The doors sealed on their own inside four seconds, which is what a building does when something comes through a wall.
Ivory Banner's front office held eleven clerks, two department heads, one lawyer, plus a man with no licence and a bad leg.
Every one of them was now inside a sealed room with a precision-class monster that had come up through the foundations.
The thing that came through the wall stood taller than the reception desk on four limbs that took the light apart as it moved.
Both forelimbs were the problem, and each one ended in an edge that showed the room behind it in a thin bent line.
'It has glass on the front legs... and the room bends where they pass, so they are thinner than they look,' Ossian moved along the desk, 'do not guess the reach.'
A guild guard drew a baton and committed to one clean step forward, the way a trained man does.
The Mantis took the arm off at the elbow before the step finished, then went still again with the room folding along its edges.
Nothing about it had chased the guard at all, and it stood where that committed step was always going to end.
'It punished the step, not the man... whoever moves with commitment gets opened,' Ossian went down behind the desk with the guard screaming, 'and my whole build is commitment.'
Grave Rush is four steps, no halfway, with the direction chosen before the first foot lands.
The one skill he owned was the one thing this creature was built to answer.
Eleven clerks were on the floor behind the desks, and none of them had anything in their hands but a screen.
"Talk to me," Ossian said it into the earpiece from behind the reception desk, since Calista had the drone feed from the street.
"Give me ten seconds of it standing still," her voice came through with her breathing wrong underneath it.
'Her channels are seizing... she is watching a monster and holding her own arm down,' he heard the catch in her breath, 'she is still working, so work.'
'It sealed us in, so it wants the room this way... damn it, it likes a crowd that cannot leave,' Ossian looked along the row of desks, 'four steps, left side.'
He tried the pursuit anyway, four steps along the left side of the room, and a plan in hand beats standing behind a desk with none.
The Mantis let him take three of them and opened his forearm on the fourth, through the charcoal plate, into the meat underneath.
'It waited for the fourth... shit, it knows the count better than I do,' Ossian came out of the run with blood down to his fingers, 'stop using the legs.'
He tried once more along the desks with a shorter line, and the second failure cost him a strip of the same forearm.
Bone showed at the bottom of that cut, white under the office lights, and his hand stopped closing all the way.
'Twice, and the second one was worse... the thing is teaching me,' he got the arm against his chest, 'no more running at it.'
"Stop chasing it," she cut in over the sound of her own bad arm coming down onto a rail, "You're feeding it a direction every time."
'She is right and I hate that she is right... it eats the commitment, so commit to something else,' Ossian looked at the wall it came through, 'go at the old damage instead.'
Jackal Right does not chase a body at all, since the hunt in that glove locks onto damage instead of a whole animal.
The Mantis had one old wound of its own, along the third plate of the abdomen.
Whatever cracked that plate had done it a long way from this city, and the join had healed badly enough to show.
'There is the break, third plate down... and my hand goes where the damage is,' he opened the ruined fingers as far as they would go, 'let it pull.'
The pull came from the gauntlet rather than from his legs, which meant the movement was not a step it could read.
Ossian went across four feet of office floor sideways, dragged by his own fist with none of his weight going through the bad leg.
Its forelimb cut where his commitment should have been, then found nothing there to open.
Calista came through the fire door on the north side with an ordinary spear and no mana arriving in her arm at all.
The point went through the joint of the rear left limb, and she drove it into the floor with her whole body weight.
'She pinned a leg with a stick... no power, no licence, one joint,' Ossian felt the creature's whole frame change balance, 'now, while it is anchored.'
A pinned Mantis has nowhere left to fold, which leaves the abdomen sitting in one place for a man with a fist.
One straight punch put Dreadweight through the crack, and the abdomen came apart around his forearm.
'That went through the plate like a boot through a window... hell, the whole thing was one crack away from finished,' Ossian kept the fist where it was, 'she gave me that.'
Black fluid came out over the reception desk while the forelimbs folded in on themselves without any light left in them.
The office stayed quiet for four seconds, then eleven clerks started talking at the same time.
Nobody in that room had seen a precision-class creature before, and all eleven of them had just watched one die.
'She walked into a sealed room with a spear she cannot hold... and the guild wrote her off as unrecoverable,' Ossian got his good hand under her elbow, 'do not say it like that.'
"Say one grateful word and I'll invoice you for it," Calista was holding her left arm against her ribs while she said it.
The guard with one arm was alive against the far wall, with two clerks holding a belt above his elbow.
Paramedics reached the sealed doors nine minutes later, four ahead of the guild's own posted response time.
Paloma came out from behind an overturned chair with her screen already open and a buyer's name on it.
"Precision-class corpse, intact forelimbs, and the guild's own cameras recorded the whole thing," she priced it before the dust had come off the ceiling.
Ivory Banner had it on their floor, in their building, killed by a man they filed as dead five days earlier.
'Their room, their cameras, their wall... and they get to buy the footage back from her,' Ossian went down onto the carpet with his arm bleeding through his fingers, 'she is enjoying this.'
Holding a tourniquet that long takes a kind of nerve nobody in that office had been hired for.
Ivory Banner would be selling its own security footage back to a woman they discharged, which Paloma had worked out before anybody else in the building.
Then the mask came up out of the corpse, thin and pale, with the same folded edges the forelimbs had.
[Glass Mantis is available to you]
[This face does not hunt, it removes what is unnecessary]
'This one does not hunt... after five days of a face that wants nothing else,' Ossian looked at the thing lying in the fluid, 'that is a different animal entirely.'
A second panel opened underneath the first one while he was still holding his own forearm shut.
[Compatibility check against your allied creatures]
[Calista, eighty-seven percent]
Compatibility had never appeared on any panel before, and nothing on the screen said what the figure was measuring.
'Eighty-seven percent of what... and why is it measuring her at all,' Ossian read the line with Calista six feet away, 'do not let her see your face doing that.'
Calista was looking at the corpse, holding an arm that had stopped answering her, in a building that had thrown her out eight months ago.
He closed the panel before she turned around and put the Glass Mantis mask inside his coat.