The barrels of the rifles smoked.
The firefight was over. The blur had vanished, folding back into the impossible geometry of the Zone.
Nobody cheered. Nobody lowered their weapons.
By the rusted sedan, the demolition expert lay completely motionless. A dark pool of blood expanded from beneath his shattered armor, seeping into the cracked asphalt.
No one checked his pulse. No one called for a medic. No one even looked at him.
Every helmet in the squad was turned toward the center of the avenue. Toward the boy in the torn hazard suit.
No one moved first.
Asset 04 stood perfectly still amidst the scattered brass casings.
The left side of his hazard suit was gone. The fabric had been violently shredded from the collar down to the hip, hanging in useless ribbons. The pale, cold skin underneath was exposed to the dead air.
It should have destroyed him.
It didn't.
There was a mark. A deep, dark purple contusion stretched across his ribs.
Blood seeped from the massive, stitched wound in the center of his chest, agitated by the shockwave.
But the blood didn't fall.
It stayed.
It beaded up on his pale skin in thick, dark droplets, completely static.
The heavy gunner took a slow, jagged breath. The sound rasped loudly over the open comms.
"…That hit you."
Asset 04 didn't blink. He didn't answer.
He turned his head toward the heavy gunner.
A fraction late.
The physical action of his neck rotating completed, but the visual image reached the squad's retinas a split second after the fact.
He lowered his left arm.
His arm moved.
The shadow didn't.
One second passed. Two seconds.
Then—
it snapped.
It simply deleted its previous state and reappeared in the correct alignment.
The sniper tightened his grip on his rifle, his knuckles turning white beneath his armored gloves.
"That's not normal," the sniper whispered.
The heavy gunner took two deliberate steps backward. His heavy boots scraped against the debris. The barrel of his rotary cannon drifted away from the rooftops and pointed toward the ground.
They stepped back. More than before.
"Stay away from him," the point man hissed.
He backed up, putting himself closer to the rusted storefronts.
Suddenly, the point man swayed.
He dropped his kinetic gauntlet to his side, his left hand violently grabbing his own helmet. His knees buckled.
His heart hammered in his chest. An aggressive, chaotic, terrifyingly erratic rhythm. His vision blurred.
A thin, dark line of blood leaked from his left nostril.
He dropped heavily to one knee. He couldn't draw oxygen.
Three seconds later, the pressure vanished.
The chaotic arrhythmia stopped. His heart rate dropped instantly back to a heavy, normal thud. The vertigo evaporated.
It passed.
Then it stopped.
He wiped the blood from his nose with a trembling glove, smearing it across his face.
He looked up at the boy standing perfectly still in the center of the street.
No one asked the point man if he was injured. No one explained the symptom.
The Squad Leader looked at the glowing blue extraction route on his wrist display.
"Move out."
His voice was flat.
Asset 04 turned back toward the dark avenue ahead. He began to walk. The torn ribbons of his hazard suit fluttered in a wind that didn't exist.
The squad followed.
But the formation was broken.
When they first entered, the vanguard gap had been twenty feet.
Now, the gap was fifty feet.
Then sixty.
The Squad Leader, the heavy gunner, the sniper, and the point man clustered tightly together in the rear.
They kept their distance.
No one wanted to be close.
The monster hadn't missed.
It didn't want him.