The violent ballet of swinging steel didn't end with fanfare—it simply stopped. One last plate carved through empty air, its edge whistling past close enough to raise goosebumps, and then the mechanical thunder died. The slabs hung suspended, transformed into monuments of interrupted violence. Nothing remained but the survivors' harsh breathing and the bridge's low metallic moan as stressed cables settled into place.
The pause lasted exactly three heartbeats.
Movement came from below. Not from the bridge itself, but from narrow walkways running alongside it, half-hidden in the perpetual mist. Six figures rose into view, three per side, positioned with mathematical precision.
Each wore a mask.
These weren't ancient artifacts like the volcanic relic from Witnessing Hollow. These were contemporary, almost corporate in their clean design—white polymer bases smooth as porcelain. Across each face stretched a black handprint, but the proportions were subtly wrong. Six fingers instead of five. The palm sat where a nose should be. Three narrow slits marked the eye region, and from the middle opening, a steady trickle of dark liquid descended with metronomic patience. At the crown of each mask, an inverted spiral had been carved, creating the optical illusion of depth, as if the forehead contained a miniature whirlpool pulling the viewer's attention into nothing.
The masked figures stood motionless. Then, moving as a single organism, they bowed with ceremonial precision.
When they straightened, each held a barrel.
These weren't wooden casks. They were seamless metal cylinders, gunmetal grey and roughly the dimensions of industrial drums. They looked far too heavy for human hands to manage.
The rightmost figure raised its barrel overhead with the mechanical smoothness of a trebuchet arm. The throw wasn't powered by muscle—it was executed with engineering precision. The cylinder traced a silent arc upward from the lower platform, cleared the railing, and entered the airspace above the bridge proper.
It climbed to its peak and began its descent.
The target wasn't a person. It was a zone—a circular area of grating approximately three yards across, dead center in the bridge lane.
WHOOMF.
The impact wasn't an explosion. It was a violent compression. The barrel collapsed inward with a percussive thud that struck the chest like a physical force. Air pressure inverted. The bridge section beneath the impact point shuddered hard enough to rattle teeth. No shrapnel scattered. Only a crushed cylinder remained, and a lingering sensation of displaced atmosphere that made breathing suddenly difficult.
Then the other masked figures began their throws. The launches were staggered, creating overlapping trajectories and cascading impacts. The bridge had transformed. No longer a timing puzzle. Now it was a spatial mathematics problem solved under continuous bombardment.
User 'ArtilleryFan':Now THIS is innovation! Area denial! Beautiful!
User 'PanicRoom': How do you dodge that?! It's everywhere!
Elijah's mental framework shifted instantly. The slab timing had been sequential, linear. This required three-dimensional tracking. He watched the arcs being traced in real-time, calculated impact zones, identified safe corridors, and—most critically—recognized the targeting logic of the throwers.
His hypothesis, confirmed after the second volley: the masked figures adjusted their aim based on clustering. They didn't hunt individuals. They sought density. A lone runner in a clear lane might be ignored. Two or more people grouped together attracted the barrage like blood draws sharks.
He started moving. Not with the panicked scrambling from before, but with fluid, seemingly random motion. He ducked beneath a frozen slab's suspended arm, rolled across grating still vibrating from a recent strike, and came up near the left railing.
Marcus was ahead, clearly favoring his left side, half-dragging Vivian along the right edge, away from the center where most impacts concentrated. They formed an obvious pair, moving together.
Elijah's movements became a sequence of irregular shifts—unpredictable jukes and feints that made him look like someone barely avoiding destruction, yet he always ended up in spaces where barrels weren't landing. He let the concussive waves from near-misses buffet him, using the momentum to add authenticity to his stumbling gait.
He drifted. Not away from danger, but laterally across the bridge, gradually angling toward Marcus and Vivian's position. To any casual observer, it appeared to be the erratic path of someone in pure survival mode.
A barrel launched from the left platform, trajectory initially calculated for the bridge's center. But Elijah had moved closer to Marcus now, creating a loose cluster. The barrel's rotation seemed to shift mid-flight. Its arc bent slightly, redirecting toward the new concentration of targets.
Elijah caught the adjustment in the minute change of its spin axis. The barrel had committed to its new course.
At the final possible instant, as the cylinder entered its terminal descent phase toward the cluster, Elijah stepped aside.
He didn't move into open space. He stepped into a narrow gap between a low-hanging frozen slab and the left railing—a corridor that had just been cleared by a previous impact. It was an insane choice, a guaranteed collision point once the rhythm mechanism reactivated.
The barrel, having recalibrated for the Elijah-Marcus cluster, now had only one person remaining in its kill zone: Marcus.
Marcus spotted it late. Grey metal filled his upward vision. No time for planning. He shouted something wordless, shoved Vivian hard toward the relative safety of the right railing, and threw himself forward in a desperate, flat dive.
The barrel imploded.
WHUMP.
It struck not his body directly, but half a foot to his left, exactly where his leg had been a fraction of a second earlier. The concussive force wasn't a direct hit, but proximity mattered. The atmosphere vanished. A hammer of pure pressure slammed into his left side.
Vision whited out. Sound disappeared. He felt himself lifted—not upward but sideways—his body tumbling like discarded clothing into the bridge's right-side railing. The collision with the metal bar drove every molecule of air from his lungs in one sick gasp. His left arm, already compromised from earlier damage, erupted in a wave of nerve-dead agony. His fingers went slack. His grip on consciousness started slipping, grey static creeping in from his peripheral vision.
On the opposite side of the bridge, Elijah was "thrown" in the other direction by the same shockwave. He let it carry him, rolling with the momentum into a low crouch that bled off the force. He came up on one knee, back pressed against a frozen slab, head lowered as if stunned. It looked like pure luck. It was physics, choreographed.
He didn't glance over to check on Marcus. He studied the path ahead, tracking the next series of arcs being drawn by the silent, six-fingered figures. His expression, in the moment he believed no drone was capturing his face, was perfectly calm. A chess master observing a forced move playing out exactly as planned.
User 'PhysicsFail': HOLY CRAP! Carter just got LUCKY!
User 'CorpPrince': Marcus is done. Look at his arm. That's a game-ender.
User 'GrimReaper': The barrel chose. The bridge provides, the bridge takes away.
Chloe had witnessed the entire sequence. She hadn't been dodging randomly either. She'd been solving the same mathematical problem. She saw Elijah's initial drift toward Marcus. She saw the barrel's mid-flight correction. She saw the perfectly timed sidestep into the improbably safe gap.
Her sharp eyes locked onto Elijah as he rose from his crouch. She didn't see a fortunate survivor. She saw the geometry. She saw the calculation. Her lips compressed into a bloodless line. She said nothing.
Vivian was screaming, crawling toward where Marcus lay collapsed against the railing, clutching his deadened left arm, face drained of color. "Marcus! MARCUS!"
Marcus blinked, the grey static receding, replaced by nauseating, pulsing pain centered in his shoulder and radiating outward to fingertips that refused to respond. He pushed himself upright with his functioning arm, using the railing for support. He looked across the bridge.
His gaze found Elijah, who was already advancing again, picking his way through the next bombardment, his body once more adopting the trembling, desperate facade of someone fighting for survival by inches.
For the first time, the small seed of suspicion planted during the rhythm poisoning incident bloomed into dark certainty. It wasn't about luck or awkwardness. The drift, the timing, the sidestep... it was a sequence. A deliberate, invisible sequence.
Their eyes met across the smoke-hazed air, over the crumpled barrels.
Elijah's expression was blank. A clean slate. He offered no apology, no concern, no acknowledgment of the shared, horrific mathematics that had just crippled his teammate. He simply turned and continued forward, leaving Marcus to deal with the consequences of the equation.
Marcus's jaw clenched. Pain and fury merged into a single burning fuel. He shoved himself upright, ignoring Vivian's continued cries. "Shut up," he forced out, the words ragged. "Just... follow." He began moving, a lurching, one-armed gait, each step sending white-hot protest signals up his damaged side. He was diminished. He was a liability.
And Elijah, the quiet conductor, had calculated that outcome precisely.