“Good point.” I reached out with Dead Reckoning’s long-range function. Eight life points up on L2, in front of the elevator in staggered rows. “Eight Contrails waiting at the door for us. What’s the plan?”
“I’ll hold our escape route and try to protect her,” Rali said, squeezing over to the green girl’s side of the elevator, bumping her a little as he got his bulk situated between her and the door. “Sorry. I’m not really made for small spaces. I’m more of an open-floor-plan model.”
The girl smiled a little and ducked her head shyly.
“Just stay behind me, all right?” Rali said.
“All right.” She backed farther into the corner.
A sliver of light appeared at the top of the door as we rose, the light striped with shadows. A second later, the shadows were stretching into legs. The sound of crying started to filter down from somewhere close by.
Adrenaline pumped through me, and I cycled Miasma to my muscles, piggybacking on that, hitting all the major Ki-enhancements. The elevator kept climbing and the gap kept revealing more of those legs. The first row of three was squirming and shifting feet nervously, but the row staggered between them was steady.
“I think I can buy us a couple seconds head start,” I said to Warcry, refilling my Spirit sea to bursting with Hungry Ghost. “Be ready to move.”
“I’m always ready, grav.” Fire raced down the ginger’s head and arms.
With a blast of Miasma, I sent Rigor Mortis freezing through the first three sets of legs in front of us. I hadn’t ever used it on multiple targets before, but I know I managed to hit at least two of them because their squirming and moving stopped. A woman started screaming, and the third set of legs scrabbled and kicked, but didn’t run away.
Warcry cocked his flaming fists back, ready to pounce.
It clicked in my brain a split second before the rest of the bodies came into view.
“The front three are captives!” I yelled.
But Warcry had already jumped. He snarled through gritted teeth and changed his trajectory in the air, missing the frozen women and slamming into one of the Contrails behind them. The woman I hadn’t managed to freeze screamed and struggled harder.
Bullets, knives, and Spirit attacks flew.
I popped Death Metal shields on both arms and barreled out of the elevator. I tried to miss the struggling, screaming captive, but the space between the rows of cages was too narrow. I clipped her and the closest seized-up woman with the edges of my shields as I crashed through.
Just behind them, a copper scaly dude with a winged snake tattooed across his face spat a stream of green Spirit at me. Without Ki-sight, I never would’ve seen it coming. I took the venomous-looking spit on my left shield, then hooked under with my right, slamming his chin with an uppercut elbow. Obviously the dude had a glass jaw, because he went down immediately.
With a push-kick, I knocked his unconscious form out of the way and shield-bashed a squid thing that was shooting glowing magenta Spirit tentacles at Warcry from behind. When I hit him, the squid yelped and let out a cloud of inky magenta Spirit. Red flashed through the cloud, and Warcry’s prosthetic made that baseball bat ping sound of him kicking someone’s head in.
Dead Reckoning freaked out to my right.
I spun around to a guy in ninja-like black clothes running up on me. I threw a Ki-reinforced intercept kick at him, but the second he saw me throw the attack, he split into four ninjas, and all of them ran up the air like it was solid.
Dead Reckoning went off in every direction. I ducked under one of the ninja’s boosted kicks, but took a boot from another one in my side. There was no way to keep track of them all.
Another kick slammed into my face, whipping my head around. I stumbled and just barely missed a throat-strike.
I had to even the odds. Miasma exploded off me into Three Corpse Sickness, more solid and humanoid than ever.
Take the ninja clones out! I thought.
With eerie simultaneous nods, the corpses chased three of the ninja dudes through the air.
That left me with the original. I went after him, but he just ran up the nothingness out of my reach. I doubled my Ki-strength and jumped, high enough to deadleg him with my shield, but Death Metal sliced through his thighs without hitting anything.
I dropped back to the floor, brain racing to figure out what I could do against an incorporeal ninja.
The ninja landed off to my left side with a boom that made the floor shake and shot out both fists in a U-punch at my face and stomach. I threw my shields into the shots, but the impact threw me back like I’d been hit by a bus. I landed in a heap with that first screaming lady.
Before I could fight my way back to my feet, the ninja landed on my chest like a nose-diving jumbo jet and pinned my arms to my sides. I coughed the air out of my lungs, and the lady underneath me started gasping for breath. The guy must have had some kind of mass-manipulating Spirit to go from incorporeal to feeling like he weighed eighty tons in the blink of an eye.
The ninja locked his hands around my throat and started squeezing.
I twisted and fought, but I couldn’t get free and I couldn’t suck in any air. It was like the dude’s hands were metal clamps, closing off my airways. With no other options, I reached out for his life point.
The airy gray candle slipped through Dead Man’s Hand like smoke. It solidified, then when I grabbed again, drifted away. He must have some ability to make it solid or incorporeal as he needed.
The ninja chuckled, his
