Chương 112: 111. Vector II

Kelly siezed herself with temporal energy and time-skipped her entire body, Her body stuttered. One moment she was mid-stride, the next she was anchored to the mech's broad back, her stealth suit's boots magnetized to the armor plating. The position felt familiar. She'd spent maybe ten loops, in the early days—when she'd just started looping and was too scared to face the creatures outside—trying to learn how to build one of these things. The schematics were a desperate ghost in her memory.

The idea of a mech suit had seemed appealing to a far less experienced, far squishier Kelly. A big metal shell between her and the world. The dream died faster than it arrived. She gave up on the whole 'mech lady' idea because mechs were both too expensive and too fragile. Cash-intensive piñatas if you knew where to cut.

"Case in point," she muttered. An explosion of liquid control ruptured the metal shells' internal systems. A quick slice from her weapon in the same breath, and the suit's primary and secondary spine was severed along with most of its back and extra arms. The forearms fell like stringless puppets, electrical jolts coming out of the damaged parts as the suit hissed smoke and electricity. She had sliced through the main control bundles, like cutting the tendons and nerves in a wrist.

The parts that told the arms how to move and the legs how to balance were gone. The suit's brain could no longer talk to its limbs, and the systems that amplified Vector's strength and speed were offline. It was now just a very expensive brick that was about as useful as a broken toaster.

"What's this, performance issues?" Kelly mused, exhausted from the full-body time skip, but still standing thanks to her training. She ran towards the nearest wall and yelled back.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

"You aren't funny, monster!" Vector complained through his armor's loudspeakers, clearly jealous of her peerless wit.

"You're dead!" The mech's two remaining arms ran on a third skeleton and power source she couldn't reach with one swing, and continued to aim and fire at Kelly.

"Just… DIE! Fucking abomination!" Vector screamed. As his large frame ejected from the otherwise immobile mech and retaliated with another volley of bullets, Kelly turned and ran. The full-body time skip left a buzzing exhaustion in her bones, a hollow feeling her training and augments immediately began fighting. She dilated time and rushed to the nearest wall of the dome. It was now or never.

Without his mech boosting his capabilities, Vector's eyes couldn't even follow her, with time slowed as it was and Kelly sped up to insanity. Thanks to Giantbane and the idiots still battling in the sky being an excellent distraction, she could make it. Ren had probably already vanished through the heavily guarded hole in the dome she'd made earlier. So Kelly slowed time further and moved to carve a new one on another, presumably less guarded, side. She didn't look back.

As Kelly raced for the edge of the dome, the sky decided to have a disagreement with itself. Venus was performing about as well as anyone could while stuck in a four-way aerial brawl against an angel and two overpowered inhumans. Somehow, through the spectacular display of mutual attempted murder, Venus, Freya, and Cain all stopped trying to kill each other for a moment. Their combined fire shifted, converging on a single glowing target: the angel, Verrimisir. A dry chuckle escaped Kelly.

"Would you look at that. A team-up. How wholesome." There was no response from Ren. He was already gone, having vanished sometime during the initial exchange. She was alone inside the dome. But in almost two thousands loops, Kelly had grown used to voicing her thoughts aloud. She found herself to be good company.

"Did the overgrown pigeon flap his wings too loud and offend all three of them at once?" she mused, watching a pulse of gravity from Freya warp the air around the angel.

"Or is he actually strong enough to make them put the 'mortal enemies' thing on hold? I'm really hoping it's the first one. I have plans that don't involve a competent angel." The battle wrote itself across the burning sky. Freya used directed energy weapons that carved glowing scars in the atmosphere and gravity pulses that made buildings below shudder and collapse—the sort of hardware you'd point at a starship and hope for the best.

Cain's weapon-swarm was a cloud of shifting, glittering malice, forms flickering between whirling blades, concussive launchers, and lances of pure force. And Venus. Venus Vaughn. She fought with her speed, her strength, and a lot of weapon augments. Each shot she fired was a thunderclap that arrived a moment before the sound, projectiles moving so fast they punched through the superheated air and kept going. One shot missed the angel, streaked upward, and vanished into the opaque dome high above.

Kelly tracked its probable trajectory and realised it could definitely poke a hole in something sitting in orbit. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. In retaliation, that damned magical asshole Verrimisir kept throwing fireballs. Not little campfire pouches. He hurled massive, swirling spheres of incandescent fury that flew with the rumbling, inevitable arc of small meteors.

They landed with things you couldn't call a 'bang', but a whump that swallowed city blocks in an instant, unfolding into lakes of white-hot fire. The East Grid inside the dome was no longer a city. It was a hellish inferno with a structural integrity problem, and the main attractions were busy redecorating it from the top down. Kelly's mind automatically started filing reports. She recognized some of Venus's augments. High-end experimental, bleeding-edge corporate wetwork—things not yet available to any military.

The Vaughn R&D overview files she'd scoured had been very thorough. Venus had very small, miniature gravity drives in her that gave her near limitless adaptability in flight. She had to—the visible thrusters in her back and feet were nowhere enough for those kind of logic defying movements. Those arm-cannons weren't standard issue, either; they were prototype hybrid systems, likely railguns with extra power sources, boosted by a secondary directed-energy stage to keep the projectiles from vaporizing in mid-air.

Hypersonic delivery. The missile pods on her back would be launching micro-munitions, each one a smart seeker with a bad attitude and a payload that could make a city planner cry. But cataloguing the angel's magic was like trying to read water. The fireballs had a stubborn coherence, a structure that fed on what it consumed and burned too bright and too hot for anything that obeyed natural laws. She squinted, her perception enhancements straining.

The underlying energy kept shifting, refusing to settle into a pattern she could lock down. It was annoying. As Kelly ran, she watched Venus fire a full-power shot from her right cannon. The recoil visibly staggered the woman in mid-air, and her flight path stuttered for a half-second as she corrected.

"There. She's got the firepower of a battleship grafted onto a human-sized barrel. You push past enhancement level thirty, your systems have to pick a main function. Hers picked 'artillery.' Means she can't brawl and shoot the fun stuff up close. She has to angle herself, plant her feet, and let the big guns talk." It was an educated guess, pieced together from stolen corporate design philosophy documents.

And paired with paired with Freya and Cain's offensive, it meant the angel was surrounded by assaults from all sides. Even backed into a corner, three-on-one, the angel wasn't just taking the beating. He unleashed a blistering whirlwind of searing light, trying to shred their formation and carve out some breathing room.

But the three of them just tightened the noose—Freya warped the space around the attack to diffuse it, Cain's swarm absorbed and scattered the energy, and Venus put a railcannon round through the gap.

"Teamwork makes the dream work, I guess, even if the dream is murdering a magical, annoying, man-shaped pigeon." He wasn't actually a pigeon, of course. But picturing him that way always improved Kelly's mood. When time finally resumed, Kelly had managed to reach the outside of the dome. Her reward for that bit of effort was a dozen wires whipping out from the opening, each one weaving itself into what promised to be a profoundly inconvenient and inescapable net. Just her luck. Figures emerged through the smoke.

Vector's men, the ones who had left earlier. They'd decided to come back, and they'd brought their guns, all of which were currently aimed in her general direction. And then the main event arrived. The fat man himself emerged from the hole behind her, riding some military vehicle Kelly didn't recognize—a grotesque cross between an armored motorcycle and a racecar. He held weapons in each arm, his forearms riddled with miniature holes that looked an awful lot like smart missile ports.

His cold killer eyes landed on her with a disdain so pure it was almost artistic. The holes on his arms began to spin with a mechanical whirr, and his eyes started to glow. He'd brought a party. Kelly didn't waste a thought. She equipped Mana Vacuum and time-skipped beside him, her gun reappearing already pressed directly against his temple. He'd been on her to-do list, after all. Letting someone with mind abilities just wander around was terrible long-term planning. She pulled the trigger. Her finger didn't budge.

Her failsafes didn't trigger. In response, the large man's eyes glowed with an intense, punishing golden light. Both of them, machine and man, shared the same horrible idea. Kelly felt a sharp tingle of pain stitch itself into the meat of her skull. A telepathic lobotomy, express delivery. Kelly froze. Just for a heartbeat, shock short-circuited her system. Vector didn't need a longer invitation. He exploited the opening, an arm swinging at her with the speed of a shot round.

Suffering from the strain of overusing her time abilities, the immortal intern couldn't slow time or skip through it. She managed to switch to Fortress of Flame as the payload connected. The pain in her skull intensified, a hot, drilling pressure, as both his eyes glowed a brighter, more aggressive gold. He was really putting his back into it. The remaining soldiers saw their moment and took it.

They tackled her from the side, a coordinated heap of enhanced muscle that threw the mad scientist through a landscape of debris and smoke. She hit the ground with a force that punched the air from her lungs and kicked up a thick, choking cloud of pulverized concrete and ancient ash.

"Shush, it'll be painless if you don't fight it, little monster." Vector leaned through the pile of enhanced men pinning her down. He whispered to Kelly, the words coming from his mouth and also from a new, unwelcome voice that had set up shop inside her mind. It felt like needles digging into the surface of her skull, scraping around for a purchase to begin a full intracranial hijack.

But it was distant, muted—like a man shouting from another room, or across the street—as if it hadn't, and couldn't pierce whatever natural defences her mind had. It was far weaker than what Verrimisir had achieved. Kelly was moments away from abandoning the loop and forcing a reset either way. The nuclear option was looking polite.

"Just let me in. Don't fight it, creature." The large killer's voice sounded.

"Then I can look beyond the surface and see why you believe so adamantly that you're one of us."