Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 95: Fireworks

The Alpha circles. Patient. Reading me the way the other two never bothered to.

I stand still. Arms loose. Hands empty. Same bait that worked on the others.

The shark accelerates. The furrow deepens. Sand sprays in twin walls behind the dorsal fin as the distance collapses.

Thirty feet...

Twenty...

Ten...

It breaches.

I don’t roll. I pivot—one sharp rotation on my lead foot, torso twisting, letting the massive jaw scream past my chest. Close enough that the displaced air flattens my jacket against my ribs.

The tail comes.

I’m ready this time.

The muscular whip sweeps toward my midsection, same angle as before, same punishing arc. But my right heel is already chambered.

[Pressure Step.]

The Ironwake Reefs scream. A violent burst of hyperpressurized steam erupts from the heel as I drive my boot into the shark’s tail mid-swing.

The kick doesn’t just deflect—it redirects. Two thousand pounds of momentum, already committed to a lateral sweep, get shoved sideways by an impact point loaded with enough kinetic force to crack coral plating.

The Alpha’s body torques off-axis. It crashes sideways into a dense cluster of black cacti with a sound like a dozen spears punching through wet meat at once.

The obsidian spines impale it from shoulder to tail. The shark convulses—once, violent, full-body—then locks rigid against the cacti, pinned and bleeding dark fluid into the sand.

It doesn’t move again.

I lower my boot. The steam from the Ironwakes hisses into the dry air and vanishes.

Boris and Jacob are staring at me.

"I never said I was playing fair."

I tap the comms. "Clear. Bring the squad in."

Oliver arrives first, already scanning the carcasses with his usual practiced assessment.

Boris waves a hand. "Sharks are yours. We don’t use them."

Oliver nods. Good enough for us.

The rest of us spread across the cactus field and start harvesting.

The spines come free with a firm pull and a twist—like extracting a tooth from a jaw that doesn’t want to let go. Each one is about twenty inches long, perfectly tapered, the obsidian surface smooth and cold to the touch. The edge could split a hair.

Rhayne is the fastest. Her heavy industrial gloves—the same ones designed to contain her Void Link—handle the spines without a scratch. She falls into a rhythm: grip, twist, pull, stack. Grip, twist, pull, stack. Mechanical. Efficient. The kind of work her hands were accidentally built for.

The rest of us improvise. I wrap my palm in a torn strip from my undershirt. Jacob uses a folded piece of saddle leather. Boris rips the sleeve off his coat without ceremony.

Oliver finishes with the carcasses and joins in, using the skinning knife from his belt to pry the spines at the base where they connect to the plant.

Lola sits on a rock.

She watches us work for about two minutes. Then she picks up a spine, examines it, sets it down, and lies back with her arms behind her head.

"This is the most boring thing I’ve ever done," she announces to the sky. "And I once watched Oliver clean a carcass for three hours."

"That carcass kept you alive," Oliver mutters without looking up.

"The carcass was boring too."

We work. The pile grows. Rhayne’s stack is twice the size of anyone else’s by the time I lose count.

After what feels like an hour but is probably closer to forty minutes, Jacob calls it.

"Over a thousand. That’s enough." He pulls a bundle of spines from the sand and holds them up. "Two hundred per person in your inventory. That’s the limit of the system’s primordial storage space. Don’t try to force more—it’ll reject and scatter."

I distribute the load. Two hundred into my inventory. Two hundred into Oliver’s, Rhayne’s, Lola’s. Jacob and Boris take the rest.

[Inventory: Black Thorn Bolts x200]

As I’m closing the inventory window, a heavy sound reaches me from behind.

Boris is on his knees.

Not a stumble. A collapse.

His legs simply gave out beneath him. His axe drops from his grip and clangs against the rock. His breathing is ragged—short, shallow gasps that sound like his lungs forgot how to expand.

I’m beside him in three strides. I press the canteen to his mouth. "Drink."

He drinks. Weakly.

"Oliver. Scales."

Oliver tosses a handful without question. I push them into Boris’s palm. He chews them slowly, mechanically, the way a machine processes fuel it can barely metabolize.

Color returns to his face in increments. His breathing steadies. But his eyes—when they find mine—carry the specific exhaustion of a man whose body just reminded him what he’s becoming.

"We need to go back," he says. His voice is thin. "We’re too close to the tower. It’s pulling on me."

I look over my shoulder. The tower looms behind us, less than a mile away.

A mile.

That’s all it took to drop Boris to his knees. A man who fought a Reef Stalker bare-handed twelve hours ago.

If this is what a mile does to a fading Diver, I can’t imagine what ten feet would do.

"We need to go. More sharks will show up soon." Jacob is already moving toward the mounts.

"Mount up," I say. "We ride slow. No gallop. Worm’s still out there."

The return is quiet. Ferredons at a walk, single file, the desert stretching flat and black in every direction. The tension from the ride out is gone—replaced by a heavier thing.

The weight of knowing what’s coming.

Lola pulls her mount alongside mine. She rides in silence for a few seconds—her version of building up to something.

"You promised," she says. Not accusatory. Factual. The way she states everything.

"I know."

"After your signal. As many times as I want."

"That’s the deal."

She nods once. Settles back into her saddle. Satisfied.

The walls of Lost Ark appear on the horizon as a dark line against the darker sky. Home. Or the closest thing to it in a world that doesn’t believe in the concept.

We’re half a mile out when the sound hits.

Deep. Low. The maritime bellow that vibrates in the ribcage before the ears process it. The same cargo-ship horn that shook the hall when we first arrived.

The siren.

"Right on time," Boris says from his saddle. He looks steadier now—the Scales and the distance from the tower doing their work. But the pallor underneath is still there.

A coat of paint over rust.

"I have a plan," I tell him. "Don’t run the wedge formation tonight."

Boris looks at me like I just suggested he set the walls on fire. "A flat line against the Red Tide is suicide, kid."

"Not if you have artillery."

He frowns. "We don’t have artillery. The ballistae are fixed emplacements."

"You don’t have ballistae artillery." I let the sentence hang. "You have something better."

Boris stares at me. The frown deepens. Then his eyes drift past my shoulder to the small figure riding behind us—the girl with the oversized weapon case strapped to her back, humming something only she can hear.

"You’re insane," Boris says.

"Probably."

"A flat line exposes the entire front. If your girl misses—"

"She won’t."

Boris holds my gaze for a long three seconds. Then he lets out a breath that carries the last of his resistance with it.

"Your call, kid. But if this goes wrong, I’m blaming your father."

I turn in my saddle and look at Lola.

She’s already looking at me. The half-lidded eyes. The calm that doesn’t belong on a fourteen-year-old face in this messy world. The faintest curl at the corner of her mouth.

I smile.

She smiles back.

Thumb up.

Tonight, Lost Ark gets fireworks.