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Chapter 13 - Break Out (Part 2)

Asta judged the distance. Too far to jump without bouncing twice and breaking. Too exposed to climb without being turned into a case study. The squad spread, neat as a diagram.

Knife-lover lifted the flechette rifle. "Kneel, Hollow. Drop the trick kid. Let the lady go and maybe your bones get to stay inside you."

Lysandra's grip tightened on his shoulder—warning, humor, or both. "Your move."

He picked a third option.

"Cover your eyes," he told her, and didn't wait to see if she did.

He slammed his gauntlet into the catwalk railing and tore. Steel screamed. The panel ripped loose, teeth of metal along one edge. He heaved it off the catwalk and sent it spinning. It caught the nearest pylon full in the face. Sparks went stupid. The Halo sputtered and died on one side, flickering like a lie losing confidence.

He didn't stop. "RISE."

His shadow surged through the gap, made a rope out of itself. The Black Knight stepped out of his heel, put both hands on the rope and pulled like a man hauling a drawbridge. Shadows don't have weight; knights do. The rope went taut.

He swung them.

Lysandra hooked her arm around his neck and her legs around his waist, clean and unembarrassed. The catwalk blurred. Bullets stitched the air where they had been. The hound leapt after like a thrown smear. Theyhit the hangar floor in a roll that told his shoulder about consequences.

They broke in different directions mid-momentum. He took left, shoulder-checking a crate stack into a guard. Lysandra cut right and picked up the bent pry bar from the floor like it had been waiting specifically for her. She had no business being that efficient with a piece of metal. She was.

The squad recovered fast. Knife-lover shouted, voice flat with training: "Center! Collapse!"

They came in a wedge. Asta met the tip. Shadow was thin in the Halo's leftover glare, but the world still had corners. He slipped into them, let the Knight's weight sit in his bones, and made the first two helmets remember what a fist is. The pry bar rang against a rifle. A guard yelped as Lysandra drove the metal into his knee with all the elegance of a hammer's prayer.

Asta went low. The hound took an ankle and learned to love the taste of boot. He rose inside someone's guard and whispered "Rise" into the man's shadow; it tried to stand up on its own and took the owner with it, ruining the neat wedge.

"Lights!" Knife-lover barked, and two more pylons whined awake, this time not circling but facing them head-on, white-hot cones that sawed shadow down to threads.

Asta's head pounded. The System stung his eyes.

[Resource Low.]

[Advice: Commit or Withdraw.]

"Commit," he said, and swallowed the nearest dark, the smear under a fallen crate, the thin shadow under a forklift's wheel. It scorched on the way in and cooled in his belly. He leaned forward into the sort of decision you only make after you've already made it.

The Black Knight came fully through him.

Not the whole armour (the Halo complained when he tried), but the shape: the gauntlet a second skin, the greave a memory that still held, the spine plates aligned like a promise. He felt taller without growing. He hit harder without trying.

He broke a pylon with the Knight's fist. Its glass bit his knuckles and learned humility. He kicked the second, and it folded like bad origami.

Shadow roared back into the room as if grateful.

Lysandra threw the pry bar like a spear. It went end-over-end and punched through a visor with an ugly, good sound. She snatched the fallen guard's sidearm in the same breath and didn't fire it, she hit the third pylon with it like a club. Sometimes a gun is just bad metal with a grip.

Knife-lover vaulted a crate, slid, came up with a blade in her off hand. She moved like people who wake smiling do. She reached Asta, and the knife found the seam in his shadow-plate near his ribs. It kissed there.

White pain. He hissed. She grinned inches from his face. "Hello," she said again.

He headbutted her.

Her grin broke into a surprised O, then into blood. She fell back, laughing through it. "Better," she coughed. "Rat has teeth."

The squad's line buckled. Asta pressed before it could unbuckle. The hound tore across the floor like heat. Lysandra was a hinge, step in, strike, step out—fluid, unbothered by the way everything tried to kill her out of politeness.

They would have bled their way out, clean.

Then the Director walked in.

He didn't shout. Shouting is for people who want to prove the sound enters rooms before they do. He simply came through the side door flanked by two men in suits that had never met rain. The knife in Knife-lover's hand stopped laughing. The remaining guards straightened as if gravity remembered them.

"Asta," the Director said, voice warm with an interest that wasn't human. "New trick. Disappointing that you used it so soon."

His shadow moved before he did. It stretched across the floor, thin as oil, and raised a hand none of the lights could bleach. It held an old-fashioned knife. Shadows shouldn't hold knives. The shadow did.

[Alarm: Entity of unknown class. Shadow Authority present.]

[Hypothesis: Director, Acolyte or Host.]

Lysandra stepped to Asta's side, close enough that her shoulder touched his. Her voice barely rose. "He's wearing something. Or something is wearing him."

"Both can be true," the Director said, and the smile never left his mouth. "I would like my asset back."

"Asset?" Lysandra said.

"Her," he said, and didn't look at her when he said it. He looked at Asta. "And the thing in your hand."

Asta glanced at his gauntlet. The Crownless fragment slept inside it like a dog with violent dreams. The Director's eyes stayed on the metal the way a starving man looks at bread he believes is already his.

"Return them," the Director said, gentle. "You can keep your life. Maybe even your license."

Lysandra's laugh was one sound. "That easy?"

"That easy," he agreed.

The room was gracious enough to wait for an answer.

Asta shook his head once. "No."

The Director shifted the weight of his attention and the hangar felt colder, fewer. Shadows that weren't Asta's leaned toward the man like grass under wind. The knife-lover took a breath that shook, as if enjoying it.

"Then we will do this the unclean way," the Director said.

He lifted a hand. The suits at his side set a box on a crate and opened it. Inside: a lantern. Not a bulb, not a modern thing—an old iron cage with panes of glass and something inside like a trapped star. They turned a key. The star woke up angry.

[Warning: Captured Daylight - Artifact.]

[Effect: Shadow Excision.]

[Countermeasures: None, avoid direct exposure.]

The lantern bathed the hangar in clean, merciless light. Asta felt his shadow peel away from his skin in protest. The hound flattened with a sound he couldn't hear but could feel in his teeth. The Knight's weight went thin.

Lysandra's hand flared in instinct and then guttered, light torn off it by the lantern's appetite. She went paler. "Hate those," she said through her teeth.

The Director watched him with affectionate curiosity. "I did warn you about being studied."

Asta tried to move. The light pressed him in place with polite, heavy fingers. He could still breathe. He could still bleed. He couldn't get the shadow to rise.

Knife-lover wiped blood off her lip and pulled herself upright, delight back in her eyes. "Nowhere to hide, rat."

"No," Asta said, and felt the old anger come up, slow, clean. "I grew out of hiding."

He reached for something that wasn't the room.

Down inside where the Warden fragment coiled, where the Knight watched in winters, there was a hollow with his name written the way a knife writes into bone. He put his hand in it.

[Commandment Three: Devour]

[Target: Captured Daylight?]

[Feasibility: Unknown. Risk: Severe.]

Lysandra's fingers found his wrist, one beat, tight. "Don't."

He looked at her. The lantern light ate color around her and left edge. Even washed out, she made the room feel like someone had finally opened a window.

"They will take you apart," she said, low. "And call it safety."

A bullet, if it is a good one, knows what it wants.

Asta wanted.

He took one step toward the lantern.

The Director's smile sharpened. "Curious."

Asta lifted the gauntlet, palm open.

"Rise," he said.

Shadows can't rise in daylight.

They did not. His didn't. The room stayed bright and mean.

He put his hand on the glass instead.

Cold tore at him the way heat does when it has wanted you for a long time. The light tried to go through him and found something else there, something that did not love being seen.

"Devour," he said, and the word hurt.

Glass screamed. The lantern pulsed. The suits swore. The Director tilted his head the way a man does when the magician's trick turns out to be dentistry.

[Devour Attempt: Active]

[Status: Failing… Failing…]

[Adjustment: Crownless Fragment lending support]

[Status: Failing…]

The light bit him. He tasted iron and the first snow he ever ate as a child and the way doorways feel just before a storm. His shadow tried to lift and was stapled down.

"Devour," he snarled, and the Knight set its hands over his, and somewhere in him the Warden fragment laughed like a knife finally pointed the right way.

The lantern stuttered.

[Status: Breach]

[Gain: Daylight Trace]

[Side-effect: Vessel Shock]

He fell to a knee. The light faltered as if someone had coughed in church. Shadows pooled back under things with relief like creatures allowed to drink after being told water is a myth.

The Director's smile went small. "Now that," he said, softer, "is very bad for both of us."

Knife-lover lifted her rifle and aimed for the center of Asta's head.

Lysandra moved.

She didn't step between. She stepped with. Her hand smacked the rifle barrel aside at the exact moment the shot cracked. The round shattered the lantern's pane instead of Asta's skull.

The captured daylight spilled out, confused and angry, the way bees are when someone kicks their house.

"Down!" someone screamed, probably everyone.

Asta grabbed Lysandra by the waist and the wrecked lantern by its throat and pulled them behind a crate as the light exploded into three ugly truths at once.

The hound leapt over them like a blackout. The Knight's sword split a beam that wasn't a beam and cut it into a problem with two halves.

The suits ran. Knife-lover laughed too loud and chased anyway.

The Director stayed.

His shadow looked at Asta's shadow the way predators look at water they have to cross.

"Rat," he said, almost fond. "You are going to cost me so much paperwork."

Asta stood, slower than he wanted because the room was still ringing inside his bones. He put Lysandra behind his shoulder. She let him, for the heartbeat before she didn't.

"Later," he said to her, not looking. "Run when I say."

She didn't answer. Which meant she'd do the opposite.

Shadows licked back along the floor like tongues learning their job again. The lantern flickered its dying heart.

[Essence: Low.]

[Recommendation: Withdraw.]

[Optional: Summon—Black Knight (Partial).]

He lifted his hand. The Knight came into the light like an argument you bring to a fistfight and regret too late.

The Director's shadow smiled.

The suits dragged a second case out of nowhere and popped the latches. Inside: chains. Not metal. Not anything that loved names. The air cooled.

[Identification: Null Chains - anti-signature artifact.]

[Effect: Locks concepts. Do not engage.]

"Too late," the Director said, as if Asta had complained.

He flicked his fingers.

The chains went bright and then not. They leapt, quiet, serious, a net thrown across a pond you don't know has teeth.

Asta shoved the Knight forward and reached—past pain, past light, past the way his name felt in his mouth—to the place the System lived.

"Rise," he said again.

The chains hit.

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