I was on final approach towards the target's last whereabouts, and given his powerset, there were very small odds he would be found anywhere else. Armor configured for maximum autonomous defenses--chaff, flares, interdictors, all set to fire automatically in the event they sensed a situation where they could help. With this type of threat, even the moment it took me to react could be deadly. Weapon loadout was a confusing mess of short-ranged, fast, low-collateral weaponry like scatterguns and flak, and hugely destructive explosive ordnance. And EMP grenades, missiles, as many as I could carry, and even the electroshock modules on my wrist blades.
I wished Athan were here...for a number of reasons...but mostly because this kind of threat would be exactly what he was best suited for combatting.
We were hunting a technopath, easily the second most dangerous class of Exhumans after code Xavier. The problem with technopaths is their powers were so widely distributed and so widely varied. They tended to make lairs and fill them with their devices, whatever their particular brand of technology was, and then lurk there, churning out ever-more-dangerous machines or monsters until eventually they completed some masterstroke project of theirs and began to unleash it on the hapless world around them.
The temptation to leave a technopath alone was strong. For most of their lifecycles, they were harmless, stealing or taking, or even buying whatever materials they needed and tinkering away in solitude. However, it seemed like a mere inevitability before they built some doom weapon and felt the need to try it out, and it was always, always easier to kill a technopath before they finalized their doom weapon.
I felt like the cycle was not dissimilar to what seemed to happen with most every other Exhuman, just slower. A technopath with no gadgetry was just a human, after all, and it took time before they worked into the overdeveloped sense of superiority which led them to try to conquer their fellow man. This is why they made lairs and protected them so jealously...unlike their kindred Exhuman, they feared humanity, which made them cautious, which made them dangerous.
It also helped not-at-all that such lairs tended to be narrow, long, and small, all of which meant that my jetpack, arguably my greatest advantage in a combat, would be utterly without use. I would be a human, on-foot, relying on expertise against an Exhuman who severely outgunned me, was in an entrenched position, and held every element of surprise, favorable terrain, and home-field advantage.
Which is why this was a suicide mission and nobody had taken it.
I landed on an adjacent rooftop and peered down, enhancing the scene as I was able through my optics. Not much to see, a warehouse like any other, no indication of anything abnormal. As I flicked through spectrums, it became apparent this wasn't the case, the building leaked a low level of radiation, was hardened against electromagnetic pulse, and had been reinforced from within. Strange wiring, seemingly hung up at random with no clear plan hung on every wall, connecting a multitude of devices I couldn't begin to fathom, seeing them only as a source of heat and electricity from here.
I got a proximity alert which resolved quickly into an IFF and shouldn't have been surprised. I turned on my comms with a thought.
"Hello Deej, nice night for a stroll?"
IFF, 'Identify Friend or Foe' was basically a signal each hunter broadcast more-or-less constantly so that we could identify each other, even in the chaos of battle. Our systems were linked so that it was impossible to fire on another IFF target, we could keep track of each other in 3D space, and so forth. Very useful for a situation where we were to cooperate, as this one.
"You're not going in there," he said through my visor's earpiece. "At least, not alone."
"Go home," I said with half a laugh. "This doesn't concern you, and I am not splitting the bounty."
"Unless ja plan to fight me, I am goin in wit ja."
Well, I certainly wasn't going to waste the time or ordinance on that. I waited on the rooftop while he, in his colorful exosuit, rocketed towards my building on the ground. I was trying to figure out the best way to penetrate even this first barrier.
The reason half of my ordinance was heavy arms was because often, you simply couldn't defeat a technopath's defenses. By the very virtue of building their own defenses, a technopath was obviously paranoid, but that tended to mean their defenses were equally multilayered, and overdesigned, with fail safes and redundancies to prevent every possibility they could predict.
The good news was, they, like all of us, only tended to consider the options they themselves would take. I had no interest in hacking or rerouting electronics or assembling my own atomic dampener or whatever technology might help. I had explosives, and no matter how intricate and overwrought a trap was, it was still completely ineffective when reduced to a crater.
The question was, when to use them. If I simply destroyed everything in my path, it would be much more likely to impede progress than to make it, yet doing the alternative meant adding more risk.
Even this clearing, between the building I roosted on, and the warehouse, even this far out, there could be traps and cameras watching us even now. Technopaths often had a specialty, whatever it was their power gifte them with, and we didn't even know what particular brand of technology this technopath was into; establishing that as soon as possible would give us much better odds of survival.
With a grunt, Deej pulled himself up to the rooftop and sauntered over to me, his ponytail of dreads brushing against the back of the clear bubble dome of his helmet.
"Was there someone else out here?" he asked. "I picked up another IFF for a moment."
I checked my logs with a few taps and saw nothing. I hadn't seen any alert or indication, but knew Deej wasn't green enough to make such a mistake. "Who was it?" I asked.
"Don't know. It turned off as soon as my system hailed im for ID. If you got nothing, they must be ghosting from you."
"But not you, not until they knew you were here." I thumbed my lip as I thought. "We know the identity of the Exhuman, it's nobody from the association. I checked yesterday, and nobody has MIA'd in the last week...either the technopath is building his own IFF on our network...which is bad...or he has an IFF from another hunter...which is probably even worse."
"I don't know," he said, and we both knew those were some of the most troubling words we could have with regards to a technopath.
We both sat there, indulging in a moment of fear and hesitation as we both flipped through optics, mine in my visor and and his in a chunky binocular unit held to the front of his helmet, staring at the mute beige building in the dark.
"I guess we go," he said. I nodded. My wings deployed and I shot into the air, somewhat slowly. My visor lit up with an expected warning that I was way over on carry weight. No maneuvering for me, but it did mean I got to pack in some extra ordinance. No other warnings assailed me as I flew to the roof of the building and gently touched down. I felt like a fly knowingly landing on a spiderweb.
There was no skylight in the warehouse, naturally, so this was about the extent of my jetpack's usefulness. Once I went through the front door...if that was our plan...I'd be indoors, where the enclosed air would make it impossible to fly without slapping myself around with my own wake. Deej, however, was potentially even more dangerous in enclosed spaces for the same reason; his audio-based weaponry would be concentrated just like the winds from my jetpack.
I dropped to the ground, flanking the main door, as Deej rolled in, standing on the other side. We gave each other a nod, and then kicked in the doors together, both of us rocketing backwards rather than in.
When it came to breaching a lair, front doors were always the worst. We waited long moments while nothing happened, I flipped through my optics again and again. No new sources of radiation, no activating electronics, no detectable seismics, just...the door opened.
I heard something though. A heavy footfall. And then another. Something huge, at least as large as a full battle exosuit. Just as it entered my vision, I heard the sound of metal clanging on metal, and a figure stepped out into the doorway.
Huge, and more scar than anything else, it was an exosuit, but wrong. There were parts on the arms and legs, sheltered nooks and crevices which shone with dulled paint, indicating the suit had once been cheery, even ostentatious in its markings, but all that remained now was scorched blackness, the grey of expanded structure foam, and char.
He clapped slowly at the two of us, sarcastically, the sound of metal clanging again, as the huge metal arms of the exosuit clashed.
Something about the suit seemed familiar. It was obviously a custom job, hugely expensive, and the fact that it was half-filled with structure foam...well, that was hardly a standard feature. Still, it was hard to pin where I'd seen it. All exosuits tended to look familiar past a point, huge bulky humanoid shapes, and with my eye constantly drawn to the structure foam scar in the front, and the layer of black, there wasn't much else to go on.
But who would pay so much for a suit like that, and then leave it in such decrepit condition? They were obviously expecting a fight, they could have done repairs anytime before now. Structure foam was useful for sealing breaches and damage in the middle of a fight, but it was hardly the same as having a suit in full operational condition.
His movements were staccato and inhuman, but whether that was from the state of the suit or the pilot, I could not tell. I was still afraid of how the technopath might be using the bizarre qualities of the suit for their own devices, but this was absolutely nothing like what I had anticipated.
Involuntarily, almost, my wings deployed and I took to the air, but with the added weight, it was more of an ascent than a jump, and just before I cleared him, the exosuit shot forward with an impossible leap and grabbed hold of my leg. I felt a scream escape me as I suddenly reversed direction, and then a violent crunch as he slammed my back into the ground. Lights flashed in my face from the concussion I now surely had, as well as the warnings jumping up across my visor of flight system damage, and more importantly, user damage. I felt my leg get lifted again, my face scraped the ground as I was dragged upwards again, but before he could slam me back down, I heard an explosion of noise, seemingly covering every possible audio quality, high-pitched and low, soft and loud, all at once, and my assailant was blasted off of me.
I caught myself before my face met the pavement and gave myself a moment to recover, as I locked my visor on tracking the target in 3D space. Still looking at the ground and catching my breath, I was able to see him right himself and charge straight at me again.
His speed was impossible, he accelerated even faster than me. It should be making him black out, or at least putting enormous stress on his body with every move. Could it be this was his technopath power at work? Some kind of inertial dampening past human tech?
I didn't have time to think. I turned from being hunched over to rolling forward and sideways, hoping his massive speed would play against him if I moved into him.
It didn't, and he snapped me up as he went past. Maybe he'd anticipated my move? Or maybe I was just slow and feeble without my pack. Either way, I had almost a second where his metal hands held me before him, the blank faceplate of his helmet giving me no indication of what was going on behind it.
I strained against him, uselessly, fired flares into his face, even unloaded a shot of scattergun into him from point-blank, where if he had any kind of refractive armor whatsoever, the repelled laser burst would have killed me instead of him, but for all the good it did, I may as well have tickled him.
Our moment together ended when he finished crossing the empty lot and slammed me into a building with the same speed. The wall behind me cracked, as did my pack, and several of my ribs. Pain surged through me, and I coughed blood onto his black blank faceplate, trying not to choke as I gasped and coughed at the same time.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
He held me pinned there for a few moments, tilting his head sideways like he was questioning me silently. He released one hand, holding me aloft by my neck only, and then with the free hand, punched me in the ribs with machine force and precision.
"Karu!" I heard Deej scream in my ear, animalistic.
I couldn't even double-up, couldn't even raise my arms to hold myself, the force of the blow had nowhere to go but into my body. I felt more of me breaking, and my vitals went critical in my visor before my unfocused eyes. Pain...I remembered pursuing it not too long ago. Now I had more than I could handle. In the distance I heard engines roaring as Deej closed in on us, but hot air flashed before my face as the exosuit fired a volley of a dozen missiles straight up, which curved backwards gracefully to chase him. Almost apologetically, he had to turn away from us to evade them as they chased him down. He would, I knew, but I wasn't sure I would be alive to see it.
The hand which had struck me moved to my face and stroked my cheek with almost tender care. One huge metal finger hooked under my chin and pulled my face upright to point at his faceplate. My vision swam in and out, and I wasn't sure what he was doing or why, until I heard Deej gasp.
The exosuit had turned its IFF back on, or stopped ghosting me, or whatever it had done. I saw a tag on it, swimming in front of my eyes, and strained to focus on the info callout.
'Tenebrae' it read.
I still had no idea who this was, but I appreciated knowing the name. I would stalk him through hell for all eternity if nothing else. After a moment, my IFF system synched with his and the name updated.
'Tenebrae. Cached: Luminary'.
Again, he looked at me sideways like he was questioning me, but this time I understood. I understood who beat me, who would kill me. It was Luminary. More than my death, he wanted acknowledgement of that.
Unable to draw enough breath to reply, I spat blood on his faceplate again.
I could almost hear his rage as he drew back this time, his exosuit whining as the fist drew ready, but before it could finish me, there was another blast of all-encompassing sound. The wall behind me seemed to liquefy, like it was sand instead of rock, and both Tenebrae and I fell right through it.
"Karu, get away from him! I need an open shot!" Deej's voice in my ear was only barely audible. I tried to pull my thoughts together to process the words and their meaning. It felt like all I understood right now was pain. I wanted to curl up and wait for it all to end.
But that wasn't Karu the hunter. Despite being inoperable, I put my jetpack on, and indoors, it blew me around at random, but it helped me upright nonetheless. I saw a black shape of rubble move at me, and fired myself into the ceiling, evading his grasp, even as I knocked myself halfway further towards unconsciousness. He turned towards me, but fell as the floor under him disintegrated with another resonating blast. Everything wooden exploded all around us, and the whole room filled with splinters and toothpicks as the ground fractured into nonbeing.
Unsteadily, I guided myself towards the door, feeling slow and stupid as Tenebrae breathed down my neck, scrambling after me through the debris while I fluttered only just out of his reach. I made it to the opening, and Deej grabbed me and threw me clear, before turning back, extra speakers deploying from his back and sides as his audio generators ramped up to maximum.
Even behind him, even with all his focus pointed forward, I felt it in my bones as Deej unloaded into Tenebrae. Literally in my bones, they vibrated in a way I didn't know it was possible for bones to do, it was terrifying, and I knew if nothing else this night already had, the sensation of my teeth vibrating in my mouth would give me nightmares for years to come.
I took the opportunity to fish in a pouch on my hip and slap a stim onto my neck, feeling lucidity flow into me, and took a deep breath as though I'd just surfaced from deep underwater. My eyes were still fluttering weirdly, but I could think again.
The pain was still there, sharp as ever, but I was removed from it, like it was in a bubble near me, instead of filling me up. I blinked away the rest of my disorientation and turned back towards the mess.
The building we'd plowed through was a small shop on the first floor of a brick building. Above it was probably an apartment, and I hoped, prayed, that building was unoccupied. Inside was just dust and splinters, fragments of broken brick, and smashed displays and furniture, all bouncing off the ground to the wobbling pulse of Deej's sound.
For a moment, I couldn't see Tenebrae, and then, from the dark, his huge shadow lunged at Deej.
"What the hell?" I heard over my comms, as Tenebrae smashed a fist into Deej's helmet, making small cracks spiderweb across it, and then he locked arms with his assailant, trying to push the twisted exosuit off of him.
Deej's suit had been built for mobility, not strength, and it was obvious as soon as the two grappled that Tenebrae held every advantage. Servos screamed in Deej's shoulders as his arms bent further and further back, and I was afraid they would get ripped right off.
"Hey, Luminary!" I shouted. "Did Wilfried find the proximity mine I left for him?"
His attention snapped to me, the blank faceplate, streaked in my blood and coated in dust facing me, even as he drove Deej to one knee. Still silent, he threw Deej aside like dirty clothes, and dashed at me, full-speed again.
How was he so fast? He didn't have any bones left in his body after Deej's attack, how was even standing, much less fighting?
I didn't know, but I had to avoid this hit. Just because I'd dragged my mind, kicking and screaming back to lucidity didn't mean I had done anything for my body. Another hit or two and I was dead. Sparks flew from his feet, screeching across the concrete as engines in his back fired, blasting him forward. I was hovering, but only just, and if I went up, he'd snatch me again.
I went up anyway.
As I'd predicted, he seized my ankle, which left my arms free as I'd hoped. I spun on him, feeling myself falling as my damaged jetpack was completely incapable of dealing with the new torque of me moving, but before I lost orientation, I unloaded two missiles point-blank into the ground beneath us.
Electricity and a concussive wave washed over us, making my hair stand straight up from two different forces as the EMP missiles detonated. At this range, and two of them, and the biggest booms I had packed for the technopath, the entire city block went black instantly, and I threw my visor off as it went dark. His suit locked up, skidding forward on its front with its huge momentum, and with his hand still locked around my leg, I went along for the ride, thankfully on top of him instead of under. My leg twisted painfully, but I was safe atop the frozen, sliding husk.
Depending on his systems, he would be down for anywhere from a minute to eternally, and with all of his bones broken inside, without the exosuit, he was completely disabled. I hoped. I'd already misjudged him several times now.
The suit slid to a halt and I fell off his back, landing on my own back with my leg painfully twisted.
"Deej, help," I gasped.
No response, of course, my visor was somewhere in the darkness. It took several minutes before Deej, on foot, found me.
"Lordy, girl," he said, straining against the machine's death-grip on my leg. We couldn't get it to loosen up, but he did remove my boot and leg armor, and I fell out of the locked grasp.
With the suit disabled, I tried to open the back hatch. It took both of us pulling as hard as we could to open the manual access. When the suit finally cracked open, I had to turn and throw up.
Inside was...what was left of Luminary. Still alive even...I thought. But what was in there wasn't a human. When I'd run him through, 'killing' him up north, his suit had deployed medical gel and structure foam to seal the breach and the wound, but...not cleanly. The gel had preserved his vitals enough to keep him alive, but the foam had also gotten into him, effectively sealing him into the suit, welding him to it.
And then the mine's explosion had done the same, but worse. What I saw when I opened the back was tendrils of flesh and structure gel combined horrifically, fused into something no longer either machine or man. It seemed the force of tearing open the back plate had ripped off his back, because what I saw inside was his exposed spine, parts of which had already been hanging out of the flesh, and others were freshly bloodied by our interference.
Out of the open panel, blood, structure foam, and medical gel dripped onto the pavement like a seeping sore. An animal noise escaped him, but I doubted he could speak anymore.
"This is…" Deej trailed off. He looked like he wanted to vomit as well.
I had no words either. I simply took one of the blasting charges I had for demolishing a building and primed it, and then placed it inside the panel, closing it. Deej nodded at me and then we walked away, him supporting me as the stims began to fade. I re-upped just in case, but that was a bad policy. Still, I wasn't going to let him catch me off guard again.
I found my visor, still dead, which, though EMP-hardened like my kit, would still need some repairs before functioning again. Consequently, I had no idea how long the fuse on the charge would be, but we needed to be well clear.
We were two blocks away when I felt the earth jump and the shockwave pass through my body, pushing me forward half a step. Behind us, a small mushroom cloud loomed above the skyline. Excessive, yes, but this time there was no doubt. Even if it were outside his suit, even if he were inside a bunker, Tenebrae was now, without question, completely and irrevocably dead.
As soon as we felt the blast, I turned around to head back.
"Where ja goin, Karu?" Deej asked.
"Need to check the body," I growled.
"Nobody could survive that."
"Let's say I have trust issues when it comes to Luminary."
He shadowed me back, matching my crawling pace as I limped my way over, holding myself the whole while, as lights slowly started to flicker back to life in the distance. Electronics nearer the site were just fried. I wondered how much collateral I'd done, and hoped that my insurance would cover it, as we hadn't technically engaged an Exhuman.
Or...hadn't yet, I thought, as I looked at the remains of the warehouse. It, and the two adjacent were more obliterated than anything else, giving me a clear view inside. In there were no deathtraps, no machines or robots or genetic monstrosities, just an ordinary-appearing workshop with tools and machines and lots and lots of alien-looking parts I couldn't begin to fathom.
And in the very middle of it all, still active, despite the blast and the EMP, a perfectly sky-blue sphere, cradled by a spindly, alien device, which looked something like a baseball glove made of brass clock towers.
"Karu," Deej said, and I looked back at him, having to work to pull my eyes from the radiant blue sphere. I followed his gaze and gesture, and saw a huge crater, embers still smouldering, and a twisted, melted wreck in the middle, only a quarter the size of a man. He walked over and gave it a few experimental kicks with a booted foot.
"Melted slag, nothing left," he said. "Rest easy, yute."
I would, once I'd investigated the sphere a little more. I'd never seen anything so...pure before. It looked like a perfectly spherical hole in the world, leading to the bluest sky I'd ever seen, completely unaffected by the darkness which surrounded us.
"Karu, don't. Technopath, remember?"
"I remember. I just...need to see this."
"It's dangerous badman stuff, let's be 'way before he finds us."
"In a second."
I was being stupid, and I couldn't entirely blame it on the stims or trauma of the night, but the thing...whatever it was...it was so unbelievably incredible, even I'd seen nothing like it before. Deej sighed and accompanied me to within its glow.
"I'd feel a lot better about this if we had our gear. I can't tell if this is radioactive or anything."
I stooped and snapped a twig off of a branch which had been blasted through the wall, prodding the sphere with it. The twig went through unharmed, and came back exactly as it had entered. I touched it, not warm or cold, just...just a twig.
I took a breath and put my fingers in. Nothing, like it wasn't even there.
"Are you crazy?" Deej asked.
"Maybe," I said with a laugh which made everything hurt. "I'll be right back."
"Karu, don--" he reached for me, but I'd passed through. As soon as my head was through, whatever he said was gone, words in a different world. On the other side was...well, I could see myself half-peeking out of an identical sphere connected to an identical machine, but this one was somewhere completely different. It looked a lot more like a technopath's workshop, but even in the brief moment I was there, I felt something alien about the place. My hair stood on end, literally, and I realized it was floating without gravity.
I felt myself pulled backwards, and reappeared in the ruined warehouse, Deej extracting me by pulling my waist back through.
"Karu?" he asked.
"I'm fine. It's some kind of teleporter device. The technopath's lab is on the other side."
He let out a sigh. "We're done here, okay?"
I nodded, and felt even that gesture hurt. "Do you think you could call an ambulance for me? I'm not sure I can get there on my own."
He laughed. "Let's walk out of the dark, ja?"
He reset some breakers and did some basic hotwiring and got his suit back online, and then carried me gently in the exosuit's arms until we were back where the power was on. He left me outside a coffee shop while he used their phone, and came back with a donut and a cup of coffee.
"Where's mine?" I pouted.
"You," he said with a cynical jab in my direction "are goin' unda anestheisa and into a regenerata', ain't ja? So no food or drink in ja system.?"
I sighed, but he was right.
"Thank you for saving my life approximately six times tonight, Deej," I said, as I reclined against the suit's spread hands.
"Next time, don't be such raas about it."
"Do you still want to hunt the technopath?" I asked. My eyes were closing now, the stims were wearing off again, leaving me with nothing but exhaustion and pain, and I was losing to them, badly.
"No. But you do. So I'll see yah when you wake up, airie?"
"You really are the best, Deej," I sighed.
I was deep in a fitful, pained, exhausted sleep before the flashing lights of the ambulance arrived.