"Grunt, no! Don't hit it!" Leo's shout was a crack of thunder in the tense alley. The plea was so sudden, so contrary to the logic of their world, that it actually made the Berserker pause, his charge arrested mid-step.
Grunt turned his head, a furious sneer twisting his features. "What did you say, cleaner-boy? Scared you'll have to mop up a bigger mess?"
"The acid," Leo yelled, pointing with his free hand. He was still maneuvering the pallet jack, trying to get the precious medicine clear of the loading bay. "It's not defensive. It's a payload! Look at the ground!"
Grunt, for all his fury, wasn't an idiot. His small, intelligent eyes flickered down to the asphalt around the Alpha Gnawer's feet. He saw the way the pavement was pitted and soft, the small puffs of vapor rising from it. He saw the glistening trail the monster had left behind it. The pieces clicked into place. This wasn't a fight. It was a deathtrap with legs.
The Alpha Gnawer, seeing the hesitation, took the initiative. It opened its massive mandibles and vomited a high-pressure jet of milky, steaming acid not at Grunt, but at the two Phoenix Guards behind him.
The soldiers reacted instantly, their high-tech armor's [Energy Shield] skill flaring to life. A translucent barrier of blue energy appeared before them, but the acid wasn't a normal energy attack. The chemical solvent slammed into the shields, and instead of deflecting, it began to aggressively break down the energy matrix. The shields fizzled and died in seconds, the soldiers crying out in alarm as droplets of acid splashed onto their armor, which began to smoke and corrode.
The alley was too narrow. There was no room to dodge.
Leo watched in horror. He couldn't let them die, no matter how much Grunt despised him. He had to intervene.
His mind raced, sifting through his abilities. He couldn't [Mop Up] that much acid without being in the line of fire himself. He couldn't use his foam; the alley was too large, the foam too slow to deploy. He needed a wall. A real, physical wall, right now.
The environment. Always use the environment.
His eyes darted around the alley. It was filled with debris—piles of trash, rusted dumpsters, and the collapsed brick facade of a neighboring building. Bricks. Solid. Plentiful. Heavy.
The Gnawer reared back, preparing another volley of acid.
Leo dropped the controls of the pallet jack. He ran to the side of the alley and planted his hands on the massive pile of fallen bricks. He didn't have a skill to move them. But he was a Level 10 Janitor. His will, his very concept, was the imposition of order on chaos. And this pile of bricks was chaotic.
He poured his mana, not into a specific skill, but into the raw, fundamental idea of his Class. He focused on the bricks, on the concept of a wall, on the very definition of a barrier.
The ground trembled. The pile of bricks began to move. Not flying through the air, but scraping, grinding, and sliding across the ground as an unseen, orderly force pushed them. They assembled themselves, brick by agonizing brick, into a crude, three-foot-thick wall rising from the ground between the Gnawer and Grunt's men.
It rose just in time. The second jet of acid slammed into the newly-formed brick barricade. Bricks dissolved and turned to steaming slag, but the wall held, sacrificing itself to absorb the brunt of the attack.
Grunt and his men stared, dumbfounded, at the wall of bricks that had just assembled itself out of the rubble. Grunt looked over the top of it at Leo, who stood panting on the other side, his hand still extended. The Berserker's face was a cocktail of shock, confusion, and a new, grudging respect.
"What... what Class did they say you were?" one of the guards stammered.
The Alpha Gnawer, its attack thwarted, let out a chittering shriek of fury. It abandoned its ranged assault and charged, its massive form a battering ram of chitin and rage. It slammed into the brick wall, shattering it into dust and fragments.
The fight was back on. And this time, it was at point-blank range.
Grunt roared, his battle-lust reignited. "It's hammer time!"
"No, you idiot!" Maria's voice yelled from the loading dock. She had seen the same thing Leo had. "Its blood is the same as its spit! If you rupture its body, we all melt!"
The warning came too late. Grunt, in his fury, swung his mighty sledgehammer. But the near-death of his men had planted a seed of doubt. He altered his swing at the last second. Instead of aiming for the creature's soft body, he brought the hammer down in a crushing blow against one of its thick, armored legs.
There was a sickening crunch of chitin. The leg buckled, but didn't break. The force of the blow, however, caused the creature's entire body to destabilize. The acidic fluid sloshed within it. A high-pressure leak sprang from a joint near the damaged leg, spraying a fan of deadly acid across the ground near Grunt's feet. He leaped back, his boots smoking.
He had hurt it. But he had also turned it into a walking chemical bomb with a pinhole leak.
"It's a two-part creature!" Sarah suddenly shouted from the relative safety of the loading dock, her mind having finally put the pieces together from a medical, biological perspective. "The Gnawer is the delivery system, but the street—the Maw—is the stomach! It herds things onto the Maw to be digested externally! You have to separate them!"
Separate them. The word sparked an idea in Leo's mind. The Gnawer was the host to a juvenile Street-Maw colony. But a host and a parasite have a connection. A tether. A lifeline that can be cut.
The injured Gnawer turned its fury on Grunt, its mandibles snapping. Leo ignored the fight. He turned his attention back to the street, to the faint, vein-like patterns shimmering beneath the asphalt. That was the main body. The heart of the problem.
He sprinted out of the alley, back onto the main street, pulling a canister of the Aqueous Foam Cleanser from his belt.
"Cleaner-boy! What are you doing?!" Grunt roared, barely dodging a swipe from the monster's claws. "Get back here and... do whatever it is you do!"
Leo didn't answer. He ran to the edge of the dormant Street-Maw, aimed his nozzle at the ground, and unleashed a torrent of cleansing foam. He wasn't trying to create a distraction. He was performing a targeted decontamination.
He sprayed a thick, white line of the super-slick, ultra-sterile foam, creating a border between the normal asphalt and the camouflaged monster. A chemical wall. A line of salt against a demon.
The Street-Maw reacted. The entire section of pavement shuddered. The veins beneath the surface pulsed with a sickly, panicked light. It was being hurt, not by force, but by a conceptual assault. The foam's absolute purity was anathema to its existence.
Back in the alley, the Alpha Gnawer suddenly stopped its attack. It shrieked, a new sound this time, one not of rage, but of pain. It stumbled, its movements becoming erratic. The connection to its other half, its symbiotic colony, was being drowned in a sea of frictionless, sterile soap. The juvenile colony living in the Gnawer was dying, cut off from the main network.
The monster clutched at its own abdomen, which began to glow with a furious, unstable green light.
"It's going to blow!" Maria screamed. "The acid sacs are rupturing!"
Grunt stared, frozen for a second, as the creature in front of him began to swell like a toxic balloon. He had no way to stop it. His hammer was useless.
Leo saw it too. There was no time to run. He had one last, desperate, janitorial idea. He dropped the foam canister and raised his hand, pointing it at the swelling, about-to-detonate monster.
He shouted the name of the only skill that could possibly contain a mess this big. "[Mop Up]!"