back for her with both hands and she stepped sideways and pushed and he stumbled forward three steps, and the web lines he fired back over his shoulder came at her in a loose spray, unaimed, and she cut them, the blade moving through the strands and her fingers trailing along the edge after, clearing the silk.
"Wanna know why I spared you each time?"
He turned.
He stood. His legs found their steadiness through the effort of requiring it from them. One hand went to his collar where the blade had pressed, the fabric open, and he looked at her with his sense still sparking at the edges of his vision and coming back, slowly, to something he could read.
The smirk was almost gentle.
"Because you made me angry."
He looked at the collar. Then at her. The suit's fabric hung open at the neck in a thin line, precise, and the thread at the edge of the cut caught the canal light.
His voice came out low.
"You nicked my suit."
He let her feel what was behind it.
"That was a mistake."
Her chin rose a fraction. The smirk held, the edge of it sharpening.
"It was a statement."