Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users - Chapter 436

Capítulo 436: Finally, A Group Project I Don’t Hate 2

He tracked a second shift in the bowl ahead, during which dust rose and fell without wind. Everly rotated her wrists and checked the give of her knee.

She smiled a small smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Eager, but not out of control.

The first stone clacked against another stone. A simple sound, not loud, but heavy. Then a second and third.

Figures climbed over the ridge as if the low wall were a stage. They were taller than a man and broader, shoulders like pillars wrapped in plates that looked like granite more than bone.

Gorillas, if someone had asked a sculptor who liked quarries to guess at gorillas and then given the guess teeth for fun.

Their coats were slabs. Their knuckles hit the ground with the thud of sledges set down at shift change.

Eyes glowed faintly, not with heat, but with whatever passed for mind in a thing that measured with sound and weight.

Five of them in the open, one more hanging to a shelf on the cliff like a spare thought.

Everly’s grin sharpened. “Finally,” she breathed. “Team sport.”

“Patience,” Evelyn said, but her voice also had a line of bright interest. “They’ll test for bait. They’ll want us to meet in the bowl.”

“We will not meet in the bowl,” Ethan said. He lifted his left hand. A faint ripple shimmered between two broken pillars to their right, brief as a blink.

The gorillas’ heads tilted as one. He lifted his right hand and let another shimmer flash by the low ridge.

It was not bright, not showy, not a suggestion, not a parade. He drew their attention to the rock that broke into gaps he could use.

The nearest gorilla slammed both fists into the ridge and sounded like a drum dropped in an empty room.

It stepped into the bowl with the care of a thing that respects its own weight and then lunged forward at a speed that didn’t look possible, each hop more like a vault than a run.

Everly hissed air through her teeth. She took two steps into the open and then seemed to change her mind and take two back, a stutter that looked like fear to something dumb and like bait to something awake.

The three front gorillas went a bit hard on the show and surged. The cliff gorilla loosened its hold and slid down to join the press. It was good. Clustered.

“Left,” Evelyn said. She took the thin line along the wall and knifed outward, a precise strike at the edge of a plate, not to cut deep but to set a hinge.

Her blade kissed stone and found the seam. The first gorilla turned to swat her and met nothing but a mirage that broke like water.

It roared low and adjusted. Everly used the beat to drive straight into the second gorilla’s thigh, a shoulder check that wouldn’t budge a wall but would stagger a stack if you hit where it was tired.

The impact thudded up her arm. She laughed out of pure joy. The gorilla rocked, recovered fast, and swung.

Ethan’s image took the hit with a crack that wasn’t real, and the real Ethan yanked Everly back by her pack strap.

She cursed him with affection and bounced on her toes like a boxer downloading a new move as a treat.

“Don’t chase,” he said. “We pull them sideways. Past the fault in the floor.”

“What fault,” she said, already moving, and then felt it: the faint give at a line that cut the bowl in two where mortar had failed under a pretty surface.

He had marked it with his illusions to pull eyes away from their feet. Now he gave them the floor they deserved.

He shifted two more ghost steps across the weak seam and let one of the gorillas try to land where he hadn’t promised it safety.

The slab under its weight cracked clean and dropped a foot and a half. The beast stumbled. Everly was waiting to punish the stumble.

She brought her heel down at the hinge Evelyn had marked and rode the plate’s brief buckling to grind the joint. It popped. The gorilla bellowed, a wounded engine sound.

The cliff one leapt long, hunting height. Evelyn met it mid-arc with a line of wire she hadn’t been carrying when they entered the trial.

She snapped it out and stepped aside. It wrapped around the gorilla’s forearm and pulled its center off-line by an inch.

An inch matters. It hit the ground with one wrist turned and lost the use of that hammer for three breaths.

Ethan filled the breaths with something worse. He raised a veil of mirrored edges in a shallow half ring, low to the ground, so the gorillas saw only their own charging as shadows.

Two slammed shoulder to shoulder. The third clipped a stack and broke a plate that had done nothing wrong. The noise made the rest hurry, which made them sloppy.

Everly barreled into the nearest with a laugh, then remembered she had promised to conserve and turned the laugh into a grunt that sounded like she was being sensible.

She bent, seized a loose chunk of stone, and used it like a fist on the hinge Evelyn had set. The plate gave.

She whooped once. The whoop got cut off by a backhand she only half avoided. The heel of a palm, like a mallet, caught her ribs and skated.

She stumbled and sucked air sharply. She turned the stumble into a roll because practice makes even bad moments pay rent.

She popped up again, eyes bright but wet at the corners where pain had gathered.

Ethan slid between two gorillas that both wanted to flatten him to fix their day.

He gave them a choice of two Ethans for a heartbeat, then a third on the other side of the seam, then none at all as he dropped low, cut a tendon line at an ankle seam, and let its own weight finish the argument.

He was ugly when it mattered. It was a pretty costly time. He didn’t spend it.

“Everly, breathe,” Evelyn called, not looking away from her target. She took a small cut, then a second, building a picture more than carving one. When she saw the pattern, she committed.

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