Chapter 9 No Witnesses #2
I move through the olive grove toward the southern team.
The trees provide cover, but I don't need cover.
I need proximity. My species isn't built for ranged engagement — we're close-quarters specialists, evolved from ambush predators who closed distance in short, explosive bursts and overwhelmed prey through mass and weaponry.
The first fire team is advancing on the villa.
And they're shooting at it.
The rounds punch through the decorative stonework — superficial damage, the reinforced walls behind it catching the bullets. But the sound carries. Inside that villa, Edith is hearing gunfire aimed at the building she's hiding in, and the fear she must be feeling —
The rage is not an emotion. It's a chemical event. My species' combat hormones flood my system in a cascade that narrows the world to targets and trajectories and the shortest distance between my claws and the things threatening my mate.
I come out of the grove at a dead sprint.
The first operative is facing the villa, weapon up, firing in controlled bursts at the windows.
He doesn't hear me because my footfall on soil is nearly silent — weight distributed across a broader foot structure than human, designed for moving across the sand dunes of Krath'zon without leaving prints deep enough to track.
My arm wraps around his throat from behind.
I lift him clear of the ground, spin, and use his body as a shield against his nearest teammate, who's already turning.
The teammate hesitates, target discrimination, friendlies in the line of fire, and the hesitation costs him two seconds. Two seconds is a lifetime.
I throw the first operative into him. Two hundred pounds of human at speed. They tangle, fall, and I'm already past them and closing on the third.
He's faster than the others. Gets his weapon around, gets rounds off.
Three impacts against my chest plating — sharp kinetic jolts that compress the tissue underneath, bruise the muscle, hurt in the way getting punched by a professional hurts.
The rounds flatten against the armor and fall to the ground, mushroomed.
His expression when the bullets don't penetrate — when I keep coming through gunfire that should have dropped me — is the expression of a man whose understanding of the world has just been fundamentally revised.
I reach him. My gauntleted fist connects with his solar plexus at about sixty percent of my actual capacity. He folds, airborne for a moment, hits the ground seven meters back. Doesn't get up.
The fourth operative is running. Smart.
Not fast enough.
I catch him in four strides. My hand closes on the back of his vest and I yank him off his feet, momentum carrying us both into the wall of the garden shed.
The corrugated metal buckles under our combined weight.
He tries to bring his sidearm around, good instincts, combat-trained, and I strip the weapon from his hand with a grip that bends the barrel.
His eyes, when he looks up at me, are the eyes of a man seeing something his brain was never designed to process. Not a man. Not an animal. Something that exists outside his categories entirely.
"Stay down," I tell him, and my voice in this form comes out in frequencies that bypass reason and speak directly to the mammalian hindbrain's understanding of predators. He stays down. Physiologically incapable of doing otherwise.
Four neutralized. Only one confirmed dead; the man I used as a shield took a round from his own teammate's panic fire. The others are unconscious, concussed, broken but breathing.
I don't want to kill them all. The realization surprises me.
In the arena, there was no choice — fight until one of you stops moving.
Here, now, with Edith's voice still in my head saying come back to me, I want to be surgical.
Precise. The weapon Morrison trained me to be rather than the weapon the arena masters forged.
The sniper on the northern ridge disagrees.
The round takes me in the gap between my shoulder plate and my neck guard; the join where the armor is thinnest to allow head movement. The bullet punches through the soft tissue beneath, tearing muscle, nicking the subclavian artery on its way through.
Blood sprays. Hot. Steaming. Too bright and too metallic and carrying the copper-ozone tang that marks me as something taxonomically impossible.
The pain is extraordinary. Not because the wound is fatal; my healing factor is already clamping the arterial tear, vasoconstriction responding faster than human physiology allows, but because the bullet was aimed with precision.
The sniper identified the gap in my armor from three hundred meters.
He studied me through his scope while I fought, found the weakness, and exploited it.
That's a problem.
Because it means at least one of them is observant enough to learn my anatomy in real time. And that kind of intelligence, escaping this island, reported to people with resources —
No. No witnesses.
The second fire team is converging from the west. I can hear them — heartbeats, boot soles on volcanic soil, the mechanical click of safeties being released. They've heard the fighting. They know their first team is down. They're coming anyway.
Brave. Professional. Doomed.
I move to intercept, and the neck wound destabilizes my balance. The blood loss isn't critical, my clotting factor works four times faster than human, but the muscle damage affects my right arm's range of motion. My dominant hand. The one with the claws I need for close-quarters work.
Friction. Cost. The reminder that even Krath warriors have limits.
I reach the western tree line as the second team enters the olive grove.
They're moving differently now — tighter formation, weapons sweeping, prepared for something more than a single bodyguard.
They heard the gunfire. They know their comms are dead.
They're operating on the assumption that whatever took down four of their people is still out there, and they're adjusting.
I let them enter the grove. Let the trees close around them. Let the darkness and the terrain do the work of making them afraid before I make them incapable.
The environmental controls trigger again; the main building's exterior lights blaze to full power for three seconds, blinding anyone using night vision. Then kill completely. In the olive grove, the sudden dark-to-light-to-dark cycle creates strobing shadows and afterimage blindness.
I move during the blindness.
The first two go down in four seconds. Controlled strikes — gauntleted fists to the temple, the jaw, the nerve cluster at the base of the skull. Non-lethal if I'm precise. I'm precise.
The third is faster. Gets his weapon around, fires a burst that stitches across my side: two rounds sparking off plate, one finding the soft tissue along my ribs. The wound from Zeno's knife, healed yesterday, reopens. Fresh blood, steaming.
He sees the steam. In the darkness of the olive grove, my blood is literally glowing with heat, faint wisps of vapor rising from the wound like breath on a cold morning.
"What the fuck —" he starts.
I close the distance. My working hand wraps around his weapon and crushes it — the polymer stock cracking, the barrel bending, rendered useless in one grip.
My other hand — the compromised right, weaker now but still stronger than any human hand on Earth — finds his collar.
I lift him until his feet clear the ground.
"Drop everything," I say. "Weapons. Communications. Everything."
He drops. A knife from his boot. A radio that's already useless. A phone that's already dark.
I set him down. Not gently, hard enough to jar his teeth, to make the point, and he crumples to his knees.
The fourth has already run. I hear his heartbeat receding through the grove — panicked, sprinting, heading for the helicopter.
The helicopter.
If he reaches it. If the sniper provides cover. If the rotors spin up —
I leave the three in the grove and chase the runner through terrain that I know better than they do, in a body designed for exactly this kind of pursuit. Not endurance — explosive, devastating, close-the-distance speed that eats ground in strides no human skeleton could sustain.
He doesn't make it to the helicopter. I catch him at the tree line, forty meters short of the landing pad, and the takedown is clean. Controlled. He hits the ground, I pin him, and the pressure point in his neck sends him under before he can scream.
The sniper sees this. I know because the next round hits me in the thigh; the gap between the femoral plate and the knee guard, where the armor joints flex. The bullet buries itself in muscle dense enough to stop it before it reaches bone, but the impact drops me to one knee.
Pain. Real pain. The kind that overrides adrenaline and announces itself as damage that matters. My healing factor is working overtime now: three wounds pulling resources, the neck still sealing, the rib still oozing, the thigh starting its slow clot-and-repair cycle.
I'm running out of margin.
The sniper has the high ground. Has the range. Has demonstrated the ability to find gaps in my armor. Every second I spend on open ground between the tree line and the ridge is a second he can put another round through soft tissue.
I need a different approach.
The helicopter.
I sprint — not toward the ridge, toward the landing pad.
The sniper adjusts, and a round sparks off my shoulder plate as I run.
Another punches through the meat of my upper arm — in and out, clean through, the kind of wound that would drop a human and that I register as a problem I'll deal with later.
The helicopter is dark. Powered down. The last two operatives are beside it, trying to start the engine, and the fourth man, the security element, sees me coming and brings his weapon up.
The weapon. I need the weapon.