Chương 111: 110. Vector

The world was trying to kill her again. This time, it had chosen a particularly scenic method: a dome the size of a city district, a civil war between planetary powers, and enough stray energy discharge to vaporize a neighborhood. Kelly crouched behind the fractured stump of a building's support column. Chunks of polycrete the size of her head ripped through the air where she'd been standing half a second before.

The suppressing fire wasn't aimed at her—she was still invisible in her stealth suit—but the battlefield, and the people after her, had decided her general vicinity was an acceptable loss. Kelly peeked through a bullet hole in her cover's weak point, and she saw exactly who was leading the assault. Through the debris fog, and the day got a lot more personal. Vector. He was fat.

Not standard-issue fat, but impressively, monumentally obese in an era where you could dial your bodyfat percentage down for a monthly subscription. It implied a commitment to gluttony that was almost artistic. The man had dinner plate hands. He wore a cold, placid smile that didn't reach his cold, calculating eyes. One eye was normal, human. The other was excessively large, swollen with expensive tech, and glowed a persistent, unhealthy green.

The components inside were visibly overclocked, humming with a strained energy she could feel in her teeth.

"You have got to be kidding me," Kelly muttered inside her helmet. The last and only time she'd seen him, she'd been hiding behind a flattened wall. He and his squad of black ops psychopaths had been recklessly attacking her adoptive 'father', Caliph. They'd gotten every innocent they were supposedly sent to extract killed in the process without a single care. The only reason she'd survived that day was because Caliph, the mad criminal, had been so violently uncooperative that he'd forced their full retreat.

Vector hadn't looked overclocked then. Now, the man was a monolith of hivemind control and barely contained madness. The fact that he still had his job and had regular soldiers following his orders implied he was, and had gotten very, very good at killing. Too good for his superiors to let go, even as the tech ate his mind. The Fatman, Vector, was on the move. His battle mechsuit—a hulking, multi-limbed frame—shifted and reconfigured.

Portions of its armored carapace hissing, sliding and reshaping, forming eight long, sleek twisting barrels that tracked the chaotic movements in the combat zone, zeroing in on her last position. He turned himself into a horrific, gun-toting octopus. While his soldiers scurried to drag wounded comrades toward the dome's fractured edges, and while Venus occupied Freya and Cain traded blows with the angel in the sky, the second-in-command wasn't managing the retreat.

Vector performed a heavy, piston-driven mech traversal, crushing rubble underfoot, going straight for the patch of empty air where Kelly was.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she said again, the humor entirely absent. He couldn't see her, but the suit's sensors were clearly a grade above standard issue. He was hunting a ghost, and he was good at it. Realizing this, Kelly decided to bail. She pushed off from the column, making a beeline for the nearest skeletal wall that might offer a path out of this immediate blender. A way out of the dome. The goal was to exit the scene, regroup, and maybe let the idiots above finish each other off.

The enraged, fat, overclocked man in a battle mechsuit didn't let her. A motor whined. One of his massive mech-suit hands, not a gun barrel, lunged from his side. It was big enough to crush her whole and the ground beside her. It moved faster than anything that size had a right to, a piston-driven blur aimed to grab the space she occupied. Simultaneously, all eight of his gun barrels flashed. They fire at more than just her—they blasted everything around her to mist. The air superheated.

The ground erupted in a line of geysering slag and fragmented cover. It was perfect, calculated suppressing fire, designed to herd and disorient while the hand closed in.

"Persistent," Kelly spat, already shifting her weight as the runes in her bracelet flared, and a dense network of erected shields sent it all ricocheting into everything but her. Her reaction system helped, a little, but the guy really packed a punch. Her shields frayed and shattered one by one under the assault. The spectacle overhead was someone else's problem. This was now a very immediate, very heavy problem. Kelly's scanner gave her a quick read.

The guy in the cockpit had an Enhancement score of 25, specialized in cognitive function. Fine. Standard officer material. Then she looked at the suit he was wearing. Her eyebrows went up. The suit was a piece of work. Obscenely expensive hardware that under normal circumstances, only ever showed up in corporate R&D vaults and black-site military manifests, not stomping around a collapsed city. She whistled, a low sound lost in her helmet. That piece of kit was obscene.

Her scanner adjusted, recalculating, and the new numbers it flashed were just rude. The mechsuit the fat man wore was boosting him. Brute-forcing a flat, non-specialized surge to a score of 45EQ. Across the board. Every category. It was turning him from a simple problem to a catastrophic one. A tank, stronger than a Tüin ambassador. So when his arm shot out and she deflected it with what looked, from his perspective, like casual magical ease, the whole many-ton machine ground to a halt. The cockpit hissed.

Vector blinking, his brain trying to reconcile the math with the reality. His voice, filtered and metallic, muttered something she barely caught through the armor.

"... freaking monsters breaking the rules." Kelly's head tilted inside her helmet.

"Monster xenophobia? Really?" Her voice was a dry distorted crackle through the helmet. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it"And rules," she said, "are incredibly breakable, by the way." Then she sped up, dilating time, hastily dodging gunfire from too many limbs that still moved fast even in dilated time. She shifted her weight, the mana in her augments whining softly.

"It's the best thing about them." Time dilated around her, the world sinking into syrup. She'd started moving the moment she finished talking and was instantly annoyed by the fact that he still tracked her. Gun barrels from too many limbs were already moving her, spooling up, shifting to where she stepped. Even in her slowed time, they moved fast. She wasn't faster than the guns. She just needed to be somewhere they weren't already aiming.

She dropped into a crouch, letting a burst of high-velocity rounds chew a canyon into the pavement where her chest had been. Chips of melted concrete drifted past her visor like slow-motion snow.

"That's too many guns!" Kelly called out, her voice stretched strange in the time bubble. She pushed off the ground, her augmented and mana-charged legs coiling and releasing, launching her sideways behind the jagged stump of a concrete pillar. A second burst stitched a line across its face, spraying dust.

"You outsourcing the aiming? Do the hive charge consultant fees? Or do they just tell you where to shoot like a good ape?" At her words, the overclocked man jerked, roared, and kept firing. The suit was terrifying on paper. In practice, the man inside wasn't used to it. She could tell. Kelly watched its movements from her cover. The paint was pristine, barely scratched. Fresh out of the box. Its footfalls were heavy, yes, but they followed a predictable rhythm—step, stabilize, acquire target, predict target, step.

The weapons fired with perfect synchronicity, their patterns overlapping to cut off angles. It was textbook. Sterile. It had a cold, efficient calculation—an AI hive-mind running drills. His predictions of her dodges were about 80% accurate. What he lacked was the beautiful, messy innovation that came from genuine panic, from adrenaline screaming at you to forget the manual and just live. He didn't have conflicting instincts. He'd probably outsourced control of each gun to a basic targeting AI. Amateur hour.

"Busy guy," she grunted, coming up into a sprint that zigged behind a slumped transport pod. She'd seen these tactics before. Recognized the tactical patterns—predictive targeting, group drills, the precise flanking maneuvers of Euro-Asia wars and urban pacification units. She'd seen it in a few of her crazier days, too; in Genecorps tower, against the mercs under the city, and that time she'd raided the hyperloop.

This suit was built to be a one-man suppression unit, to replicate the strength and tactical fire of a full squad. A prototype. It had the hallmarks of something designed to preoccupy a big, aerial, and resistant target that could stand there and take a beating. Something like Freya. Or Cain. It was not designed for an agile and stylish fashion icon who could dilate time, like Kelly. He brought aerial machine guns and sub-sonic artillery to a fight that needed sonic rounds or a magic sniper to even touch her.

A showy, area-of-effect solution for a problem that required a single, focused point of impact. Kelly watched the fireworks and thought he'd brought a sledgehammer to a lock-picking contest. She activated her perception enhancement a fraction of a second before the world smeared into slow motion. Gun barrels, too many of them, swiveled toward her. Even in dilated time, the streams of fire were fast, converging lines of hypersonic light.

She dropped into a crouch that became a sideways roll, composite shields flaring into existence for a microsecond to deflect a trio of rounds before winking out. Chips of shattered pavement hung in the air around her like frozen rain. She landed in a roll, coming up behind a scorched delivery van.

"You're over-engineered!" she yelled, popping up to loose a three-round burst from her rifle at the suit's knee joint. The rounds sparked off the armor. A minor distraction.

"Built for a dragon! I'm not a dragon! I'm a Time-god! A baby one!" It was a masterpiece, and he was using it for Skeet Shooting. She could work with that. He could've won if he ditched the suit. Let the AI fully pilot. Close the distance, forget shooting, and just grapple—just grab and hold. Smother her. Nobody ever tried that. She had no Titles or Traits against being pinned. It was always beams and bullets and explosions. Sometimes the answer was a really big, really strong hug.

She don't have a 'get out of hug free' card. Not yet. A simple, physical solution would've worked. Instead, Vector announced his presence. He turned the fight into a grand military spectacle. Kelly saw the desire: to prove the mech, to prove himself. Likely to Venus and whoever watched the recording later, perhaps to further cement his position as someone who could be trusted to Vaughn and the higher ups in the Echelon.

Vector, the ambitious weapon, trying to graduate from temporary bodyguard to a piece on the strategic board. He needed a flashy win. A dominant, terrifying display. So he was using the loudest, brightest options in the arsenal.

"Fucking monster!" The mech's external speakers boomed, Vector's voice distorted into a godlike proclamation.

"—your body will make us untouchable, with what you can do… the Echelon will be studying you for years!" Kelly actually blinked.

"He's doing a voice." An ambitious bodyguard. Auditioning for a promotion in the middle of a firefight. That's how you get everyone killed. For a second, Kelly felt it—a pang of something almost like pity. It was a cold, analytical thing. Here was a guy who'd probably been told he was a weapon his whole life. Now he had the ultimate weapon wrapped around him, and he had no control. No autonomy or free will. His augments were using him, and he was using the suit to beg for a better spot at the table.

He was screaming, 'Look what I can do!' to people who only cared about what he did. His ambition was a trap he'd built himself. He was lonely inside all that metal. And nobody could save him. The feeling lasted about half a second. Then she remembered. The old files Ren had grudgingly confirmed. And her personal experience. Before the systems started eating his mind, Vector's service record wasn't for protecting others. It was for sanitization. Whole blocks, quiet, quick, and clean. No witnesses, no questions.

Women, children, elderly, even pets. He had a penchant for psychological torture, even before he lost control. Whole family's brutalised for corporate and state interests. His reality was much worse than her memory. The man inside the machine had been a stone-cold exterminator long before he became a spectacle. Her sympathy iced over, solid and final.

"Yeah," she said, the word quiet and final in the helmet.

"Never mind. The guy's a real piece of work either way." Kelly sped herself up and slowed time around her. She was immediately annoyed that he could keep up. Vector's eyes clearly couldn't track her—she noticed a slight lag, a stumble in his gaze as it tried to follow her through the thickened air. But his suit's brain could. It tracked her perfectly, even as she moved five times faster than she had any right to. The machine was compensating for his weak little fleshy, non-super-speed brain.

Kelly sighed, the sound lost in the time-dilation.

"This is gonna suck," she said. Then she time-skipped her entire body.