The breach put three more scavenger beasts into the hall before the first one had finished bleeding out on the floor.
Ossian had the Carrion Jackal sitting on his right gauntlet, where he had moved it to open that first one up.
'The mask is on the glove... and I need it on my face to move at all,' he counted the three shapes coming along the north wall, 'ten seconds, that is the whole problem.'
Moving the mask back onto his face takes ten seconds, and that count does not care what is walking toward him.
Everything about the fight came down to which of those two shapes he was wearing when the animals arrived.
The gauntlet version hits harder than anything he owns, but it leaves him running on one broken leg.
"I need ten seconds," he said the number out loud to another person, which made it the first entirely true thing he had told anybody since the Gate.
'That is the whole secret, handed to a woman I met an hour ago... and she is the only one here who can use it,' Ossian watched her face, 'no flinch at all.'
"Then you'll get ten," Calista moved first, taking the angle that put her between him and the north wall.
Her channels were not going to give her mana on demand, so she was working on footwork and a shaft she could barely keep hold of.
Ten seconds is nothing at a bus stop, then it becomes a very long time in a room with three animals.
Ossian set his shoulders against the pillar and opened both hands, starting the transfer with three beasts inside the room.
The mask came off the gauntlet as black mist, and for eight of those seconds he was a man with nothing at all.
Every wound he owned came back inside the first two seconds, and the leg went out from under him at four.
'Four... the leg is gone, and I am still six seconds away from a face,' he got a shoulder onto the pillar, 'stay standing, six more.'
"Left foot, you're square," Calista called it from eight feet behind him while she put the spear shaft across a beast's throat.
'She is calling my footwork from back there... and she is right about it both times,' his weight came off the square stance, 'she can see the fight better than I can.'
The second beast reached him at the sixth second and came in low for the bandage on his leg.
Calista put the spear into the gap in front of it and bought the last four seconds with a weapon her arm could not carry.
The shaft came out of her hands on the second push, and she had it back left-handed before it stopped moving.
'Six, and she is taking hits that were meant for me... shit, that is what the ten seconds actually costs,' the spear came apart against a shoulder plate, 'count, keep counting.'
'She has no mana and she is still standing in front of me... do not waste what she is buying,' Ossian counted down against the pillar, 'two, one.'
Bone shut over his face on the tenth second, and the leg stopped mattering to him at once.
He put the first beast into the floor with a shoulder and took the second one apart with both hands.
The third one ran for the breach, which is what a scavenger does the moment a room stops being cheap.
'Let it go... no, it came in here for a bandage, so it will find somebody else wearing one,' Ossian watched the hole in the wall, 'onto the gauntlet, now.'
He moved the mask onto the gauntlet in the open this time, with nothing alive in the hall to interrupt him.
[Jackal Right is holding]
[Your hand keeps the hunt while your face keeps the man]
The transfer landed as a technique rather than an accident, and he drove that fist through the third one's spine in the doorway.
'That is what it is for... the glove does the hunting while I keep my own face,' he opened the fingers with the grit still on them, 'ten seconds is the price.'
Ten seconds is a long time in a room with anything alive in it, and no amount of practice was going to shorten the count.
[Identity Fracture, thirteen percent]
[Four points for ten seconds of wanting somebody else to do the fighting]
'Nine to thirteen, and I never even swung at her... it charged me for standing still and hoping,' Ossian read the panel outside the hall, 'hell, it counts everything.'
The corpses came to three hundred and forty credits at the salvage window that never asks about licences.
Between the coat Bastien lent him and the kit he tore up for his leg, he was four hundred credits down before the salvage was counted.
'Three forty in, four hundred out... I killed a room full of monsters and finished sixty credits down,' Ossian read the docket twice under the window light, 'hell of a working evening.'
Calista wrote both figures into her notebook without one word about the shape of them.
Sixty credits down still counts as a working night by porter arithmetic, and that sum stops being funny after a while.
"Don't thank me," she said it before he had his mouth open, then named her fee for the evening in the same breath.
"Four hundred a job, and the drone hours are billed on top," she wrote that under the line where he already owed her money.
'She priced tonight before I could get a word out... the figure is what this fight cost me,' Ossian watched the pen, 'she is not doing charity, and she wants it written down.'
"You'll clear it when there's something to clear," Calista put the notebook away without looking at him while she said it.
The notebook had eleven lines in it now, and every one of them was money he did not have on him.
Neither of them had eaten since the afternoon, and both of them walked back into the hall instead.
Calista turned the last corpse over with her foot to check the hide, which is a habit that comes from filing salvage reports.
Shell residue lay along its back in a dried crust, worked down into the grit of the skin.
A scavenger picks up whatever it walks over, and this one had been across something that grows shell.
Nothing in a scavenger's diet puts shell on its back, since the crust grows on a thing rather than sticking to it.
Ossian knew that residue, since he had torn a handful of it off a larva with both hands two days ago.
'That is off the thing in the egg... damn it, this came out of a Gate that is shut,' he crouched with his palm above the hide, 'the certificate said sealed.'
The Gate had closed two days ago with a completion certificate attached to the file and a survey team signature under that.
Something carrying larval residue had walked out of a sealed Gate and come up through a wall within sight of a school.
'Two days it has been out... and it found the one building with an injured man inside it,' Ossian stood up off the bad leg, 'it came for the wound, not for me.'
[The lair you crawled out of has not finished with this city]
[Something down there is still sending pieces of itself up here]
Calista photographed the residue from four angles with a phone older than her discharge papers.
"That's not going in a public report," she said it while she worked, since a public report would put an unlicensed man at the scene.
'She is protecting the evidence and the pair of us at once... and she still has not asked me about the mask,' Ossian watched her frame the last shot, 'she will ask, but not tonight.'
The hall had a hole in the north wall, three dead animals on the floor, plus a breach nobody in the city had logged.
Two days is long enough for a thing to learn which streets carry people, and Calista traced its likely route north on her own map.