It sounded simple enough.
Only the people about to hit the dirt understood how close to death it put them.
Gear was checked and cinched down. Weapons came up. Every eye tracked the ground below, braced for something to come out of it mid-descent.
Years of fieldwork had taught them how sharp a Gastrea's senses were. Human scent, unfamiliar movement, either one pulled them in like instinct given teeth.
A formation of helicopters could be heard from kilometers out, and the smell of that many people carried further.
Since the moment they'd crossed the Monolith, Gastrea on the ground had been tracking them, running the whole way, unable to do anything about the altitude.
Ranged attackers among them were rare.
Most ground Gastrea worked with claws and raw muscle. Put a target in the air and they had nothing.
So they'd paced below, snarling and circling, waiting for the drop.
That wait had ended.
The tremor underfoot grew, hundreds of bodies running, snarls rising and overlapping until the sound crawled up the spine and lodged the heart in the throat.
"Move, move, move!" A veteran operator called it out first, voice rough with nerves and carrying anyway.
"Faster! Get down faster!"
Another took it up, rope clenched hard enough to whiten his knuckles, eyes locked below for whatever came out of the treeline.
"First ones down, find cover and set up!"
The order steadied them. Everyone knew the math.
Whoever landed first had to hold ground and cover the ones still descending, or the whole unit died in a circle of teeth.
Shouts passed between the aircraft, operator to operator.
Faces set hard. Nobody slacked. Ropes hissed through gloves as bodies dropped toward the ground.
The first ones down carried the worst of it. Not only the initial wave, but the job of shielding everyone behind them, building the first line under attack.
Crouched at the door, Rentaro said nothing. He seized the rope and jumped.
Clean, no hesitation, a steadiness that didn't match his age. Combat had put it there.
His augmentations meant none of the caution the others needed.
Prosthetics like his could take a fall from tens of meters without complaint.
Even so.
His boots hit, and the ground spoke to him, and something moved across his face.
The shock ran up through his soles and into his chest. Soil shivered underfoot.
No earthquake. Bodies. A great many of them, closing fast.
He knew the sensation intimately. Every mass engagement felt like this. Never this strong.
To register at that distance meant numbers he didn't want to calculate.
A hundred at minimum. Probably more. Possibly with higher-grade specimens mixed in.
"Rentaro!"
Before he could finish reading the terrain, her voice came from above.
Bright, teasing, without a thread of fear in it, wildly out of place.
A small figure landed square on his back, arms looping his neck, cheek against his shoulder blade, hair tickling his skin.
Enju weighed almost nothing. A faint clean scent came with her, cutting through the rot in the air.
"This isn't playtime."
He kept his eyes moving, artificial eye active, scanning, catching every shift in the brush.
"Get down, we..."
She nuzzled against his back, unmoved by any of it.
Any other day he'd have indulged her. He always did. Not here.
The tremors kept building. The snarling drew closer. Something was going to break the treeline any second.
"Don't be so tense, Rentaro. Look up. What is that?"
Light in her voice, nothing strained about it, which was itself wrong.
She squeezed a little tighter, lifting her chin toward the sky, eyes bright with curiosity.
Enju played, but never in a fight. In a fight she was dependable to the bone.
Nothing about her behavior fit.
His brow drew down, but he followed where she pointed anyway.
Above the helicopters, something Satoru had done was throwing off a faint glow, too diffuse to resolve.
Pale gold, threaded with a blue-green halo, gathering slowly in open air. Something taking shape inside it, bright enough to force the eyes away, leaving only a blurred outline.
Then a roar detonated across the whole valley.
Low, enormous, carrying a contempt for everything beneath it. Eardrums buzzed. The ground seemed to flinch. Every Gastrea howl in the distance thinned to nothing against it.
An immense shape fell out of the sky and hammered into the earth.
The impact went off like ordnance. Ground bucked, soil and stone blasted outward, a wall of dust rolling in every direction.
Rentaro threw an arm across his face.
Sleeves snapped in the wind. Whatever had landed, the pressure coming off it ruled out anything ordinary.
The dust settled. He lowered his arm, and his chest went tight.
Pupils shrank. His mouth opened without producing anything. Breathing stopped for a moment.
Standing before him was a tiger's head on a man's body, corded with muscle, four or five meters tall.
The head looked alive, brown-gold fur cut with black stripes, eyes the size of bells burning cold red. Its jaws hung open on curved fangs, and the killing intent came off it in waves.
Every muscle stood defined, packed with violence held barely in check. Its arms were thicker than his waist, hands ending in huge claws that caught the light and looked capable of opening anything.
"That's... that's a shikigami too?"
He swallowed. His voice came out dry.
He'd already watched the flying one work, already understood what these things were, but this landed harder. Not only the strangeness of it.
The weight it put on him. Like a mountain settled across his chest, breath coming short. Augmented, far stronger than any standard operator, and he still felt small under it.
The thing hadn't moved.
Standing still was enough.
One punch, if it wanted, and everything in front of it would be paste. The air itself had gotten heavier.
"Don't worry about it. The Gastrea are its problem now."
Satoru's voice drifted down from above, unhurried, as though a hundred-plus Gastrea amounted to an anthill.
He stood atop a helicopter, smiling faintly, dark glasses hiding whatever was behind them.
The shikigami growled low, a command received, and drove its legs into the earth.
The sound rolled louder than before. Leaves shook loose from the trees. The howling out in the woods turned frantic, something in it recognizing what had arrived.
Two deep prints tore into packed ground, dirt spraying, hairline cracks spidering out from the impact.
Then the huge shape smeared into an afterimage and was gone.
Faster than the artificial eye could resolve. A brown-gold blur and a wake of pressure hanging in the air.
Rentaro opened his mouth and produced nothing at all.
There was too much to process and no words that fit. All of it sat outside what he understood.
He'd thought the man himself was the extraordinary part. Apparently the things the man summoned were on the same scale.
"I guess we don't need to help? That shikigami looks pretty strong."
Enju hopped down and stood beside him, head tilted, less certain than she sounded.
The thing was powerful, no arguing that. But the numbers coming through the trees stretched past sight.
"Strong or not, it's one shikigami. There are way more of them down here than there were in the sky."
She looked toward the treeline, where countless dark shapes flowed between trunks, the snarling closing in, and worry crept into her face.
"I don't know either. Stay sharp regardless. If it starts losing ground, we'll have to..."
The forest erupted before he finished.
Shrieks and roars tangled together, chaotic, threaded with pain and something like despair. Nothing like the aggression they'd heard minutes ago.
Everyone present knew Gastrea voices intimately.
These sounded wrong, and getting stranger, other noises buried underneath.
Bones snapping, wet and sharp. Flesh coming apart with a dull tearing. Woven through the shrieking, it raised the hair on every arm within earshot.
While the operators on the ground were still trying to make sense of it, a shape came racing toward them.
Weapons snapped up. Every eye locked on. Gastrea, they assumed, and braced for contact.
No. Not toward them.
It swept along the perimeter of their position instead, cutting past at the edge.
Fast enough to blur, gone from view in a heartbeat, leaving nothing but a streak on the retina.
Then they saw it clearly.
The tiger-headed shikigami, already returning, and by all appearances untouched.
Though it looked nothing like it had a minute ago.