Chapter Thirty-Four - The Edge of the Sword

“Why?

Because it’s cool as shit!”

--Three Swipes, 2037

***

Things happened fast.

Gomorrah opened up with a surge of flames so hot I felt them through my suit. It was a spitting bar of fire wider than a person’s head, and it instantly started to melt everything within a metre of it.

Doc Hack was just as quick. Three arms tore out from his body and grabbed his assistant to place the poor idiot between the doc and the flames. The man screamed as he cooked.

Doc Hack drowned the screams out in return fire, the guns held by three of the arms he’d deployed spraying bullets across the lab.

There was no grace in the way he fired, just a wild spray of shots that pinged off of empty tubs and cracked into cement pillars.

Gomorrah rolled to the side, the wash of her flames ending as easily as it had begun. She hid behind a pillar while weathering the storm.

My turn, I supposed. I whipped out my Trench Maker and sighted down the barrel even as my finger squeezed the trigger.

Doc Hack looked worse for wear, the front of his smock still alight, but beneath it were layers and layers of prosthetics, all shifting into place. He stumbled back even as thicker, armoured arms rose to intercept my shots. Electrified bullets crashed into steel plates with a snapping buzz and did fuck all.

“You are making a mistake!” Doc Hack roared, his face twisted into a mockery of anger, plastic teeth bared.

“You don’t have room to talk about mistakes,” I shot back.

The Doc fell onto his rear with a heavy crash.

I paused. Was it over?

The back of his smock tore apart and long multi-jointed legs slammed into the ground. He started to scuttle backwards.

There was only so fast a body that size could move.

I grunted and aimed to fire again, then motion caught my attention from the edge of my vision. The guard.

He screamed something incoherent and loud as he raised a gun to his hip and fired.

I winced back as a trio of shots clattered against my helmet. It rang, but the pain wasn’t any worse than being hit with a rolled-up newspaper.

“Shut up!” I shouted at him before putting two in his chest.

“Cat!” Gomorrah called. “He’s moving out!”

I whipped my head around to see Doc Hack slamming through the doors at the end of the lab. I swore and bolted after him, Gomorrah a step behind me.

We arrived in a long passageway, the Doc already halfway down it. “You would bring this city down with your greed and naïvety!” Doc Hack screamed.

I took two steps into the room, then raised my Trench Maker up and fired.

Doc Hack’s head exploded, plastic and servos flying back.

“I was the solution to all of your ills!” Doc Hack roared.

“God damn it!” I shouted as I started to run and fire centre of mass. I wasn’t sure if anything actually hit; I could barely aim standing still.

“I got him!” Gomorrah said. She fell to one knee and raised her flamethrower.

I ducked away and activated my railguns.

Doc Hack must have seen it coming. “Then I’ll take the place and burn it down with me!”

I hadn’t noticed the pipes in the walls and the ceilings. They were everywhere, in every corridor we crossed and every wall we passed. The O2 signs and the methane warnings were like ads in my periphery. Easily ignored.

Doc Hack fired. This time it wasn’t a wild spray, but something more calculated.

I saw the holes punched through the rusty old pipes as if they were paper.

There was a hiss, and Gomorrah’s flames raced across the room.

The world went white, white and warm, and I felt myself being thrown back into the nearest wall. I didn’t hear a damned thing, but the alerts across my vision warned me my ears were off.

I stumbled away from the wall and shook my head.

Everything was on fire. The walls were blackened and fire poured out of pipes in long jets.

Doc Hack was gone.

My hearing returned with a pop, and I was introduced to the sound of the world burning and crumbling apart.

“Gom!” I shouted.

“I’m fine!” Gomorrah said. She picked herself off the ground and surveyed the room. “Keep going. I’ll take care of this,” she growled. “Kill him for me, would you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

The floor had collapsed, the ceiling too. Large slabs of concrete with crooked, rebar-like grasping fingers poking through.

Where was that fucker?

I leapt over the hole, vaguely aware the collapse had gone deeper than I’d initially thought. This was going to be costly.

The corridor bent, and I found Doc Hack running while tearing off broken limbs. The lost mass was lying across the floor, discarded arms and legs trailing behind the doctor, who was running all the faster now.

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“Wait!” I screamed as I took off after him. I whipped out my Icarus, Trench Maker slammed into my thigh holster. “I need to kill you!”

“I died for the cause a long time ago, girl! There’s no killing me now!” Doc Hack screamed right back.

He stopped running, spinning around with a screech of metal-ended limbs on grated flooring.

His chest opened up, and two of his arms tore something out from within. A long barrel, covered in rings.

Cat, that’s a Tier One Vanguard weapon. A railgun.

My own railguns fired, twin tracers punching holes into and through Doc Hack.

I squeezed the trigger on my launcher.

He fired.

It felt like someone had just landed a jumping kick right in my short ribs.

My forward momentum turned into a backwards flip, one that ended with my crashing onto all fours after somersaulting through the air. I gasped as a warning flashed up on my HUD.

ARMOR INTEGRITY DOWN TO 99%.

“Shit,” I groaned as I jumped back to my feet. I didn’t have time to process the pain. The doc was too big a problem for that.

I stared. The bastard had left a foot behind, glued to the floor by my launcher. A launcher that was a dozen paces behind me.

No time for that.

I sprinted after him again.

The corridor ended at a pair of double doors, steps beyond them leading down.

I leapt over the steps while taking in the room. Not a normal room. A passageway next to one of those large open tunnels filled with shit. Windows along the edges showed the crap flowing past a floor down.

There were idiots in the room—trench coats, metal limbs, guns. Doc Hack was at the far end, tossing his railgun to one of the grunts. “Your sword has been blunted already, samurai!” he shouted. “Let’s not end this in your demise.”

I whipped out my Claw and fired as soon as the reticle was over the bastard.

He screamed, for the first time in actual pain, as a spinning blender appeared in his innards.

The fire from the grunts distracted me right after. There were six of them, at a quick count, pneumatic rifles in hand.

I didn’t have time for them.

Twisting around, I fired at first one, then another, emptying my Claw into them while my railguns took care of the rest.

Doc Hack didn’t stick around.

I ran to the edge of the room and saw him below. He was boarding a boat, the engine already on, the Sewer Dragon at the wheel throttling up.

He would pass right in front of me on his way to some other shithole.

The other boats were sinking.

“No,” I growled.

I swung forward, fist meeting safety glass with all of the strength and weight of my armour behind it. The glass didn’t shatter, but the plates holding it in place did, rusted strips tearing off with a squelch of old rubber as the entire thing fell away and ruined the room’s seal.

“Myalis, I need a fucking sword.”

Understood.

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A sword appeared by my side. I didn’t have time to consider how very stupid it was to ask for that, specifically. I was too busy placing a foot on the edge of the ledge created by the missing window.

The sword requires an activation phrase to turn on. Do you wish to set one now?

I jumped.

Doc Hack turned, and I could see his face, his actual face, buried behind prosthetics. Just a pair of eyes, metal grafted to his exposed bones, his mouth nothing more than a tube. His eyes focused on me.

I crashed into the boat a metre in front of him, knees bending with the impact even as a tide of shit splashed up around the boat.

I grabbed the sword in one hand, the other grabbing the sheath. “Fuck,” I began.

I tore the sword out of its sheath. It was a metal rod, with a few rings along its length. I was confused, but I trusted Myalis.

“You!” I finished.

Activation name set. Activating!

The sword hissed, like a cat met in a dark alley. The blade snapped into place, a dark bar sucking in the air around it. I swore I could see stars within.

I twisted with the swing. The air screamed blade as it moved, a banner trailing after the edge.

It touched Doc Hack’s side, and he tried to grab at me.

It didn’t help him.

The sword sliced through him in a single swipe, and everywhere it passed, the meat inside Doc Hack’s mechanical body was dragged into it. Metal rent and vacuumed into the black edge.

Then it was over and I stood there, deck wobbling under me, as Doc Hack’s remains fell apart. I saw a piece of his face splash into the shit.

A fitting end for him.

***