Jaheed
"Well this is a fine mess."
Jaheed, Ket Sal, and Ammit were standing amidst what could indeed be described as a fine mess; what had once been a rather stately office space and now looked as though a hurricane had swept through it. Broken bodies and chunks of misshapen gore were scattered wildly about smashed desks and overturned cabinets and a blood-streaked potted plant that had, somehow, remained largely undisturbed.
Jaheed had been working with Sekhmet for four years now, and he knew her handiwork to be almost preternaturally clean. Ammit, he saw, favored a rather blunt approach.
"Yeah, this'll probably complicate things," Ket Sal mused, unfazed – clearly he was already well-acquainted with Ammit's particular brand of utter destruction. "Or make 'em simpler, honestly. Fewer pieces on the board now."
"We should talk to Count Geraeva," Jaheed declared, turning on his heel. His mind was picking at the problem, trying to fit the pieces together in proper fashion, and he knew well the Scion was doing the same. "Get ahead of this thing, before he hears and gets the wrong idea."
"Sounds like a plan to me," Ket Sal. "Face-to-face?"
"More fun that way," Jaheed agreed. And then, to Ammit, because it seemed the polite thing to do after such a terrifying display of violence: "Merci, guerrier." The Se-dai blinked, looked mildly surprised.
"De rien," she said, after a moment, and inclined her head.
"That actually sounded halfway decent," Ket Sal remarked, glancing over Ammit's shoulder. "You been practicing?"
"I pick up bits here and there," Jaheed shrugged with faux-modesty. "Sekhmet teaches Kore, Kore teaches me. Secondhand is really not the ideal way to learn a dead language, but-" he shrugged again, "I do what I can."
There was a tiny little sound at the edge of his senses – a marginal shifting of rubble – and Jaheed was pitched off his feet at once as Ammit shot past, an eight-hundred-pound hunk of metal moving at the speed of a las-bolt and bringing in her wake a powerful gust of wind that knocked the cigarette right from Ket Sal's mouth. Before either could even process what was happening, the Se-dai simply raised her boot-heel and stomped down on the head of the lone survivor. A chunk of bone impacted against Jaheed's shoe and that was that.
"Ew," Ket Sal noted, flicking off a piece of brain matter. "Nice catch, though."
There was an odd moment, then, where the trio just stared at the headless corpse of a man who had already been all but dead – and then, without a word, they turned around and made right for the Gorger. The dead man had killed any banter or conversation, and besides: there was work to be done. And so they started down-
Jaheed came to a complete halt.
There, through the window, he stared as though in a dream. He watched as the sun lazily crested the horizon, painting the sea in a gentle panoply of distorted blue and purple. Saw the rippling deformation of the air around it, saw the sky above as a gradient from umber to black. Watched as night was peeled away, obliterated inch by bloody inch. And though he could not possibly explain it, what seized Jaheed then was a stark and sudden malaise.
"Hey," he said, quietly. Both Ket Sal and Ammit were observing him now with puzzled expressions. "Something's wrong."
Ket Sal arched an eyebrow. "Broadly? Specifically?"
"I don't know," Jaheed's hand darted to the comm-unit on his ear. "I just-" He keyed Kore's number, got static in response. Keyed in again. Static. Tried the Gorger, got more static. His head snapped up, his eyes locked onto Ket Sal's, and the Scion understood at once.
"We're in a blackout," Jaheed declared – and then the three of them were racing down the hall.
"Motherfucker," Ket Sal swore, no doubt running up against the same barriers in his occipital HUD. "We're in a bag, alright. What the hell is this about?"
"An ambush, a trap, I don't know," Jaheed shook his head. "But we need to find Kore now. She's still down there."
"She has Sekhmet-"
"No. I don't like this." Jaheed shook his head even more violently than before. Every one of his instincts was screaming danger, and he would be a fool to ignore their cries. "Whatever this is, they had weeks to do it. Why'd they wait 'till the exact moment Kore and Sekhmet were alone?"
"You're looking at it the wrong way," Ket Sal told him, as the three of them stormed up the Gorger's waiting ramp. "We're the ones with only one Se-dai. We need to-"
And then, from the viewport, they saw it. A plume of black smoke, rising like a terrible pillar in the distance.
"Shit," Ket Sal said, simply. Jaheed was already shouting orders for takeoff.
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Kore
Kore was in a remarkably good mood.
Nearly two weeks they had spent on Madriu, and in two week's time they'd made a great deal of progress – or so Jaheed had told her, anyway. Though Kore kept herself appraised on the macro of what her liege was doing, she was perfectly at home letting the micro fade into the background. Her work required focus, after all. It was best not to get distracted. At any rate; with two weeks of good progress in the bag Jaheed had deigned to grant her and Sekhmet the day off. And so at this very moment the two of them were sitting at a humble little cafe, watching the sun crest the horizon with steaming drinks in hand.
Arvoza was a busy, bustling city, one of towering skyscrapers packed together and disgorging thousands of busy office-workers onto the streets below. That's all it was, really. Just endless offices upon offices, each stacked upon one another until they were scraping at the edge of the atmosphere itself. Some might have found it exhausting. Kore quite liked it, herself – liked the feeling of disappearing into a crowd, into irrelevance. It was easy to go unnoticed in a place like this.
And, of course, that was a major part of why Sekhmet was allowed to be sitting here in public, albeit with sunglasses to mask her silver eyes. In truth, she looked fairly unassuming – just a slim, somewhat short-statured woman with messy hair. And a sword. The sword had, admittedly, attracted more than a few stares.
"This coffee sucks," Sekhmet whined, apropos of nothing. And to punctuate that particular statement she downed an entire mug of boiling-hot drink in a single gulp.
"I think it's alright," Kore sipped at her own, too content to be sympathetic.
"Of course you do," Sekhmet rolled her eyes. "You have no taste."
"And you do?" Kore arched an eyebrow.
"I ate nothing but Se-dai slop for years. My palette is unbiased."
"You are the most biased woman I've ever known," Kore chuckled, folding her arms. "I cannot believe I'm hearing this from you."
"I'm practically a gourmand," Sekhmet declared haughtily, to which Kore's eyebrows raised high enough to bump against the ceiling.
"How the fuck do you even know that word?" she asked, genuinely.
"I'm not a meathead like you, Kore." Sekhmet smirked, rising to her feet and giving the bodyguard a condescending pat on the shoulder. "I'm an intellectual. I have a curiosity, a hunger for the world around me. A voracious appetite for knowledge."
"You are so full of shit."
Sekhmet broke into a grin, hitched a thumb over her shoulder. "I'm gonna go check out that store across the street. You wanna come?"
"I barely even started my drink," Kore complained, lifting her cup as proof of concept. "Go on, I'll just chill here for a bit. Incurious and meatheaded all the while, thank you very much."
"Aw," Sekhmet leaned over, kissed her on the forehead. "I like meatheads."
"You've said the word 'meathead' too many times. Now it just sounds weird," Kore waved her off, took another sip. "Go check out your shop already. You're bothering the customers."
"You're chasing me away?"
"I'm just enjoying my drink," Kore said smugly, leaning back in her seat. "I don't even know you."
After a bit more banter, Sekhmet did indeed depart the cafe, and thus Kore was alone, and within her there was a deep and overriding sense of contentment. Contentment that was tainted, at once, by the sudden realization that she had not felt this way in four long years.
Four years. Four years she had been Jaheed's shadow, his shield, his fist. The embodiment and executor of his will. She knew that all the crew, even Sekhmet, saw the pair of them as merely extensions of one another. Never one without the other. They were a team, a dyad. And they were spectacularly effective. And yet...why was it that this was the first time in four years that Kore had felt so at-ease?
The malaise was like a pit in her stomach, now. She set her cup aside, dusted herself off, turned to find a waiter – and instead found herself staring into Jiang Tsen's brown eyes.
The world ground to a halt. Time froze. The universe went on pause, gracefully allowing Kore the time she needed to fully comprehend who and what she was seeing.
He looked much the same as she remembered, impossibly. Long black hair. Longer brown trenchcoat. Unshaven stubble, a wolf's white-toothed grin. That dangerous, hungry little gleam in the corner of his left eye. Right now, Kore was staring her past right in the face.
She didn't like what she saw. Not one bit.
"Kore," Tsen smiled, extending a hand. His voice was as gravely and hoarse as ever. "It's good to see you."
Kore's response, then, was to unholster her pistol and level it against his forehead. No hesitation, no indecision. Just one smooth motion. Hand to gun, gun to head. She had done it a thousand times before and she would do it this time, too, because her life had changed and Tsen was no longer...
He was no longer Tsen at all. He was just another threat. Another target. And another victim, no doubt. How many had she killed by now? She had long ago lost track. It didn't matter. He would be another nameless tally to a ledger without end. Once she squeezed the trigger, she would be forever rid of him, and then she could return to her happy life with her best friend and the woman she loved.
Here, then, was the odd thing – she didn't pull that trigger. In fact, she didn't even move a muscle. And all around the patrons of the cafe were frozen in similar fashion, all terrified and unmoving, all having come to the simultaneous conclusion that the best chance of survival was to simply remain unnoticed. All, that is, save for six men in dark trench coats, all staring at Kore with hard eyes and bad intentions. She recognized two of them from her days on Callisto.
"Step away," Kore ordered, keeping her words clipped and tight. Betraying nothing of the terror in her heart. "Turn around. Forget you ever saw me. That's what you're gonna do."
"You look well," Tsen offered, his own voice still entirely even and professional. The hands of his men were drifting, slowly but inevitably, into their coats. It took little imagination to conceive of what might be reaching for.
"You got five seconds," Kore threatened, tightening her grip on the pistol. She had to stall, had to pray that Sekhmet would notice. Sekhmet, who always came to save her. Sekhmet, with whom Kore would always be safe. She had to come. She had to come she had to come she had to come–she would come! Kore knew it like she knew the sun and the moon and all the stars in the sky. Sekhmet was coming. All she had to do was wait.
"Before...?" Tsen trailed off, unfazed by the half-hearted threat.
"What do you think?" Kore demanded. And then: "You have no idea who you're dealing with."
"I know exactly who I'm dealing with," Tsen told her calmly. "You and I go way back, after all."
"I work for a powerful man," Kore insisted, tightening her grip even further. A bead of sweat ran down the side of her face. "A dangerous, powerful man."
"That's right," Tsen agreed, his smile growing by incremental degrees. "You serve the Jade Wolf. And I serve the Crimson Emir."
A shadow fell over her, heavy and looming and smothering all hope. Kore gulped, swallowed. For the first time in her entire life, her hand was unsteady. Every layer of stern, stoic armor she had wreathed herself in fell away, like nothing, and she stood now naked and exposed and terribly afraid. There was no job, no chief of security. There was only Kore, a woman born with no parents and no last name.
"What do you want with me?" she asked, finally. Her voice wavered, threatened to break.
"Well, that's a complicated answer," Tsen admitted. "But in the short term, I'd like it if you came with me. Do you mind? We got a truck waiting out front."
"I'm not-I'm not going anywhere with you," Kore insisted, trying with every ounce of strength and willpower in her body to squeeze that trigger and liquefy this godawful bastard's miserable fucking brain. She couldn't do it, of course. It was simply outside the realm of possibility.
"Yes, you are," Tsen told her, a little sadly. "One way or another." And then, because she had been too panicked to notice, the men of Heraldry were upon her.
They had vapulators, crackling batons designed to deliver a paralytic – and agonizingly painful – shock. Kore had a disruptor pistol, a melt-blade, and most importantly four years of finely-honed instinct. It was those same instincts that took over, then, overriding all her fear and hesitation and replacing them with a clear understanding of how to kill.
Five came at her simultaneously. Kore pivoted, shot one right in the face, then immediately hollered and dropped to a knee as a vapulator made contact with her elbow. The gun clattered to the ground and was promptly kicked away; four men stood over her now with vapulators sparking madly. Kore's entire arm was wreathed in searing pain that spread from her fingertips to her collarbone and choked her lungs in a thorn-studded grip. She was panting like a dog, hair falling over her face and teeth grit hard. Yet still, the terror was gone. Only the fight remained. Her fingers wrapped tight around the grip of her melt-knife, her old and ever-trustworthy companion, as Tsen said from above: "Nobody wants to hurt you, Kore."
A hand touched her shoulder – and with a snarl, Kore was in motion, her blade darting in and out and one man fell back, a trio of holes in his chest, while another screamed with a jaw melted clean off. Kore grabbed a third, stitched a quartet of holes into his stomach, turned, ducked a punch, took another to the face, blocked a third, twisted, snapped the wrist, put the melt-blade against his throat and pulled. Then came blinding stab of pain, right at the base of her spine – but Kore just whirled around with a furious bellow and clashed weapons with the attacker for six seconds before raking his thigh, bringing him to his knees, and jamming the blade into the side of his neck.
She turned, let the body drop, and saw now perhaps a dozen more Heraldry men – or the Emir's men, perhaps – advancing with just as many vapulators. And Tsen among them of course, smiling all the while even as civilians screamed and raced by.
Kore just flipped her knife to a backwards grip and for the violence to resume.
She didn't have to wait long.
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Sekhmet
Sekhmet, meanwhile, was actually enjoying herself.
She had been perusing all manner of curiosities and antiques when her enhanced Se-dai senses had alerted her to a number of discrepancies. Fluctuations in heat, distortions in the air, the light from the window not quite bending the way it should. And so, with not a moment's hesitation, she had reached out and grabbed the invisible Mondat by the throat, lifting the man high off his feet and watching with some satisfaction as the cloak peeled away to reveal a jet-black bodysuit and cyclopean red eye.
"Finally," Sekhmet declared, crushing his windpipe with a twitch of her fingers. "Some entertainment." And then three of their number had descended upon her, their 'skin' a glitchy and jittering multicolored distortion that Sekhmet's artificial eyes automatically filtered out. The rogue Se-dai just grinned, reached down, and unsheathed her ker-sot.
For a full blistering minute they had fought, mithril katana clashing against three glowing phase-blades. Sekhmet was faster than any of them by a country mile, but the Mondatti were no fools and never attacking one at a time. Instead, they pressured her from three simultaneous angles, each one always darting and reaching for the smallest of openings. The Se-dai, meanwhile, was a blur, twisting and flipping and passing the sword from one hand to another as she fended off what should have been an ineluctable assault. This was where she loved to be, above all else – dancing at the razor's edge of life and death, pushing her prodigious skill to the absolute limit. Faster. Faster. Faster.
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And then her enhanced senses picked out one singular sound from amidst all the screams, the clamor, the jolting hums that rang out every time mithril met phase-blade. She heard Kore's voice, a harsh and pained whisper, calling out her name. Calling out for help.
Sekhmet's girlfriend was in trouble.
This was no longer fun.
Sekhmet decided to go even faster.
She severed the first Mondat's arm at the elbow, then removed his head before he could even register the pain. Upon the second, she unleashed a flurry of fifty-seven rapid stabs, seven of which broke through his guard and pierced every vital organ.The third tried to come at her from behind and she merely ducked, grabbed his phase-blade barehanded, and yanked him in for a headbutt that blew a pink spray of brains out the back of his skull. All told, this sequence of events occurred in the span of four seconds.
Sekhmet was gone before the last body had even hit the floor.
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Kore
Kore had passed SUPERKOMMANDO rating two years ago, which meant she could easily qualify as one of the Emperor's Liquidators. Then, she had gone even farther and passed SUPERKOMMANDO-II, which put her on the level of an elite Praetorian. The best of the best, barring the augmented implants that made them so. She was, in short, a truly terrifying close-range opponent who could take a staggering amount of punishment and continue fighting.
Yet even still, there were limits. Kore, mobbed now by a dozen different opponents, had been beaten and shock-prodded too many times to count. Her leg was broken. Her nose was broken. Five ribs were broken. Three of her teeth were gone. Her muscles had seized from repeated shock-prodding and every movement was agony. Every breath, too, was torture beyond belief, for one of her lungs had been punctured by a fragmented rib. Her thoughts were marred by a fractured skull. Blood ran down in rivers from her torn scalp, blinding her. Worst of all, someone had managed to snatch away her knife.
Nevertheless, she fought hard. She broke and bashed and bruised and smashed anyone or anything that dared to come near. Even now she was catching a punch, snapping a wrist, chopping a throat, shattering a kneecap. And then, finally, one of Tsen's men lost his patience. He keyed the vapulator to maximum voltage and jammed it against Kore's chest and held it there, watching her writhe and convulse and waiting patiently for her to collapse, uncaring at this point as to whether or not it would stop her heart.
Instead, impossibly, she raised her arm. And slowly, agonizingly, she fought through the pain, her teeth grit so tight they might well have shattered as she lurched forward and snatched the vapulator right from the man's hands.
Everyone took a step back. Everyone, even Tsen, all in reverence and fear of this truly superhuman feat. And Kore, snarling like a rabid dog, made it one step forward before every muscle seized up and she collapsed, twitching, to the floor, entirely conscious but entirely unable to move.
"Sekhmet," she gasped, as she fell. A final plea for help, and that was that.
Tsen let out a low whistle, after a moment. "Load her up," he ordered, and two men moved to do just that. All the while the leader of Heraldry was glancing around, hand resting upon his holstered las-pistol. Always keen, always sharp, always watching. The truck was still idling, the doors open and the men inside gesturing for the others to hurry. And they had dragged her perhaps ninety-percent of the way there before Tsen caught a glimpse of something.
"Down!" he bellowed, dropping flat in an instant. Some listened in time. Some did not. There was a shattering of glass, a blur of motion – and then three of his men were dead, every one of them bisected neatly at the waist, and skidding to a halt between Heraldry and Kore was a women with blazing eyes and a jet-black katana in her hand.
"DON'T TOUCH HER," the woman snarled, with a mouth trailing steam, in a voice that could not possibly be human.
"Ah," Tsen remarked calmly, from behind a countertop. He reached down and keyed his commlink. "The Se-dai's here. Kill her."
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Sekhmet
Sekhmet heard them immediately – five hovertrucks roaring up the street, no doubt carrying all manner of men and weaponry with which to rip her lover away. A time crunch, then. That was no problem. Sekhmet moved fast.
She didn't bother to calculate any sort of approach or plan of attack – she just leapt forward, with the weapon she was born to wield, and started killing. The men of Heraldry opened fire which was pointless, really, as Sekhmet weaved through the beams with ease and began to dissect the wielders in turn. Ordinarily, Sekhmet was an artist with a sword, one who could be obsessively strict when it came to ensuring the perfect cut. Today, her girlfriend was quite possibly dying and Sekhmet had not been there for her and so the itinerant Se-dai was just slaughtering as fast and efficiently as possible, her movement almost frantic as she cleft one man from stem to stern and beheaded another and disemboweled a third and leapt up, bounded off a wall, twirled in the air and rent five more to bloodied chunks like a literal tornado of death.
When the first las-cannon boomed, she leapt impossibly fast to the side, evading it entirely. When the second sounded she twisted in mid-air, dodging by a fraction of an inch. But the third and fourth ones caught her dead-on and sent her flying back, smashing a table to smithereens beneath her eight-hundred-pound bulk.
A dozen alarms were wailing inside her head. Ammit, of course, had taken a las-cannon head on; Ammit had also been outfitted in proper ablative armor. Sekhmet had only her mithril carapace to protect her and already the integrity of that skin-deep shell was compromised, the heat seeping in and forcing her systems to try and rapidly self-cool.
Sekhmet, however, didn't give even a fraction of a fuck about any of that. She just flipped her sword to a back-handed grip and dropped low, preparing to shoot forwards and resume killing once more.
From thin air, twenty Mondatti appeared.
Sekhmet just roared and met them head-on, killing two in a split second before she felt the heat of a dozen different blades puncturing her body. Still she remained a blistering dynamo, impossibly fast and impossible to pin down as she switched from slaughtering Heraldry to slaughtering Mondatti. All the while her eyes were actively filtering out the dazzle-patterns, and all the while her systems were working overtime to cool her overheated body. This was how the Mondat killed Se-dai – countless incremental advantages, all adding up and all wearing the Blessed Executioners down bit by bit.
Then, from between two assassins, Sekhmet caught a glimpse of Kore being hauled into the truck – and all else was forgotten as she burst through the horde of Mondatti, obliterating the one unfortunate enough to be in her path as she raced forward to stop that fucking truck!
And that, of course, was exactly what the Mondatti anticipated.
On her back, unbeknownst to the rogue Se-dai, there had been planted a minuscule targeting bolt. Her systems had logged the intrusion, of course. But that notification had vanished beneath an ocean of alerts and thus gone entirely unnoticed. Incremental advantages, indeed.
Eight repeater turrets were waiting at the edges of the cafe, set up on crab-like legs with semisapient computers slaved to the targeting bolt's position. With that constantly-updating data, each turret ran multiple projections – not where Sekhmet was, but where Sekhmet was going to be. Probability-matrixes spelled it all out, and between the eight of them they could cover every possible angle with ease.
Sekhmet skidded to a halt, glanced around, and understood what was about to happen.
The turrets opened fire.
Sekhmet ducked, on instinct, and then was knocked clean off her feet by a deafening salvo of crimson las-fire that filled the room like a bloody miasma, firing again and again and again and perfectly tracking her position all the while, even through the haze of dust and black smoke that was beginning to blanket the area. Handheld las-cannons boomed, too, followed by a half-dozen JAGGANOTH incendiary missiles that squealed through the air and bathed the cafe in iridescent flame. They shot her again and again until finally she stopped moving, and finally one of the Mondat gave a curt hand-signal. At once, every turret fell silent.
"You've got it from here," Tsen told them, and then he – and the truck, with Kore in it – were off.
The Mondatti were a loose semi-circle now, the twelve of them stalking in slow and careful. Shredder-discs and phase-blades were at the ready. Each could see Sekhmet's tracker bolt in their HUD, clear as day. The itinerant Se-dai was not moving.
The smoke cleared; what they saw, then, was little more than a wreck of a Se-dai. Sekhmet was laying against the wall as though resting after a hard day's work, her sword embedded a foot into the drywall beside her. Her left arm was blown clean off, the stump dangling tubes, wiring, and a thin strip of meat. Worse, her entire right-side torso was simply gone, exposing the curved, teal-colored teeth that were ostensibly her ribs. Myriad boxy machinery blinked and beeped amidst a throbbing, bulbous mess of purple-grey flesh, some analogous to human organs and some just entirely abstract. Her other arm was broken, bent backwards at a forty-five degree angle. And her face...
The right half of it had been burned off, the skin stripped away to reveal a grinning mithril skull and a hollow socket wherein her eye had once resided. Her jaw was nearly severed, her mouth gaping open to reveal only more strange teal circuitry. And her remaining eye – her remaining eye had gone entirely dark, and was oozing aquamarine fluid.
Slowly, the Mondatti closed in.
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Two options: emergency shutdown, or death.
That's what Sekhmet was presented with. A giant warning in flashing red letters, DÉGÂTS CRITIQUES, over and over again, because she had truly reached her limit. Her entire body was but a hair's breadth from collapse. The only thing to do, then, was to pass into a state of suspended hibernation and pray for outside intervention. Sekhmet had done all she could, after all. She had done so remarkably well. It was time now to rest.
She had done all she could.
These thoughts flickered through her mind for just a fraction of a second before, of course, she dismissed every single one of those damned insistent warnings. Silenced every one of those damned obnoxious alarms. And rose, slowly, to her feet, and felt that weary and battered old engine rouse itself to churn once more. One last time, perhaps.
Sekhmet reached back – with truly enormous effort, as her entire body was all but nonfunctional – and yanked her sword from the wall. And even with a half-severed jaw she managed to bite down hard, clenching the sword between her teeth because she knew she could no longer trust her grip.
She dropped to a crouch, as she had ten thousand times before, and made ready to bring Kore back.
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As the mutilated cyborg rose to her feet, grabbed the sword, and clenched it between her teeth, one of the notoriously silent Mondat actually blurted out, "There's no fucking way."
And then she was high above him, and then she was descending like a terrible angel of death – or perhaps moreso a feral animal as she grabbed the lead Mondat by the skull and buried him nearly a full foot beneath the floor. And then everyone moved at once – and Sekhmet was killing with her broken arm, with the sword in her teeth, and with her legs. She kicked one more Mondat to death with a spinning roundhouse and then the turrets began to heat up and Sekhmet was gone, smashing through the wall and tearing off onto the street before the weapons could even begin to fire.
It must have been a terrible sight, for the men in those trucks – a half-skeletal Se-dai with a sword in her mouth, galloping after them like a three-legged wild animal. And gaining on them, incredibly, even as the hovertruck pedals went straight to the floor. She dodged and darted and weaved through traffic, then leapt up, landing solidly upon one car roof and hopping, now, from vehicle to vehicle. Her eye was a blazing silver sun, alight with nought but one singleminded purpose: Save Kore.
One of the hovertrucks swerved, trying to clip her and send her flying – but the Se-dai leapt nearly twenty feet into the air, then dropped and grabbed at the truck as it sped away, her fingers digging long furrows into the aluminum. Her grip held. She lifted herself, stood on two feet, braced back – and then kicked off with all her strength and collided against the back of the lead truck like a human missile.
Sekhmet scrabbled to the top of the vehicle even as panicked las-fire streaked by. A las-bolt smacked against the side of her exposed skull, to which she gave no reaction. She just bent down, dug her fingers into the metal, and with a snarl of exertion she tore the roof right off the car. Six heads turned to goggle up at her – seven, counting a battered and semi-unconscious Kore. Five of them were strangers. One of them she was certain, by Kore's description, could only be Jiang Tsen. The bastard himself.
"GIVE HER BACK!" the Se-dai roared, the words blaring out from a broken voicebox and a mouth that did not move.
"I'd rather not," Tsen frowned – and then a fat-barreled slug launcher boomed in his hand, blowing Sekhmet clean off her feet and sending her skipping like a stone across the asphalt. "Stall her," Tsen ordered, over the comm, and the other four trucks peeled back to do just that.
They encircled Sekhmet like vultures as the Se-dai struggled to rise. By this point most of her systems had shut down or outright failed, and now she truly was but a skeleton of an indomitable Se-dai. The mere act of standing upright proved too much and so she knelt, her one remaining flicking sluggishly from one target to another as Mondat and Heraldry alike disembarked to surround her. There were a lot of them. Far too many, she knew.
But Kore was in danger, and Sekhmet loved her more than anything, and so there was no question as to whether or not she would keep fighting. Sekhmet called upon the last vestiges of her strength – shattered her mental shackles – and dropped for one final time to a low crouch, sword gripped tight in her broken hand. The old engine churned to a halt. The heat within her compressed down to a pinprick of light. She stood as still and silent as a statue as she prepared to unleash The Seventh Vile Art: The Art of Instantaneous Death. It was a straight shot, from here to the truck. She could make it. She knew she could make it.
The Art of Instantaneous Death is, amongst the three Vile Arts still known in the modern era, by far the most difficult to execute properly. It requires perfect conditions, both of body and of mind. Total focus. Total control. The pinnacle of precision and technique.
The engine churned, just once. The pinprick became a supernova. Every muscle fired. And Sekhmet's legs, unable to withstand the sudden surge of power, simply blew apart into chunks of mithril and flesh.
Sekhmet sunk like a stone, the back of her head denting a truck as she fell.
She was done.
Yet still, she remained just barely conscious as Tsen's people closed in around her. Still, there were enough neurons firing in her dying brain to understand that she had failed. Kore was gone. She hadn't been strong, or smart, or fast, or brave, or careful enough to save her – and that made sense, because she was a coward. A disappointment. A failure, who ran for her life because she was too weak to do what every one of her cousins did every single day. Anansi was right about her, in the end. They were all right about her.
Kore had been wrong, and now Kore was going to die, and that was all Sekhmet's fault. She knew this for a certainty as the kidnappers closed in and, above, a tiny black speck streaked across the sky.
Tsen saw it too, in his rearview mirror. Saw, as well, an even smaller speck separate and drop from the first.
"Trouble incoming," he said, into his comm-unit. "Buy me as much time as you can."
Sekhmet continued to stave off the emergency shutdown, forcing herself to remain awake and aware as a las-cannon was pressed against her temple. She deserved this, she knew. She deserved to die and so she had to punish herself, had to make certain that she saw death, when it came.
And then, above, the second speck became a black-and-gold missile, and her Mondat executioner turned his head – and then the missile struck, and everything was dust and smoke and debris and shouts and a shockwave that pitched both Sekhmet and the truck clean into the air, whereupon both were set quite violently back upon the ground.
Slowly, the dust cleared, and then there she was – Ammit, a titan in full regalia, standing at the base of a massive crater and placing herself firmly between Sekhmet and her assailants. An indomitable, implacable sentinel, shielding the dying Se-dai from harm. She held her ker-sot, a hammer that weighed nearly a thousand pounds, in but a single hand – as though it were weightless.
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then, Ammit – who never, ever spoke or broke decorum during battle – did just that.
"That's my sister," she told them. And then, in an instant, she was leaping forward with hammer cocked behind her head.
Five heraldry men were all but atomized by a titanic blow that split the asphalt like an overripe blister, sending chunks of pavement flying in every direction and burying all present beneath a shower of ash and dirt. And then everyone, everyone was firing at the hulking Se-dai with everything they had because it was simply do that or die a certain death. Ammit didn't even bother to evade. She just waded through the hail of gunfire and slaughtered everything that moved, smashing one assailant after another to bloody bits until, from above, a red-tipped JAGGANOTH missile streaked down and bathed the entire intersection in a billowing green inferno.
Any hopes that the fire might have forestalled Ammit's advance were shattered at once by the sound stomping footsteps as the Se-dai emerged, like a specter, wreathed in emerald flame and utterly unfazed.
They were desperate now. One of the trucks came roaring up, headlights blazing, intended to just pin the Se-dai against the nearest building. Most Se-dai would have simply dodged. Ammit, instead, planted her feet and spread her arms and caught the truck head-on, her heels digging deeper and deeper into the asphalt as she struggled with all her terrible might against an engine that sputtered and roared in protest. Then, she adjusted her grip – fingers on the bottom, thumbs on top – and heaved straight up.
For a moment the truck stood bipedal. Then, Ammit stepped forward and punched, crumpling the vehicle like a tin can and sending it clean through the nearest building. The resulting shockwave blew every non-augmented off their feet and pitched the entirety of the broken asphalt back into the air once more.
The rest of the attackers, then, were turned to bloody paste in short order. And so Ammit was kneeling by Sekhmet's side as, behind her, the Cloud Gorger was setting down right in the middle of the intersection. It was Jaheed who came down the ramp first, unarmed, followed closely by Tarsus and Diesch with pump-shotguns in hand. All three of them froze in their tracks when they saw what was left of their cyborg crewmate.
"Six-five-seven-four-four-nine-oh-two..." Sekhmet ground out, as all came to surround her. Her words were little more than mechanical grinding that clicking that vaguely resembled human speech. She could only pray that they would understand it to be the tag number of the escaping vehicle – a vehicle that she could not possibly explain was currently escaping. She was powerless, in that moment, wanting nothing more than to sit straight up and scream save her! Instead, a blinking notification told her that only thirty seconds remained until shutdown. No emergency override, for Sekhmet had passed up on that chance and paid the price accordingly. This, instead, was a total system failure. This was death.
"Fuck," Diesch said, eyes horrified and wide. Beside him, Tarsus had a hand over his mouth. "No, no, no."
"Sekhmet, hey, Sekhmet," Jaheed was speaking rapidly. When had he knelt beside her? She hadn't even noticed. There were gaps in her memory. Holes in her vision. Everything was falling apart. "Is Kore okay? Is she somewhere nearby? Sekhmet, talk to me. Sekhmet!"
"Got...her..." Sekhmet managed, with truly herculean effort. Ten seconds remaining. "Jiang...Tsen..."
"Who?" Jaheed demanded. "Sekhmet! Hey!"
"Can't...sta...y...aw..ake..." Sekhmet muttered. It was all fading away. "I'm...s...orry...Ko...re...I'm...sor..."
Her one remaining eye went black. Then dull. And then, finally, translucent and dead. Just a piece of plastic now, sitting in a skull-shaped cradle of mithril. A weapon that had been powered off, and nothing more.
"No-" Diesch choked out. Jaheed just stared in disbelief. Even Ammit was frozen on the spot, unable to move a muscle.
It was Sen Tarsus who finally managed to snap them from their collective trance. Tarsus, the old veteran who had, unbeknownst to any of them, seen a hundred terrible battlefields and a hundred dying friends. Tarsus, who had lived through the worst and turned her back on the rest.
"We have to move!" she snapped – and everyone jolted as though they had been shot. And then, just like that, everyone was in motion, Tarsus racing up the ramp to prepare a haelen-pod as Ammit hauled Sekhmet's body over her shoulder and Jaheed and Diesch covered her, weapons in hand. Up on the bridge, Ket Sal had the controls, and now he bade the Gorger to rise, buffering the wreckage of the battlefield with blistering winds as the Gorger's fat twin engines belched incandescent flame. The ramp slammed shut, Sekhmet was laid in the haelen-pod – and then alarms were blaring, and all were sprinting to the bridge.
"It's the Madrian navy!" Ket Sal shouted, in disbelief, as the crew burst onto the bridge. "They're trying to ground us!"
"The fuck they are," Tarsus snapped, shoving the Scion aside and settling into her seat at once. Her fingers became blurs, darting between six different panels at once as her eyes locked into laser-focus.
"What's going on?" Jaheed asked, shooting Ket Sal a baffled look. "This is a Mercurian Vessel! They have no right-"
"Either they're on the take, or they're not who they say they are!" Ket Sal shot back. "Either way, they have a half-dozen fighters surrounding us and-"
"Strap in!" Tarsus interrupted, her voice a hoarse bellow. "We're gonna force our way through!"
"You're what?!" Ket Sal demanded. Still, he made great haste to find a seat and do just that, and all around him the others were doing the same.
Now, then. From the outside, the Cloud Gorger appeared as a junky, aging old shuttle – essentially two cylindrical engines stapled together, with a rectangular section festooned somewhere in the middle. An inelegant and outdated design, to be sure. On the inside, by contrast, Jaheed knew that Tarsus had been making illegal modifications for quite some time. But he could not possibly have understood the true extent of what the Cloud Gorger really was, beneath the hood – until Tarsus keyed the thrusters to max and the rickety old vessel leapt forward at a speed that strained the very hull.
The crew within were pitched wildly to and fro as Tarsus had the ship darting and weaving through an all-encompassing grid of las-fire. The rickety old vessel was moving in such a way that made the pursuant interceptors like sluggish by comparison. And all the while the Gorger was firing back with AI-slaved pulse turrets that blew one attacker into molten slag and split another clean down the middle.
Tarsus was drenched in sweat. Her hands moving even faster. Her face was eerily calm, even as the window for escape got tighter. And tighter. And tighter. Until...
The Gorger burst through Madriu's upper atmosphere – and without a moment's pause Tarsus slammed the ship into voidspace, ripping a hole right through reality and careening back in realspace a half-second later, ten-thousand lightyears away. The entire ship shuddered and jolted as though coming apart at the seams, and Jaheed came perilously close to biting his own tongue off.
And so, there they were, hanging in void of deep space. Everyone released their harnesses and collapsed to the floor at once, shaking and vomiting and bleeding from the eyes as one often did following a brute-force leap into voidspace. Klaxons were wailing all across the bridge, telling a deafening tale of a thousand damages sustained. Tarsus just crawled over, slammed her fist down upon the MUTE button, and collapsed, panting heavily, right along with the rest of them.
Everyone was silent for a long, long time. Until, finally, Diesch asked the obvious.
"What now?"