Dan

Through the thick sheets of rain, Dan sprinted at his fastest pace possible as he followed the green waypoint. From what he recalled earlier from Lola’s conversation with the Kodak squad, they were on their way to make sure Jane was still alive and capture her. Then, they would move on to a signal jammer for maintenance.

While running, Dan was loading more grenades into the drum of his launcher one by one. He had reached a level of proficiency that he could still maintain a decent sprint while loading a weapon in heavy rain.

Running speed: 21 kilometers per hour.

While he didn’t break his previous record of thirty, Dan grinned beneath his mask even while breathing heavily. He was going to catch up to that Kodak squad and possibly rescue Jane from being captured. Dan didn’t the specifics of what would come after he found Jane and killed the trio of Kodak agents. He didn’t have anymore healing stims to spare to help Jane if she was injured.

I’ll figure that shit out when I get there, Dan thought to himself.

The distance between him and Kodak squad had narrowed down to around one hundred thirty meters. The floating green waypoint hovered over the row of parked vehicles along the road as Dan continued keeping his consistent run along the sidewalk. He lost count of the number of bright lights shining down on him from light poles, neon signs and advertising billboards.

Dan stopped before a metal box at an intersection that projected a holographic map of the area.

“What the hell,” he whispered. “How the hell did I miss these things?”

He stepped in front of the metal box with the floating map and tried scrutinizing the details of his current whereabouts. Through the heavy rain and the rudimentary blue lines drawn to represent the streets, buildings and other crap, it was difficult reading the holographic map. The map seemed to only extend out to a two block radius.

Dan glanced around the holographic map and stared down at the street where his green waypoint pointed him. According to the city’s map, the Kodak squad were approaching a section with an area open enough to house a fountain in the middle. The road diverged into two roads to make a Y shape.

He dashed past the holographic map and continued following the waypoint. Now that he wasn’t loading grenades into his launcher, he could now push himself as hard as he could in his sprint. Dan still kept himself to the side in between the parked vehicles and the fronts of buildings in case some asshole on a rooftop spotted him.

The waypoint gave a distance measurement of seventy meters between him and the squad. Then the measurement rapidly decreased.

His target had stopped.

Dan slowed down his approach to a light jog, knowing that the Kodak squad could be linking up with another team. If he was going to crash a party, he had to make sure everything was in his favor.

The waypoint indicated the squad was still held up off to the side, possibly inside the building Dan was quickly catching up to. Up ahead, Dan saw the section of the road that diverged into two. He slammed his back against the wall and slowly moved closer to the edge of the building wall. And he wasn’t prepared to witness that carnage left behind.

Dan saw the fountain as indicated by the city’s holographic map from that intersection. The fountain had been reduced to a crumbling wreck as chunks of concrete were strewn across the small patch of grass and the roads. He spotted car that laid upside down beside the demolished fountain, suggesting that the hunk of alloys had been hurled straight into it. Entrances and other sections of buildings had collapsed as if the area had been hit by an earthquake. Numerous bodies of Kodak agents numbering in the dozens littered around the fountain and across the diverging roads. Even from this distance, the dead agents were either dismembered, chopped in two or laid in pools of blood.

This was the leftovers of a battle between high-ranking agents.

Even with all the rainfall, Dan could feel himself sweating from the aftermath of the battle. Dan’s ears picked up faint chatter coming from the building past the wall. He slowly stepped closer toward the edge and leaned out. In his brief glance, he spotted the trio of Kodak agent pacing back and forth. One of their facial expression twisted before he abruptly backhanded a jewel casing.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” he said. “What’s Lola going to say about this?”

“Jane is supposed to be here isn’t she? I don’t see that bitch anywhere,” another one responded.

Dan made a mental note of each of the three Kodak agents inside the partially destroyed structure.

The angry one who took out his frustration on a store item stood about as tall he did. His armor was the typical bulky suit with spikes and razor wire wrapped around his uppers arms and thighs. His short cropped dark hair mixed with the pale ghostly skin and bloodshot eyes were nothing new.

The other two weren’t anything special. They both wore the same armor and had the same general physical appearance. All three were armed with the CMA assault rifles, guns that were inferior to Dan’s ZK-77.

Honestly, he genuinely wondered if these Kodak agents like there had rolled off an assembly line. But with all the crazy nonsense he had seen so far in his short time being a shard agent, he wouldn’t be surprised if Kodak was using cloning to boost their numbers.

Dan scanned the stats of the angry one.

Agent: Joe Rabid

Age: 19 M

Shard: Kodak-Cresh

Rank: Tier 1 | Level 18

Strength: 20

Agility: 17

Endurance: 17

Intelligence: 16

Healing Factor: n/a

His HUD sent Dan details of the other two directly to his vision through more floating text. All three of them were within the same league, give or take a level. All three were still higher-ranked than he was. But Dan had proven that he had the capability and the guts to take on agents with higher stats than him.

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I can take these guys, but not here, he thought. He still needed this trio to lead him to the next signal jammer and find out where Jane had gone. The only good news he had heard was that his squad leader was still alive.

“Fucking Lola didn’t get the job done,” Joe said.

“Watch your mouth. If she were here right now she would—”

“She would be fuming just like us,” Joe said, cutting off his teammate. “Jane must have recovered and got away. Lola should have brought some backup, what the fuck was she thinking? I gotta call this, then we head for the signal jammer.”

Dan kept his back against the wall. The rain had somewhat let up and the sheets of falling water weren’t as impenetrable compared to a few minutes ago. He looked out at the carnage and fixated on the bodies of Kodak agents left after the battle between Jane and Lola.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Joe said to this two teammates.

He kept as quiet as he could as the trio stepped out of the hole left in the shop’s wall. Dan leaned forward and watched as the three agents walked off to the left, barely acknowledging the bodies of their bretheren littered across the site.

Dan’s waypoint spat out a distance of seventy meters between him and the squad and he got back on the move. He jogged lightly, keeping his distance from the Kodak squad and moving through the street. Up close, the carnage looked even worse. The stench of blood and death from the numerous corpses of Kodak agent hit his nose, even through rain and the mask. He saw one particular body of a female agent who’s body was nearly bisected in two.

He truly was lucky to have survived an encounter with Lola.

He hunched his back as he kept a consistent light jog though the miserable streets. The occasional street light or neon sign brightened up a few spots on the wet and drenched pavement but other than that, Dan was seeing the infrastructure failing around him. More street lights either flickered or were off entirely. The sky was filled with storm cloud, preventing any moonlight from piercing through.

The sooner he was out of this city the better.

The pursuit remained uneventful for another four blocks before his HUD updated him with new info.

Signal jammer 200 meters away.

Bonus objective: eliminate the squad of Kodak agents.

Dan’s eyes followed a new waypoint that popped up and hovered above the jammer at the end of the block off to the right. And since his intention was destroying that jammer so that he could properly access his map and contact his teammates, that Kodak squad had served their purpose.

The trio was still strolling along through the street ahead of him, all their backs turned and unaware of his presence. Dan put the grenade launcher on his back and grabbed the handle of his ZK-77 rifle. If he encountered anymore Kodak agent ranked higher than a tier one, he needed his grenades. These particular Kodak agent might have been a few levels higher than Dan, but they were small fry compared to his fight against Lola.

With the seventy-seven rifle in his hands, Dan aimed down the red dot sight on and lined up the glowing dot on a distant silhouette. He squeezed the trigger, remembering to fire short, controlled bursts at targets further away.

Dan watched as his shots hit the mark and the silhouette collapsed. The other two dark figures abruptly stopped their stroll through the neighborhood. If they hadn’t caught onto Dan’s presence, they did now.

Immediately, Dan dived and made a shitty landing onto the hood of a nearby SUV. His face smashed into the metal of the hood but he brushed the pain away. The bullets flying past where he stood made him pull himself together. He bent his knees and crouched in front of the SUV and exchanged shots against the remaining two Kodak agents.

While their CMA rifles were inferior in everyway compared to his seventy-seven, the rounds still blasted small chunks out of the road beside him, creating new potholes in the pavement.

The SUV and the ground next to Dan took more hits. Armor-piercing rounds punctured the metal of the vehicle and the pavement near his feet. He took advantage of the brief pause in the gunfireand leaned out from the SUV. One of the Kodak agents running toward him was fumbling with his CMA rifle. The smacks and the faint curses that reached Dan’s ears told him one thing: the rifle had jammed.

Now that he wasn’t being peppered by bullets, he raised his seventy-seven and fired a burst, aiming for the agent’s upper body.

Multiple depleted uranium rounds smashed into the Kodak agent’s upper torso and one round shredded the agent’s neck. Even from this distance Dan saw the blood splatter before the agent hit the ground and stayed down.

“One more to go,” Dan muttered. “Where’s that last guy?”

His question was soon answered when something suddenly shoved him onto the wet pavement. Dan smashed into the road with a small splash. He looked up and narrowly swerved his head from a kick.

The last Kodak agent kicked the rifle out of his hand and grabbed him by the neck. Dan recognized the agent as Jow, the angry one. The Kodak agent lifted him up with one hand and forced Dan back on his feet. The two briefly looked at each other. Dan saw a drenched face twisted with fury and the agent baring a full set of teeth at him.

“You little rat, you killed my team,” Joe said.

“That’s rich coming from you. You guys were the ones who ambushed us. It’s almost like if you lead with violence you get violence,” Dan replied. If he wasn’t wearing his mask, he would have spat a wad at the Kodak agent just to be a prick.

“You’re gonna die brat,” Joe seethed.

“I’m a year younger than you,” Dan shot back. “You’re not that much more of an adult than I am.”

Joe huffed and let go of Dan’s neck. Then he followed up with wrapping his arm around Dan’s neck. The razor wire and small spikes along Joe’s armored form dug into his coat. The arm wrapped around tighter around Dan and he struggled to breathe as the Kodak agent dragged him toward the opposite end of the street.

“I’m going to enjoy watching you suffocate. And then, I will defile your corpse for what you did to my comrades,” Joe said with glee.

“Sick fuck,” Dan whispered even through the tightening chokehold. Not only was it getting hard to breath but he could see the edges of his vision getting darker. No way was he going to go out like this. Not after everything he had survived so far.

In such a compromised position, Dan knew that to overcome this physically stronger opponent, he had to use his environment. He stressed his neck muscles in looked forward, spotting a light pole.

“Any last words you little shit?” Joe said.

“I… have a few,” Dan wheezed. He put all of his strength into his legs and made a dash forward.

Dan’s feet just barely made it to the light pole and he ran up the malfunctioning source of light. He ran up just enough to flip up the bottom half of his body into the air and use his entire body weight to curl himself back.

The sudden weight shift forced Joe off balance. The agent went down with him and the two tumbled onto the wet concrete. Dan raised his arm and brought down his elbow onto the agent’s neck, loosening his grip around his neck.

He tried to get back on his feet but Joe had other plans. The Kodak agent’s arm shot up and grabbed Dan by his neck. The fingers dug into his neck with such sudden speed and force that Dan couldn’t get a word out.

“Nice try,” Joe said.

While Dan was in no position to strike at anything vital to turn the tide of this fight, that was only true if he was unarmed. He reached back and grabbed the hilt of his sword and held it in a reverse grip.

“Oh fu—”

Dan brought the blade down and penetrated the abdomen of the agent, the black blade piercing through the Kodak agent’s armor with ease. The tight fingers around Dan’s neck loosened but he wasn’t done yet.

He gripped the sword’s hilt tightly and dragged the sword back toward him through Joe’s torso. Gasps and gurgling blood left Joe’s mouth as Dan continued to run the sword through the agent’s armored hide. Dan knew he was stronger and in better shape than he ever had in his whole life. Plus he had a sword with enhanced cutting power compared to a normal blade. But he didn’t expect so much resistance carving his way through the enemy’s body.

Joe finally released Dan’s neck and his arm went limp. He looked down at his enemy and saw Joe looking to his side, his bloodshot eyes glassy and unfocused. The Kodak agent coughed up one last spurt of blood before he stopped moving.

Taking the sword out of Joe’s body, Dan hacked and coughed, briefly pulling down his mask to take in as much as possible after nearly getting choked to death by his enemy. After a couple of swings and slashing the rain-soaked air around him, Dan got most of the blood off his blade and placed the sword on his back.

Bonus objective complete: eliminate the squad of Kodak agents.

Experience rewarded.

A spinning blue icon popped up in the center of his vision before another set of message displayed.

Congratulations. You have ranked up.

Your current rank: Tier 1 | Level 11

You have earned 5 stat points.

“That’s wonderful,” Dan said in a raspy voice. He stepped over Joe’s corpse and scooped up the ZK-77 rifle off the ground.