Museum Core Chapter 111: The Cavalry

Her journey to the plane hadn’t quite been “abducted off the street by an unmarked car” levels of abrupt, but it had been a near-run thing.

Frye had passed along the alert along with a whole bevy of orders and five minutes later, Jacyln had found herself sitting in the cramped confines of some kind of experimental transport jet that seemed to be the military equivalent of the Concorde, along with the usual suspects of Henderson and Granger, as well as Harper, who was presently desperately trying to organize the haphazzard mess of supplies he’d grabbed into something more coheretn.

But they’d also pulled Müller into this, who was currently sitting across the aisle from her, stowing some kind of ridiculously massive rifle that had almost certainly been custom-made for him.

And, finally, the French special forces operator Adrian Genet had had the supreme misfortune of being close enough to get swept up in the “draft,” and called up to fulfill the treaty obligations of NATO.

He … well, it was fairly obvious he hadn’t expected to get dragged into anything, as he was wearing civilian clothing and had dragged along what felt like half a tree’s worth of plant matter to use in battle.

With his class, stitching those leaves to his armor would protect him as well as any magical armor he had access to, throwing any of the stones weighing down his pockets would likely hit like a howitzer’s round, and even pocket sand would hit an enemy like a sandblaster.

All in all, actually watching a high-Rank Primal Warrior in action should be fascinating, though the issue at the forefront of Jaclyn’s mind was the monster they’d be fighting.

The door to the cockpit opened, revealing a woman in a Royal Air Force uniform, likely the copilot, considering that it was the right-hand seat in the room behind her that was empty.

Jaclyn was certain the copilot hadn’t realized she could hear her as she muttered “can’t believe I’m asking this” before loudly proclaiming, “Who here needs a parachute to jump out of the airplane?”

Harper and Müller did.

Genet, surprisingly enough, didn’t. According to him, falling counted as “terrain damage,” and that was something he was immune to.

Seriously, she really needed to investigate that Class some more.

The BPA primarily used either Anima Monk or Logos Mage for combat roles, with Healer of Nature and Gearhead for back-line support.

And they had a whole lot of holders of the Police Officer class, which was still largely untested despite that “supernatural law enforcement” was meant to be the BPA’s primary job.

It was simply hard to use their core power in a controlled environment. It was designed to allow all Police Officers in the area to combine their magic to supress the supernatural abilities of a superhuman criminal, which was great and all … but the class was based on the spirit of the law, rather than the letter, which was why it was rather difficult to use in experiments.

They needed real criminals to use their powers; simply having a volunteer steal a candy bar wouldn’t fly, simply due to the fact that it was, you know, part of the experiment setup, and the people involved would know that.

But, thankfully, aside from the anchor beasts, there were no criminals with superpowers, yet.

And so on, and so forth.

They were preparing for disasters she fully expected to be incoming, using methods no one knew for certain would work.

Suddenly, the plane beneath her lurched to life without so much as an announcement, causing Jaclyn to glare towards the cockpit even as the acceleration slammed her back into her seat. She could still easily move, but only by drawing upon her supernatural strength. A normal person would likely have been hard-pressed to do anything but sit there, trying to avoid passing out.

That continued for a couple more minutes until things finally leveled out, the plane having reached its cruising speed.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Thank you for flying with the Royal Air Force. We expect to reach the target area in a little over two hours, the seatbelt light will stay on the entire time, but I believe you’re all adults, and tough enough to survive the odd bit of turbulence. My copilot will demonstrate how you will be deployed at the relevant time. Bathrooms and food are in the back, both are exactly what you would expect from a military flight. If you don’t know what that means, I envy you.

“Hope you have a great flight.”

Jaclyn rolled her eyes, unclipped her seatbelt, and stretched in the aisle. She supposed anyone who made their living flying around in experimental aircraft had to be a bit … special.

“Alright, here’s what I know,” she announced from the front of the plane, standing before the cockpit door. “The US anchor beast is likely somewhere in the mid to upper C-Rank, a frost elemental they’ve nicknamed ‘Winter Queen.’ It’s around ten meters tall, the center of a snowstorm that has been continuously blowing since the merge.

“It is likely caused by one of its powers. We are also aware of its ability to create smaller ice monsters, and general cryokinesis is almost certainly a third power. A fourth isn’t known, and may be either saved for emergencies, or a part of its demonstrated abilities in a way that isn’t obvious.

“The Americans are currently engaging with elementalists, but primarily using mundane weapons, up to and including nuclear weaponry. One detonation has been observed, but there will likely be more.”

She sighed, dropping out of “stern lecturer mode.”

“Guys, I know this is sudden. And it’s going to be dangerous. But you’re all experienced fighters and are used to the supernatural. Watch out for yourselves, watch out for each other, and we’ll all get home safe.”

Granger raised his hand, as though he were in a classroom rather than, you know, here.

“If there are nukes, we should probably protect ourselves from the radiation,” he said. “I have a modified cleaning spell for that. Who wants to learn it?”

Jaclyn did, very much so. She knew fire was her weakness, to a lesser degree, acid, and if she hadn’t been immune to it, poison would also have been an issue.

But radiation was also something that could easily wind up inflicting damage that was hard to heal, or interfere with her regeneration in general.

Granted, lingering radiation from a mundane detonation, especially one of the airburst variety, should be fine, but in an active warzone, with bombs still falling in the general vicinity? Defenses weren’t just important, they were vital.

***

The nuke had detonated barely half an hour ago, but the crater was already so filled with snow that you’d think it was just another feature of the landscape.

And at the center of said crater stood the Winter Queen, all sharp angles and harsh edges, bitterly cold radiating off her with such intensity that it seemed to blot out the sun in the sky, an inverse star that robbed the universe of its warmth rather than creating it, nay, it erased the very concept of ever getting warm again by its very presence.

Yet even though the monster seemed to have weathered the impact with staggeringly little damage, Fuller could tell that it wasn’t entirely one-hundred-percent.

The odd crack marred her previously glass-clear form, and there were some edges that looked slightly warped, as though they had briefly melted and then resolidified before the water could flow away.

More damage than they’d achieved thus far using anything else …  but it had taken a motherfuckign nuclear warhead to achieve that.      

But the nuke wasn’t finished just yet; it would continue to play an important role, thanks to his presence.

The entire world had turned a strange kind of greyscale to his eyes, all the color of the surroundings blooted out by the curtain of radiation that hung around him, glowing in a color he could neither describe nor even perceive in a way he could properly explain, but he could see that it was there.

And he could reach out to it.

And then, he could control it.

The world around him regained its color while a blazing nothingness appeared in his hand, and a flick of his wrist turned that into a burning ray of energy that tore clean through yet another minion as it was just pulling itself out of the snow.

Once more, power flowed into him, but it had both declined in actual and relative amount since … shit, had that really only been an hour ago?

Fuller glanced down at his watch, then stared at it a couple more seconds to make sure the hands were actually moving. They were.

One hour, he’d not only reached E-Rank but also gone a third of the way to D, and yet even with all that power, he was still deteriorating.

His insides felt hollow despite the energy burning at his core, and the warm empowerment of the system had slowly transformed into a more forceful kind of support, leaving him feeling like he was wearing one of those damn compression socks he was supposed to wear on airplanes nowadays, except this was a full-body variant that actively moved his limbs the way he wanted but couldn’t, not on his own, not anymore.

The Winter Queen glanced up, and Fuller shivered under her unseen gaze, the power he allowed to suffuse his body in response doing nothing to stave off the cold.

And then she turned away, as though dismissing him entirely, and marched off to … somewhere, more frozen, malformed, legionaries of ice pulling themselves from the ground behind her.

A small part of Fuller felt hurt at the fact that he’d been so soundly dismissed, but a far larger part knew that he had just been given the chance to level further.

“System, put however much of my growth towards Mind as is necessary to avoid unbalancing things, then put two-thirds of the rest to Body and whatever’s left to Magic.”

He’d be growing in power if he went after the minions, but just because he wasn’t fighting the big bad asshat of an anchor beast didn’t mean he wasn’t deteriorating.

Both hands held out in front of him, as though grasping an invisible bowling ball, Fuller began to draw in the radiation staining his surroundings.

In the distance, gunfire began to ring out, but he chose to ignore it, fully focusing on his own efforts, the sphere of destruction growing before him into a wildfire that would consume all in its path.

***

Well, that had just happened.

Just when he thought people couldn’t surprise him anymore, some crazy Yank turned himself into a walking fission pile. How very American …

Frye chuckled softly. It was almost as though someone had taken one look at Jaclyn, decided that having a prim and proper British constable outdo them in terms of insanity just wasn’t done, and decided to go ahead and make the situation as a whole go completely off the rails.

And it seemed like Washington was none too happy with one of their generals deciding to do something heroic but utterly outside the scope of his orders or responsibilities.

Some were preparing to turn him into a symbol, the glow-in-the-dark version of Captain America, others sharpening the knives to take the new folk hero down several pegs, painting him as a loose cannon careening across the battlefield … and the damn fight wasn’t even over yet.

Ah, politics. How would we ever make a mess of things without you?

And based on the information Frye had, there was a good chance Major General Fuller wouldn’t even be alive to defend himself.

Though the worst part of this whole affair was that he knew that if London hadn’t been destroyed, his own government would have been just as bad.

But getting himself worked up over that whole affair was entirely beyond the scope of what he’d sat down to handle.

No, Frye was here to analyze all these wonderful video feeds and that glorious information flowing across the ocean and into his mind, greedily vacuuming up every scrap of knowledge about both the monster and how the Americans dealt with it.

Perhaps he’d spot something worth passing on to Jaclyn, or the Yanks, or glean some insight that would help him with his own organization.

And if, God forbid, the relationship between their respective nations broke down so thoroughly as to end in conflict … well, the world sadly had damn sight more information on Britain’s supernatural fighting force than he did on anyone else’s. It was high time to change that.

***

The world around him might have been emptied of radiation, but it was still monochrome, nothing but white snow and blackened dead grass as far as the eye could see.

And, as per usual, the monsters had vanished entirely, vaporized into nothingness.

These ones had been … they’d been a lot. More than he could have taken on as he’d been just five minutes ago, even if he’d shifted the entirety of his enhancement towards his magic. Hell, even as he was right now, it would have been a hard fight … if it hadn’t been for the radiation that saturated his surroundings. Well, used to saturate. It was all gone now, fuel for his fight.

In the distance, gunfire rang out, light in volume, but each individual weapon was a hell of a lot heavier than anything normally used. Beyond even regular squad-support weapons. The kinds of machine guns that had to be mounted on vehicles or stand on tripods.

And unless Fuller was very much mistaken, he could hear the roar of an autocannon above the rest.

He crested the final hill and walked into a scene straight out of some post-apocalyptic action flick. The kind where the radiation or chemicals or whatever had mutated people so badly that they wound up developing superpowers.

Superheroes in the shittiest costumes of all time, since everyone was wearing the exact same outfit, dull-grey full-body NCBR suits that were supposed to offer at least some protection from the fallout of the earlier blast. And it did. Partially.

However, Fuller could see the energy seeping into them, slowly passing through the suits and into their bodies, though at least they were tougher than he had been when he’d slammed that goddamn demon core shut right in front of his face.

Hopefully, when all things were said and done, they’d still be in a fixable state.

And, of course, he couldn’t differentiate the combatants by anything other than their powers.

The one hip-firing the autocannon had to be Santos, his abilities as a kinetic mage allowing him to neatly control the recoil while also massively increasing the impact of the bullets, for all the good it was doing them. A few cracks radiated out from whatever point the bullets hit dead-on, but any shot that hit an angled surface went tumbling off into the distance, frozen solid and likely shattered.

And the woman desperately trying to keep away the cold with flames that died within seconds of manifestation was almost certainly Stevens.

But those were all the people he recognized, out of all the elementalists he’d seen grow into their power over the past few months.

Shit.

And as for the various marines running around with their absurdly heavy weapons, well, they were barely doing any damage, their powers ill-suited for this arena.

Not that he was much better, though in his case, it was a matter of lacking power, rather than not having suitable abilities. Even drawing in every drop of radiation in his surroundings would likely not bridge that gulf, but it wasn’t like that was going to stop him.

The Winter Queen suddenly jerked back, stumbling, metallic smears that glimmered faintly with radiation streaking across her torso, even more of it somehow having slid into the various cracks that had been inflicted upon her.

What the … depleted uranium.

It hadn’t done much direct damage, but Fuller came to a realization. He could fire the radiation he was collecting right at the monster, or he could pour it straight into the streaks of slightly radioactive material presently covering the monster and turn it straight into something that could just as easily have been part of an active fission reactor five seconds previous.

And for the very first time, something seemed to have served to hurt the beast. Metal inside her torso suddenly began to flare to life in a blast of heat and radiation, while entirely surrounded by ice and sealed in by the remains of the DU rounds that covered the surface. And when ice turned to vapor but had nowhere to go, well …

The entire front of the Winter Queen’s torso seemed to explode into a massive gout of steam and metal fragments but before Fuller could see the true extent of the damage he was swept up by an attack he felt more than saw, only truly becoming aware of what had happened when he came to a stop beneath God only knew how many meters of snow, likely only alive due to instinctively having poured on the physical reinforcement.

But that change was occurring with painfull slowness, him having ordered the system to shift half his energy into his body, but even as he lay there, the transfer was still happening. It was like trying to drink honey through a straw; it did not matter how strongly you sucked, in the end, the liquid was too thick to move at anything other than its own pace.

And overreaction and proof that he’d overdone things with the shifting by a mile.

Fuller began to let radiation leak out, mana becoming lethal rays that began to slo-o-owly melt the snow as to avoid boiling him alive.

A tremendous crash rang out from somewhere outside, far too close for comfort, but he decided to ignore it in favor of freeing himself. Whatever it was, it hadn’t landed on his head, and that was enough for him.

Icy water flowed over him, soaking into his clothing and chilling him to the bone even as the nuclear fire within him raged and the steely grasp of the system’s power manipulated the limbs he couldn’t, as though he were some bizarre marionette that had somehow managed to seize its own strings.

Until suddenly, he saw a flash of grey, as someone scraped away more of his snowy prison, only to go stumbling back, shock radiating from their body language. Then, a briefcase thudded into the snow at Fuller’s feet.

“Sir, that’s for you.”

It was the voice that finally let Fuller recognize the figure as being male, and as the man retreated, he put two and two together to realize that what he’d assumed to be tinnitus had actually been a Geiger Counter clipped onto the soldier’s belt.

And the source of the previous noise was likewise readily apparent: the wreckage of what had likely once been an A-10 Warthog strewn across the battlefield.

But it was the Winter Queen that drew in his eyes like a magnet, the figure’s front pitted and cracked, but it was painfully clear that all he’d managed to do was blow off a few milimeters’ worth of ice, and she was surrounded by a freshly summoned group of minions.

“System, put all my growth towards Magic,” Fuller growled as he bent over and picked up the briefcase.

Fuller opened it immediately and felt his heart start beating faster at what he could see within.

He could recognize the shielded lead container that had to contain an orb of weapon-grade plutonium, and the two hollow tungsten carbide half-spheres that would allow him to repeat the exact kind of stunt that had landed him in his current predicament.

But it was the vial of luminous green liquid that really drew his attention.

A potion. A freaking healing potion. They barely had any of these … and someone had managed to break one free for him.

Fuller didn’t even hesitate, he unscrewed the cap so quickly he half-expected it to start smoking, stuck the opening into his mouth, shotgunned the whole thing and immediately pulled up his status while the potion began to stitch up his insides.

Physical Status: Consequences of severe Irradiation (slowly deteriorating)

He waited for it to further improve as the elixir continued to stitch him up … but the status stayed the way it was.

Well, that sucked. He’d just consumed a sixth of the United States’ supply of healing potions, and all it had done was buy him a little more time.

Fuller set his mouth into a thin line as he grabbed the parts that made up the second demon core.

Why had this thing even been ready to go? It wasn’t as though using the first one had gotten them anywhere.

But just because he had no earthly idea why this object had found its way into his hands did not mean he didn’t also know exactly what to do with this second demon core.

Grab one of the half-spheres, dump the orb of plutonium that was no longer harming him despite then fact that he was holding it with his bare hands, slap the second piece of the hollow shell on top … only to drop the whole assembly almost immediately as it began to heat up to painful levels.

Once again, radiation didn’t bother him anymore. But the only shield he had against heat was raw toughness.

There was a loud hiss of steam as the core hit the snow-covered ground, briefly cooling only to then begin to visibly glow.

But Fuller had already forgotten about it, putting the device that would have killed just about anyone else in an instant out of his mind as he instead focused on all the energy streaming into the air, almost immediately blotting out all other colors and then blooming ever higher, surpassing anything he could have created himself by an order of magnitude, nor would be able to create for a good long while even if he lived long enough to try.

All that radiation rapidly began to wrap around him under his command, hanging there like a shroud, trapped by his mana and will as an invisible curtain of deadly light.

And then, Fuller opened fire, the first lance of energy taking a frost legionaire through the chest and vaporizing it so swiftly that its entire torso was blown open by the sudden explosion of steam.

But it seemed as though that would be the only free shot of the fight, as at least twenty monsters whirled on him at that, charging with unnatural swiftness.

Another throwing gesture, another hurled lance, another dead monster.

Why am I moving my hands to throw light? Fuller suddenly wondered, but only spent a couple of seconds trying to make that happen before he realized that this was the absolute worst time to be experimenting.

Instead, he pushed the radioactive shroud forward, the half-dozen monsters that charged straight through coming out the other end so radioactive they practically had to glow in the dark and presently melting, then getting vaporized entirely as he swept all the radiation streaming from the demon core at his feet, that had already melted itself halfway into the ground.

Seriously, why was that thing so powerful? Had the previous experiments with the first demon core already released so much energy, or was this variant loaded with something ridiculous, cooked up by the boys at R&D?

Wave after wave of energy washed out from him and obliterating the minions, every single foe he felled being one the people duelling the Winter Queen would not have to deal with.

But these things were far tougher than anything he’d had to face up until now, and they landed the occasional blow, a glancing strike from a disintegrating fist of ice that nevertheless struck like a goddamn truck.

None ever managed to badly hurt him individually, but pretty soon, he was feeling like a tenderized slab of beef, stumbling backwards, even the power of the system barely able to keep him standing.

And then, when Fuller brought his entire shroud down on top of a frost elemental that had gotten a little too close for comfort when a second one took advantage of the opening and hurled a lance of ice that, for once, did not melt against a wall of energy, instead managing to skewer him through the gut.

Shit, he wheezed as he went down on one knee, the burning pain of having been impaled clashing oddly with the freezing numbness that emanated out from the wound that would definitely wind up killing him.

He coughed wetly, feeling liquid splattering the front of his torso, and didn’t even have to look down to know the stains would be crimson.

But he wouldn’t meet his maker alone, no way in hell.

With a growl of fury and pain, he pulled himself back onto his feet and swept both arms forward, unleashing every scrap of mana and radiation under his control in a tsunami that vaporized a good three-quarters of the monsters that were currently bearing down on him.

And suddenly, the flood of radiation streaming from the demon core at his feet seemed to cut off, the world swimming back into focus, not hidden beneath a curtain of energy only he could see.

Yet at the same time, there was a loud crunch at his feet as the ice spear hit the ground in pieces and broke even as the pain wracking his body vanished.

“What the …” Fuller breathed, glancing down, seeing pink skin through the crimson hole in his battered and burned uniform.

It was only then that he noticed the blinking notification in the corner of his vision.

You have reached the 3rd Rank and acquired the ability to draw in your element to both recharge your mana reserves and heal yourself (to a point).

You cannot absorb anything you have created.

But before he could even begin to come to grips with what that meant, Fuller’s radio crackled again, barely functional after all the abuse he’d put it through, but the message still came through loud and clear. Another nuke, ten minutes from now, targeted at the monster’s current position, barely a hundred meters from where he was standing.

“System, when the nuke detonates, keep my Body as boosted as possible until the heat starts to die, then transfer the boost back to my magic while making sure I’m still tough enough to survive my surroundings. Can you do that?”

Yes

Sequence memorized and prepared.

Fuller sighed in relief. Even with what he’d been doing so far, the notion of being anywhere near a nuclear blast was still utterly terrifying.

But if he played his cards right, he might just be able to channel that energy.

As long as he survived the initial blast.

Fuller spun on his heels and ran, as quickly as his battered body would allow. Absorbing all that radiation had fixed him some, there was no denying that he’d put himself through more abuse in the last hour than in the two decades previous.

Then he stopped, scooped up the now-not-quite-as-hot demon core and leaped into a nearby snowdrift, feeling the powdery mess swirl up, and then fall back down into what felt like every single place he did not want it.

And all the while, his physical boost was ticking upwards, slowly growing to reach the amount he’d actually set it to be, the proverbial needle moving as though trapped in syrup.

How long did he have?

Fuller glanced down at his watch, but at some point, that thing had well and truly died.

Functionally indestructible military model, my ass.

So he lay there, starting to shiver from the cold, braced against the detonation he knew to be coming.

Until the world vanished in a blast of heat, noise, and gloriously lethal radioactive energy.

And Fuller realized he’d been too close. Way too fucking close. He could feel his eyes dry out in an instant and begin to burn, while whatever hairs the radiation poisoning hadn’t caused him to lose caught fire, and some distant part of him was dimly aware of the fact that his clothes were presently being reduced to ash.

But even as the heat and howling winds battered his body, the radiation poured into him like manna from heaven, fuelling his regeneration and more besides, and as the system began to shift its support of him from toughness to firepower, yet it never really affected him. All he “lost” was instantly replaced by the power of the nuclear goddamn warhead that had blown a couple of hundred meters from him.

So when he rose to his feet, he felt like he was twenty again, and if he’d had a mirror to hand, he was fairly certain his eyes would have been glowing.

All around the Winter Queen, the earth crackled and popped as her cold warred with the heat that steamed off the ground, briefly distracted and completely open.

The monster was still far from dead, but had nevertheless severely deteriorated, many more sharp edges melted off, pristine body shot through with jagged white lines.

A ray of energy as thick as his arm slammed into the monster’s side, half made up of his own power, half fueled by the lethal rays bathing their surroundings.

The Queen went sprawling, but even as she fell, a lance of ice went flying back at him. It splashed into his face as near-boiling water, having melted in-flight, but the sheer amount of “ambient” energy he’d had to drag into the path of the projectile boggled the imagination, and the mana that action had devoured was equally horrifying.

Fuller blanched. Even channeling the recent nuclear blast, it seemed that duelling the monster on even ground was not in the cards.

Another spear rocketed at him, but this time, he used the trick of generating a shockwave to hurl himself out of the path of the attack, then began drawing in as much energy as he possibly could as he ran for it.

In an instant, his core was full to bursting, and every injury save the gnawing hollowness within had been healed. And the radiation that continued to stream towards him instead accumulated around him as yet another shroud, a curtain of light that would have reduced the old him to a quivering mass of tumors in a matter of seconds … until he felt ready.

Fuller spun and unleashed every drop of energy he held within himself, then poured everything around him into the monstrous ray as it left his hand, a bolt of incandescent power that set the very air alight as it leaped across the battlefield, slammed into the monster’s leg, and punched clean through.

His foot hit a rock he’d missed due to looking at the monster, and he tripped, rolling across the ground until he came to a rest, looking backwards, staring at the now one-legged anchor beast that was somehow glaring at him even without eyes.

The monster pushed itself back into a crouching position with one hand, air around its other, raised hand coalescing into something somehow even colder than normal, to the point where the previously gasseous components of the atmosphere began to drip down as liquid.

Uh-oh.

Somewhere overhead, a plane engine roared.

And then, as though realizing that there were likely reinforcements coming, it whirled around and began to scramble away, moving on three legs like some kind of fucked up spider.

For the briefest of moments, Fuller considered trying to hunt it down, but just like his opponent, he realized there was a hard limit to his abilities, and he’d reached it. Someone else could kill that thing.

He … he’d crawl behind that hill over there, and just close his eyes for a couple of hours.

That’s when the Marine fell out of the sky and sucker punched the Winter Queen hard enough to leave a crater. And then began to pound on the anchor beast as though he were Rocky Balboa beating up a slab of beef in the freezer.

Fuller continued to slowly retreat until he finally collapsed behind the pile of dirt, utterly spent.

He gave one final glance at his status and winced when he caught sight of its description of his current state.

Physical Status: Stabilized (see more?)

And looking at the expanded view made him grimace.

Your physical condition has stabilized through extensive absorption of your chosen element; however, due to the extent of the damage and the nature of the stabilization being “absorption of the substance/energy that caused the damage,” a fundamental shift has occurred.

Your physical condition will no longer deteriorate; however, it also will not significantly improve unless a being of significantly more power (min B-Rank with a healing inclination) intervenes, or you yourself reach A-Rank and use the power gained at that point (Elemental Reactor) to rebuild yourself properly.

A damning proclamation. But a darn sight better than he’d had any right to expect.