> Flint VS Steel

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> 003 begin (to) insight

  Blaze had considered it, but she decided that she neither had the time nor inclination to explain herself to Jett. It was a long story, and it was in her best interest not to elaborate on how or why she'd been breaking into the science block. Of course, that didn't stop him from hissing questions the entire time. She let them fly past her head. She was trying to focus.

  The shooting seemed to have stopped. At the very least, she couldn’t hear it anymore. Maybe Jett had something to do with that.

  “Would you shut the fuck up,” she hissed, yanking open the door to the corridor. “I’ll tell you shit when it becomes important. Just follow my fucking lead.”

  The first thing she needed to do, above all else, was make sure that room was secure. She didn’t know what was going on, but she had a hunch. No, more like…

  What else could it possibly be?

  ──Yeah. She knew exactly what this was about. She was probably the only one who did, not counting whoever on the staff had whatever authority to find out. That was precisely why her throat was still starting to catch. The butterflies in her stomach continued to whirl.

  It didn’t make sense. If the secret was so big, who could have possibly found out to react like this? How much didn’t she know? How many pages of this story was she missing? All she had was a few scattered pieces, along with a vague certainty that they were part of the same puzzle.

  “Down on the ground!”

  The deep, dusty bark shattered her train of thought like a battering ram through a window. She couldn’t see the source. She had no plans to comply.

  ────bang─────

  The air cracked open. Something impacted the wall behind her. A hundred things rushed through her brain at once. Jett, bullets, the long straight corridor, countless unknowns.

  Blaze didn’t have a single moment to reach her conclusion. A figure sprinted up from the exact staircase she had been aiming for, machine gun in hand. She slammed her brakes, stopping instantly.

  Glancing back, Jett had long since done the same.

  The figure in front of them toted a bulletproof vest over his torso. A man with shaved silver hair, his face clearly not young despite the mask over his nose and mouth concealing much of his features. Gloves, pads, and yet the clothing was perfectly ordinary beneath that between his jeans and wifebeater. No, that was in itself a kind of camouflage. For a moment, she had almost taken them for little more than heavily-armed thugs, but everything was deliberate. These were soldiers, coordinated professionals.

  “Down on the ground,” the man in front ordered, much calmer than the one behind.

  Blaze bit her tongue, lowering herself to her knees. There wasn’t much that could be done staring down a barrel like that.

  The man’s gaze shot to his colleague over her shoulder. “I said no live fire, shithead. There are kids here.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  The superior let out a dry grunt that made no attempt to conceal that this would have become a lecture under different circumstances.

  “No good way to deal with child soldiers.” The phrase was tinged with disgust as his eyes settled back on Blaze. “Weapons on the ground. Take ‘em out. Both of you. Slowly.”

  She heard a clattering from Jett behind her. A boiling cocktail of emotions hissing inside her, she reached into her uniform and grasped metal, gradually drawing a semi-automatic pistol and setting it on the ground.

  “Slide them to me,” the man instructed.

  She pushed it across the floor, watching it shudder from the friction. The man was probably a dozen paces away, so she wasn’t surprised when neither her gun nor Jett’s actually reached him, but he didn’t seem to care all too much either. His eyes had been on Blaze the entire time, and she felt herself trying to burn a hole through his face.

  “Ain’t your fault,” he said, tone like smoked glass. “You gotta get out of here when you can, God willing. You shouldn’t have these.”

  She couldn’t place his accent. It sounded American at its core, perhaps somewhere southern, but there were just too many renegade elements for him to have gained it in one place.

  “───You’re a real softie, aren’t you, Captain?” came yet another voice. Its accent was much purer ─ likely Hawaiian, pubescent male. Much too young.

  From behind the man stepped a new, much shorter figure. It was hard to tell while she was kneeling, but Blaze suspected he was only slightly taller than she was. Unlike the soldier, he was clad in all black, head to toe in leather and buckles. Each gloved finger wore a thick silver ring, and a white theatre mask cast a mocking smile as it adhered perfectly to the circumference of the pitch hood, concealing even the shape of his face. Unlike the urban camouflage set to take center stage the moment the man was done with his armaments, there was not even a hint of stealth to this figure at all. Despite the lack of colour, it was an almost eyewateringly garish sight, practically sarcastic next to his comrade. It was so out of place that it seemed like a joke. He strode flippantly into full view as though giving a business presentation rather than strutting into the range of weaponry. It was an absolute confidence fit for someone who lacked a single molecule of caution.

  The so-called Captain didn’t take the bait, not adjusting his line of sight even slightly and keeping his eyes firmly on Blaze as he spoke. “How long?”

  The masked boy folded his hands behind his head. “We’re about done down there. Turns out our package comes with free shipping. Pretty sweet, right? I told you, man, this isn’t even a heist, it’s a literal walk in the park.”

  The man behind Jett spoke up. “If we’re wrapping up, is it worth taking these two out to the courtyard at all?”

  The Captain looked to the hooded figure. “Rogue?”

  “Eh, who gives a crap. What are these two schmucks gonna do?” the masked boy shrugged. “Besides…”

  He gestured down the stairs he’d come from, and up came two more men, hauling a huge black cylinder the size of a small car. The casing, Blaze didn’t recognise, but the shape and where it had come from made it more than clear what it was from a glance. Her heart began to race, nausea building in her gut.

  “Put her back!” she cried.

  “And let her become like you?” the Captain replied. “Stay down.”

  The boy chuckled. “If you wanted to keep your Gold, you should’ve hired a banker. We’re done here, Cap,” he said. “Time to fold up and go home. Round up your dudes.”

  With that dismissive remark, he turned to leave, trailing after his prize. It sounded for a moment as though he muttered something ─ Blaze couldn't hear it through the sound of rushing blood in her ears.

  She did hear the sound of the man behind her adjusting his gun, as though just to remind her that she was still on the wrong end of his barrel.

  The Captain snapped some curt order down what looked like an earpiece, took one last look at Jett, then Blaze, then his subordinate.

  “Keep them pinned.”

  “Yessir.”

  With that, he left the corridor.

  “You’re not leaving with them?” Jett finally spoke up. His voice was level, almost serene. Did he not even have the motivation to feel anger, fear, anything? It wasn't her problem.

  The gunman only responded with a grunt of “shut up”, so he seemed to agree.

  But that was where their common ground ended. This man didn’t know a damn thing about their circumstances. None of these shitheels did. Even writing her off as a ‘child soldier’ was wrong. These troops had made a circus of themselves with the number of errors they’d committed. Most of them were minor, with the exception of one. There was only a single, very specific mistake they had made that could not be brushed under the rug.

  ───They should have known that she had resolved long ago to never be powerless ever again.

  Blaze’s hand moved with the swiftness of a magician. From inside her uniform, she drew her second gun.

  She only needed a split second and a halved glimpse. Her revolver's own crack split the distance between her barrel and the man’s.

  “I’m telling you, man. Getting hung up on the age of enlistment? Boomer shit. Take it from me,” the Rogue declared as he sat down on the opposite side of the bus to the Captain, arms outstretched across the whole seat as though hitting on a girl. “I’m a zoomer, right? Barely, but I am. From my perspective, it’s totally fine to let us join the party. There are already zoomers in the military, right?”

  Removing a few seats had made adequate space for the tank, but the man was tired enough of dirty work like abductions to think too hard about its presence. He had seen what was inside it, and he wished he hadn’t. And now this damn kid was rattling off some bullshit about how it wasn’t a big deal to use children as weapons. Maybe the Rogue just didn’t know that he’d already raised kids of his own. He’d learned not to engage with the arrogance of a teenager’s incomplete worldview.

  “You know I’m Gen X, right?” he said.

  “Dude, it’s 2024. We don’t judge people by what they can’t change. We judge them on the content of their character,” the Rogue replied. “You’re boomer.”

  He could hear the self-satisfied grin beneath that white mask. It was a voice that knew that it would be recounting this ‘despicable roast’ to the boy’s friends later, assuming he even had any who would listen.

  “I don’t approve of child assassins either,” he said. “Even if our clients do.”

  The bus started to move as the last few men sat down, and the Rogue gave a conceding nod.

  “Well, even if you’re here on a provisional basis, I can’t complain about your services,” he admitted. “As a Captain of the Guard, you’ve done pretty good. The boss thinks so too. Best of the best… Well, you’re good enough to keep up.”

  Getting a package out of a privately-owned decommissioned military base full of child paramilitary in the middle of New York City in less than ten minutes, specifically without spilling a drop of blood or alerting anyone until it was already done, was just the latest in a series of impossible tasks that their customers had demanded from him and his men. These guys were batshit, that was for sure, but he couldn’t pretend they weren’t the real deal. There was something real fucked up happening here, and he didn’t have a tenth of the full picture, but if their enemy was handing guns to kids and drilling them into killing machines, he knew he was on the right side at the very least. Not that the Rogue’s presence comforted him, but the number of children among his allies couldn’t fill a shed, let alone a school.

  “World’s going to shit,” he sighed.

  “How are you liking the cyberpunk future, old man?” the Rogue chuckled. “Cheer up. Mission clear, right?”

  The bus turned onto the highway back to Manhattan, and sped toward the skyline.

  Blaze rushed around the corner to see the bus pull away from the island, heading for the mainland at full speed. Her head pulsed, teeth grinding. Her grip on her guns tightened.

  ──“That’s gonna be hard to handle,” muttered Jett from over her shoulder.

  “They’re leaving in waves. They mentioned the courtyard,” she said. “Go run interference.”

  If there was a big enough group of hostages there, then a single ripple in the enemy formation would create an opportunity to break their ranks entirely.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a bus to catch.”

  A flash of confusion crossed his expression for a moment, but he didn’t ask ─ apparently, he had decided he didn’t need to know what she was up to, and moved to backtrack without another word.

  Blaze shifted her attention back to the vehicle barrelling away from her.

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  It was already halfway to the city. If it made it, she would lose it for sure. At that speed, it didn’t need much longer to cross the entire bridge.

  ───The winner would be decided within the next twenty seconds.

  Her target was over four hundred metres away.

  Her pistols, modified or not, had an effective range of less than one hundred metres. Even a bullet would not be able to catch it.

  That was fine. She had no intention of relying on something like that to begin with.

  The first thing she had to do was reach the bus herself.

  To do that, she would have to cross the distance with time to spare. The longer she took, the further it would escape.

  The numbers rushed through her head.

  If she was going to catch it in ten seconds, she herself was going to have to clear over seventy metres every second.

  An impossibility. Even ignoring the feat as something out of reach even for the greatest athletes in history, a human body would shatter from simply kicking off the ground at that speed. It was something that could not be mechanically done.

  ───But that was also fine. All she needed to do was shed those limits. Whether or not human means could reach it was a meaningless quibble for the one who grasped an alternative in her left hand.

  The world hissed in blue ─ an artery of static flowed in all directions.

  For Blaze Thompson, that inhuman data───────────────

  ───────────────────────────was already installed.

  ───Open.

  Her heart ─ no, her core ─ churned like a turbine. Not a single physical change had occurred within her body, and yet its limits were overturned instantly. Without so much of a blink of an eye, her very existence itself expanded, and everything was within her reach.

  Four hundred metres? What a joke.

  Something like that wasn’t even beyond the palm of her hand.

  Her foot pushed, the ground buckled. The earth exploded as she launched herself as a living cannonball with a single stride. The scenery rushed like rapids.

  She barely even needed to touch the bridge as she took a second step. The bus seemed as though it was practically falling toward her.

  One second had passed.

  She took aim at the spinning wheels, the bolts and the tyres in perfect clarity even as they roared with the fire of their engine.

  She wasn’t in range, not yet. But she was about to be.

  Two seconds had passed.

  Movement behind the dusty windows. Her enemy had noticed, but their brains clearly hadn’t caught up with what they were seeing. She couldn’t blame them. Nobody could adjust so quickly to the impossible.

  Three seconds had passed.

  Game, set──

  She pulled her triggers, letting her pistols smash the back wheel’s bolts and ripping through the tyre’s rubber.

  With one last step, she overtook it, and turned──

  Slam.

  It took one swing of her left arm, a single blow across the face of the bus to capsize it. The underbelly turned upward, the tyres fell up from the asphalt, sending it howling off to one side. The sound of carnage raised to a crescendo, and a sonorous ringing came as a period to end it.

  Four seconds had passed.

  Only the steel railing, bent wildly out of shape from impact, was saving that wheeled metal coffin from falling into the water below.

  Blaze holstered her guns inside her jacket. As she approached the bus’s back door, she figured she wasn’t going to need them.

  Five seconds had passed.

  The door slammed open, falling down on its hinges.

  The masked figure ducked his head through, clambering out of the now-horizontal gap. He seemed utterly unfazed for someone whose ride was just smashed so badly at full speed, but there was a faint red splatter on that white mask.

  “Heh. I think you did my neck in, bro,” he said simply.

  Blaze frowned. “What, everyone else gave up?”

  The figure shook his head. “Nah.”

  He twirled something long and black in his hand ─ a painted knife. At first, the dripping made it seem like it had been recently dipped, but it only took Blaze a moment to realise what that liquid was.

  “I fired them,” the boy said. “Since we’re doing this now, they’re useless, and it’d be a pain if they blabbed even if nobody would believe them. Shame, though. I actually liked the Captain quite a bit.”

  Despite his words, his tone was utterly dismissive. There was no remorse or passion in his voice. It was as though he were talking about a dull scrap of homework or how plain his breakfast was. There was nothing more to it than that. It was a recount of something that was even less than routine.

  ───But something was off about what he had said.

  When had he gotten a chance to do something like that?

  It was Blaze’s turn to catch up, she realised. In the time that it had taken for her to catch up to the bus and crash it, there was some moment…

  The movement behind the windows? She’d taken it as a reaction to her own presence ─ no, it probably had originally been exactly that. But this guy had taken it as an opportunity. Within seconds at most, possibly less…

  “You killed all of your own comrades?” she frowned.

  It wasn’t only a shock that he would have betrayed his team. Unforgivable, but barely the tip of the iceberg. For someone to have possibly done so much, so fast, so easily…

  It was impossible. Flatly, utterly. Hypocrisy coming from her, she knew, but this was different. She was different. She had come out the other side of the end of the world with power incomprehensible. Blaze Thompson was the one and only. There was just one other person, possibly, who could have had anything close to her own strength, and that girl was sealed in that cylinder inside the bus.

  So who the hell was this?

  “Just the ten dudes in here,” the masked boy shrugged. “After all, it’d suck for you if your little stunt had ended with blood on your hands, Paladin.”

  Blaze paused, struck on the spot with a sense of foreboding ─ not because she recognised his words, but because she didn’t.

  “Who are you?”

  “Pleased to meet you. I am the Rogue of the Shadow Conference,” he gave a bow, that mocking mask of his adding a flair of sarcasm. “Myself, I’m just a little thieving rat. I like to think of myself as the King’s aspiring jester.”

  She gave a sidelong stare. “Shadow Conference being what, exactly? What do you want with that girl?”

  “You mean the Gold? She’s almost as valuable as you, Paladin.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “Too late, dude. You’ve been a member of our Conference before even me, whether you know it or not,” he replied. “The King, the Judge, the Knight, the Cleric, the Rogue, and the Paladin. Six is six. You’ve been one of us for years.”

  She grit her teeth. “That’s for me to decide.”

  The Rogue sighed. “No, man. You don’t get to decide shit,” he said. “If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around it, I’ll just show you.”

  He was gone. Just like that, he vanished──

  ──No, above me?!

  A leather boot came down like a mortar shell. With barely an instant to spare, Blaze’s left arm shot up to meet it. The force of the kick rushed through her body, striking the ground like a bolt of lightning through a rod──

  Her feet moved. Something smashed. The road beneath her feet literally shattered into pieces of dark stony shrapnel as though a hundred jackhammers had struck the exact same two spots.

  There was no time to adjust. A second black swing struck her in the side, sending her careening over the asphalt like a ragdoll. Blaze scrambled to find the ground, righting herself with her feet──

  ──crack─

  Shape. She threw herself to the right, barely avoiding the blade of a flying knife as it skewered the ground behind where she had been crouched just an instant ago.

  She recognised that sound. That sound was almost the same as a bullet.

  A sonic boom…?!

  Her enemy had thrown that thing hard enough to break the sound barrier. It had pierced the tar of the road. Impossibilities. And on top of that──

  I can’t even keep track of him.

  He was ridiculously fast. Blaze hadn’t wound down a bit from clearing over four hundred metres in just three seconds, but this guy’s speed was on a level that she hadn’t even seen him disappear from right in front of her eyes. There should have been nobody in the entire world capable of outpacing her, let alone so much that he was practically invisible───

  ───Something behind her moved. Blaze turned on her heel, swinging her arm──

  “Gah!”

  The Rogue flew straight into her fist. His body struck the rail, warping and tearing it from the bridge as he bounced off.

  She didn’t let the opportunity go. If he was so much faster than her, then all she needed to do was step it up───!

  For just a moment, her vision burned blue.

  Adjust.

  Her punch made contact. The Rogue barely blocked.

  A hook came, a counterattack. She barely deflected it.

  Blaze’s body… No, her very perception of time was getting used to this pace. Now she looked closer, his technique was amateurish. His strength was lacking, both in terms of his own attacks and his ability to deflect hers. Had that speed been his only advantage?

  No, there was more. Another motion, behind her again, but how was that──

  She sidestepped. A knife flew from behind, into his hand.

  The same one he threw?

  The blade that had opened the battle dutifully returned to its master’s hand, uprooting itself from the ground and flying against all logic.

  Taking advantage of her evasion, the Rogue leapt back, gaining some precious distance. Each hand drew more knives that had been folded into his leather ─ thighs, back, elbows. Holding them between his fingers like the claws of a wild animal, he took a stance to hold his ground.

  Something glinted in the sunlight, and Blaze’s eyes settled on the rings on his gloves.

  “I thought those were weird. So you tied wire to your knives,” she noted. “Interesting trick. Kind of feels like it shouldn’t work.”

  She had caught her breath instantly ─ or perhaps she was never out of breath to begin with ─ but the Rogue was panting profusely through his mask.

  “Haa───haha… Well… what can I say…?” he replied. “You’re already pushing me… to my limit… I’m pretty unfit, y’know… If it comes down to it, I have to rely on weapons…”

  “You won’t get that far,” Blaze replied. “I’ve never pushed myself this hard before, but I’m not even close to as hard as I can go.”

  “Heh… You’ve got a good arm, dude. And I never thought you’d catch up to me so quickly.”

  “You’re not bad yourself,” she said. “But you underestimated me, and I won’t let you get away with that. How much faster can you go? Because I feel like I could double this without breaking a sweat.”

  It wasn’t a lie. This was more than comfortable for her. But Blaze wasn’t sure she could get to double either. She had sped up when the Rogue had shown her a higher speed, but for double this pace? She didn’t even have a frame of reference. It was almost as if, to reach higher, she needed───

  “I’m all good, Paladin,” the Rogue straightened his back. “You’re right. I’ve learned my lesson about taking you head-on.”

  Now Blaze’s breath caught. It was as though his words had coiled around her ankles, draining her blood from her veins. Whatever he had in mind, she could not allow him to get any further.

  “When it comes to──?!”

  He didn’t get another word out. Blaze’s fist made sure of that. A bolt of blue shattered the road through his feet.

  A direct blow struck the mask literally head-on, cracking it right down the middle and letting the Rogue fly back across the asphalt. The white smiling face skittered across the ground, several feet out of reach. The boy screamed, grasping at his hood as though the sun would sear his flesh from his bones.

  Blaze took one step forward, but he wasn’t eager to let her finish either. Rolling over, he flung himself under the bridge’s rail, dropping off and into the water below. She made it just in time to see him break the murky, iris-like surface with a crisp white splash.

  “Tch.”

  She had really been hoping to see his face, but apparently she was in for no such luck today. She had no doubt that she was going to be seeing him again though, given all the crap he was rambling about.

  “‘Paladin’?” she muttered. “What a fucking joke.”

  She was perfectly content to have jack shit to do with whatever special social club had decided she was a member, and she was keeping Mel far away from them too. Any nutcase like that wasn’t someone she planned to associate with.

  Her ears picked up a growling, and she lifted her gaze to spot a motorcycle slowing down as it came toward her. A stocky guy was at the handlebars, and right behind him was a familiar lanky figure.

  “Draven, Jett,” she acknowledged.

  “All good?” Draven asked.

  “We cleared the courtyard out. Apprehended four guys,” Jett reported. His eyes were elsewhere, scanning the cracks and brand new potholes in the bridge, the bent rails, and the tipped bus precariously balanced on the edge of the road. “What the hell happened here?”

  “Explosive bullshit,” Blaze replied instantly, gesturing to the mask a few paces away. “Fought their kid boss. Knocked his mask clean off, but I didn’t get what he looked like. He went in the water. See if you can get him, he’ll be arriving on the mainland for sure. Go tell the coastguard.”

  “Will do, no sweat,” Draven said. “Whew, what a day, right?”

  “The package?” Jett pressed, ignoring him.

  “It’s still in the bus, I’ll figure out a way to deal with it. Go,” she instructed.

  The two didn’t need any further instruction, and the bike revved up, deftly dodging the aftermath of the carnage.

  Blaze jogged toward the vehicle she’d trashed. The company was definitely not going to be happy about any of this, but that wasn’t her problem.

  Through the open back door, she could see the cylinder on its side, jammed where some seats had been removed. If the ceiling had been higher, then it might have fallen, but it wasn’t even close to coming unlodged as it was. She was less concerned about its position, and more about the red blinking light. Ducking her head, she climbed inside the bus to get a closer look at the white text printed just above it.

  REFILL.

  It was at that moment that Blaze realised she had stepped into a puddle. Some kind of fluid was leaking down around her feet. A huge crack had scarred right down the side of the cylinder, bleeding something or other.

  She understood what it was almost instantly. This was the fluid that the tank’s patient had been suspended in, and it was practically gushing out. It must have been the crash, she noted.

  “Shit.”

  What was this stuff? Did the cylinder need it? How long could it function without it? Would it work without it at all? Her mind reeled. She didn’t understand enough about this, but she was running low on time and options.

  Creak.

  ──Lower than she thought. She could feel something starting to bend. This bus wasn’t going to make it much longer.

Blaze scoured the tank’s exterior, looking for anything she could use to mitigate the issue, but she only found one red switch ─ in case of emergency, it was labelled.

  Well, she reasoned, this sure seems like a fucking emergency.

  She yanked it, and the mechanism forced the cylinder wide open.