It came out on legs like bent streetlights, tall enough to look into second-floor windows, and its tag was not the friendly orange of a Straggler.
It was red.
[Threshold Warden — Tier 1 Guardian — Lv. 8]This creature guards the gate. It does not wander. It hunts.Leo. No joke in this box. Run.
I've told you the System liked to be funny. I want you to understand what it meant that, right then, it wasn't.
For a second, all four of us just looked at the thing. Halloran was seventy-four and had been fighting for four days, and I watched him do the arithmetic of his own body and come up short — I watched him decide something, the way old men decide things, quietly and without telling anyone. Priya had three shadows and a sixteen-year-old's certainty that she was immortal, and I could see that certainty meet the Guardian and start, for the first time, to doubt itself.
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The Guardian's head — if you could call it that — turned toward Halloran first. Toward the oldest, the slowest, the tiredest. Monsters, it turns out, do their own arithmetic.
I could have run. The math still said run. Two people were already under a coat on this street because the math had said something and they'd listened.
I was tired of the math.
"Priya," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to. "When I say go, you grab its front leg. Just the one. Half a second is all I need."
"Leo, that thing is Level 8—"
"I know exactly what level it is." I stepped in front of Mr. Halloran. My hand was already warm. "That's the point. I know exactly what everything on this street can do, down to the percent. Including me."
Halloran put a hand on my shoulder — to pull me back, I think. I didn't let him.
"You gave me your fire, old man," I said, not turning around. "Let me show you what I did with it."
The Guardian took a step. The street cracked under its foot.
And I ran the numbers one last time — not to decide whether to fight, but how — and for the first time since the sky broke, the numbers came out in my favor.