NOVEL NEXT B3 - Lesson 31: "D.U.C.K. Field Test."
Thomas's breath caught as the man hit the cobblestones with a bone-cracking thud, the sound echoing in his chest like the toll of a funeral bell. Even from across the square, he could hear the wet, ragged gasps, the pitiful groan that followed. The man wouldn't be fighting again tonight. Maybe not ever.
The moonlight felt too bright, too sharp, turning every drawn face and wide-eyed stare into a mask of shock. Thugs and defenders alike were frozen in place, eyes locked on the figure above — that thing that had once been Jonah.
Thomas forced himself to breathe, jaw tight as he tracked the faint shimmer of those unnatural wings, the metallic lines glowing along Jonah's arms. This wasn't right. None of this was supposed to happen.
This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
He had spent months proving what he'd always suspected — that he was more than some street rat running errands for older, dumber thugs. He was talented. Thomas had a knack for seeing angles others missed, for turning chaos into something sharp, directed. In just four months, he'd climbed three major steps in cultivation, turned Bosco's decaying district into a profit machine that ran smooth as clockwork. Now he had not only the respect he deserved, but coin enough to grease the wheels of his rise even faster.
That success had bought him more than just gold, as well. It had bought him time, resources, and attention. Real attention — from the kind of people who didn't give it lightly. Icefinger himself had pulled him aside more than once, passing down a few tricks colder than the man's name. Shown him things no street-level pup had any right to know. Thomas had felt like he'd been handed the keys to the city's underbelly, and he'd used them well.
This mission was supposed to be his next rung on the ladder. Easy. Walk in, throw some weight around, drag the girl out by her pretty little neck if he had to. Even Sister Audrea — the Stone Witch herself — wasn't supposed to be a problem. Not anymore.
Not for him.
He wasn't the scared boy who'd slipped out of the orphanage gate that night. Not the half-starved street rat watching his own back. He was strong now. Strong enough to stand toe-to-toe with her if it came to it.
The "handler" shadowing him tonight had been a condition from above, sure — but unlike with Bosco, he understood the why. It was just oversight. Insurance. A test run before they gave him more slack on his leash.
What he hadn't counted on was the defenders digging in so hard for a girl who, by all rights, wasn't theirs anymore. Maggy especially — damn her — had made her own breakthrough, it seemed, and while she didn't outmatch him, she'd learned enough from the Archmage to make every inch hard-earned.
Then Jonah had gone down. Thomas had felt the heat rise in his chest, certain the handler was making their move. Thomas could imagine someone further up the ladder getting nervous about how fast he was climbing.
But then Jonah had gotten back up. And when he'd seen the handler's mask slip from across the square — the brief, startled wideness in those usually unreadable eyes — Thomas had realized something colder:
This wasn't the handler's doing.
And whatever it was… it was dangerous.
Now Jonah floated high above, wings of ghostly light spreading and folding with lazy grace. He drifted down in a flicker, faster than sight, to stand between Thomas's men and the defenders, motionless but for the slow, rhythmic sweep of those impossible wings.
The square held its breath again. The only sound was the pained groaning of the man Jonah had dropped moments ago.
Thomas could feel it, the tension strung tight as a drawn bow. One wrong twitch and it would all snap.
It did.
One of his idiots — too brave or too stupid to live long — let out a wordless yell and charged.
That single step was enough.
It was like tossing a stone into a still pond. The moment broke, and the ripples became a wave.
"Get him!" someone else bellowed, and in an instant, the dam burst.
Boots pounded the stone. Shouts and battle cries rose as the rest of the surviving crew — dozens of them, battered but still breathing — surged forward.
On the other side, the defenders moved as one. Maggy darted from the base of the temple steps, staff leveled, her eyes hard and set on Jonah's flank. Sister Audrea rose from her crouch, stone cracking under her feet as she strode forward, lips pressed in a thin, grim line. Bartholomew vanished into shadow mid-stride, the air where he'd been still rippling with the afterimage. Ann, still half-beast, snarled low and leapt ahead, claws scoring the cobbles.
And Jonah — Jonah didn't move until they were nearly on him, the flicker of his strange wings painting them all in ghostlight as the clash reignited.
Then he was in motion, a blur of silver lines and blue light.
Steel rang. Spells cracked the air with sharp reports. The smell of dust, blood, and something sharper — the faint ozone tang Jonah seemed to trail behind him — burned in Thomas's nose as the fight pulled him forward with the tide.
Somewhere in that chaos, Thomas's mind split, half calculating, measuring openings, gauging who would fall first and how to press advantage, the other half still knotted around the sight of Jonah's eyes in the moonlight.
Cold. Alien. And utterly beyond his control.
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From his perch high above the plaza, Alpha's [Wasp] drone hovered on silent grav-motors, its optic arrays drinking in the chaos below. Lines of tactical overlays danced across his vision — movement vectors, spirit signature readings, kinetic estimates — each updating in real time as Jonah carved through the enemy ranks.
The D.U.C.K. interface panel sat open in one corner of Alpha's HUD, readouts pulsing with the slow, steady rhythm of a heart monitor. Structural integrity: 97%. Shield matrix stability: holding. Neuromuscular reinforcement: nominal. Even the mana infusion rate, something Alpha had been quietly concerned about since the activation, showed no signs of destabilization.
Good.
Jonah himself, however, was still buried deep under the automatic combat protocols. The boy's conscious mind slumbered somewhere beneath the roaring tide of nanite-directed signals. The ACP — loaded with the same AI combat suite Alpha had once tuned for the Guardian — was doing the heavy lifting, translating raw sensor data and body mechanics into action at speeds no human mind could match.
Alpha zoomed in, tracking Jonah as he pivoted on one heel and slammed an elbow into a thug's jaw, the blow snapping the man's head back with a crack that made nearby fighters hesitate. Not bad, Alpha thought. Especially given the boy's limitations. Mages like Jonah lacked the layered bone density and muscular reinforcement cultivators built over years of grinding physical cultivation. And with the D.U.C.K. install consuming his spinal core and replacing his entire peripheral nervous system, the body still needed time to adapt to the invasive changes.
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Even so, Jonah's performance impressed him. No spellcasting, no flashy techniques — just brutal, efficient dismantling of enemies ranging from high Bronze Spirit to low Silver Spirit, all without serious injury. The adaptive algorithms were doing their work, and doing it well.
Then Alpha's sensors screamed.
A sharp spike of spiritual energy flared at the plaza's northern edge — hot, concentrated, unmistakably hostile. The drone swiveled, lenses locking onto the source.
A man burst into view, moving with the fluid economy of someone who had long ago learned the difference between wasted motion and killing motion. Spirit energy wreathed him in a coiling corona, distorting the air around his frame.
Alpha's mouth quirked into a smile. "It seems the mastermind has decided to show himself."
A quick scan returned results that made even him take note. Peak Shackle Breaking. That put the man within arm's reach of the tier occupied by known heavy hitters like Robert and Bert. Alpha smirked.
This could provide some interesting data.
The handler didn't slow. He cut through the fringes of the melee like a blade through cloth, thugs and defenders alike scattering from his path. His eyes locked on Jonah.
The ACP reacted the moment the incoming threat tripped its danger parameters. Jonah's wings flared wide, scattering silver-blue motes across the cobbles as he pivoted to meet the rush.
The first clash was violent enough to ripple the air.
The handler's fist, wrapped in condensed spirit light, met Jonah's forearm with a boom that rattled nearby windows. The impact shoved Jonah back three steps, boots gouging shallow trenches in the stone. His ACP rebalanced instantly, but the handler was already there, pressing the attack with a downward axe-kick that would have shattered a carriage. Jonah barely managed to deflect it, the shield matrix flashing into existence just in time to absorb the brunt of the strike.
Alpha's systems mapped each exchange in microseconds, flagging patterns and sending real-time prediction algorithms bouncing between a network of a dozen new [Wasp] drones that had arrived ahead of Hugo, watching the fight from just as many angles. The handler fought like someone used to crushing opponents before they could adapt — each blow heavy, decisive, intended to end a fight in three moves or less.
Jonah wasn't ending. He was adjusting.
The next series of strikes came faster — a darting feint to the ribs, a sweep at the ankles, a sudden jab at Jonah's throat. The ACP met most with quick, efficient counters, but more than one slipped through, forcing Jonah to absorb or redirect the force. His body reeled under the impacts, shield flaring in a cascade of fractured hexagons.
Below, the battlefield cleared itself without orders. Thugs dove for cover, the defenders pulling back into a tight cluster, everyone instinctively giving the two fighters a wide berth.
For half a minute, Alpha noted, Jonah was losing ground, forced to defend against the handler's relentless rhythm. The ACP had never fought a human target this strong before. It was building its library of responses on the fly.
Then, subtle shifts.
On the fourth exchange, Jonah didn't just block — he redirected, turning the handler's strike into a stumbling half-step that left his flank open. On the seventh, he feinted retreat only to lunge back in, wings flicking to alter his momentum mid-step. Each clash fed the ACP more data, and the counters grew sharper, tighter, more punishing.
Alpha's smile widened. The adaptation curve was accelerating.
The handler's confidence began to fray. His attacks grew faster, but also sloppier — the precision of his earlier blows giving way to raw force. Jonah punished each lapse, knuckles smashing into ribs, a wingtip clipping the man's temple in a snap-fast pivot. The handler's breath started to come heavier, his guard just a fraction too slow on the recovery.
Panic wasn't here yet, but Alpha could smell it coming.
Jonah caught a wrist on the next exchange, twisted hard enough to draw a snarl from his opponent, then used the momentum to launch a knee toward the man's midsection. The handler barely rolled with it, but the stumble was there — a visible fracture in his composure.
From above, Alpha logged the change with clinical satisfaction.
It was time to end this.
Alpha turned his attention to three fast-approaching signals.
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Thomas's jaw ached from clenching as he tracked the fight.
The handler and Jonah moved too fast for most eyes to follow, but Thomas had spent years learning to read a battle's rhythm — and he didn't like what he was seeing.
The handler was losing.
Not yet badly, not yet obviously, but the signs were there. Jonah's strange, silver-veined body was finding its footing. The initial ragged defense had sharpened into precise, punishing counterstrikes. The handler's movements, once a seamless chain of offense, now came in bursts, each one just a hair too long in the windup, a fraction slower in recovery. Jonah was forcing him into mistakes.
Thomas swallowed hard, bile threatening in the back of his throat.
He didn't understand how the quiet boy from the orphanage had suddenly become… this. Wings of shimmering ghostlight, a body moving like an executioner's blade, eyes that belonged to something that wasn't human. Whatever the cause, it was turning the tide — and if the handler fell, that left Thomas standing at the front of a collapsing wall.
Part of him screamed to call the retreat now, while he still had the bulk of his men intact. But another, colder part knew exactly what that meant. Walking away before the handler did would be career suicide — no, worse than that. The people above would look at him and see someone who flinched. Someone who cut and ran. The kind of man who didn't get trusted with the real jobs.
His fingers twitched at his sides, caught between fists and open hands. Stay? Run? Risk his neck or risk everything else?
The decision was stolen from him.
A ripple of screams tore from the southern edge of the plaza. Thomas's head snapped toward the sound just in time to see something — someone — tear through the knot of thugs stationed there.
At first, he couldn't make sense of it in the dim lamplight. The figure was man-shaped, but wrong — black and silver plates gleamed like wet chitin, four arms working in concert as they cut through his men. It kind of looked like a walking… ant? No, the bulk was wrong, the legs too solid, the posture too deliberate. It was a man in armor, but the armor was nothing Thomas had ever seen. The helmet's sweeping curve and great, compound eyes flared with inner light, throwing back a predatory glint.
In one hand, the armored figure wielded a massive polearm tipped with something that spat crackling sparks. In the other, a shield broad enough to cover a doorframe. Every time a thug pushed through the storm of fire from the figure's two smaller, rearward limbs — weapons mounted like insect appendages, spitting bolts of sizzling energy — the polearm flashed forward, burying its point into muscle or gut. A pulse of lightning turned the unlucky soul into a shuddering, slack-jawed heap.
"Celestials above," Thomas breathed before he could stop himself.
More shouts erupted, this time from the western rooftops. Thomas turned in time to see a shadowed man loose a single arrow. The shaft arced high, then split in a brilliant flare, expanding into a metal lattice that spread wider than three wagons. It crashed down over one of the larger clusters of his men, the weave shivering with faint blue light before the runes along each strand lit in unison. The captured thugs convulsed, cries cutting off into pained grunts before they slumped as one.
Thomas cursed aloud, stepping forward to rally what forces he could — but the hairs on his neck prickled, and something sharp hissed past his cheek. The whisper of its passing might have been the kiss of a breeze, but his gut knew better.
He spun, eyes sweeping the shadows — and found her.
An old woman, small and plain, stood amid a circle of bodies. Every one of them lay still, silver needles jutting from the sides of their necks. Her hands moved with patient precision, sliding another needle between her fingers. And her face… she was smiling at him. Not cruelly. Not warmly. Just… softly. As if she'd been waiting for him to notice.
Thomas's mouth went dry. He barely ducked the second needle in time, the thing burying itself into the wall behind him with a faint metallic chime. That was enough.
"Fall back!" His voice cracked the air like a whip. "Retreat! Now!"
The order shivered through what was left of his crew. Faces turned toward him, then toward the newcomers ripping through their ranks. The choice wasn't hard. They broke, scattering toward alleys and side streets, vanishing into the deeper dark.
Thomas was already moving when the handler tried to do the same. But Jonah was faster.
The boy — the thing — blurred into the air above him, wings scattering blue motes. Then Jonah dropped, both boots slamming into the handler's back. The ground beneath them cratered with the impact, dust and shards of stone spraying outward. The handler hit hard and stayed there, limbs at unnatural angles.
Thomas didn't wait to see more. He shoved through the fleeing bodies, boots pounding the cobblestones, but when he risked one last glance over his shoulder, the sight burned into him.
Jonah was walking toward the temple. The glow of his silver-veined skin threw his shadow long across the stones. In one hand, he dragged the handler by the collar, the man's feet and arms limp, twisted. Blood smeared the cobbles in a rough, uneven trail.
Thomas's chest tightened, fury and dread tangling into a single, sour taste at the back of his throat.
He kept running.