Chương 24: An Unbeatable Mountain

A mountain of muscle and steam was bearing down on her, blocking the light from the station. Kelly reached for the high-pressure rounds— His fist found her first. It landed like machinery in freefall, a piston wrapped in flesh. A wave of liquid control erupted from her, targeting his blood to no effect. Kelly threw the slab up by instinct alone. The blow drove her into the side of the train, metal groaning with the force. Fractures flared through her forearm—sharp, bright, and distant, like someone else's pain.

Kelly drew a shotgun mid-step and fired blind—pellets slammed into his swinging arm, knocking the swing wide as she dropped low, broken gravel scraping under her roll. The brute's momentum ripped through the platform beside her, shearing metal floor and tile with the same arm, debris scattering like shrapnel. His free hand came up instantly, muzzle flash flaring—rounds hammered into her shield with the weight of a wrecking ball. Armour-piercing. She felt it in the recoil, in the strain of her elbow. 4. 72 EQ.

On paper, painful but doable. But he was overclocked. And that was a different genre of fight. It meant he had stacked high-powered AIs running in parallel—one predicting her aim, another correcting his movements, three more running full-time on threat modeling and movement automation, and some parts of his body weren't even pretending to be organic. Like the purpose-built weaponry in his left arm, a guided ammunition system that corrected mid-flight the moment it fired. He hadn't used it yet.

Thanks to his weapon augment, and the AIs piloting his limbs, she couldn't afford to get close. With a thought, her molecular switch shifted into a segmented chain-blade strapped to her side. She needed to move with precision and speed, using position as her weapon, because against him, brute force alone could not keep her alive.

"Hey. Catch." She threw the bottle at his face and his hand snapped forward a foot from her nose, swatting it out of the air without needing to look. Reflexes bought with chrome and combat hours. With a thought, she triggered the liquid inside and the bottle exploded into a shockwave of mist and cold vapour that bloomed outward, swallowing her heat signature in a cloud of chilled fog. Probably. Acid would have been better.

A little acid would have melted through his chestplate and that smug little twitch at the corner of his mouth, but she hadn't exactly pencilled in get burned and crushed by a human wrecking ball on today's schedule. Kelly vaulted a broken barricade, boots catching the edge for height. Her frame cleared the gap in one motion—up to the train roof, gun already barking back. Shots flared down from above, forcing him to pivot, angle upward, adjust.

Pain bloomed sharp in her side where ribs had cracked, every breath grinding bone against muscle. Her left arm hung slow and clumsy, nerves dulled to a heavy numbness that warned of deeper breaks beneath the skin. It wasn't the first time she had been injured this badly, but it was the first time in many loops that it mattered. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. So her blood control didn't work on humans? There were ways around that.

Fine, old school it is. Kelly drew her blade and locked it to the shotgun's barrel, the edge snapping into place like a bayonet.

"Alright," she muttered, "let's see if your upgrades come with a warranty." She fired again.

"I don't have time for this, it's not you," the brute said as he casually tore at the ground's cosmetic layer to create additional cover, apparently assuming that Kelly wasn't the person manipulating the Hyperloop defenses by the fact that they hadn't swarmed to defend her. Tapping the side of his head as his eye swivelled and locked. His pupils dragged behind movement, recalibrating a beat too late—like the rest of him was moving faster than his face could follow.

"Seriously? No—don't," he snapped as his arm jerked up in a twitchy motion and split open with a mechanical hiss, unfolding into a rack of smart-loaded chambers.

"Yeah, I can see that—shut up. All of you stop talking at once; override whatever you want, just stop talking in my head and kill her." Bullets launched in a staggered spiral like miniature missiles, veering mid-flight with knife-edge corrections, carving patterns through the smoke as they hunted their mark. Rather than letting the spiraling bullets surround her and pierce her from all sides, Kelly charged, firing a spray of high-pressure rounds.

Shells tore from the shotgun, white-hot and screaming, cutting space between her, the brute, and his missiles. But before she'd even aimed, he moved. Kelly raised the slab. The first impact struck like a hammer, the next burst in fire, heat blistering across steel. Smoke poured off the surface, covering her in a veil of rising black. Kelly broke left—into the smoke's blind spot his AIs hadn't recalibrated for—using the cover bought with bone and pressure. The stock hit her shoulder.

The blast ripped from the muzzle. Success. The brute staggered, moving too late, plates shifting as the round struck his unguarded center-mass. He had been looking in the wrong direction. She was on the edge of his periphery, covered in smoke. Even the muzzle flash was obscured from his vision. He didn't fall. He blurred, some rogue AI seizing his body and jerking him right, avoiding more fatal injury and keeping its host alive. But the bullets still hit.

The rounds punched through, catching under the shield and plating to tear through soft tissue. Blood tracked down his side in clean, narrow lines. He touched the wound, ran his fingers through the slick, and looked at her.

"I didn't expect to get injured this soon," he said. His grip shifted. The weight of him followed.

"Not bad." His arm snapped forward and fired again. Kelly let out a scorched laugh through the smoke and heat curling off the shotgun's barrel.

"You and me both, big guy." She had failed to kill him, "but failure's just another bruise on the way to progress," she said, ducking beneath targeted fire.

"You're bleeding, your AIs blinked, and now I know where you crack. Next time, you drop." She'd been bruised, broken, fractured, and her lower legs, arms, chest, and parts of her head were covered in second-degree burns. Survivable, but pre-loop Kelly would have been out for the count, and post-loop Kelly still found it hard to breathe. But she'd opened him up, made that million-dollar targeting array stumble. Not a victory, but a lesson—brutal, repeatable, and always paid for in blood.

[Uncommon Title: ' Fortress of Flame (I)' gained!] [Title - Fortress of Flame (Uncommon, I-Grade): Received 50% or more beyond-surface fire damage from a being of a higher sub-Rank, without losing consciousness. Whilst equipped, grants a 10% decrease in heat damage.] Kelly glanced up, just enough to let the panel flash across her vision. Her lips twitched.