Hiran turned and saw a man standing further down the street, roughly twenty feet away. There was an empty space around him, with the crowd giving him as wide a berth as they’d given Hiran.
His features were pale but leathery, and though he was slender and narrow-shouldered in build, he was as tall as the thugs who’d been threatening the vendors. A metallic sheen glistened over his throat and the underside of his jaw. His legs were back-jointed, almost like Lila’s, and his unshod feet were mechanical contraptions, almost equine in shape.
He wore a long coat of brown leather that reached down to his ankles and half-gloves that revealed his fingers of scuffed black metal. The man knuckled his gray, scraggy beard and glared at Hiran with the pair of crimson optical implants lodged beneath his brow.
“Who are you, stranger?” the man asked. “That was a Martial Form, wasn’t it? You don’t look like a cultivator to me, with all that top-of-the-line hardware you’re packing, so how did you pull that off?”
Hardware? Oh, right. I look like I have the most expensive Shrava augmentations. Hiran shrugged. “I’m Hiran.”
“So is every other Ghandarnian man on this planet,” the man said, scoffing. His optical implants whirred and clicked.
Hiran frowned as a notification appeared on his Ajna Interface.
Warning: You have been scanned. All public identifiers have been accessed.
“What’s this?” The man grunted. “None of your hardware specs are showing up. You’re keeping them in plain sight with their factory brands in full view, but nothing about their data can be scanned? What do you have to hide?”
According to Lila, any attempt to scan Hiran’s fake Shrava augmentations would fail, since he didn’t have any in the first place. The scanner would dig up no more data than the presence of an energy signature, which came from an otherwise useless miniature fusion core the Savant had soldered to the life support module of Hiran’s spacesuit.
“Maybe your scanner just isn’t working properly.” Hiran tapped the side of his head. “I know the feeling. I have trouble with mine all the time.”
“Cut the crap.” The man spat on the street. His right hand hovered over the hilt of a sword belted to his hip. “You’d better come clean, boy, or the only way you’re leaving here is in pieces.”
“Come clean about what?” Hiran shrugged. “I’m a fifteenth ranker mercenary, and I was hired to take care of these idiots lying all over the street. I did my job, and I got paid, so I’m going to go find another.”
“This was a shit job,” the man said, scowling and revealing a mouthful of blackened metal teeth. “No one was going to take it.”
“I did,” Hiran said, before patting his belt pouch, where his credit chit was kept. “Two hundred credits. And hey, since you scanned me, you won’t mind if I return the favor.”
Madhya Mercenary Profile #4119372-C
Operative name: Elliot Smith
Realm of Origin: Asharican Union, Kuleva
Guild Affiliation: Ashen Guild
Standing: Third Ranker
Gig record: 4897 successes, 0 failures, 112 cancellations
Hirer’s Overview
ACCESS DENIED
A stream of gibberish scrolled across Hiran’s Ajna Interface, and he was forced to dismiss his scan. He’d been the subject of a data-theft countermeasure, he realized.
Lila had told him about them a few days ago. The most common ones worked by rapidly obscuring their users’ information while flooding the Ajna Interface of whoever was spying on them with illegible nonsense. The most expensive and subtle ones yielded readily to any probes while revealing absolutely nothing at all, giving off the impression that there was nothing to hide.
Hiran had nothing to hide at all regarding his Shrava augmentations, because he literally had none of them. But to the mercenary named Elliot, he must seem as if he’d been equipped with some of the best data-theft countermeasure programs.
Elliot growled. The disgruntled scowl on his face turned into a snarl of rage. “Men have died for doing much less, boy.”
“Stop calling me that,” Hiran said, frowning in irritation. “I’m older than you, you idiot. And you’re wasting my time. See you never.”
He began to turn away, only for the mercenary to draw his sword. It was four-feet long of curved, black steel, and it hummed as Elliot swept it through the air. It was a combat vibro-blade, far less effective than an Enforcer’s rippersword, but easily capable of slicing through flesh, bone, and light armor.
Bheled used to have something like that as a backup weapon, Hiran recalled. Maybe I should get myself a blade like that too, since I can’t really go around waving Azure Fang everywhere I go in Madhya.
“Stay where you are!” Elliot ordered.
Hiran cycled a trickle of Aether into his Sun Circuits. Golden lines blazed across his skin, but he knew his holographic module would reshape their appearance, so that anyone who looked upon him would see the activation lights of high-end Shrava augmentations flaring to life instead. He flashed the mercenary a grin. “No.”
Elliot opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Hiran simply turned and ran down the rest of the street, cutting sharply to the left as he approached the intersection there.
Another street yawned before him. There were warehouses on its eastern side and a string of hardware and tool storefronts on its western side. Each warehouse building stood at least three or four stories tall. A quartet of Ghandarnian workers crossing the street blinked in astonishment as Hiran skidded to a halt right in front of them.
He kicked off into a tremendous leap, blasting a shallow crater in the street’s asphalt surface as he hurtled twenty feet into the air. Hiran twisted his body as he ascended, so that his bootheels touched down upon the frontal wall of the closest warehouse. Then he executed the Chaos Path, one of the techniques from [Darkened Mist] which he’d learned during the third year of his apprenticeship under Master Vikram.
Aether swirled from his feet, forming grasping claws that latched onto the synthcrete surface of the building. This allowed Hiran to run across the front of the warehouse, the length of his body casting a nine-foot-long shadow upon the street beneath the radiance of the midmorning sun.
A few strides brought him to the end of the building. He kicked off again from there, tucking himself into a full somersault as he spun across the width of the street, before landing on the roof of a tool shop. Hiran broke out into another sprint that had him running across the top of a dozen buildings, hurdling chain-link fences, ducking beneath ventilation columns, and slipping through small mazes of clusters of maintenance pipes.
Hiran reached the end of the street, turned sharply to the east, and threw himself off the roof of the building he’d been standing on. His leap brought him partway up the front of a four-storied warehouse. He executed the Chaos Path again, latching his boots onto the synthcrete surface, and climbed the rest of the building’s height, before hopping over a safety rail of woven wire and landing upon its roof.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
It was fairly open up there. A few empty metal crates were stacked in the far corner of the rooftop, and a narrow stairwell shelter sat in the middle of the space. This warehouse was one of the tallest buildings within two city blocks, and the safety rail of its rooftop was so densely woven that prying eyes from nearby windows would have a difficult time trying to figure out anything that happened on its surface.
Hiran rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck muscles. A full minute later, Elliot hurdled over the safety rail and landed on the far end of the rooftop. The mercenary was sweating, obviously having pushed his body and his augmentations during the pursuit.
“What’s your problem?” Hiran asked, shaking his head. “You’re a third ranker, right? Don’t you have better things to do than bother a fifteenth ranker like me?”
“You used a Martial Form in the street! And then you used another to climb buildings!” Elliot replied in a ragged and rasping voice. “I want to know how!”
“I learned them, of course,” Hiran said. “What’s it to you?”
“You’ll tell me who taught them to you,” Elliot said, brandishing his sword. “It’s up to you whether you die quickly or slowly after you do.”
“You do know that I could have outrun you easily, right?” Hiran cracked his knuckles, then interlocked his fingers and stretched his palms by turning them outward. “If I hadn’t stopped, you wouldn’t have come anywhere near me, and we wouldn’t be speaking now.”
“What’s your point?” Elliot snarled. The fingers of his left hand retracted into his palm. A whirring circular saw replaced them. The mercenary fell into a combat stance, with his sword held straight in front of him and his saw pulled back in readiness to punch outwards.
“My point is that I wouldn’t do that if I were worried you’d have any chance of hurting me,” Hiran said, cycling more Aether into his Sun Circuits. “If you’re smart, you’d walk away right now, but I don’t think you will, because you’re… well, not smart.”
He charged directly at the mercenary, crossing the twenty or so feet between them in a fraction of a second. Elliot flinched in surprise, but to his credit, he managed to lash out with his sword before Hiran could slip inside its reach.
The vibro-sword flickered out toward Hiran’s throat. It was a hasty and awkward blow, but it was also quite swift, which meant that the mercenary had augmentations that heightened his reflexes.
Hiran used the Fallen Spiral technique from [Woven Cloud] to catch the humming blade in a net of Aether spiraling from his right palm. He tore the sword from Elliot’s grasp and whipped a tight left hook across the mercenary’s jaw. Metal warped and creaked beneath the impact. Lines of red light flashed down both sides of Elliot’s neck as his head snapped to the side.
Shock absorbers, Hiran thought, his eyes widening. He’d be unconscious already if not for them.
The mercenary stumbled back, his optical implants clicking wildly. Blood and some oily, black fluid streamed down the sides of his broken jaw. He swept his saw out, hoping to bury its edge in Hiran’s abdomen.
Hiran stepped casually out of reach, then strode forward and hit Elliot again, this time with an uppercut to the mercenary’s midriff. Once more, he felt metal flex and creak beneath his knuckles and the same curious, shifting sensation he’d experienced when he’d struck the mercenary’s jaw.
More shock absorbers, he realized, as Elliot staggered back, grunting in pain and frustration instead of simply keeling over and gasping for the breath that should have left his lungs.
The mercenary reached into his coat with his right hand. Hiran saw that he had a shoulder holster filled with a pistol. He dropped low and crashed his right shin against both of Elliot’s, sweeping the mercenary’s back-jointed legs out with an Arrogant Tide technique from [Stride of the Conqueror].
Elliot still managed to draw his pistol and aim it at Hiran’s head even as he fell. Hiran smacked the gun aside just as the mercenary pulled the trigger. The shot went far off its mark and tore into the sky.
The mercenary struck the rooftop. He tried to rise, but Hiran stamped down on his face, with a Contemptuous Comet technique executed at a tenth of its usual strength. The perpendicular impact left Elliot’s shock absorbers with no room to work with, so Hiran’s heel struck his brow square-on, crushing his optical implants and driving the back of his skull into the rooftop with enough force to crack its synthcrete surface.
Elliot’s body went limp, then. Hiran shook his head and withdrew his foot. Then he turned around to face the other mercenary that had arrived on the rooftop.
The newcomer was a woman. Her scalp was bare, just like Elliot’s, save for a white-haired top knot held in place by a leather cord. Instead of a sword, she had paired submachine guns holstered at her hips.
Her complexion was pale too, but also uncannily smooth. Hiran wondered idly if her skin was some kind of Shrava augmentation as well. The woman’s other augmentations resembled Elliot’s, right down to the metal neck, arms, and back-jointed legs, but she didn’t have the same bulky optical implants. Instead, she sported a pair of synthetic eyes beneath her brow. They had sapphire-hued irises, and their sclera was webbed with circuitry the color of copper.
Those look a lot more expensive than these, Hiran thought, letting his gaze drift back and forth between the woman’s eyes and the metallic wreckage on Elliot’s face. He quickly scanned her with his Ajna Interface.
Madhya Mercenary Profile #4119372-C
Operative name: Mirabelle Smith
Realm of Origin: Asharican Union, Kuleva
Guild Affiliation: Ashen Guild
Standing: Third Ranker
Gig record: 3127 successes, 22 failures, 332 cancellations
Hirer’s Overview
ACCESS DENIED
Looks like I got locked out again. Oh well. Let’s get this over with. Hiran clenched his fists and took a step forward, but the sapphire-eyed woman raised her hands in a forestalling gesture.
“Wait,” she said. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Good. Then you won’t get any, at least not from me.” Hiran halted in his tracks. “You two look the same in a few ways, but you’re obviously the smarter one.”
“My twin brother can be very stubborn, but I think you know that already,” she said, forcing a thin and weak smile upon her face. “Please don’t hurt him more than you have.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Hiran said. “Anyway, he’s lucky you’re here. You’d better bring him to a… what was it… Shrav-doc right away, so that he can get his, uh, eyes fixed.”
“Elliot hasn’t sustained any lethal injuries,” the woman said, looking directly at her brother. The copper circuitry in her eyes spun and swirled for a moment. “But his optical implants will need replacing. He won’t be happy about that.”
“I don’t really care what he’s happy about,” Hiran said. “He chased me down and threatened me.”
“And you rightfully defended yourself,” she said. “That should be the end of things, except…”
“He’s going to keep coming after me when he wakes up, right?” Hiran asked. He patted the holstered pistol on his hip. “If you think you can’t convince him not to, then it’d be a stupid move on my part to not finish him off here and now, wouldn’t it?”
“It would, but I’d really rather you not, because you’ll have to contend with me first.” The woman’s smile turned cold. “And he might not agree, but between us twins, I am by far the most formidable one.”
“You’re definitely a bit more reasonable.” Hiran took his hand off his pistol and nudged the unconscious Elliot with the toe of his boot. “What is this fellow’s problem, anyway?”
“He saw you using a Martial Form,” she said. “There’s an open contract out now to hunt down and apprehend a warrior named Vikram who’s on Madhya. He’s a cultivator, whatever that means, and according to the scant visual recordings that exist of him, he fights in a similar fashion to you. Martial Forms, or something along those lines.”
Vikram? Master Vikram? He’s here on Madhya? How? And why? Hiran forced a mask of stoic neutrality over his features as he fought down surprise and astonishment that welled in his heart. “So he thinks I am this Vikram fellow? You said there are recordings of him, right? Does he resemble me?”
“Not in the slightest, but Elliot probably thought you might provide a lead of some sort.” The woman shook her head and sighed. “He’s been chasing this contract for the last two months and not made any progress at all. In fact, everyone in the Ashen Guild who’s gone after Vikram so far has failed, either because they couldn’t find him or because when they did, they couldn’t subdue him.”
“He really needs to learn how to let things go.” Hiran grunted and stepped away from the unconscious mercenary. He frowned as a thought struck him. “So how did he and I cross paths? How long has he been tracking me?”
“He wasn’t tracking you.” The woman rolled her eyes. “He was actually going to clear the contract you’d taken, saying it was an eyesore that no one had done so by now. But then you did, and you used a Martial Form in front of him.”
“Huh.” Hiran chuckled and crouched down next to Elliot. He slapped the mercenary’s cheek gently. “A diligent sort, eh? You managed to improve my opinion of him a bit, uh, whoever you are.”
“My name is Mirabelle. You should have learned my name when you scanned me,” she said, frowning. “We’re third-rankers with the Ashen Guild, the largest and most powerful mercenary guild on Madhya.”
“Well, I’m Hiran, fifteenth ranker, no guild.” Hiran got to his feet. “Anyway, it was fun beating your brother up and chatting with you, Mirabelle, but I’ve got to get back to work. I’m sure you know how it is, since we’re in the same line and all.”
“And as a fifteenth ranker, most of the work you will find will be only slightly better than the last contract you just finished,” Mirabelle said, folding her arms. Her smile widened. “But seeing as you obviously aren’t just any fifteenth ranker, I have an offer for you.”