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Act IV, Chapter 8: The Dennys

  It is good to be alive.

  Peter surfaces again. He feels the familiar weight of his combat suit, studded with batteries and beads, draped over his usual robes. He stands with maybe the largest single grouping of Apostles he can remember seeing in one place.

  He reminds himself that he remembers very little.

  Some of the Apostles are familiar to him, their faces conjure names from the shadowy, boxed-out corner of his mind keeping subconscious tallies. Armand, the towering man with the unbreakable Blessing, Leslie with her crooked grimace and missing tooth, Annie (in the audience for some school play, songs and dances about orphans) with her arms wreathed in tattoos.

  A few of the others are less familiar. Some are outright strangers. He vaguely recalls something about increased Converts swelling the ranks lately. Recollections of their plan hang in his mind like a fog: a large-scale offensive, to combat the Girl and prepare the coming war, the unexpected appearance of a high priority target, one whose consumption would elevate even an Apostle to heights second only to Phoenix himself.

  And he understands why he is where he is, now, standing with this small battalion in the dark parking lot of the Denny’s (“slow down, Pete, nobody’s trying to take your Grand Slamwich”), preparing and steeling themselves for something major.

  "Divisions," Armand barks, cutting their massed crowd of 13 into three groups with sweeps of his hand. "Concentrate fire on the signal. Division one, kinetic. Two, heat. Three, electricity. It has to be simultaneous. This is not some M-corp musclehead. This is not some hothead mercenary with a cute Knack. This man is, as far as we can tell, a real fucking monster. Maybe he can take everything you can throw at him. Maybe he can't. Phoenix is confident that 13 Apostles' worth of energy, spread across three different forms, should be enough to confuse even his Blessing's best defenses. Anything short of that is not guaranteed. We need our first strike to be our last strike. Understood?

  Peter joins the murmured chorus of assent. Armand glances around at his gathered army, nods, and swivels to the entrance. Peter and the others fall in behind him.

  Inside, the restaurant is largely empty, save for a very startled-looking old man sipping coffee in a distant booth, and their target, posted up at the counter by the kitchen.

  The power radiating off of this man, without any visible exertions on his part, without any swellings or fluctuations in his Blessing, is staggering (a dizzy cloud of moths, bumping against grandpa’s bug zapper, lining up to fry themselves).

  The man is short, broad-shouldered, his dark hair unkempt, his face dotted with stubble. His clothing is odd; his shirt is more like some sort of rough-spun tunic, his pants maybe leather? He’s wearing something bulky beneath his shirt, he has a knife strapped to his belt. Peter startles when he notices the honest-to-goodness longsword leaning against the counter next to the man, who is busy tucking into an immense plate of scrambled eggs and making conversation with a rattled-looking waitress.

  “-too sweet, especially with that syrup you put on them, but these, God in heaven, please give your cooks my highest regards for these. And those potato chunks, the salted ones, what did you call those again?”

  “Hash browns.” The waitress’s smile is thin and tight. Her eyes dart up as Peter and the other Apostles enter, and he sees her wilt a little at the prospect of an already strange shift growing stranger. “G’morning. Table for… like, fourteen?”

  “Won’t be needing a table,” Armand gravels. The man at the counter wipes his mouth with a napkin and stretches, swivels on his stool to greet them. The man’s dark eyes rake over each one of the Apostles, drinking them in. If he’s troubled by them, he doesn’t show it.

  “Here we are. The vanguard. Er-” the man glances over his shoulder at the waitress’s nametag. “Kelsey. So sorry about this, but you and your comrades might want to evacuate the building. Try and put a few hundred paces between you and the property if you can.”

  The waitress seems bothered. “These friends of yours, Fizz?”

  “Fitz. And no. No, they’re going to try to kill me in a minute. Again, best for you to be scampering now.”

  The waitress turns her attention back to Armand. “No fighting in the building. If you-”

  “Kelsey!” the man amplifies his voice with his Blessing, deepening and broadening it. The effect is immediate, and the woman stiffens. The old man in the corner hustles out a back exit. “ime is of the essence!”

  Kelsey doesn’t need to be told twice.

  The man stands from the counter, rolls his neck, scoops his sword up. All around Peter he feels the flashbulb twinkling of other Blessings revving up.

  The man studies them. “Thirteen Consecrated in one spot, and not one trying to eat the man next to him? I’ve got to commend you for your discipline.”

  “We’ve got a dozen men on you,” Armand says. “We can make this quick, or we can draw this out.”

  “Didn’t come all this way to dodge the first bit of sport.” The man cranes his neck to watch Kelsey clamber into her car in the parking lot and drive off. He nods, turns back to face them. “Now. Show me your Shrouds.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  There’s a moment of confused silence.

  “Fine. I’ll lead the way.” The man straightens, and his Blessing erupts from him. The volume of it is unbelievable, swollen, its upmost reaches touching the ceiling, its outer boundary maybe as wide around as a small room. The force of its expansion blows out most of the glass in the building, sends a small hurricane of menus and napkins fluttering in the air. Peter is driven back a step.

  “Show me,” the man demands again, voice laced with power.

  Gradually, all around Peter, his fellow Apostles expand their own Blessings to their fullest. None of them, not even Annie, can make anything even a third as large as the man’s, and the display feels a little pathetic, but Peter joins in, fear buttressed slightly by the reminder of their numbers.

  The man grins. “There we go. Well. En Garde.”

  It is good to be alive.

  Peter comes to again, to the sound of roaring wind in his ears.

  It takes him a moment to place where exactly he is: hundreds of feet in the air, falling fast (skydivers flipping in patterns, their faces rippled by wind, rock music in the background). He has no idea how he ended up here. Far below, the Denny’s has been reduced to a flaming waste, its highlighter-yellow sign laying lengthwise across a blasted crater.

  There’s screaming coming from above him. Peter flips around just in time to see Armand hurtling down toward him, pale and terrified, his mouth frozen open in a shocked “O.”

  Armand’s legs are missing. No, wait, there they are, fluttering several dozen feet above them. Armand screams something unintelligible to Peter, and then an invisible cleaver chops his head in two, cleanly bisecting between his eyes.

  Charging through the remains of his leader, sword in hand, the man from the restaurant hurtles down through the air. He's laughing.

  Peter braces himself.

  It is good to be alive.

  Peter coughs up blood, feels the quake and rattle of something deep in his chest, fractured or broken. He glances around: he’s in the parking lot, now, his body half-embedded in the asphalt.

  He’d been thrown down at incredible speed. The kind of impact only he would be able to survive. Scattered around him are the remains of his fellow Apostles, who hadn’t been blessed with the Knack for absorbing massive impacts that Peter had.

  Annie’s crumpled form lands beside him, her shirt licked with flames, her eyes vacant, dead. Peter feels as if this should elicit some emotion in him, but he can’t recall enough about Annie to feel the grief he feels he should.

  With a crunch, the man lands behind Peter, flecking him with chips of asphalt and dirt. Peter is too embedded to turn and watch as his opponent approaches, can only listen to the gravel crunch of his footsteps.

  The tip of a sword edges into his vision, pointed down at his chest.

  “Yield,” says the man. “Yield and I’ll leave you be. None of you are fit for my armory, anyway.”

  Peter has no idea what this means. Unbidden by him, his hand reaches up and grabs at the blade of the sword, the cushioning of his Blessing keeping it from cutting him. “Sorry,” he coughs. “He won’t let me.”

  Peter’s hand wrenches weakly at the blade. The man steps into view, pulling his weapon away with something like pity. “Who won’t let you? What does that mean?”

  “Blessed Above,” Peter says.

  “He some sort of leader? The head of your, uh, merry band?”

  Peter does the best approximation of a shrug he can, half-stuck into the ground. His arms are scrabbling against the asphalt now, trying to pull him out, to launch him at his enemy. Peter watches their efforts with a hollow dread. To get back up and fight is the last thing he wants now.

  “Is he… controlling you?” the man asks, dark features screwed up, quizzical.

  “Something like that. He can-” Peter’s jaw clamps shut of its own accord, and he quickly gives up on trying to talk. He’s halfway out now, his arms working to yank his legs free. The knight steps forward and pins him with his boot. The weight behind his foot is immense, and his frenzied, disembodied thrashings are helpless against it.

  The knight squints, studying him, then looks off to the south, where even now Peter can feel the distant presence of Phoenix, watching, pulling. “Your Shroud isn’t your own. It’s… rented?”

  Peter would laugh if he was allowed. The knight shakes his head, disgusted.

  “What a way to put a damper on a fine melee. This is not sporting. Not sporting at all.”

  The knight kneels down, retrieving the knife from his side. He flashes it in front of Peter’s face.

  “I have an idea, young man. I know he won’t let you speak, so you’ll have to blink twice if you consent to it.” The knight pulls Peter’s head up by the hair, and he can feel the weapon's cold tip somewhere at the base of his skull. “This dirk of mine, it’s more than just a sidearm. It can cleave Shrouds at their fundamental level, can ignore them and their effects entirely. It’s scarcely bright enough to see, it's why I didn't notice it before, but there’s the faintest sliver of Shroud connecting you to your master, stretching from you off into the distance, where I assume he’s sitting now, fuming at me. Now, were I to sever this thread with my dirk, I imagine one of two things might happen. First: the shock instantly kills you. Second: it severs your connection to your master, freeing you.”

  The knight’s head hovers back into Peter’s field of view, one eyebrow cocked. “Would you like me to try?”

  Peter tries to decide if he’s afraid to die. He feels as if the part of himself that wants to live ("I'll always be here. You just need to remember.”) is still there, somewhere, but it’s bound and gagged, stowed in a cupboard. He feels the shape of its absence more than its presence.

  He glances around at the mangled, burned remains of his comrades. He senses the fury of Phoenix as he watches, feels it in the thrashing of his body against the knight’s overwhelming strength.

  He half-remembers a day, long distant, when he died before. He doesn’t remember it hurting very much at all. If anything, the experience had enough of a pleasant aftertaste to lodge itself in his brain, even now. It was nothing to be afraid of.

  He looks at the knight and blinks twice.

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