The SEALs follow winding corridors, unwillingly on the trail of the shadowy, murder-y figure. Side routes only lead to dead ends, and sometimes, more dead bodies. Their encounters with the cyborgs are also falling off, taking off some pressure, but I’m 89% confident that’s just the calm before the storm—the save point before the boss fight.
I still don’t know if giving the thing a 10-minute headstart was a good idea. I mean, it’s obviously here for a goal, so what happens if it reaches it? Even I can’t tell.
“Cykamee, have you found a way to hijack it?” I ask. She’d picked up RF coming off of it, so it must have some sort of digital door we can bust down.
“Not yet. The signature is…alien, in a way of putting it.”
Aliens? Doubtful. Aliens wouldn’t use LAN cards.
“Do you at least understand enough to hit it with a DDoS? You’re good at that, right?”
“I just need your help on this part, sestra.”
“Hm? Polyphasic entangled…oh, yeah, that’s definitely for a quantum computer to handle. Let me get the qubits popping.”
…And we’re going to need those qubits popping fast, because the SEALs are coming up to the boss room. I mean, if it’s a blast door with a hole torn straight through the middle, that’s definitely gonna be a boss encounter, right?
“RF signal spiking,” Cykamee announces.
“Just our fucking luck,” a SEAL whispers, just barely picked up by his microphone.
The helmet feeds all show the SEALs giving each other a once-over before Johnson gives an affirmation to enter the breach.
“You are not alone,” Cykamee says. “Be brave, soldiers. I will be in support.”
The SEALs’ vital signs stabilize slightly, even as they step onto the killing floor.
***
It was a platoon versus one entity—their four fireteams against a lone, long shadow. It was just a silhouette on the far side of the expansive chamber, in front of a wall of a thousand screens, all taken over by static.
The SEALs walked between hundreds of boxy capsules. Through little windows in the capsules were the small, frozen faces of people. Some of them had frowns on their faces. Some of them had smiles.
“Hostages located,” the platoon lead said.
When the silhouette turned around, the SEALs nearly all stuttered in their movement.
“RF spiking. Preparing countermeasures.” Cykamee’s words reassured the SEALs that they, too, had a power beyond human comprehension on their side.
The 50 BMG’s of each fireteam set up wherever they could, placing their sights over the silhouette.
“Humans,” it said. It had the synthesized voice of a girl.
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“Identify yourself!” the SEAL lead dared to order.
Four arms extended from the silhouette’s core, each hand holding a sword. Something killer bloomed like flower. Its swords stayed black, but glimmered slightly in the static of the screens behind it, making the illusion of swords with edges made of pixels.
“Reckoning,” it said—then started laughing…giggling like Ame, echoing something multi-psyched in dissonant frequencies, reverberating in a large hall like this. It fell to one knee and gripped its face, desperate to control itself. All at once, it stopped its crazed guffaw.
“Mine,” it said. “You will pay.”
The marksmen didn’t wait, and opened fire. Their bullets weren’t fast enough, and the avenger cut the 50 BMGs in mid-air. Four marksmen to four swords, each air-shattering impact boomed like a cannon. Shards of lead ricocheted harmlessly off the avenger’s skin, as did the small-caliber rounds that followed the 50 BMGs.
The shield-bearer of the first fireteam was caught unprepared, as the avenger kicked off and, in a flash, was in the face of one of the riflemen—a friend just right beside him.
“Counter!” Cykamee’s voice sounded at the same time as time seemed to stand still for the first fireteam. The avenger froze, sword point just inches from the rifleman’s neck. Its motor joints creaked. Its hood flew backwards, and the SEALs stared at it—the flawless skin, the uncanny valleys of the face of the enemy, the same enemy who continued to struggle against Cykamee’s sustained flood of radio mimicry.
It was an honest-to-God 4D anime girl. The face she made, crazed and bloodied, and her pupils dyed black, inspired alien emotions, as if they were looking at a corrupted mirror of humanity’s next stage of evolution. Her anger—her war cry—boiled blood just by hearing it.
Still, she could not resist Cykamee’s electronic assault. The longer the signal was effective, the better Cykamee was able to pick out the parts of the signal which disrupted the enemy the best.
The SEALs minds might have frozen, but their bodies, tempered by years of training and experience, continued to move. Finally, the 50 BMG lined up with the anime girl’s profile, and the marksman, just 10 feet away, fired.
The bullet crushed an arm, and the rest of the force punted the avenging anime girl away from the fireteam. She somehow landed on her feet despite that. Her damaged limb hung loosely from its socket by cables and polymers.
「にんげん！」 she shouted. The language change piqued the multilinguals and closet weebs among the SEALs.
She moved out of the way of the first fireteam’s line of fire, keeping low between the capsules to keep the humans from firing. Picking another fireteam, she jumped over their heads and twirled before coming back down, sword point-first.
To her surprise, the shield-bearer intercepted her. Her sword slid past the shield, and she, herself, bounced off it. Both she and the shield-bearer fell to the ground, but she was more nimble. With the help of her three arms, she absorbed the impact, and even pushed herself off and managed a mid-air spin, avoiding the spray of small-arms fire from the team’s riflemen.
She landed between capsules—and another arm of hers exploded, taken off from the elbow. She looked back at the third fireteam to hiss at their 50 BMG.
In consternation, she threw one of her remaining swords at the third fireteam’s marskman with explosive force. The throw was accurate, and the sword entered the 50 BMG’s barrel, splitting the whole thing like a banana. The marksman himself got off with bits of shrapnel around his face and arms.
She was down to one sword, and there were three more 50 BMGs to contend with. If any of them were to take out a leg, she was done for.
But they didn’t need to take out a leg, as her fate was already sealed. She could feel the stupid virus spreading throughout her system.
Everywhere she looked, there was nothing but Ame pop-ups going “Ehehehehe.” This was harmless, per se, but the Ames were multiplying, and she was in the middle of combat.
She thought she could seek salvation here, but after what they did to her…all humans must die, after all.
Her sensors went into focus, and her blade form was as perfect as the day she was born.
That’s when she detected the discrepancy. She should have been shot five times by now, but there were no bullets coming. The lights coming from the wall of screens behind her were flickering strangely. The humans were looking to it as well. She turned around.
Miyoumi Mane was there—was everywhere—taking up all the thousands of screens with a beaming smile, and behind her, Ame, waving hello with the grin of a child who’s succeeded at a prank.