“RICKY! WHEN I CATCH YOU RICKY!”

I didn’t have just an entire plan to take down Gaz. That would have been petty and probably stupid because any plan to deal with him would need to take into account that he was an ingenuitive fucker. That made him hard to predict. It wasn’t like I could google much about him to begin with and what we did know was just that he was really good at scavenging. I wasn’t going to give up, though. I had the beginnings of a plan in mind, most of which involved not letting him hit me again.

I’d done some serious thinking about the way we operated, and how other people filled roles in other groups and how it all came together. I saw my team as 4 skirmishers: Marauder was a threat because of his predilection for violence and ability to take advantage of the kind of chaos most people shy away from. Prodigy was a deadly fighter. Whatever she was put in front of would either need to be durable enough to survive her punishment, or never make a single mistake she could exploit with her superhuman strength, speed and reflexes. Shift was fast, slippery, and generally frustrating to have to contend with. As for me, I was good at creating or fostering the sorts of openings they could take advantage of and shut down any tech some poor bastard brought against us. Getting in fast and hitting hard was as much our specialty as getting out fast after starting trouble.

The ideal numbers for a team, in my opinion, were either a three man cell or a five man band. I had neither, mostly because we’d tightly knit ourselves through circumstance and hadn’t found anyone to fill that last spot, and it was more of a way for me to examine how to best utilize and cover each others weaknesses.

Marauder and Prodigy were competent at range or in close quarters, but they each had a preference and a space where they excelled as the skirmishers they currently operated as. That meant I needed to move them in places where they could fight without getting in each other’s way, or plan for them to end up overlapping.

To my right, Prodigy held the Kama tight, ready to kick open the door the second I gave the okay. To my left, Marauder held both guns, sweating, gloves without their fingers strapped down tight. Shift, behind me, had recovered her shock baton, an escrima stick with a high powered taser built in at both ends. She was no longer panting, but I knew if this dragged out she’d start to drag too.

I turned my shield on, and took a deep breath. “Prodigy, I’m gonna need you to handle the two goons to your immediate right once we’re in there. They look like they paired the most dangerous one at range with a powerhouse who can do damage up close, and something’s preventing me from scanning too deeply into their tech through the camera. The close quarters fighters definitely have some higher end cybernetics running the length of their spines.”

“Reflex enhancing?” she asked. I nodded.

“Probability of them having increased speed and strength is non-zero.”

“Weapons?”

“Looks like one of them is into guerilla science just like us Marauder,” I told him. “He’s got a chainsaw attached to a sword’s handle, and it’s letting off enough heat to create a haze around it. His partner has a cannon the size of a motorcycle on his shoulder. That’s the two I’m sending you after.”

“Child's play,” she confidently replied behind her mask… and I was terrified more of the fact that I believed her than anything else. Notably, she did change the grip on her sword, holding it more traditionally.

A small adjustment but for her that meant all the world.

“Shift, general nuisance duty,” I told her.

“Order’s received,” she saluted before twirling the baton, leaving trails of light as the electricity trailed in the air. With a group of five that had the kind of hardware they had, Marauder would be pressed. He was tougher than leather, but not superhumanly so. To that end, he’d have Shift running interference. She was perhaps, where powers were concerned, the most exceptional of us all, even if her battery life was a massive limiter. If she mostly stuck to quick bursts of use, she could still be a hell of a balance on the scale.

“Don’t burn out, but support Marauder as much as you can. I’m going to have you,” I commented tapping his shoulder, “Deal with the snake tongue again, this time with her sledgehammer pal.”

“Just a sledgehammer?”

“It’s got a car battery between two blunt pieces of metal,” I reassured him and he shook his head with a laugh.

“Que lastima,” he admonished them. “I was expecting worse. Any other advice?”

“Don’t die,” I told them. I then cleared my throat, and sharpened my senses to a point.“Gaz is mine, I’m gonna make it a point to keep him off balance as much as I can.” I could feel them go tense.

“It’s the whole reason I made the shield,” I told them, and activated the last, and most important, of the shields that was connected to the base of my neck, forming a translucent helmet over my head. “Among other things. Trust me.” My thing, more than anything else, was that the world ran on technology, and technology bent to my will. As I saw everyone on my team as skirmishers we still each filled a role.

Marauder was mid ranged area of effect, Shift was mobility and evasion, and Prodigy single target and frontline. In the short term I brought utility and control. Long term, I adapted and made us all better. That was the reason behind the name, more than just a clever play on my power.

On the other side, we had Gaz who, like me, was smarter than his demeanor had given way to and clever enough to take advantage of people’s preconceived notions to put them down hard. Unlike me, though, he was both a tank and he threatened to kill you with every swing of his arms. I didn’t know much about the people he’d brought but based on what I’d seen I could tell this wasn’t going to be easy. If my shoddy cams were anything to go off of, he had one supremely strong ranged threat, a bodyguard for him, an assassin in the form of that snaked tongued chick, and another hard hitting melee paired with her. Well rounded, but not to the point they countered our group. Mostly, it was the extra body that was going to make this tough. They were set up to bully whoever tried to get past them with a simple gameplan: hit hard, hit fast, and show no mercy.

My Raiding Party, his Scrapyard Bullies.

With a forceful kick, Prodigy kicked open the door and the darkly lit room was open to us. I walked in, after her and Marauder, shield illuminating the room in its translucent blue shimmer. They were waiting for us, having converted the previously gorgeous Atrium into a defensible position: desks ripped up and turned into cover, the waterfall from earlier still falling behind them. Gaz stood in the open, smiling viciously.

“Well well fucking well,” he spat. “Ready for round two?”

“I’m almost flattered you thought you needed to outnumber us to win,” I acknowledged to the others, cannon man moving the weapon to aim it our way.

“Gonna make sure I finish the job this time. Figured it’d be better to be thorough,” he smirked. “Enjoying not being able to see through us this time?” I narrowed my eyes at the challenge, and that made the red-fang smile grow. The snake tongue spoke up next.

“Think I’ll rip out your tongue, see how you like it!” she almost literally hissed in a voice that was mostly synthetic. Gabe licked his lips and bared his own fangs in a smile.

“Why don’t you come try?” he challenged.

“Yeah, why we doin all this talkin, boss?” the cannoneer said, and the whirring whine of a weapon closer to a jet turbine than a gun coming to life filled the room.

As if I’d let that go unchecked. Before he could get it fully ready to fire, the weapon suffered a power failure, and the targeting system went awry. He started fiddling with the rather titanic weapon he’d mounted on the desk, and Gaz snapped his head to look at the sound of an emergency failure.

“Fuck,” he said and turned to us, his own body amping up.

“Go!” I ordered, running forward. Shift took off, sprinting in a blur of motion ahead of me, and Prodigy made a beeline for the goon between her and the cannoneer.

Marauder was already firing on Snaketongue and Hammerbro. Hammerbro moved in front of her, letting the bullets plink off his back, mostly harmless as the hail of fire continued to rain on him.

As for me, every upgrade I had made to my cyberdeck during our prep time immediately came to bear. Gaz was my focus, and I saw him moving with a clarity that I never had before. The thing about experimenting with tech like this in controlled environments with someone like Prodigy was that I wasn’t exactly certain how useful it would be. After all, this was a far lower scale of the technology enhancing her already supernatural reflexes. The same code I used to shut off his vision pierced into his cyberdeck, and the cybernetics that gave him his sonar and other sensory boosters kicked into high gear as I figured they would.

“Did you forget how last time went?” he asked me, barreling on me the same way he had before. His wild swing, though, found nothing but air after I ducked under it and put enough space between us to fire the shock pistols directly into his chest when he wheeled on me. The electrocution went through his body, but it didn’t do much more than make him flinch. Good enough for me to take the moment of weakness and ram my fist into his jaw when he sloppily came at me again. I didn’t get away with it cleanly, as he responded immediately with a straight punch to my chest.

I was winded, and thrown off my feet, but I wasn’t crushed and the hardlight distributed the force across the full shield harmlessly. Mostly. I rolled and by the time I was up, I had drawn another shock pistol and unloaded on him again.

Shift, god bless her, came back into view and smacked him hard enough with the baton that, combined with my own attack, he actually fell to his knee with a grunt and swung his arm at her.

“Nah, I don’t forget,” I told him in a bit of a wheeze. “Believe that. Adapt to survive, thats what life has always been about right?”

The other upgrade I’d prepped, the quicker intrusion software, pierced through the layer of obscuring tech he had armed himself with and I saw a few things that concerned me:

First, his chest was hollowed out and replaced with some sort of engine that was connected to the rest of his cybernetics. That must have been why he always sounded like a muscle car when he fought, but I had no idea what was powering it. My mind’s eye outlined it in red, marked as a target. Second, as I was about to learn anyway, he also had claws inside the ends of his fingers. Also, of note, was that his bones and muscles were all reinforced or otherwise replaced. I wasn’t even sure how much of this android was still organic anymore.

“You’re damn right kid, that is what life’s about. Come correct or stay the fuck at home! Little shield of yours is clever, don’t know how you managed to make something strong enough to keep me from pulverizing ya, but it won’t last forever!”

In the midst of our tussle, Snaketongue and Hammerbro had managed to close in on Marauder, who abandoned both of his guns and was now expertly keeping both of them at bay by forcing at least one of them to be pivoting to avoid the other’s attacks. With his thermosword and gauntlet shield active, he was scrapping the two of them by forcing them to have to fight in a tight space, too tight for a wild swing to be brought down by Hammerbro specifically. If he backpedaled, then Marauder took the opportunity to swing at him and put his shielded hand in the way of Snaketongue’s bladed arms and… snake tongue. It wasn’t going to work for long, but he was keeping them on their toes. He could hold long enough for Shift, who made an appearance as they tried to break the dance by separating, to back him up. She spun in the air in a quick circle that put her foot into the side of Hammerbro’s leg and hobbled him.

Marauder took advantage and delivered a shield thrust into his face at the same time Shift Jabbed the baton into Snaketongue’s neck while she had the element of surprise. Snaketongue convulsed for a sec, then swung in retaliation as her body reasserted control, only to hit Marauder’s shield after Shift pivoted out of his way, and the cyborg almost lost the arm when he attacked with a swing of the blade. “Man, I shoulda brought a sword!” she complained in a light pant but went on the offensive with Marauder again.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The real reason Shift hadn’t, in this case, brought a sword was because she wasn’t as confident in her ability to assassinate someone with a stab as she was in the universally useful “smash in their skull and electrocute them” method. She wasn’t a trained assassin, so she hedged her bets this way instead.

Prodigy, on the otherside of the fight, was fighting with a degree of seriousness I hadn’t seen in a long time. With a masterful flourish she parried the chainsword with a swing of her thermosword at the perfect moment and stepped into his guard to jam the blunt end of the kama into his chest. Before he even had time to feel it she transitioned with a pivot and brought the business end of the weapon into his calf, finding a soft spot on the armored frame that was his body with surprising quickness and hamstringing him with it. A killing blow would have followed, but my temporary shut down wore off and the cannoneer was able to get the weapon ready to fire.

Prodigy was supernaturally reflexive and had a sort of mystical power she drew on from within that could increase her strength and speed tremendously. It could even make her more durable as long as her focus and stamina held up. Paired with a suite of cybernetic enhancements from the forge to make her the perfect killer, she could deal with a lot.

She could not deal with a direct cannon shot from 10 feet away.

She dove aside, seeing in the second before the trigger was pulled that she was in danger, and just barely escaped the ball of plasma that melted through the floor where she had been as second ago in a violent explosion that still singed her body and flung her aside. She was sent rolling backwards across the floor and only gained control when she drove her kama into the ground to slow down.

Everybody was stunned, including her partner who narrowly escaped the explosion the same way. Silence reigned, even from Gaz and I.

“Holy shit,” I panted, as Prodigy grit her teeth and Snaketongue, looked annoyed.

“HA!” he yelled, “Told ya it’d work Glynda!” he gloated, breaking the silence.

“Ga-lin-da,” the Snaketongue corrected angrily, and the fight continued.

Gaz got up, shaking off the convulsions and the engine roared as he squared up and lunged for a superman punch. Seeing the actions with my eye’s upgrade let me turn what I would have been grazed by into a near miss, and he slid to a stop a foot away, hit by more shock pellets from my rapid trigger-pulls. I kicked the back of his leg and he fell again, and I drove the pistols both down on his head. It wasn’t elegant, but it did make him fall further towards the ground.

He didn’t take long to get up and land a punch into my ribs as he turned that I couldn’t avoid. The shield shimmered, holding fast but not stopping damage fully as I was sure it wouldn’t be able to do. I didn’t let myself fall, ducking the cross-punch he attempted. Thankful for the years I spent boxing and doing a mix of martial arts, I dropped my guns and caught his arm, flipping him over my shoulder and slamming the heavy body into the floor. The effort wasn’t wasted as the fall seemed to have an effect, he grunted and didn’t instantly recover, which I took as a chance to draw the other two shock pistols and shoot. “Shift!” I yelled as she warped places with me after the pellets assaulted him again.

The world became a blur of dizzying shapes and colors in the few seconds after I was placed 30 feet away from him and she smacked his jaw with the shock stick again to keep him stunned.

The only way to deal with that monster was going to be keeping him stunned and wearing him down until Prodigy handled her marks, and I’d set us up this way both to prove a point to myself and to him:

I wasn’t gonna let anyone fight my battles for me, or let my team see me as someone who needed defending. Gaz was almost insurmountably tough and strong for me, but I had a trick or two in mind to handle him and if I couldn’t at the least he wasn’t going to put me down by himself.

Prodigy, frustrated but still focused, threw Kama with enough force that it buried itself in the cannon at just the right angle that it seemed to destabilize the internal mechanisms within the weapon. How she knew where to aim was a mystery. I had technology super-vision and I had no idea how she knew exactly where to throw the damn thing to do that, to say nothing of the absurdity of the fact that she DID it. Unphased by her own prowess, she shifted focus onto Chainsawsword. “Bring it on you scrappy little bitch,” he yelled but underestimated how long he had to banter with her. By the time his sentence was done he was already defending against the sword she threw, swatting it aside and earning a punch that cracked into his nose, stunning him and knocking him on his ass. She wasted no time, as he started to fall, delivering a roundhouse to his sword-hand and knocking it into the air. As unbelievable as it sounded, she jumped and caught the weapon, revving the 6 foot long, haphazard feat of backyard–engineering and slung it, again, at the cannon that the gunner had decided to abandon in favor of a rifle. His mistake was staying close to the cannon as the chainsaw bit into it’s barrel, and the maw of steel mechanisms ignited, exploded and threw him aside just as it had done when he fired it at her.

For the first time in days, I saw her smirk a vindictive, petty smile, and I swelled with pride. The other guy, however, got up and loomed over her, blood streaming down his face. She turned her head to him, lifting an eyebrow, and took a fighting stance. She didn’t need it, but I stepped in with a shot from my pistol in the half second I had left. The pellet bursted against his spine and he got exactly what that comment earlier earned him when prodigy closed in.

Gaz, once more, rose from the floor and Shift, in a panic, swapped me back in. I shook off the warp-distortion in time to be ready for him, and he was caught off guard by Gabe charging into the side of his body with his shield. “Yo, jefe,” he commented as Gaz was knocked on his ass again. “Need a hand!”

Once more, with my cyberdeck working overtime I sent a virus that made Hammerbro’s sense of hearing be filled with Rick Astley. He was startled off his rhythm and when he swung, Gabe didn’t even need to use his shield to block it. He moved aside and Gaz took the hit instead, and then Gabe kicked Hammerbro into him.

Galinda, however, swung her bladed arm at me. The speed caught me off guard, and though the shield didn’t break, the tip of the blade was sharp enough to carve through it anyway and slice me across the ribs. I winced, but shot her in retaliation. Marauder took over, driving the shield into her face and knocking her down. “Pana, you good?”

“Didn’t get too deep but that’s a design flaw,” I said through gritted teeth, unable to touch the wound due to the shield to feel it but knowing because I wasn’t spilling out my guts that I was fine enough not to worry.

“Sloppy work,” he said.

“It didn’t break the shield it just got between the paneling. Not even sure how.” He nodded, and we both heard the engine roar to life as Gaz threw Hammerbro aside forcefully and kicked off the floor towards us. We both skirted aside, avoiding the clawed fingers, and the dance continued.

Only, he was losing minions faster than I was losing friends. Prodigy, leaning against the rubble from the exploded cannon, slinked to the ground while holding her head. Overexertion over the course of the day combined with first degree burns from the explosion had taken her off the field for a bit, but she’d handled two of his cronies for me, leveling us out.

While he tried to relieve me of my organs, I kept trying to find an angle to exploit on him. Marauder had his hands full trying to get the better of hammerbro and Snaketongue, but Shift was helping him turn the tide of that fight.

A claw swipe ripped red lines out of my shoulder, my chest, but he couldn’t get enough bite through the shield and my enhanced reflexes to put me down. All the while the shock pistols were starting to lose battery.

“Only a matter of time,” he growled between another miss and graze as I saw he was slowly backing me into a corner.

Shift got a free moment and moved into place in a blur of movement that saw her stabbing the baton at his back, but he turned faster than either of us thought he would have and he caught her wrist.

There was a sickening SNAP, and she had to look away to find something to warp places with. How she had the wherewithal to do that was beyond me. He didn’t give her the chance, and yanked, throwing her aside as she swallowed most of a scream.

Even with no one to back him up he was an issue.

So were we.

I saw it just before Gabe finally managed to slice one of Snaketongue’s arms off in retaliation to a sloppy attack on her part, and then he grabbed her tongue with his fingertips.

This time she screamed more in rage than pain as his power shattered it once more from the point of contact. He smiled, kneeing her in the face hard enough that I saw the shiny red lights all over her head blink off, and in that moment Gaz looked to see what happened.

That was the closest thing to an opening I was going to get.

“You mother fucker do you know how hard that is to fix!?” he yelled turning his back on me as I panted, bleeding from my face, several places on my legs and arms and stomach too.

Every node where the shields were emanating from switched function, and somehow Gaz sensed the light changing from blue to green. They brightened as all the connected batteries and power collected on one fist.

Hammerbro pointed, yelling out “What the fuck?”

When Gaz turned around, he saw the shield collected around the fist flying straight towards the center of his chest.

All at once, all of the power housed within did the opposite of harmlessly dispersing the impact. No, instead the strength of a heavyweight boxer hit his chest dead center in a straight, and the force distributed through the “shield” several times, bouncing back and forth, draining the batteries and capacitors alike to almost empty until the reverberation violently released the multiplied force. Gaz was hit with three times what he’d been met with when Prodigy had first managed the same, and instead of simply sliding backwards he was sent flying directly into Hammerbro. The two of them smashed through a wall at the far side of the atrium through the waterfall, and I let out a roar of both pain and happiness that it had worked.

Normally, the shield distributed force harmlessly across itself, which was why a smaller, denser shield would always be better than a large one. I’d figured out how to stop overlap, and instead create dense integration of multiple shields that fed into and empowered each other cleanly. That, however, was only the first thing I’d done. The second, which the team hadn’t known about, was figuring out how to turn the shield into a force multiplier by capturing the impact of a hit and causing it to bounce back and forth between two panes of, more or less, reflective force. While this required an energy feed from the batteries not to immediately fall apart, it would still add more power into the resulting burst. Two shields had created a reaction about 1.3x the original force in my first, crude experiments. I’d refined it as much as I could to 1.5, and almost fried a battery or two in the process.

This was six of those shields. The force had gone up more per shield and added battery power. I had delivered more than 20x the force of a frankly impressive punch if I say so myself, in an area the size of my fist to him. The downside had been that I never figured out how to direct all of that force one way. The blowback wasn’t the full amount, and I reserved a single layer of shield to protect myself, but it wasn’t even close to enough.

So… while Gaz wasn’t getting up, I was fairly certain my arm was broken in 2 places. At least. The pain was numbed by adrenaline, however, and I looked at my teammates with a smile as my arm hung limp at my side.

“It worked,” I breathed out.

“What the FUCK was that!?” Marauder yelled, turning off his gauntlet and grabbing his own head in surprise.

“That was payback,” Prodigy noted. “I have no idea how you did that, but I am impressed.” I nodded a thanks, and when she got up and regrouped with us, she frowned. “Broken arm?”

“Pretty bad one, yeah,” I commented as she tore the burned remains of her shirt off revealing seared skin and, thankfully, an intact sports bra. As she made me a sling and I swallowed a scream, I exhaled in delight as I saw the Black Box was intact in Shift’s empty gun holster. “Give me a second,” I breathed out, allowing my eye to return to it’s normal function and held out a hand towards a nearby wall, accessing a security terminal hidden within.

“I’m taking this,” Marauder happily groaned, lifting the sledge hammer and resting it over his shoulder. “Not the worst craftsmanship I’ve seen.”

In my head I was back in the bricked system, using my power to sift through the garbage data until I found the dreamer and waded over to her.

“Yo, Gaz is down for the count,” I told her. “Quick question?”

“Fuck you let me out of here!” she yelled, still clearly battling the virus in her rig.

“I will if you answer something for me,” I told her.

“Fine, what!?”

“If Gaz thought I was coming, why didn’t he bring more heavy hitters?” I asked frankly.

“The gang’s been divided up across Halogens territory. This aint the only gig we’re working, just the one he’s at.” I considered that, then narrowed my eyes.

“You all on retainer for more than just this job protecting the PsyOp?” She sneered at me.

“Fuckin think I’m dumb? I can’t tell you some shit like that!” she growled.

“Fair enough, that’s as good as answering me directly. Interesting that she masked that parlay as anything other than recruiting her own personal muscle,” I wondered out loud.

“You got a point?” she shot at me.

“I’ll cut you a deal, I’ll unbrick your rig if you concede the lockdown protocol,” I told her looking into her face with a blank expression.

“No sell, I’ll get out eventually,” she bit back.

“Unless I jam another four viruses up your ass right now,” I threatened her.

She was quiet for a second. “Okay that’s a fair point,” she told me and snapped a finger. “There.”

“Tell Gaz I wanna chat when he’s awake again. I knocked him into the bathrooms, him and the dude with the Hammer,” I told her removing myself and leaving the key to the program with her, just enough out of reach she’d have a bit of work to do to reach it… or at least that’s how we envisioned it as I buried the code under a few layers of garbage and disconnected.

In the real world, the shutters started to lift.

“Nice,” Shift said. “Let’s get out of here before-”

The flashing of red and blue was all we needed to see before we decided to cut and run towards the back exits. Without a doubt, the cops were on the FORGE payroll too, which meant they’d set up a surprise just in case.

Didn’t matter to me, frankly. So, they were gonna fight both clean and dirty, sure whatever. I had the Box and I’d beat Gaz… mostly… so I’d take what I could get.

They had the building surrounded, I could see it now that I wasn’t locked behind shutters that could block outgoing signals. Signals that, for example, would let me see through traffic cameras.

We’d stashed our car about a mile and a half away. That meant a far run while I was bruised, bleeding and nursing a broken arm. Shit, maybe I’d gotten one over on him, but I probably hadn’t really won in all honesty if it took this much out of me. I shook off the thoughts as we stacked up on the backdoor.

“Alright, no way back up and I doubt we could get the grappling hooks across the street again without them seeing us and turning it into a shooting gallery,” I grunted. Prodigy, half of her outfit in tatters, took a knee, catching her breath. Marauder, I could now see he was holding his abdomen and grunting every other breath. Relatable there: I for sure had a bruised rib.

“Not great,” Marauder astutely rasped out. “Adrenaline’s wearin' off…”

“Nope, not at all. What’s the plan, Upgrade.” I turned to Shift, who had asked, and saw her scarfing down two chewy bars at once. Her wrist had already healed from being completely crushed by Gaz earlier, and she seemed no worse for wear. She smirked through bites. “Oh… me?”

“Yeah, now or never,” I told her. She nodded aand smirked.

“Alright,” she spoke and reached into a pouch on her leg. She produced an energy drink cocktail she’d prepared ahead of time, shook it up and unscrewed the cap of the vial she’d put it in. “Ready, set…”