“Shit!” she said in desperation, watching the van with the safe inside disappear in the city streets below. “What the hell am I going to do now?"
She thought about attacking them, taking back what was stolen from her. Money, she did not need. The only true value for her was that Trono’s serum. And she was not letting them have it. She could never let them have it. She had to destroy it.
But there was a better way than to jump over the rooftops and come down on top of the van.
She picked her phone up again, hoping that it could be somehow salvaged, bolting it with some of the energy from her body, trying to start it. But it was dead.
So, she could not call and activate the self-destruction mechanism inside the safe that would burn the inside and turn Trono’s plasma into a few specs of dust.
“Funny, I can heal and repair my body, but something as this… I can’t freaken’ do.”
She breathed deeply, disappointed and shocked she got herself in this situation.
“So, what?" she said as her breathing exercise allowed her to compose herself. "Let them have the safe for now. It would take them days to open it safely because if they were to do one wrong thing, the explosive device we put in would be activated. I do not need to worry about that now. What I need to worry about is…”
[Warning:
Your health has declined to 25 percent.]
She checked the wound in her left shoulder, her fingers still coming back all wet and sticky with blood. It was supposed to be healing by now. But it felt painful even to lightly touch it. She mastered the pain and felt her wound around. She sensed it and knew she still had a bullet in it.
She checked her diagnosis and was not surprised to see that the wound was getting worse and that not even the bleeding was contained.
Could… Trono’s plasma go bad? Never happened before. So… Did they somehow swiped it for some kind of a poison? Yet, no known human-made poison was detected.
Yet, her ankle was reported at almost 100 percent and all the sedatives that were shot inside her system were neutralized.
System, change priority now! Neutralizing sedatives and pain suppressants put down on hold and take care of my shoulder, please, she gave it a telepathic command, not understanding why it was not done automatically, but then, as an answer she remembered the instruction she gave to the system. “System, put everything, all resources, into neutralizing the sedative, and then try to get my ankle back up. I’m way too slow,”
Those were her exact words. She remembered them perfectly.
“Damn, that was stupid! I panicked and that was the result of it.”
Just to make sure she corrected her mistake, she went and specify it clearly, "System, go on auto-healing and do what you do best and take care of my most threatening wounds first, okay?"
[The Auto-Healing Mode enabled]
“Damn, what a rookie mistake that was. I tried to be too smart, and now... I'm in the gutter. So, now... how soon can I feel better?”
[The Full-time recovery is expected within 36 hours]
“Damn, that’s long,” she cursed, knowing that the Trono’s plasma was used up to treat her trivial wounds instead of the ones she needed the most. “That was so stupid of me. I guess, that’s how they get you.”
I just need to relax and compose myself. All the answers are here, right inside of me, she thought as she watched the street underneath.
By now, the van with the safe had long disappeared, and the utility and security guys blocking the street seemed to have lost interest in arguing with the firemen and police who had arrived in the meantime, and had taken down their road blockade, picked their stuff up, and left.
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The crane was packing up and leaving and she thought about jumping on the crane and getting one of the contracted crews to give her some answers.
They may not know much, but it still is a lot more than I do.
But it was a rush play, and in the last second, she decided against it, fearing that she would get hurt some more and that her wound would get way worse.
No! Stop yourself before you wreck yourself!
Damn, I stayed at the same Class for way too long. Should have taken more missions, should have done more, grew stronger, she thought with regret.
I felt too confident, became too stagnant, living in a place where almost nobody could even come past level 3 if Integrated. That... False security, overconfidence, and underestimating the environment… that’s where I went wrong.
Suddenly she had a flashback, could hear, see Kortien, her old mentor, his gentle eyes watching her, trying to teach her. His cautioning words rang in her ears as if he was just spiking them.
“Never stop growing, advancing, learning. Once you do it, once you think you’re good enough, you’re as good as dead.”
“Concentrate on now, not the past, not my mistakes. Need to get out of this, need to focus on… now,” she muttered to herself.
She needed a safe place to hide, to patch herself up, help her overworked system recover and do its job. Sure she could have stayed on top of that roof, found some cellar to just lay down and heal herself. She had enough back energy and SR Power to do so. And three-day time would fly by, and then she would be fresh and ready to search for the answers.
But there was a better place to hide. Besides, she needed to neutralize the inside of the safe. And warn Trono.
The Hair Saloon, she thought, and instantly knew it was by far her best option. Everything else is a distraction. I need to go to my safe house.
There she had a backup phone and the the last ounce of Trono’s plasma. That could solve everything.
Once her mind was made up, there was no more need to be hesitant or feeling sorry for herself.
Not trusting her ailing and deteriorating body anymore, she decided to come down the rooftops by breaking into the fifth-floor apartment and then just running through it, hitting the stairs and running down and out. She was halfway to her safe place before anyone realized something had happened.
She thought about paying that young waiter a visit. He had to be on it. Get him someplace where she could ask him a few questions. Smack him around a bit, put a blade under his balls, cut a bit. He’d spill his guts before she had to do it for him. But then, he probably did not know shit.
Still… just by him being there was an answer to a number of questions. They knew she frequented the place. They must have tailed her, knew her much better than she could guess.
No, it's all just a distraction. stay focused!
A few streets down she entered a small park, and as she ran through it, she started to figure out what was the most important thing to do next, her run breaking into a sprint as she became certain that Trono would be their next target if they had not attacked him already.
The last they talked, he was still in Japan.
[Warning:
Your Total Energy is at 2050 / 20,000.]
That was the reserve line she set for herself never to fall below. The emergency safe zone.
“Just go and use up all the energy I need to run, and if there is anything left over, use it to stabilize my health,” she instructed her system again, making sure her body would not shut down in order to help her survive.
So, she just ran. The pain did not matter anymore. Nor the bleeding.
A few minutes later, she came to her safehouse. An old and abandoned hair saloon with metallic security shutters pressed all the way down. They could not have been removed by breaking the lock as the whole shutters were welled down from the other side, and the lock was only for decorative purposes. But there was a heavy iron door to the right that could be opened with her wireless keys.
Inside was the place that looked untouched for the last few decades. But, it had a lowered ceiling she could climb easily climb inside. It held enough space there for her to hide at least for a few hours. She could meditate and put herself in a deep trance, and her health wounds would recover in a matter of hours. Her backup phone and the last of Trono’s plasma were there.
As she stepped inside her space, she turned around to look at the empty street to see if anyone was trailing her. And froze. There was a strong sense of Deja Vu as if she was reliving that very moment again, thinking she knew exactly what was going to happen next.
Shit, she muttered as she looked at her stats.
[Energy Supply: 50/20000]
So, in an instant, she lost all her energy points. She cursed again as she knew exactly what had just happened.
The world had just been parted. Maybe it was because of what had happened to her. Or something else. It did not matter. Actually, nothing she did mattered anymore.
She took a deep breath, cast a look down the empty Parisian street, and looked at the white building and black ironed balconies, her gaze being drawn to a young girl running across the street with a big guitar case tied on her back. There in an instance, the time it took the young blond girl to cross the street, she remembered the look of sadness in the man’s eyes when she told him she did not see the future for them. At the time, he lived on the second floor there in that white building. Was that his daughter now? A few traces of resemblances said ‘yes’.
“Shit,” she cussed herself, and as tears welled in her eyes, she pressed her necklace medallion, let it go, and then tapped it three times just to press and held it for a long moment.
An instant later, the flash broke the darkness of the night and the only thing left of her were two droplets that left her eyes as they swiftly fell to the ground.