Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

Deyra assigned the work quickly, and nobody argued.

"Ivo — mark the support and mark the fall line. I want to know exactly where we cannot be standing. Vasse, Corran — the scouts do not get near her chains. Vale, you watch that thing and you tell me when it commits, and you do not fire unless somebody is about to die." She was already moving to the high ground above the strip. "Calder, tell me what you need."

"Distance and a straight run." Rhea was shaking out the jammed reel and getting nothing. "And somebody to keep the small ones off the anchor while I'm on the line, because once I've hooked that reinforcement I can't defend myself and pull at the same time."

"You'll have it."

Ivo marked the support with a chalk cross and paced the fall line, and then he made everybody walk it with him, which cost us forty seconds and was worth every one.

"Nobody inside this," he said. "From here to that stub. If it goes and you're standing in it, you go with it."

The colony did not let us set up quietly.

Two scouts came at the anchor point almost immediately — not at Rhea, at the exposed reinforcement she'd be hooking, working at the concrete around it with those comb-limbs. Vasse and Corran drove them off twice.

The cutter came down the strip and put itself across the middle of Rhea's intended running lane. That was the one that hurt. She'd picked a wide curve out from the culvert and back that would have let her build properly, and the cutter simply stood in it.

"I need that lane."

"You're not getting it," said Corran. "Not without one of us going in front of it, and we'd lose."

Then a scout got to her secondary anchor — a root ball she'd planned to swing off at the far end — and cut it out of the ground while she was watching.

"Oh, come on—"

"Second option," I said.

"There isn't a second option. There's a short line along the crown, which is fractured, which is the thing we are deliberately trying to break, and I'd be running on it." She was already looking at it. "That's not a plan, that's a dare."

"Can you do it?"

Rhea looked at me for a second.

"Yes. Badly." She rolled the bad shoulder. "Tell your friend to keep his marks accurate, because I'll be inside them until the last second."

She ran it.

Eighteen metres of fractured concrete crown with a hollow under it, back and forth, four passes, with the amber climbing her boot plates and everything under her feet flexing.

And the Bankbreaker came.

Calling its approach was my assigned job, and it took all the attention I had. I lay on the high ground with the vibration coming through my chest and reported its line and speed while Deyra timed the withdrawal.

"Committed—it's on the strip, not turning—twenty metres—fifteen—"

The scout tapping shifted, and the Bankbreaker's angle shifted with it, off the crown by about two metres.

"It's changing line—"

Rhea broke off her run and threw her hook at the outer edge of the crown, deliberately, where it would be visible. The metal struck hard enough to ring through the concrete.

The cutter came for the exposed chain. A scout on the span answered the impact with rapid taps, and the Bankbreaker corrected toward the vibration. Both creatures moved onto the weakened crown.

"Vasse—hold," Corran said, catching him across the chest when he started after the cutter. Corran had understood the feint two seconds faster.

Then a scout came off the bank at Rhea's exposed anchor line with its comb-limbs going for the chain.

I put a round through it at nine metres.

My palm let go at the trigger. That's the only way I can describe it — something in the stitching gave, and the recoil went straight through the wound, and the rifle came off my shoulder and I lost the use of that hand for anything requiring grip. I got the knife into my left and stopped pretending I was a shooter for the rest of the afternoon.

"Now," Ivo said. "The load's transferring—the crack's moving—Solt, now—"

"Everybody clear the line!" Deyra was up and moving. "Calder — pull!"

Rhea hooked the exposed reinforcement, set both boots against the lip, and released everything she had into it.

She did not lift the structure or tear out a sound support. She removed the last thing holding a span that the Level 19 Bankbreaker had spent hours undermining and was now standing on.

The crown went with a noise I felt in my sternum.

Concrete, earth, resin sheet, the shallow chambers, the cutter, three scouts and the Bankbreaker all went down together into the hollow that thing had spent the afternoon digging, and the dust came up the slope and over us and turned the whole hillside grey.

Rhea's release threw her sideways. The chain went taut wrong and her shoulder took it — I heard her make a noise she'd been avoiding making all day — and she came down on her hip and slid four metres through broken concrete, opening her thigh along a rebar edge.

Nobody died. Deyra had us all counted inside twenty seconds, standing in a line on the open hillside with our hands on our knees.

Vasse had a cut on his forearm. Corran had lost his spear. Ivo sat on the wet grass and shook for a minute, then tried to apologise. Nobody let him finish.

"Nobody approaches that," Deyra said, when she'd finished counting. "Nobody looks over the edge, nobody retrieves anything. We don't know what's under it and we're not finding out today."

I got to Rhea. The thigh was ugly and long and not deep. The shoulder was the problem.

"Dislocated?"

"Strained." She was testing it and clearly regretting it. "I've had it out twice. This isn't that. It's going to be a very unpleasant jump home."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't." She looked at the collapse. "That worked."

"Yes."

"That worked, and I got to do the one thing I'm actually good at. I want whoever's writing this down to note that the chain was my idea."

"It was Ivo's idea about the support."

"It was Ivo's idea about the support," she agreed. "The chain was mine."

The dust went down over about four minutes and left a crater where the exterior crown had been.

And on the scrub line thirty metres above us, one scout stood absolutely still.

It had come up in the confusion and nobody had seen it. It did not move toward us. It looked at the collapse for a long moment, and then at Rhea — for longer, and I have gone over that in my head more times than I want to — and then at our line, and then it turned and went into the scrub without hurrying.

"It studied her longer than the rest of us," I said.

"It watched all of us," Deyra replied.

"I know. I'm not claiming it understands what she is. But the way she moved was new, and it stayed long enough to see the result."

Nobody had an answer to that.

Then, faintly, up through our boots from somewhere well beneath the fresh crater, came three impacts. A pause. Then two.

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