Nerida Quickwave's Arc

Chapter 6 of 12

Nerida pushed off the bunker floor and let the current carry her into the open. The two shapes stood on a low rise of fused rock pillars, threaded with green light and wrapped in dark vines. The monument hummed under them. Beast and metal thing did not turn. They waited, as if the ground itself had grown them up together. She circled wide and looked for the seam between them. On the metal creature's chest, bolted into the steel plate, sat a cracked stone carving of an octopus coiled around a small mer-shape. The beast's twelve arms drifted in time with that carving. When one arm flexed, a panel on the metal thing glowed. They were not allies. They were bound. One thing wearing two bodies. Nerida tested it. She drove the bone shard at the metal creature's exposed joint. The beast answered before the steel did. An arm whipped past her and shattered a tall stone figure behind her into two scarred, acid-burned halves. The blast knocked her sideways into the rocks. Her shard skidded away across the shelf. She tasted blood in the water. She lay still and watched them settle again, side by side on the glowing pillars. She had her answer. They could not be fought apart, only together, and she could not fight them together. Not yet. She gathered the shard, pulled herself behind the broken statue, and began to study the carved octopus on the metal chest. The hunt had changed. She would not strike again until she understood the bond.