Dan broke into a run, attempting to catch up to Lola. The more he thought about it, the more he wondered how strong could she possibly be. When Dan observed her movements from the sixth floor, Lola seemed injured when he watched her sluggishly jog along the sidewalk. And somehow, she managed an amazing burst of speed before returning back to her slower movement.
He closed the distance by another twenty meters, bringing the waypoint’s measurement down to sixty meters between him and Lola. He recalled getting a brief look at her body under the street light and didn’t recall seeing any weapons on her. Unlike Alpha agents, Kodak agents didn't wear any coats that could conceal any weapons. They wore a bulky suit of armor with alloy plating and spikes.
When Lola finally came into view, she was still jogging right down the middle of the empty road. She hadn’t noticed him. Just to be safe, Dan stuck to the sidewalk while keeping his brisk pace. If needed, he could easily drop down to his stomach behind a vehicle or dive into an alley to avoid being seen.
Dan had no clue where this chick was going or where she could lead him to. If she was heading towards a hideout with other Kodak agents or rebels, then maintaining a safe distance behind her was necessary. Otherwise, he would be gunned down.
The redacted stats gave him an ominous feeling about Lola. He had no idea how she was doing that. Judging by her brief burst of impressive speed, he assumed she was at least as strong as Kate. But the main difference was that she didn’t hold any of the sentimentality of that traitor. While Kate did backstab the team, it seemed like she tried to be merciful to him during the hifh speed jeep chase. Lola would hold no such feeling towards someone like him who was an enemy agent.
Something caught Dan’s eye that changed the entire situation. Lola made a sudden turn and hopped over a car up ahead and now continued her jog on the sidewalk ahead. Then she grabbed something off her waist and something that glowed purple ignited in the darkness. At first, Dan thought it was an oversized glow stick and wondered why an agent would need such a ridiculous gadget.
The Kodak agent stretched her arm holding this strange object and she swung in a wide arc, the glowing purple cutting straight through a street light. The light spuddered out and Dan saw sparks fly from the pole before the entire street light toppled and collapsed onto the road. The purple glow stick was a sword.
The poor visibility and heavy rain prevente Dan from seeing cearly, but he swore he saw Lola lower her glowing sword and the purple blade cut straight through the pavement of the sidewalk. Seeing that, Dan was especially glad that he kept his distance.
As he maintained his pace, he finally caught up to the destroyed light pole and briefly analyzed the damage. The cut through the light pole was probably the smoothest and cleanest cut Dan had ever seen. Lola’s swing of her mysterious sword had chopped through the light pole in a perfectly diagonal straight line. He glanced down at the glistening pavement and saw marks within the sidewalk. The purple blade had cut through the ground with surprising ease. Whatever that sword was made of, it treated hard concrete and industrial-grade metal like it was playdough.
Seeing this, Dan knew with absolute certainty that he could not get anywhere near Lola. Not if he wanted to live. He didn’t want to imagine how easily her purple sword would cleave right through his coat and armor. And if they clashed blades, he had a feeling that her blade would chop right through his katana.
Dan tailed the floating yellow triangle, consciously keeping a good distance between him and Lola. Even if she was injured, she was capable of brief bursts of speed and Dan wasn’t about to let himself get chopped to ribbons.
The waypoint on Lola suddenly stopped. Dan picked up the pace while also trying to be conscious of the noise his footsteps made. Even if the rain masked the sound of his approach, he was dealing with a maniac wielding a sword that could ignore durability.
His waypoint read a distance of twenty-three meters between him and Lola and he pressed back against the front of a shop. He slowly inched his way toward the outer edge of the storefront and slowly leaned out. He saw Lola had stopped and was in the middle of a conversation with another group of Kodak agents.
Thanks to Dan’s enhanced hearing, or the obnoxiously loud voices of the agents, their voices cut through the rain and hit his ears.
“Are the signal jamers still active?” Lola asked while still huffing and puffing. “We can’t have these wretches call for reinforcements. Our numbers are looking precarious enough as is.”
“They are Ms. Odyssey,” a male voice said. “But we were sent to investigate one of them. Something about a weakened signal compared to the rest. We’re on our way to perform maintenance.”
Signal jammers? Dan wondered if those jammers were the reason why he couldn’t reach any of his teammates or pull up his map of the local area. If they were, he needed to know where these jammers were.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Lola snapped. “It’s a fucking signal jammer, not a tank. How can a signal tower malfunction?”
“Ma’am, these are existing antennas in a decaying city we jerry-rigged to act as jammers,” the male voice said.
Dan made sure to keep himself absolutely still. If he could overhear a conversation like this through the intense hammering of the rain around him, then he had to assume his enemies also had the same enhanced hearing and could hear him if he made a sound.
“Did any of you take some healing stims from the loot?” Lola demanded.
When no response was given, Lola doubled down on her question. “Listen I know you fuckers better than you think. I know at least some of you stole a few of them from the crates.”
After another moment of hesitation, one of them finally answered. “Yes ma’am. How many do you need?”
“Give me three. I pushed myself too far with the berserk mode. Jane Sunheiser proved to be more of a bitch than I thought,” she said.
Dan jerked his head at hearing his squad leader’s name. Lola took on Jane and survived?
“Can’t fucking believe they need her alive. Would have been easier if I could just chop that bitch’s head off. I’m sending you the coordinates where I left her. She shouldn’t give you any trouble considering her injuries. Secure her and move onto the signal jammer. Am I clear?”
“Yes ma’am,” numerous voices said in unison.
It made sense why Lola was exhausted and demanding healing stims. She and Jane had fought each other and Lola had narrowly won. Dan exhaled, thankful he was smart enough to keep his distance while tailing the Kodak agent. Jane was a tier three agent who was leagues above the likes of him and even the rest of the squad.
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Dan leaned out slowly and still saw Lola standing together with three other Kodak agents. She had the stims in her hand but hadn’t injected any of them yet.
“Get the fuck out of my sight and make sure Jane is secure,” Lola ordered.
As the trio of agents turned and moved at a brisk pace, Dan knew those three would lead him to both Jane and a signal jammer. He accessed his HUD and placed a waypoint on the trio as they moved out of view. A floating green triangle now followed the group, though the color and opaqueness of the shape faded to prioritize Lola.
The Kodak agent turned in the opposite direction of the group and trotted along, likely trying to find a safe place to inject the healing stims. Dan remembered how effective one healing stim was. During a training session he had involving a hand-to-hand fight against Kate, she punched him so hard she broke one of his ribs. Just one healing stim brought him back on his feet and fully healed him.
Dan rounded the corner of the store in pursuit of Lola once again. If he let Lola heal herself, it was over for him. He had no chance of surviving against a fully rejuvenated Kodak agent who bested his squad leader in battle. He had to kill her while she was still exhausted.
His waypoint on Lola indicated a distance of thirty-two meters between them. He watched the agent stumble and almost trip from the fatigue. Her speed truly began to slow down as the distance measurement gradually decreased.
Dan’s biggest problem was that he had no clear shot. He still wanted to stay out of sight so he stuck to the sidewalk, keeping close to the front walls of every building he passed. Lola was on the main road, continuing her sluggish run. Dan was unlucky enough to have numerous trucks, jeeps and other particularly tall vehicles blocking his line of sight.
Lola suddenly changed directions and walked off the road and past the other row of vehicles lined up on the other side of the road. Dan looked up and saw a set of balconies above him. He needed to get to higher ground to get the perfect shot.
A quick look at the lowest balcony was two and a half meters above his head. The balconies on the two floors above appeared to be roughly the same distance. He bent his knees and jumped into the air, just barely able to grab the edge and digging his fingers into a gap between the metal rods that made up the small fence around the lowest balcony. He pulled himself up, more than capable of lifting his own body weight and getting himself up. Dan repeated this until he reached the fourth floor balcony and pulled himself up once more.
Finally getting a good view, he spotted Lola on her knees with her back toward him. She had stopped in front of a closed banking branch. ATMs lined the opposing sides of the bank’s front entrance with Lola on the front steps before the doors.
If Lola was Jane’s equal or superior, Dan had his doubts about whether his ZK-77 could penetrate her armor. All of his teammates seemed to have better armor than his current set, so there was no reason not to assume the same for Lola. Unless he scored a headshot, there was no guarantee he could end the fight quickly. He saw the Kodak agent inject one stim into her neck. It was now or never.
Dan placed the seventy-seven rifle on his back and grabbed his grenade launcher. An explosive weapon would improve his odds of getting the kill. He aimed and fired two grenades, confident that Lola would be blown apart if hit directly.
It didn’t go as planned.
In record timing, Lola spun around and ignited her purple sword. She swung and chopped one of the grenades in mid-air while the second grenade impacted the entrance of the banking branch and exploded behind her. The explosion didn’t blow her to bits but the concussive wave knocked her forward.
The Kodak agent quickly got back on her feet and Dan knew he was screwed the moment she laid eyes in his general direction. Somehow, Dan’s initial deductions of her not having any weapons besides her sword were on the money as Lola didn’t shoot back at him. Instead, she pointed her sword at him and hopped over a minivan.
Lola made a beeline straight for him.
Even after taking one grenade explosion to the back, Lola’s speed was ludicrous to Dan’s eyes. He launched another grenade but it was too late. Lola was so fast she had already moved away from the spot he aimed at. He quickly pieced together than to take on someone with her speed, you had to anticipate where they would be rather than trying to track them and firing at where they were. By the time Dan pulled the trigger, his enemy’s superior speed would have allowed them to outrun anything he fired at them.
Lola had reached the row of parked vehicles in front of his side of the street. Dan desperately fired another grenade, this time directly at the car parkek in front of Lola. By the time his finger pulled the trigger, Lola had already jumped and left behind the blinding explosion of his grenade and the vehicle. In a single leap, Lola rapidly approached the third floor of the building. Dan saw her for a split second before she swung her purple blade.
Even with all the gruesome sights he had witnessed all his life, the flash of glowing purple made Dan shut down. The fear of death that every person had flared within him. He winced, fearing this was the end of the road. Everything around him was eerily silent aside from the heavy rain pouring all around him. He opened his eyes again and patted down his torso. He saw no wounds or blood. Lola didn’t strike him.
Then the balcony buckled. Ah fuck, Dan thought.
The structure rapidly collapsed and Dan tumbled downward. Lola wasn’t aiming to kill him, or at least not right away. Her bizarre purple blade chopped straight through the balcony and separated it from the rest of the building. Dan fell through the air and saw Lola standing on the ground waiting for his fall. She looked up at him with unsettling glee and a grin that pierced through the sheets of rain.
“Now you die!” she said.
His perception of time suddenly slowed down around him. This was just like what had happened during his training session against those drones and his encounter with the rebels shooting at him and Allen.
Dan still held onto his grenade launcher and raised it even while falling upside down. He pulled the trigger and launched a grenade at the Kodak agent. The flying grenade slashed through the rain and smashed directly into Lola. The explosion and the fire and smoke that followed didn’t end up in a kill.
Time returned back at normal speed and Dan made an unceremonious landing onto the wet pavement. He rolled just enough during the fall to smash his armored ass onto the sidewalk.
Reflex ability used. Cooldown: 270 seconds.
Dan didn’t see the bloody remains of Lola. The waypoint he placed on her earlier still remained floating as it tracked the agent. Lola was sent rocketing backward and smashed into the side of a minivan. She was already back on her feet with blood leaking from her head, flowing down her forehead and below her eyelids.
Lola didn’t say a word as she turned and sprinted away. Her gait was so awkward and unstable that Dan was impressed she didn’t trip and skid across the wet road. The distance measurement on the waypoint shot up so much that Dan knew he couldn’t catch up with Lola. Eventually, the waypoint completely disappeared once the measurement hit four-hundred meters.
You have fought and survived a battle against a higher-ranked agent!
Bonus experience rewarded.
Dan slowly propped himself back up, using his grenade launcher as a makeshift stick to help himself back on his feet. Only now did he began breathing heavily, just narrowly surviving his fight against Lola Odyssey.
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
If he hadn’t had his reflex ability as an agent, he would have been chopped to ribbons by Lola before he even hit the ground. The fight was too close to call. In the quiet he found himself in, he looked at the carnage he and Lola had caused in this brief battle.
Two vehicles in his vicinity were caught in the grenade’s blast radius and had their windows shattered and side doors charred and caved in. Even in the heavy rain, smoke still rose from the hood of one car. He stepped closer toward the row of vehicles and spotted the van that Lola slammed into.
The vehicle was a black van that now had a human-sized crater in its side and began blinking its lights from the sudden impact. The alarm that blared was drowned out by the sudden downpour of rain, now harder since he began tailing Lola. Scanning the wet road, Dan saw one of the remaining healing stims Lola hadn’t used. The syringe laid in pieces scattered on the wet road, a few of them being swept up by flowing streams of rain water.
“So that’s why she didn’t stay and fight,” Dan said to himself.
While Dan couldn’t secure the kill, he smiled underneath his mask and beamed with pride. He couldn’t wait to brag to Jane and whoever was still alive that he made an agent of Lola’s caliber turn tail and run.
That was if any of his teammates were still alive.
The green waypoint he had placed earlier on the Kodak squad abruptly popped up in his peripheral vision.
He hefted his nearly empty grenade launcher. “And off I go,” he said.