Chapter — 19
Having finished her guided tour with Wilma, Rei chose an orange-coded job from the board and walked toward the portal arch, the only way to move securely into and from their level of the atrium.
Upon seeing the archway, Rei felt like slapping herself.
It was so blatantly obvious all along. How did I not think of it sooner? Symbolism, Rei. Symbolism. How secure can a space be if you can enter it from wherever you please?
The security of her submesh had such difficulties stopping WolfMosh because instead of building a fortified wall around her realm with a single, heavily protected door to enter and exit through, she'd built her wall out of doors in a metaphorical sense.
It's no wonder he could pop up wherever and whenever he wanted...
Rei set out to rectify this glaring hole in her security the moment she returned to her submesh.
She didn't need to alter her whole realm and build a physical wall or anything, but merely to anchor her ICE into a focus.
Not feeling wildly creative and just wanting to get it done, she went for the same approach and used a portal.
To give herself potential extra milliseconds against hostile intrusions, she placed the Norse-themed wrought iron portal arch at her mountain's base near the winding river. It was then easy to symbolically close it by shutting off the portal and sinking it beneath the rapids, the flowing water working to erode any intrusive data trying to worm itself in through the closed yet still present connection.
Much better. Try getting through that! Well, WolfMosh certainly will be able to, but who else would even try?
At least it didn't take long.
With that done, Rei went to work.
***
WolfMosh stood in a now vacated shopping mall, his eyes closed to the world around him but his mind seeing the state of the battle.
It was going surprisingly poorly.
Not that his underlings performed worse than their adversaries, as they were pretty much on the same level. Their katanas and smart weapons met metal fists that hammered down on them like pistons or tore through the flesh where the rival gang members' armor had previously been ripped apart.
The strategically placed Magi in his ranks — either hidden at a distance or embroiled in the middle of the conflict where they could hide in plain sight amongst the enforcers — would have tipped the scale far in their favor if it weren't for an anomaly.
WolfMosh saw through his mind as outlined connections in the forms of his soldiers winked out one by one, not merely severed from their comm-links or his custom software keeping tabs on everyone working beneath him.
No, they were all dead before their lifeless husks hit the devastated ceramic floor tiles with fleshy thuds and metallic clangs.
The culprit responsible was skilled. Extremely so.
Taking the lives of his men seemed effortless to them, and to someone as experienced as him, it was obvious that they weren't even trying that hard. It was terrible news.
WolfMosh was good at manipulating the mesh and could, therefore, see that what his adversary was doing wasn't their limit. The question was who was the better Magi between him and the unknown.
Are they only holding back a little, or are they barely trying to finish my men off?
He suddenly saw one of Meshmagi in the middle of the battlefield drop dead, having tried to prevent the death of one of his comrades beside him. It was another thing that made little sense. The adversary only went after the Magi directly opposing them; otherwise, they left them alone, almost as if they wanted to keep the status quo of winning but not doing it quickly.
Anyone wanting to win would have focused on the Magi. Even if they are not on the same level as my apprentices, they are still the most dangerous on average.
Who am I up against, and what are they after?
Not knowing made his subsequent actions uncertain. Figuring out who he was up against was of the utmost importance, as it may lead him to the reason behind everything that had happened in the last three years. Of second-most importance was preventing the further senseless deaths of his men.
There was also one specific man among the throng of bodies doing their best to rip each other apart who shouldn't have been there if he'd listened to his younger siblings: Ichiro Takeda.
He was one of the more promising enforcers working for the Fangs, and WolfMosh watched him through a drone as he stomped one downed Piston's skull with a heavy boot while simultaneously slashing the neck of another — nearly decapitating her.
Blood and guts stained his combat gear, but he continued to gleefully push forward, killing with efficient strikes from his cybernetic limbs, precise cuts from his katana, or mostly accurate shots from his assault rifle. He'd been in enough battles against The Pistons to get a feel for their style by now, becoming efficient in his work.
WolfMosh was about to turn that part of his attention away to the overall state of the battle when he saw it.
It was as if Ichiro had drawn the hostile Magi's attention by WolfMosh placing a little extra focus on him. Ichiro had become the Magi's next target, and he had no idea.
FUCK!
Time seemed to slow as his mental augments kicked into full gear for the first time that day, his perception of time slowing as he considered.
I can't let them kill him, as there's no way to know how much chaos Rei may start when she finds out. She obviously still loves her siblings even after the coma.
No matter what Rei thought, he'd only snooped on their first call through the secure connection he'd established for them, leaving his AI to keep watch for specific things that might jeopardize his plans thereafter. That one conversation had been enough to let him know that much, at least.
But engaging the hostile Magi without gathering more data is risky...
He'd been compiling and analyzing data on their methods and patterns as he'd kept watching for the last quarter hour and would have liked to continue doing so for at least another ten minutes. Unless he could stomach the consequences of seeing Ichiro slaughtered, that time was now at an end.
Fuck. Alright. Here goes nothing…
***
Having completed her fifth job, the fifth orange job in a row, Rei was about to go deposit the completed work in the local mesh and grab her first red one when she stopped.
"Takeda Rei," a garbled, toneless feminine voice said, echoing from seemingly all around her.
Rei whipped her head around but saw nothing but her tranquil courtyard. She felt the simulated hairs on her neck stand on end. "Who?!"
"Silvia, the overwatch AI for the Cyber Fangs." The garbled female voice responded.
The AI can talk? Well, of course, it can. Speech is one of the most common forms of data transference between organics. But why does she — it — speak to me? Has something happened? Ichiro-
"You don't have time for emotional responses such as panic or confusion. Your orders are this: Take this data and store it in your cyberdeck," what Rei recognized as one of her enslaver's many puzzle cubes appeared before her in mid-air, hovering there, "then exit the mesh and make your way to master's office. Enter this data," a keycard appeared next to the cube, "into the data port beneath his desk and exit the facility through the secret-"
Rei didn't hear the rest as she felt an alarm from her dive chamber go off in her mind, initiating the sequence to boot her out of the mesh. She instinctively grabbed the two objects in front of her, vanishing.
***
Rei's eyes snapped open behind the mask covering her lower face, her pupils dilating as she saw the hand and the object it held close in on her neck.
Instinctively, she snapped her hand up and grabbed the wrist.
Her eyes moved from the injector to Wilma's face; she was shocked at what she saw. It wasn't the happy expression she remembered; it wasn't mere dislike, either. It was loathing. Hatred shone from her eyes, and a triumphant grin stretched her features into a vicious caricature of her usual visage.
"You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this, Rei-chan." Her voice oozed with malice while still sounding chipper.
Rei's mind exploded with static, and disjointed snippets of memory flashed through her mind:
She sat in the same dive chamber, connecting herself as Wilma walked up with a data slate. She gave it to Rei and said it had to be decoded immediately. Her prompt compliance without a second thought was spurred on by the seriousness in her friend's tone.
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Rei's eyes widened as the realization sunk in. It hadn't taken more than a second. The tiny hints she'd picked up from [Deception] also suddenly gained a new clarity, bringing the facade now gone from Wilma's face and mannerisms into a new light.
"It was you!"
"It was," Wilma responded matter-of-factly, but her face suddenly twisted into a snarl. "But you weren't supposed to destroy the data!" she spat.
I didn't betray the Fangs! Wilma did! She betrayed all of us. But-
Rei had to stop her spiraling thoughts as the injector suddenly started moving closer. Rei tried to stop it with all her might, but she'd seriously underestimated Wilma's strength. No matter how much she struggled, Wilma's slow lowering of the needle was casual and smooth, seemingly requiring no effort.
She has augmented strength?!
Rei realized that she should have thought of it sooner. Of course, Wilma did. All her fellow apprentices apart from her probably had more cyberware than flesh in their bodies. Rei wasn't the same; all her previous chrome had been removed, and her flesh regrown.
"Why?!" Rei cried, her panic rising at seeing the futility of her struggles against her adversary's strength.
"You don't need to worry about that for now," Wilma said, her tone now one of glee, "I'm not going to kill you, you know? Not like I tried to do last time. It's all your fault to begin with, anyway.
"No, this little thing will only knock you out. You're coming with me to where my lord will lock you up and comb through that brilliant," her voice sounded disgusted at the word, "mind of yours for any leftover data that imprinted itself."
Lock. Me. Up?..
For a split second, Rei couldn't comprehend the meaning. When she did, something in her psyche finally cracked.
Rei snapped.
[Merciless] flowed through her, and [Parallel Thoughts #1] were strained to its limit as Rei's soulless eyes met Wilma's. The scan from her cybernetic eyes had barely begun before she had breached her foe's neural link and begun to splice it.
Rei saw her adversary's eyes begin to widen, the injector moving toward her flesh with more urgency. Not that it mattered. To Rei, time had nearly stopped as her nanite-augmented brain fired at speeds it had never reached before.
Wilma's ICE was incredible, way above what Rei herself had. However, there was also something off about it. It felt stale, for lack of a better word. It was outlandishly intricate and a masterpiece of programming, yes, but still stale.
Wilma had barely begun to actively mobilize her defenses against Rei's intrusion, but that was enough for her to notice that Wilma seemed lacking in familiarity with the ICE to the degree that Rei could only attribute to one thing:
She wasn't its maker.
Taking advantage of it, she sunk her digital fingers into it and began to rip it apart, batting the automatic responses from the ICE aside as she dodged Wilma's attention. It was just barely possible due to her split streams of consciousness splicing from two opposite directions with immense complexity.
No matter how fast she processed the data, the injector moved closer to her neck by the millisecond. Rei increased the splices' bandwidth further as her cold mind braced for retaliatory impacts against her own defenses.
As Wilma's ICE finally got a chance to hit back, Rei felt like her brain was being electrocuted. Her vision from her cybernetic eyes flickered on and off in time with the pain as she directed the retaliatory strikes away from her more critical cyberware — namely, her neural link and cyberdeck.
The injector remained Rei's biggest concern. To prevent it from reaching her flesh, she prioritized disabling the limb holding it.
Rei had thought it organic until that moment, but what lay hidden beneath perfectly realistic synth skin was a mechanical masterpiece. She caught a glimpse of it through the streams of data as that part of Wilma's ICE shielding her neural link finally gave for the briefest of windows.
She jammed her digital fingers inside, wrecking the data and tearing her way through. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the limb spasm in slow motion, the injector moving slightly off-course into a new trajectory that would hit the faux leather coating she lay on instead.
Then Rei refocused on Wilma's other cybernetics connected to her neural link.
She tore through her adversary's increasingly frantic attempts to hinder her. As Rei grew more familiar with the ICE and Wilma's inexperience with it became more pronounced, Rei caught more and more glimpses of the data within.
Rei was astounded at how much cyberware the woman had, but she didn't let it break through her focus thanks to [Merciless] and [Strong Will].
More parts of Wilma's body began to spasm as Rei worked her way through, inserting malicious code where she got a tiny opening until, finally, the ICE was fully overcome.
Gaining full access to her systems, Rei didn't hesitate to strengthen her two splices as much as she could. She transferred virus upon virus she'd programmed to overcome the puzzles WolfMosh had given her. Due to their programming's lack of cohesion, some of them targeted each other, but the overall effect was still as immense as it was instantaneous.
Through clear eyes that had now stopped flickering on and off, Rei saw Wilma's body shudder. Arcs of electricity snapped beneath synthetic skin and muscle, her body frying itself from the haywire cybernetics lashing out at everything as their programming destroyed itself from within.
Then it was over.
Wilma slumped, her upper body falling onto Rei as she steamed and twitched, the smell of burnt pork and plastics filling the air. Rei pushed what was most likely already a corpse off herself with cold detachment before disconnecting and hauling herself out of the dive chamber.
Not wanting to take an unnecessary risk, she took the injector dropped in the DC and plunged it into Wilma's neck before stepping away.
Her brain felt like it was boiling from the strain it had been put under, but thanks to the briefness of activity and still being hooked into the dive chamber's cooling systems, her cyberdeck hadn't boiled her blood. She knew now that putting it under such a heavy load without proper cooling for extended periods would kill her for a fact, but it luckily hadn't. The process of killing — or at least incapacitating — her fellow apprentice hadn't taken more than a couple of real-time seconds.
Rei looked around the dive room, seeing Mikaela's dive chamber empty but Selvix still lying inside his. He was most likely already dead as the bullets that had shattered the dive chamber's see-through cover had also painted the inside red.
I wonder if he ever thought of his DC as a coffin...
Shaking off the thought, Rei looked around for whatever weapon Wilma must have used in the murder, finding it lying next to her now vacated DC on the other side of where Wilma's body lay steaming.
Walking over, she picked up the assault rifle and breached its node. Splicing the security within was near-effortless, and she looked at its information.
Is its node not connected to the local mesh?
This must be an sNode split from any mesh connection except for... yup, there it is. Only one connection is allowed, and it went to 'Sparks' for nearly two and a half years before being unceremoniously cut off barely a minute ago.
The magazine is still half-full. This will do.
As she stepped around her dive chamber, she had barely raised the weapon when a garbled and much less distinct voice entered her ears through invisible speakers placed all around the room.
"Hurry... office... Can't delay... intrusion... security bots... imminent," the distorted female voice said, almost sounding in pain between pauses — if that was even possible for an AI not fully sapient.
Someone's trying to infiltrate the facility and access the security bots? Now that I think about it, they should already be here, stopping Wilma from murdering Selvix or kidnapping me. Is it Mikaela's doing? She's not here, after all.
Not letting panic overtake her — or, more accurately, incapable of panicking due to her perk keeping such useless emotions from impacting her logical decision-making — she opened fire on the body beneath her, painting the floor and herself in the resulting blood spray.
「Notice:
[1] Adversaries neutralized.
Received: 200 Experience」
Well, isn't that interesting? Can't see it making much sense, but it sure poses intriguing considerations.
The magazine clicked empty, and she hung the now useless weapon around her shoulder using its strap.
Well, I might use it to intimidate someone, so it's not entirely useless.
Taking another swift look around but not finding anything immediately useful, she sprinted out of the dive room.
Why should I go to WolfMosh's office? The AI mentioned something about 'secret,' but what could it be? A secret data stash? A secret passage? The latter is more probable in context, but why let me leave through a hidden passage?
Can it be that WolfMosh already knew of my innocence regarding the theft of the data slate? Then why keep me imprisoned here...
Rei threw the considerations out of mind as she put both her streams of consciousness into planning as she exited the dive room and came upon the security bots. They were roughly canine-shaped, but guns mounted on their backs or otherwise pointing out of openings made it clear that their razor fangs were a last-resort measure and not their primary mode of delivering death.
I would like to have time to change clothes. Running around in an MDS would be inconspicuous if I manage to escape, but I don't seem to have that time.
As she ran past, she saw how the crimson eyes of each metal wolf flickered, their limbs twitching minutely as their heads jerked in her direction, only to be forced to look forward again. Something — what Rei suspected to be the now barely functioning AI — tried to keep whatever was infiltrating the facility from accessing the security bots, it seemed.
As she ran, she nearly stumbled as a deep and resonating explosion sounded from somewhere above. The whole building shook as dust was kicked into the air. A few of the less steady wolf robots fell with clangs onto their sides, where they remained twitching.
Leaping over one such bot, Rei continued running, her speed increasing.
An attack at HQ? That can't be good. If no one's here to stop the planting of a bomb or whatever that was, that must mean that no one's here to stop whoever or whatever's coming for the facility.
Having nearly reached the office's entryway, Rei heard a machine gun opening up fire behind her, bullets pinging off metal as the sound of casings hitting the floor rang out in rapid succession.
She ducked as she moved toward the already open door, glancing behind her. The weapon hadn't been pointed in her direction but at a wall; all the same, she saw an increase in their twitching and gun barrels slowly moving in her general direction.
Inside the office, Rei ran behind the desk, which was littered with boxes of tech and bottles of spirits, and looked for the data port. After two long seconds of her eyes roaming everywhere, she found it. Pulling out her data jack by pressing down on the seam in her left wrist and gripping it, she slotted it in.
She transferred the data that had presented like a keycard in the mesh, and just like she'd suspected, a click and hiss behind her signaled the opening of something. Pulling out her data jack and retracting it back into her arm, she spun.
A previously hidden and shielded door was opening at the back of the office, and Rei was just about to go through it when a call came through her agent.
Did the bomb damage the shielding of the facility to such a degree that the public mesh gets through?
Seeing who the caller was, she answered without hesitation.
"Miyo?" She asked, trying and utterly failing at getting the emotionless tone out of her voice.
"Rei! Are you alright? Someone's attacking Cyber Fang HQ! It's all over the Zone 8 mesh feeds!" Miyo asked frantically.
"I'm alright. I'm leaving the area now, so you don't need to worry. Are you and Ichiro safe?"
"You're leaving? Yes, I'm safe. I'm at work. Ichiro is working, so I don't know where he is, and I called you first," Miyo answered, still sounding frantic.
"Good. Get into contact with Ichiro and go into hiding. Go to one of Ichiro's friends who is not affiliated with the gang. He mentioned friends a couple of times, so there must be someone. You understand?"
"W-What? Rei, you don't sound normal. Are you sure everything-"
"I'm Fine!" Rei interrupted, "Can you do as I've asked? Don't stay anywhere controlled by the Fangs, and don't stay with anyone you don't trust. And don't call me again either; I'll call you as soon as I'm out of here. Do. You. Understand?"
Miyo was silent for a few seconds on the other side, and Rei glanced toward the office's entrance, where she could hear unsteady metallic steps and the occasional gunshots closing in.
"Fine, Imouto. But you better call back soon, or I'll come find you, you hear?" Miyo finally answered.
"I hear," Rei said as she cut the call; two barely flickering crimson-glowing eyes were already staring in her direction through the doorway.
Rei dived through the secret exit as gunfire opened up behind her, and as she'd suspected, her access to the public mesh vanished as she did. The tunnel was shielded just like the facility had been.
The hidden door closed behind her, and she ran like the devil was on her heels.
For all she knew, it could be.