"With all the animals going extinct due to the Antithesis, couldn't they have done us a fucking favor and gotten rid of the goddamn mosquitoes!?"
-Flitter post by a health worker during the West Nile Disease outbreak of the early 2030s
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“Juny, is this at least pulling forces from the frontline?” I leaned out of cover and lined my reticle up with a Model Five, and with a pull of the trigger, smart munitions sent it plummeting.
“Of course! Model Fives have entirely stopped appearing, allowing the forces manning the wall to spend less time in cover!” she reported from somewhere behind me. That was good news, at least. I had originally intended to cut across their lines from above and drop bombs on them at each intersection, using the jump pack to get from building to building, but harassing one of their command units seemed to be working out better than I could have hoped.
The Model Seventeen I was facing off against was smart enough to strategize and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances- even to create them- but its intelligence had led it to wildly overestimate the importance of killing me right at this moment. One woman can’t be everywhere at once. If the Antithesis were to focus on several places far enough apart, there would only be so much I could do.
But instead, it had drawn needed forces back just to kill me now, although I could only guess at whether it knew how quickly Samurai can snowball in power or was simply focused on the damage I’d already caused.
Back to the present, I glanced at my timer again; I’d managed to cut down on the time it took to clear out the Fives above me this time, but to really shave things down, I would have to take the crossbeams more quickly.
I was beginning to consider things I knew I would never have tried if my sense of fear was functioning properly. I was really starting to see how important a healthy sense of fear was, although I didn’t think I would properly grasp it in full until mine was back.
This time I didn’t take the crossbeams carefully. I shot out of cover at a run. The hardest part of doing something like this, I thought, was probably the nerves. Nervousness is the enemy of coordination. But now, even if I glanced down, there was no sense of vertigo. I could watch where I stepped with a calm detachment and place my feet without panicking about what would happen if I got it wrong.
When I approached a support pillar, I didn’t step around it carefully this time. I flung myself into the open air just to the side of the pillar, one hand shooting out to catch the pillar and alter my trajectory. My momentum went from propelling me straight forward to taking me in a curve around the pillar, and the servos supporting my arm creaked ominously but held. A combination of the resilient Protector-issued materials and my grav-chute, I’d assume.
As soon as I dropped down on the other side I stopped and turned, using the support beam as cover to kill the Fives on the other side of the room. The two corner crossings were easy and took no time, and I swapped arms for the following jump, just to be safe. That left me on a straight shot to the twelfth floor, but I didn’t think the trick I’d used on the pillars was going to work again since the first time had damaged both arms.
I kept the shield drones in place around me as I scaled the stairs, wary of more ambushes, and sure enough, one of them took a slash from a Model Nine for me on the way up. With its attack foiled and its position revealed, I fired a burst into it and moved on.
It was just a sign of what was to come, though. When I emerged onto the twelfth floor crossbeams, I almost immediately had to skid to a halt when bladed limbs swung into view from below, hacking uselessly at my greaves. With this Model Nine below the crossbeam, I didn’t have a shot on it, though, and I knew any combat drones I purchases right now were going to get shot down by Fives unless I bought even more shield drones just to guard them.
“Give me a grenade that can be detonated remotely, please!” I requested as I backed up, watching the Nine out of the corner of my eye as I gunned down another pair of Fives. I held my hand out as soon as they were dead.
“Of course!”
New Purchase: Remote Detonated Fla Grenade
Points reduced to…5,626
I primed the grenade, and a button appeared on my augs to detonate it. As soon as the Nine’s limbs came scything up at me again, I let the grenade fall and blinked over the button, setting it off instantly. The beam I was on shook and reverberated with the detonation, and I had to brace myself and ride out the shockwave before I could continue, but the Nine was now too dead to stop me. When the shaking stopped, though, I noticed I had more points than expected and glanced down to see a handful of Model Ones scattering.
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“…did you know those were there?” I asked Juny as I turned around to pick off the Fives above the stairwell entrance.
“Of course!”
“How did you detect them?”
“At our current elevation, the wind is likely dispersing any Model Nine scales too quickly for them to have any effect!”
“Good news for once. Okay, pulse the jump pack to send me back towards the beam when I jump,” I instructed Juny before doing exactly that. I soared out into the open air and then felt a jolt that sent me back towards the thin path I’d been on. My momentum almost sent me right back over the edge, but fortunately, between my jump, the grav-chute, and the jump pack, I’d ended up so close to the support beam at the edge of the building that I could use it to steady myself.
The moment I was stable I raised my gun and fired into the Model Nine that had been waiting behind the pillar I’d jumped past. I didn’t actually know it was there; avoiding it was a happy coincidence. I took a couple more shots to clear out a few more Fives and rounded the two corners, followed by a repeat of my previous jump.
Leaving myself in the open air like that was a bit unnerving, but I found that the speed I was moving at made it hard for the Fives to hit me, an advantage I wouldn’t have had going straight up.
Model Threes charged out of the stairwell suicidally as I approached, having hidden behind the corners until I got close. The attempt to knock me off the crossbeam failed when each shield drone intercepted one, and the two unlucky aliens bounced off and fell twelve stories to their deaths, flailing the whole way down. That left one, but it hit me head on, doing little other than forcing me to brace myself with one foot back.
I clubbed it over the head with my assault rifle, then one of the shield drones rammed it in the side, toppling it off the beam. Rather than watching it fall, I dove inside the stairwell and ran up the stairs, stopping only to check my corners before turning. But the stairwell was empty now, and I found myself on the fifteenth floor soon enough- not quite halfway to the next intact floor, I could now see, but it was progress.
Unfortunately, when I looked around to spot the Model Fives I knew would be present, I caught sight of something else that was just arriving: three Model Elevens. The Ones had failed, so now they were bringing in their bigger, meaner siblings. From my current spot I was safe, and I probably had access to something that could kill them by now, along with the time to buy it, but would anything that powerful be safe to fire from inside the high rise?
Luckily, I didn’t have to find out.
“Alana has just completed an assault mission and has returned to her gunship! Would you like to request fire support?” Juny asked as I was searching for a solution.
“Gladly.”
“Opening a channel!”
“McIntire here. Your AI said you needed support?”
“I have three Model Elevens circling me, and anything that could kill them probably isn’t safe to fire from inside the what-used-to-be-a-building I’m in,” I confirmed, starting to pick off Fives in the meantime.
“Copy that, air support inbound.”
After that brief exchange the channel cut out, but with the size of Boone, it wasn’t long before I heard the gunship incoming. It flashed forward to my left, flying between buildings, and banked towards the Elevens as they circled around from the right. All three Elevens immediately scattered as two munitions shot from the gunship- guided rocket or missile, I didn’t know the difference- and locked onto two of them.
One immediately flew back the way it came and another tried to go over the building, turning in midair in a manner no manmade craft could emulate. The rockets had to be Samurai tech, though, because they turned at hard angles when a normal rocket would have lost target, and moments later I heard twin explosions from beyond my line of sight. I didn’t doubt that they had been direct hits.
The gunship itself followed after the third, letting loose a stream of bullets from its main gun so constant it sounded more like a buzz saw than a firearm. Maneuverable as the Model Eleven was, it managed an impossible-looking dodge once, then twice, before running out of luck and intersecting with the gunship’s line of fire. So many bullets tore through it that the Eleven was bisected from shoulder to hip, the halves falling away in opposite directions.
“Scratch three. Got it from here?”
“I should be good, thanks for the assist,” I replied, silently wishing I could just fly a gunship to the top of the building, but knowing there was no way they could pick me up from here anyway.
“Roger that, returning to base. Good hunting, McIntire out.”
Now I was unimpeded though. Juny had helped me wipe out a flock of Model Ones and now their Elevens were gone too. I couldn’t know for sure, but the Seventeen must have used up a lot of the Nines it had available in the process of wrecking the building, because what else did they have that could do that kind of damage? I was effectively cheating against the Fives at this point, there was no space for a Six up here, and sending Threes against me one by one on the crossbeams would just be a waste.
My Model Seventeen foe had thrown everything and the kitchen sink at me, but it had to be running out of options now. It had gotten damned close a couple times, I couldn’t deny that, but I’d had just enough luck to stay alive until this point. And I knew better than to start thinking of the ways in which I could fail now; that would just summon it. While I didn’t necessarily believe in jinxes, I certainly did believe knowing how I could fuck up might trip me up in the moment.
I launched myself from cover, determined to make it to the top before I ran out of time.