CHAPTER 62: IVORYWORKS | THE RAID—IV

  SPECTRE—NOVEMBER 26th, 1992 | MORNING

  ?

  A thaumaturgic blast landed squarely against Tania’s chest.

  Its source: Aria Remeau. She stood at the far end of the emptied dancefloor, chestnut hair tussling along her neck. Her fair skin had paled since the skirmish had begun, and her lips deepened in a darker shade every time she recited an incantation.

  Cameron caught her before she could hit the floor, lifting her back up to her feet.

  “Shit,” Tania muttered.

  In spite of being half-stepped, Tania had failed to make any ground. Each time she advanced, Aria answered with another incantation; peppering her with smaller blasts of black-purple energy which she recited as Furvus Ardere. Each of them had to have been the size of a basketball, and upon contact with a surface, left an impact like a shadowy grenade.

  The only thing that had stopped Rachel Chen from swooping in and cutting into Tania was Cameron’s bullet fire. He’d exhausted every single bullet he had to keep her pinned, and his suppressive fire failed to pierce through the impromptu wall of swords she had erected from the ink-stroke she had painted with her Blade of One Hundred.

  Cameron tucked his Reign 18 into the front of his belt. Guts whirred around them, utterly complacent to the joint threat posed by the thaumaturgist and curator on the opposite end of the room.

  “Whatever damn magic she’s using, it’s potent,” Tania said. “As in, I can’t seem to regenerate from it potent. Your armor, Cam. You think it’ll hold up against that?”

  Cameron grimaced. “Don’t know. Thaumaturgy, it hits hard. Leroy was intent on making sure she didn’t blast me last time we were here. She’s got the range to make your speed look slow. Drink that damn Fleetfoot, and—”

  “Fame Ducitur Hasta!” Aria’s voice boomed through their impromptu arena.

  Her voice was doubled, layered in hoarseness that spoke a simple truth to power; thaumaturgy came at a cost. Around her eyes and hands were dark and brackish veins, like thorns trapped beneath the skin. As her incantation was uttered, purple-black energy had gathered around her hands and a pulse of invisible energy forced her beige trench coat to flutter in tandem with her curls.

  A large javelin-shaped projection of occult energy appeared above her, crackling in a corrupted blaze. With a sudden surge, she guided it forward.

  Cameron grabbed hold of Tania by the collar, pivoted, and reached for Guts with his free hand. He snatched the wind-sprite out of the air and held it in front of himself; forcing Guts to confront the danger that it would otherwise refuse to recognize.

  It blinked.

  Concussive force thumped out of Gut’s singular blinking eye with enough potency to throw Cameron and Tania far from Aria’s foreboding projectile. They flew backwards and crashed into one of the supporting pillars that held up the 2nd level of Spectre.

  Cameron’s body dented the steel inward, sparing Tania from the brunt of the damage.And while his white-ivory spared him from the impact, the blunt force echoed through his back and forced out a groan. Guts trailed back over to him and found its placed by his head.

  A combustive burst of black and purple reverberated outward from where Aria’s projectile had pierced the dance floor. Dust and debris cried out from the colored tiles of the dance floor.

  Near-silent footsteps pattered through the plumes.

  Before Cameron could so much as stand up, Rachel Chen was in front of him, stepping into a practiced sword thrust with her Blade of One Hundred.

  Cameron’s eyes widened and promptly narrowed.

  Scintillating sparks jumped from between his knuckles as he gritted his teeth. His white-ivory fingers clasped tightly around the tip of her jian, just barely stopping its pointed tip from skewering his face. Ink leaked from the rusted Mandarin characters along the length of her blade, spilling out onto the ground.

  A knowing half-smile stretched across Rachel’s face.

  From the splotches of black, angled jian blades identical to her own skewered into Cameron. Sparks scuttled away from his skin. Not one blade pierced him.

  Rachel Chen’s scowl of contempt was one that forced a smile out of Cameron; wide and wolfish and hungry.

  “Tickles,” Cameron said.

  With a sudden surge, he tightened his grip around the Blade of One Hundred and pulled Rachel down, primed to headbutt her squarely in the nose. She was quick; cat-like. Rachel assumed a two-handed grip, pivoted forward, and arched her jian up to dislodge Cameron’s grip. On her back foot, she leaped back.

  The exchange had happened faster than Tania could register, and quicker than even Cameron realized.

  Tania primed herself to pounce, lowering herself to all fours, slower than before. Aria’s prior thaumaturgic blast did a number on her, and even with all of her bravado, she couldn’t stop herself from groaning or hiding the pain.

  “Tania. You got that?”

  Tania lurched back up, bipedal. “Yeah. I do.”

  “Then go,” Cameron said. “I’ll take care of things here.”

  In the distance, closer to the DJ area, Aria was panting. Cameron didn’t know a thing about thaumaturgy, but between their two encounters, he was confident in two things: first, that each incantation had the kind of firepower that demanded caution, and second, that each incantation took something from Aria.

  Rachel Chen remained oddly silent, and studied the both of them, sunglasses hiding whatever schemes lingered in her eyes. Some odd combination of patience or abridged version of honor kept her from pressing them; or maybe, just maybe, she knew she couldn’t take him and Tania on at once.

  Cameron stood up, the white-ivory of his skin screeching against the ink-born blades that failed to hurt him.

  Tania reached into her pocket and grabbed a vial, issuing a stingy look to the strange liquid which bore an uncanny resemblance to some odd mixture of mercury and mustard. Whatever Janice cooked up was probably full of ingredients that Cameron couldn’t spell at gunpoint.

  She popped the cork off and drank it.

  Small, gargoyle-adjacent wings forced their way out from behind her ankles. They fluttered off the blood they were born from and awaited a step from Tania, who glanced down at the devilish appendages with dumb-founded eyes.

  Tania offered a curt nod to Cameron. Cameron nodded back.

  Cameron removed something from his pocket: the Roséviscous, a fuschia-colored vial that Janice had gifted him, which she insisted had to be thrown—not consumed. He tossed it in Tania’s direction.

  “Take it,” he said.

  She caught it, eyed it, and tucked it into the pockets of her oversized cargo shorts. “You don’t want it?”

  Cameron’s gaze lingered on Rachel Chen. “I won’t need it.”

  Tania shifted her head towards the swordswoman, only to glance back at Cameron. A lycanic and toothy grin flushed across her face. She lowered herself to all fours and kicked off her back feet; her twinned flesh wings accelerating her with the kind of launch Cameron would’ve missed even if he was staring straight at her.

  ?

  Rachel Chen’s jian hammered down onto Cameron’s crossed forearms.

  “You’re durable, underarbiter, I’ll give you that,” she said, sparks trickling off from her blade’s edge. “But far from invincible. And you’ll learn momentarily that there are few things that a blade cannot carve.”

  Cameron pushed forward with his crossed arms, sending Rachel several feet back.

  She wasn’t wrong. Leroy had found a way to pierce his defenses time and time again, and a mundy like Hughes only needed a Desert Eagle to puncture him. Rachel’s Blade of One Hundred wasn’t an instrument of blunt force, but it was an artifact of power—ancient and unpredictable.

  Rachel simply waited.

  Cameron glanced down at his forearms. Splotches of ink sat along his white-ivory, painted on by the leaking Mandarin characters of her jian’s surface. Identical blades erupted out from where the ink had been painted and shot cleanly through both of his forearms.

  Cameron dropped to a knee.

  Blood spattered out from between the blade-sized incisions in his white-ivory, staining his shell. A groan of pain erupted from the depths of his lungs, and his face twitched in hurried, immediate pain.

  Rachel Chen twirled her jian. “All I need is a canvas, underarbiter. A surface for the ink to spill onto—dirt from which seeds will grow.”

  Cameron clenched.

  He tried flexing his fingers, and his grip felt weak. Somehow, the two blades in either of his forearms avoided piercing through the bones; their positioning was sloppy, as if the ink they’d spawned from was applied by the unsteady hand of a not-so-great painter. He reached his right hand to his left arm, clenched, and shattered the blade, and did the opposite for his other arm.

  Pieces of the ink-blade remained as small stubs, jutting through either one of his forearms like small pieces of sheet metal. As long as they remained, he figured he wouldn’t bleed out, but that was a Hail Mary at best. Rachel Chen was a problem that needed to be dealt with quickly; the longer this went on, the more likely it became that she’d find a way to put an end to him.

  A burning sensation thumped along the depths of his stomach.

  A name sizzled on the tip of his tongue. It demanded to be said aloud.

  Power hummed in the depth of Cameron’s chest. A sudden surge of scarlet erupted outward from his features, trailing out from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Red dynamism was given near-physical form, clinging to Cameron’s outline and trailing from his person like occult and energetic impressions of melting candle wax. His mouth clicked into place, a name chambered like a bullet cartridge etched with Rachel Chen’s initials. All that was left was pulling the slide back, aiming, and firing—only, the word that lingered his lips was louder than any gunshot.

  A??????????????Я????????????????????M????????????????????I??????????????????????????T????????????????H?????????????????O???????????Я??????????

  If there was any smoke left to clear, Cameron’s announcement swept away what remained of the plumes and tufts of dust that plagued the inside of Spectre. Cameron widened his stance, planting one foot behind the other, and reared his right arm forward with a sudden thrust. As his hand slipped through the air, scarlet energy rushed along the length of his arm, and white-ivory kneaded itself into a tool. A weapon.

  It was the bastard child of a battering ram and train piston; a bludgeoning tool carved by way of intention and made manifest by Armisthor’s power. By Cameron’s power. It was as wide as a tree stump and as long as bo-staff, and so heavy that it required a loop-like protrusion for Cameron to grab hold of with his free hand.

  But it was his. All his.

  And it had a name.

  “Ivoryworks: Piledriver,” Cameron muttered. He took a heavy step forward, and the ground caved in beneath the weight of his foot. “My one and only says hi to that toothpick of a sword you’ve got in your damn hands.”

  Intrigued, Rachel took a step forward, matching his pace and twirling his blade.

  “Interesting,” Rachel Chen noted, “if not entirely inefficient. Your tool of choice, underarbiter.. is a far cry from the blade I wield. Gargantuan, impractical. Perhaps too heavy for even the likes of you, and yet you wield it anyway.”

  “That name you heard that made your ears hurt, lady, it’s the wick. When I say it, I’m the fire that lights it, and the wax that melts is mine to mold.”

  “And yet a candle cannot burn forever,” she noted, raising her Blade of One-Hundred, grabbing hold of it with both hands. “Wax melts. Fire wanes. This weapon of yours cannot be sustained. Not for very long at all, yes?”

  Cameron issued her a half-smile. “Bingo. But I won’t need that long.”

  ?

  White-ivory kneaded into a big heap of nothing.

  Around him, Moira’s floating, haunting form sat at the center of a black and flaming pentagram, its lines filled in with an occultic dome that kept out all of the visions, obscenities and suicidal tendencies that the Threshold sought to impose upon Cameron; it's unlikely trespasser. Cameron grimaced and kicked a rock. It bounced against the barrier and evaporated into a pile of ashen char. Hours had been spent getting nowhere, and he was beginning to feel like Moira’s efforts were a waste.

  Tantrums will get you nowhere fast. Focus.

  “Yeah, asshole, and neither will good old fashioned fucking effort, it seems,” Cameron muttered.

  Armisthor’s fleshless torso loomed behind Cameron, spectating him with ropey and pulsing arms that it crossed over its chest like waxen cords, each bubbling and popping and releasing small small breaths of a deep scarlet energy. It watched him with its mask of ivory and its mismatched, beetle-like horns, its two white pupils encased in black staring absently at Cameron.

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  Hah! Effort ill-applied, boy.

  A formless husk of white-ivory melted from Cameron’s arm. “Alright, I’ll bite. Go on.”

  Armisthor lurched forward. Its massive head lingered beside Cameron’s ear, and its voice whispered to him knowingly.

  My Ivoryworks will not make you a tool that is not meant for your hands to wield.

  “Ivor-what?” Cameron asked.

  Your hands, boy, are not meant to wield a sword. Nor a spear, nor a dagger, nor even an axe. Your will is not one that cuts. It is one that bludgeons, shatters, and cracks. The scarlet which leaks from you—my burning blood, yes—will only turn to white-ivory if and only if the weapon you make is observant of this unignorable truth.

  “So the red,” Cameron asked, turning his head ever so slightly to face Armisthor’s harrowing mask of a face. “The stuff that I puke up, that snots out of my nose, bursts out from my ears, pours from my damn eyes.. this whole time, even before I learned your name, that’s been, what? You said…your blood? Your burning blood?”

  Yes. Was I not clear, or has some of said blood, perhaps yet unburned, clogged your puny little mouse ears?

  Cameron set his jaw. “Mouse ear. Singular. Other one isn’t so pretty.”

  Yes. I remember. Half of it was severed by the stray bullet of a man whose name you never learned. A shameful display, if I am being entirely truthful.

  “So, you watch me,” Cameron said. “Fan-fucking-tastic. Bad enough that I’m glued to that bastard Leroy’s hip, now I’ve come to find out you’re, what, peeping through whenever I’m taking a piss?”

  No. Only when you don my Skin.

  The thought sent a shiver down Cameron’s spine. Armisthor had been present for every horrible thing Cameron had done; and in being privy to all of those memories, he cared little, if at all. The more Cameron learned about demons, the more uncertain he was about them and their nature.

  “So, this stuff. Leaking from me, I mean. Your burning blood. How long does that last for, once I do the thing—say your name loud and proud?” Cameron asked.

  I cannot bleed forever.

  “Helpful,” Cameron said snidely.

  The blood that burns is the flame, boy. You are the wick. The white-ivory is the candle wax meant to be shaped.

  “I need a number, Armisthor,” Cameron said.

  A few minutes, perhaps.

  Cameron grimaced. “So, about the same as when I—”

  When you don the Skin of Armisthor. Yes.

  “What are my options, then, if I need more time?” Cameron asked.

  The Skin of Armisthor is wax. If you are making use of my Ivoryworks, you may feed your creation the Skin as material. No further blood need be burned. Such a thing carries its own risk; you would be naked to the harm directed towards you.

  Cameron glanced down at his white-ivory covered fingers.

  “Last question.”

  Do ask then, boy.

  “How do I know? What’s right for me, I mean, what I can make and… well, wield, from the Ivoryworks,” Cameron said.

  A hiss-like laugh, muffled by way of Armisthor’s mask, reverberated throughout the dome they were in.

  Trial and error, boy, and the elbow grease of what you called ‘good old fashioned fucking effort’.

  ?

  Rachel Chen rolled to the side.

  Cameron landed in the space she’d once occupied. Ivoryworks: Piledriver slammed into the ground. The front of the battering-ram-like protrusion made contact with the empty dance floor, and when it did so, the piston along the back of it clicked forward and into the battering ram. Scarlet energy swelled along the white like enraged veins.

  The initial impact created a small crater where Cameron had landed.

  When the piston snapped into place along the length of the battering ram, that crater doubled in size, sending out a red-charged shockwave that caused blocks of concrete and underground piping to sprawl across the dance floor.

  With a heave, Cameron lifted his uncanny weapon, his breath strained.

  Sparing no time at all, Rachel shot back up to her feet and lowered her Blade of One Hundred to the ground. Ink leaked from the Mandarin characters along the length of the blade, and she created a sludge-like trail of black around the circumference of Cameron’s crater.

  Cameron’s head swiveled.

  Sure, he was trapped inside, but he could just as easily leap out of it. She had an angle here, and Cameron wasn’t sure what to make of it. Her stance shifted, and she held her curator-artefact to the side, almost completely parallel. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes—when they opened, they were a ghostly green.

  “Teng Zexian, lend me your strength,” Rachel said, a second, manly voice echoing her own.

  Cameron’s eyes widened.

  From her blade poured out a spectral apparition; a Chinese man in what looked to be clothing customary of the early 1800s manifested, all of his features washed over in an abyssal and greenish-blue, like ghostfire. Along each of the blades that surrounded Cameron, ink leaked and coated their lengths. Each of them expanded at once.

  Cameron slammed his white ivory protrusion into the ground, piston clanking into place, red energy bursting out from its front facing tip.

  After hurling himself up, a litany of the growing ink-blades pierced into him.

  Rachel’s prior statement, it seemed, wasn’t far off: the speed of the blade’s advance coupled with the sheer number of them chipped away at the Skin of Armisthor piece by piece, some cutting deep enough to skewer into his actual flesh. The ink dissipated into a green-blue ghostfire soon after, and the spirit of Teng-whoever zipped back into Rachel’s Blade of One Hundred.

  Worse, Guts watched all of this happen without a single blink uttered. How the wind-sprite thought he wasn’t in danger was beyond Cameron. Since his one-on-one had begun, Guts hovered just out of reach, ever-observant but oh-so-uninvolved.

  Bits and chunks of the Skin of Armisthor fell onto the ground, dissipating into a scarlet mist.

  Blood poured from Cameron’s body where he had been pierced; namely along the front of his chest, his upper thighs, and up and down the free arm he used to hold up Ivoryworks: Piledriver by way of its hoop hold.

  He fell right back down into the center of the very crater he’d made, propping the front face of his battering-ram arm into the ground to hold himself up. For every piece of white-ivory Rachel Chen had forcibly shed off from Cameron, he felt dredges of the strength that it awarded him fade.

  Therein lied another dilemma, one which Armisthor had conveniently neglected to tell Cameron: the Skin of Armisthor was as much as source of defense as it was strength, a fact which Cameron already knew, but if he were to fuel his Ivoryworks with it, or even if he lost some of it, he’d be taxing his body with a strain liable to tear tendons.

  Ivoryworks: Piledriver was heavier.

  So heavy, in fact, that Cameron felt a burning, ripping sensation along that side of his body, trickling out and around his otherwise very human and very fleshy arm hidden beneath the densely packed white ivory kneaded into place over the top of it. Between that and the pieces of blade shrapnel already in his arm, awarded to him just before he announced Armisthor’s name, pain swelled in Cameron like a sickness without a cure. It wouldn’t go away, and the longer this fight with Rachel Chen dragged on, the higher the chances she’d beat him either by a marriage of brute force and precision, or by way of attrition.

  His next attack would need to be his last.

  He had to stall; which meant ripping a page right out of Leroy Waters' playbook.

  “Neat… hnng trick,” Cameron hacked up some blood. Somewhere he’d been pierced in a place that forced it out from his throat. “It’s… too bad you’re wasting all that dancing and prancing on a shithead like Marcus. But, lady, a guy like that? He’ll gut you, cut you, toss you to the side like a stinking fish the second you stop being useful to him.”

  Rachel propped a foot up on the edge of the crater, her gladiatorial sandal settled in between the crevices of her ring of ink-blades.

  “You’ve improved,” she said.

  His words fell on deaf ears. She didn’t cave to his taunting, but at the very least, he’d established a dialogue, and that might just be enough to give him the precious seconds he needed.

  “Glad you think so,” Cameron muttered.

  Guts lingered, docile and deer-like.

  If he could grab him, he could run—not away from Rachel, but towards her. Whatever power she’d called upon took time to initiate. It took a recital just shy of an incantation. That gave him time. A brief window, sure, but time all the same, but that was assuming Guts’s wind pulse could bend the ink-blades that encircled him.

  Cameron felt a lump in his throat.

  There was another option. Yet another Hail Mary out of many Hail Marys to-date.

  “If I didn’t have to kill you, underarbiter, I’d give you a heartfelt recommendation to Mr. Velvet,” she said, assuming an offensive stance, jian pointed forward, as if she were ready to pounce. “I’m not quite fond of Hughes’ replacement.”

  It would have to do.

  Cameron released his free hand from the hoop along Ivoryworks: Piledriver. He reached and grabbed Guts.

  Rachel advanced, running along the length of her encircling ink-blades as if it were some sort of diving-board, cat-like in her reflexes and perfectly balanced. She twirled into the air with uncanny deftness, her orange motorcycle jacket fluttering, her sunglasses twisting off of her face. In seconds, she would drop like a falcon onto Cameron, where she’d skewer her jian through one of the openings in his white-ivory armor.

  Cameron slammed Guts into the ground below his feet, forcing the wind-sprite to blink.

  And blink it did.

  Before it could be flattened into the crater of shattered flooring and stray piping, Guts released a burst of wind that sent Cameron up and above the oncoming guillotine named Rachel Chen.

  His eyes widened mid-air.

  Absent his other arm to support Ivoryworks: Piledriver, the tear he’d felt earlier tore deeper. A tendon, or tendons, strained and stretched and barely held onto the heavy weapon that took up the entire length of his arm. He grit his teeth and screamed involuntarily, a pained voice wailing out through Spectre’s atrium-turned-arena.

  He was just barely above Rachel, who, already mid-fall, couldn’t turn to face him.

  He was some twelve feet into the air, and she was six feet to the floor. If she was a bird of prey, Cameron was a bigger bird, and a bird that fell faster and harder.

  Cameron reeled Ivoryworks: Piledriver back, and in doing so, felt his shoulder dislocate. It was a different kind of hurt; piercing and deep and utterly unbearable, but he couldn’t stop. Not now.

  The tip of the battering-ram slammed down into Rachel’s back. Her body curled and curved beneath its anchor-like weight. He drove her down into the ground with such suddenness that he could hardly register the impact.

  A wailing, screeching cry left her as her face and frontside was impounded into dirt and under layers of the crater. He felt the snap along her vertebral column, one after another, as each disc of her spine herniated like falling dominos.

  The piston snapped down along the length of Cameron’s battering-ram. Veiny, red energy travelled along the white-ivory.

  As quickly as he could, he lurched back, yelling, screaming, and wailing as his tendons strained further and the muscle fibers of his arm tore beneath his unruly weapon.

  The piston went off. A shockwave of red thumped out into the air, sending him flying back into the opposite end of the crater.

  He couldn’t feel his arm. White-ivory melted away from his arm and onto the ground, bubbling into a scarlet and waxy mist. He couldn’t bring himself to look at it, but knew that whatever he’d done to himself to secure a victory over Rachel couldn't be fixed easily.

  Cameron’s eyelids grew heavy.

  Rachel’s screams continued, each one more gruesome and desperate than the last, and Cameron felt a heaviness weigh on him. The same heaviness that he’d felt in his hands, before, with Hughes, that caused them to tremble. Rachel Chen was many things; and formidable was at the top of that list of many things. But ugly justice didn’t need to be delivered to her. Not as far as Cameron could tell. A pang of guilt washed over him, and he recalled how he’d delivered it to Rhett. Rhett, who hadn’t deserved it, but who hadn’t given Cameron a choice. Rachel Chen was in the way, same as him.

  She might never walk again. She might even die.

  But if she did, Cameron could sleep at night knowing that he at least tried to spare her from the theft of a second chance.

  Guts whirred over to his side. On his belt, three vials of pasteurized demon blood remained unused. He inched along the inside of the crater, his legs heavy, his body overburdened by the reverberations of a deep and stabbing pain. Blade shrapnel punctuated each micromovement of his forearms, and the sting was only a few steps shy of excruciating; but inched along he did, further and further until the burning tremors of his injuries forced him prone.

  He crawled, and crawled, one arm completely limp by his side, the other squelching and oozing blood as he shifted through the compacted ground and shattering piping. The closer he got, the louder Rachel’s wails grew, and the sharper her cries of pain cut him.

  Cameron stopped just to her side, hacked up blood onto himself, and blinked with red and urgent eyes. He slipped his free hand under Rachel Chen, trying and failing to flip her onto her broken back. It took several attempts—each heightening her misery—and further disturbances to his own injuries to get her over.

  “I.. just, hold on,” Cameron muttered, breath wispy and tired, eyelids flickering to the tune of weariness.

  One by one, he removed each of the vials of pasteurized demon blood, and forced the greenish, sludge-like liquid onto her tongue. All three.

  Memories of Hughes flashed before Cameron’s eyes; of how Rhett himself had asked for Cameron’s assistance that day to stabilize him as his body shifted, contorted, and self-mutilated in a display of healing violence that saved him. Rachel’s metamorphosis would be no different: ugly, spastic, and filled with the noises and the twists and the inglorious miracle of rapid and unnatural healing.

  The first time he’d met Rhett, the accursed bouncer had told him that someone on three doses needed to be held as still as possible.

  And it was on that very same day that Rhett had told him something else, which rang louder now than ever; louder than Rhett's dying breath that would haunt Cameron forever, and louder still than Rachel’s inhuman bellows.

  It means you’re only some bad. Not all bad. And in Brinehaven, that’s worth more than you realize.

  Cameron clenched his jaw shut and gritted his teeth. He lowered himself along Rachel's body.

  He rested his head on her chest, and with his good arm, held onto her, wheezing in pain and dousing her thrashing body in the steady red rain drops of his blood. She twisted, contorted, and flooded his ears with deafening bellows. She made every involuntary effort to remove him from her as her body painfully rebuilt itself, each re-growing nerve ending blasting her with insurmountable discomfort, coupled with what Cameron imagined to be the unbearable burning sensation of muscle tissue stretching back over the broken bones of her spine.

  With each scream, Rachel's body splayed. An elbow flared out and struck Cameron in the jaw, hard, and very nearly loosened a tooth. One of her knees buckled forward and slammed into his chin.

  But Cameron didn't let go, and there wasn't a single moment where his grip loosened.

  CH. 23: MAKING DO WITH IT :D, which was released I think a few months a back--but such is the nature of web serials!

  Also, in regards to just exactly what Rachel Chen did with that neat ability, we'll get more about what that process is called during the Raid. Stay tuned!

  CAMERON KESSLER

  GUTS

  TANIA ACKERMAN

  ARIA REMEAU

  RACHEL CHEN

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