“What the hell did you do to my arm you runt!” The agent asked with a robotic growl.
“I thought we were done talking?” I asked with a slightly synthesized voice of my own, my tongue hadn’t been damaged but the loss of most of my teeth and all the damage to my gums left the inside of my mouth too much of a mess to get the words out right. I left it to the speakers at the back of my throat to handle it instead.
The agent rushed me again but this time he came in with a wide right sweep that left me very little room to maneuver, especially with his speed. He has aimed low to land the blow at my shoulder, I could try and block it with my arms but I’d likely break both trying to do that and the agent knew it.
He was tired of my tactics and wanted to overwhelm my smaller frame with a wide and powerful blow that I couldn’t avoid and couldn’t defend against, it left him open to attack at the outset and was a big obvious movement but he wasn’t scared of me damaging him enough to stop him.
As soon as he finished his step he’d already finished tensing the muscles and the world slowed right down even before he launched the strike, likely because I recognized the strike and build up with the obvious movements.
The agent’s bladed fist was starting it path along from the left to my arm and the slow time didn’t give me a lot of motion to work with, my flesh and blood was weak compared to a trained adult’s let alone a borg’s cyberware. I could feel the tingling sensation along my back muscles and arms of my KD ability trying to help me align my defense to perfectly minimize the damage of the incoming punch which wasn’t going to help when even the minimum damage was shattered arms and more.
Instead I stepped into the punch and launched my knife straight at the agent’s face while leaving my arm to defend me knowing that it would do very little. I was hoping to shock him enough with a face strike to ruin his punch and get away with just being rag dolled across the ground again.
Suddenly the little camera shutters in his cybereyes opened wide and he sped up by about a third, almost reaching normal speed even in the slow motion that sanctum allowed me to fight in. His fist went from about two seconds away to right up to me. I felt the time crash down into the glacial speed of boost mode.
[Activating AAN Boost: ETR 00:24rs/04:02cs]
Sanctum, did you put me into boost mode automatically?
[User triggered boost mode manually with autonomic response. Does User want Sanctum to place additional spacing between synaptic and chemical triggers to disable this unconscious function?]
No, no. It’s fine, just took me by surprise. It’s fine.
The agent’s fist was back to barely moving with the blades an inch away from my defensively curled arm. I wouldn’t be able to protect the arm, I didn’t have enough time left. As I looked around at the situation I realized what the agent had done, he’d activated his speedware to give himself enough reactive movement to push his cyberware to strike faster and more importantly, move his head out of the way of my knife. His head was leaning to the side and my still arm and the knife were angled to miss his head entirely now.
He’d completely outmaneuvered me by pulling out his speedware when he was sure of the kill. I didn’t have a lot of options. Looking away from my now missed strike and disregarding the incoming strike I quickly pulled up my netrunning interface and targeted the agent for hacking, it was weird that in the boosted slow time that I could feel the servos of my IR clusters on the base of skull align to the agent.
After a moment the IR clusters found a receiver to overload with connection requests that I watched populate the readout on my interface with a stream of connection port addresses and rejections along with ICE analysis of each rejection.
I was wondered I wouldn’t find a break in the ICE to launch a hack but soon enough it found an band of unprotected nodes with minimal traffic allotment that were mostly for firmware updates. They were unsecured but still narrow, I wouldn't be able to launch my own hacks against these ports. I’d need to program some sort of ICE breaking program, something more sophisticated than my pickaxe, to break open the higher bandwidth ports.
As for the velvet worm daemon, it was tiny. Literally the smallest, lightest daemon I’d ever seen but it was also devastating to cyberware. As far as I could glean from reading through the script it was basically inert against ICE and could be blocked by basically any sort of defense until it unloaded it’s actual offensive tools and started generating the device-side scripts that would cause them to overload and shut down.
[Launched VlvtWrM1.dae]
Even in the slow time I saw the shiver that ran through the agent’s whole body. It was a tiny amount of movement but it was very violent on it’s small scale. I couldn’t see any sparks like I had seen on Marchand and I didn’t know what that meant. Maybe it wasn’t as effective because I hadn’t been connected directly before launching the hack? At least it had worked.
It hadn’t saved me just yet though. I glanced to the side to see the blades of the fist swing into the flesh of my left arm. It might not have focused muscle control behind it with the hack overloading the cyberware but it didn’t need much more power than had already been put into the punch at the speed it was already coming at me.
I let time loose as I was pulled from the ground and thrown sideways through the air to scrape along the ground and then roll to a stop. I didn’t feel any pain and only the vaguest feelings of damage to my body as Sanctum kept a handle on my sensations to keep me combat ready but I knew my arm was messed up even before I’d finished rolling.
Getting up from my belly on the floor was difficult but I disregarded my injuries to check the agent, quickly looking for him and finding him frozen on the spot and twitching wildly in slowly increasing amounts with small trails of black smoke drifting from several places on his body.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Back on my feet I glanced down at my arm to see it was pretty ruined, the tops was basically torn apart with visibly destroyed muscle hanging out of open gashes in the skin and the lower part of the arm from the elbow down was a reddened mess of odd bumps and angles that was obviously a bundle of broken bones. My shoulder wasn’t much better and I could feel a catching in my breathing that was likely a few broken ribs. I pulled up my interface for a moment to check.
Health:
Left lung punctured with two rib fragments.
Severe left lung tissue damage.
Widespread fractures in left arm.
Widespread fractures to ribcage.
Several damaged synthetic teeth.
Several destroyed synthetic teeth.
Several synthetic gum avulsions.
Several contusions to left arm.
Several muscle tears throughout jaw structure.
Several muscle tears throughout left arm.
That’s… Not good. Not so good.
Pulling my eyes away from the readout on my interface I looked back at the twitching agent to see him start to overpower his twitching to contort himself into facing me. From what I could tell of his expression through the spasms he wasn’t very happy with me.
I ran at him as fast as I could with my injuries, trying to fight against a strong sensation pulling me to the left as my body tried to compensate against further damaging my torso and arm even with the pain gone.
Even though I covered the few wide steps to the agent quickly he still had time to go through a reset of his cyberware and I only managed to plunge my knife into his eye by the time his whole body had gone dark, the lights on the various parts going out at once along with his blades quickly losing the heat only for everything to flick back on as my knife cut into his eye socket, find an armored socket and plunge out the side of his temple without causing any damage to his brain.
[Activating AAN Boost: ETR 00:24rs/03:51cs]
Time slowed instantly but it was already too late as the agent’s fist was at the side of my head before I could even process he’d reset himself. I felt several parts of my face break as the punch landed and the force rolled through my head, I hoped my eyes would make it through intact.
The world was still slowed to an extreme degree but my head was totally rocked and even with the ballistic jelly scaffolds and other structures designed to stop my brain from exploding inside the braincase and protect it from impacts there were still limits of human psychology. It didn’t matter how slow the time was when the physical shock waves were rolling through my brain meat and stopping me from thinking clearly.
All I could do was be punched in glacially slow speeds while fluttering on the edge of conscious thought as I looked at the agent and the world around me without really perceiving anything as I couldn’t connect the thoughts together.
Thankfully the punches effect eventually ended as the shockwave settled down from it’s initial impact and the strongest rebounding waves stopped trying to turn my brain into soup. This wasn’t the best situation as I came to just in time to find a second punch coming in at my good side, a body shot straight to the ribs. At least it wasn’t on the broken side but I doubted that would matter much against an angry borg’s punch.
Sanctum, do I have any options here? You have any tricks for me here?
[Nothing without activating emergency protocols.]
What would that open to me? Could you stop this guy from shattering my torso?
[Sanctum could use the cyberware currently installed to allow the User’s biological components to operate in the boosted slow time for a very brief period. Similar to the biological overdrive forced by Sanctum after Anna Marchand’s attack but with greater precision. Any biological components used even in the slightest will experience extreme deterioration and sustained use will lead to mass total cell collapse even with Sanctum intervention to provide maximum medical support.]
So if I’m willing to use my body, I’ll need to be prepared to burn it away from under me to actually move.
[It will more akin to spontaneous, wide spreading necrosis than burning. Sanctum will reconstitute the dead tissue to use it to repair damage as fast as Sanctum can and preserve User life functions but the distributive shock of the damage to the User’s body could lead to instant death. Sanctum can do little to prevent this.]
Just… Just do it Sanctum. Thank you. I’ve committed to this already. May as well keep walking.
[Deploying emergency procedures.]
I didn’t let myself rush into action when I saw that message on my interface, I knew that every motion I used would cost me and even just opening the option was withering me as my body made micro-adjustments to my posture and finished reacting to the punch received, except now with the ability to do so at the speed that I was operating at.
Rolling my eye around to look at the agent’s fist moving in below my good arm to my ribs and his other already pulling back from the first punch, likely to deliver another in a repeating pattern until I was dead I knew I needed something to really damage him. Anything less would just be leaving myself open to a deadly response. I needed him to either be in a position to give up or die right here.
I rolled my eye back around to look at my ruined arm. No use to me now. I couldn’t even move it with so much tissue damage. That left me with my legs and an arm along with my head. I’d already compromised my head with a bit that shattered a lot of my face and the punch had took that shattered state and left me with little more than a lump of torn ceramic, steel and ruptured synthskin with an eye looking out from the hole.
It was the arm then, I could sacrifice my remaining arm to put the borg down. My knife had been left in the borg’s eye when he punched me so I’d need to pull myself around and grab the knife and get it into his brain some how, or into something else critical. I didn’t know what cyberware the gonk corpo agent was using so I’d have to go for the brain.
Braincases were pretty common and there were lots of kinds. There really was one obvious and unavoidable weak spot in all of them. The brain stem had to poke out of the bottom at the back. It wasn’t really possible to avoid it. You could swap out the spine and even parts of the cord if you had the money but the brain stem was too central to the human mind to replace and that meant you needed to poke it out of the braincase at least a little.
Making up my mind I pulled myself quickly upright as I fought against the left over momentum that the punch had put into my body. I felt a rush of warmth across my torso as my core muscles moved likely faster than they’d be able to handle and then grabbed the still shaking knife in my right hand and I watched as the entire skin that of my arm that was visible went an angry red like it being flash burnt in the sun.
I pulled the knife clear of the borg’s eye socket and leaned into him, reaching behind him and aligning the knife to push up through the spine and into the brain stem with the only possible protection being an inch of steel reinforced spine. That wouldn’t hold up to a knife moving at these speeds, it was simple physics.
Then I braced my arm and plunged the knife deep into the agent’s skull, the blade sliding into the steel and slowing but then giving way and almost laughably easily sliding into the man’s brain. I’d have expected a shudder or a twitch from the agent as it happened but there was nothing, just one moment my very red arm was plunging in the knife, then it was in. No response from the agent.
I tried to keep my mind in check as I let go of boosted slow time and let it run right through to normal time.