Gareth’s zone was the cleanest of the three, which was intentional, and Gareth was aware of this purpose.

He was doing his job with a level of professional competence that was the most complex aspect of him—the difference between his ability and what he actually chose to do with it.

His team advanced through the northern blocks in a tight, methodical formation, perfectly executing a clearing sweep—thorough, with no gaps and no haste.

His three men worked with the smoothness of thirty-six days of shared survival, and the two from Cole’s group fit into the formation seamlessly without any visible friction.

Michael watched from the block entrance for a moment before going in.

Gareth moved differently when he was working than when he was in the building. In the building he was always performing something, the easy look, the casual posture, the arithmetic running behind everything.

Out here he was just competent. Clean decisions, good spacing, the natural authority of someone who had been keeping people alive by making correct calls under pressure and whose people had learned to trust the calls.

It was the most honest version of Gareth Michael had seen.

He went in and pulled up beside him and they walked the northern block together and Gareth reported the zone status with the clipped efficiency of someone running a professional operation and Michael listened and updated the pulse picture and they moved without unnecessary words.

At the second block north Gareth said quietly, "Eastern zone. Brute signal?"

"Still tracking," Michael said. "Third block east. Cole hasn’t hit it yet."

Gareth was quiet for a moment. "Cole’s good," he said. It cost him something to say it and he said it anyway which was the other complicated thing about Gareth.

"Yes," Michael said.

"His man with the bow," Gareth said. "That’s a useful skill out here."

"Yes," Michael said again.

Gareth looked at him sideways. "You knew about the bow before today."

"I know most things about most people in the building," Michael said.

Gareth looked ahead at the block they were clearing and said nothing else about it and they finished the second block north and Michael got a pulse signal from Cole’s zone that changed the picture and he stopped walking.

"Brute’s moving," he said.

Gareth looked at him.

"It’s coming toward Cole’s position," Michael said. "Third block east, pushing west. They’re going to hit it in the next two minutes whether they’re ready or not." 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

He was already moving east.

"Cover your zone," he said over his shoulder and Gareth watched him go with the easy look in place and something running hard behind it.

---

Michael was walking when he heard a sound that was less sound and more pressure, the particular quality of something very large moving through a space that wasn’t designed for things that large, and then the secondary sounds of a Rotter scatter as the horde density around the Brute fled from whatever was happening to it.

He came around the corner of the third block east and found Cole’s team in the street and the Brute in the middle of it and the situation already past the point of being manageable in the way that Brute encounters went from fine to critical in approximately the time it took to register what you were looking at.

The Brute was big.

It was not as big as a wearhouse or the size of the one the crane had brought down, but big enough.

The bone plate growth had covered its shoulders and upper arms completely and the plates had grown into each other at the shoulder junction creating a continuous shell that angled incoming strikes away from the center mass.

It had taken two of Cole’s men and redirected their attention into the wall behind them in the time it took Michael to reach the block entrance and neither of them were down but neither of them were in the fight either.

Cole was.

He was inside the Brute’s reach which was the only viable position against something with that much arm length advantage and he was working the same principle Sera had worked against the Stalker, controlling the contact point, looking for the gap in the armor shell, and the gap was not presenting itself because the shoulder plating had closed it off.

Damon had the chain wrapped around the Brute’s left leg and was pulling with everything he had which was slowing the footwork but not stopping it and the Brute had noticed Damon and was beginning to redirect.

Shin was on the right side and she saw the redirect before Damon did and she moved, not toward the Brute, toward Damon, and she got her shoulder under his arm and pushed him sideways and the Brute’s redirect missed by the distance of her intervention.

Michael was already moving.

He came in from the left while the Brute was tracking Damon’s redirect and Cole held its attention from the front and he went for the knee, not the armor, the joint below the armor where the bone plating thinned out and the natural anatomy was still mostly intact, and he put the full weight of the axe swing into the lateral joint with the committed force of someone who understood that half measures against a Brute were just a slower version of a bad outcome.

The Brute’s left knee buckled.

Not collapsed, not down, just buckled, a loss of structural integrity that broke the weight distribution and sent it sideways and Cole used the sideways to get the angle he’d been looking for and the finishing blow landed clean at the neck junction below the shoulder plate and the Brute went down and stayed down.

The street went quiet.

[Ding! Brute Eliminated.]

[+150 SP — Boss Kill Bonus.]

[+200 SP — Team Operation Bonus.]

Michael stood over the Brute and looked at Cole.

Cole looked at the Brute. At the knee joint Michael had targeted. At Michael.

"The knee," Cole said.

"The plate coverage stops at the joint," Michael said. "Lateral stress on the knee breaks the weight distribution. It goes sideways. The neck junction becomes accessible."

Cole was quiet for a moment. "You’ve been thinking about how to fight one of those," he said.

"Since the warehouse," Michael said.

Cole looked at him for a second and then looked at his two men against the wall who were getting up with the careful movements of people taking stock of what hurt. "Anyone down," he called.

"No," came back from both of them.

Cole looked at Shin who was beside Damon checking his arm where the Brute’s redirect had clipped him. "Shin."

"He’s fine," Shin said, with the particular certainty of someone who had just completed Dr. Kang’s informal medical training and was applying it in the field for the first time. "Bruised. Nothing broken."

Damon looked at his arm and then at Shin. "How do you know."

"Range of motion is intact and the pain profile is wrong for a fracture," she said and went back to checking it and Damon let her, which said something about what thirty six days of shared space did to people’s default levels of trust.

Michael looked at the block around them. The Brute down. The street clear. The pulse showing the density in the eastern zone significantly reduced from the operation so far.

His comm pulse blinked.

Sera’s zone. Two short pulses. The signal for *come look at this.*

He looked at Cole. "You have this block."

"We have it," Cole said.

---

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