Chương 100: 99: Rubber Bullets

The fight wasn't a fight. It was a lesson. The Talon's hands moved with the certainty of decades. Every strike landed exactly where it was meant to. Every block arrived before her attack had fully formed. Every movement answered a question Katherine hadn't realised she was asking. Harmony kept her alive. The nunchaku carved through arcs she wasn't controlling, correcting her stance, her footing, even the rhythm of her breathing.

It caught a strike that would've opened her throat, redirected another that would've shattered her ribs, and dragged her clear of a kick that would've folded her spine. She was the puppet. Harmony held the strings.

"Onomatopoeia." The Talon's gauntlet split open with a metallic SHINK, claws extending as he lunged.

"Pishhhhhhhh." Katherine mimicked the violent hiss of meat dropped into scorching oil. Reality obeyed. The air surrounding the Talon erupted into blistering heat, sizzling loudly enough to drown out the corridor itself. His armour glowed red before beginning to soften. The space he'd occupied became empty an instant before the armour could melt into slag. He was too fast. Too experienced.

He had been fighting before Katherine was born, before her mother was born, before the first stolen dream had ever been compressed into a crystal and called power. He didn't need the Hexagon to kill her. He only needed Harmony to make one mistake. Katherine clicked her tongue.

"And this better not be a hologram, because if I find out you're being a little bitch sneaking around with those gadgets..." BRRRRRTTTTTTTT! The shoulder cannons fired point-blank. Harmony yanked. She slammed into the opposite wall before she even realised she'd moved. Her teeth cracked together. Her vision blurred. The hail of rounds shredded the space she'd occupied moments earlier, gouging trenches through the floor, walls and pillars alike. Dust billowed through the corridor as the entire structure groaned.

She slid down the wall, legs buckling beneath her, Harmony still clenched in trembling fingers. The Talon hadn't moved. He simply watched.

"Synecdoche." The command sought to reduce him. Strength became weakness. Speed became slowness. Mastery became mediocrity. Orange code flooded the corridor. DELETE(EFFECT); The Hexagon rejected the concept before reality could accept it. Katherine chuckled. The mouthguard absorbed most of the backlash surging through her skull. She tried again.

"Synecdoche." More code. DELETE(EFFECT);"Synecdoche." Again. DELETE(EFFECT);"Synecdoche." Her lips blurred, the word pouring from her mouth again and again while walls of multi-colored code materialised ever faster, deleting the command the instant it came into existence. The Talon moved. Katherine's brain already perceived the world on the picosecond scale, fast enough to outpace an Operative's physical perception. Talons existed on another level entirely.

Their minds functioned in femtoseconds, and whenever even that proved insufficient, Apis surged through their nervous systems, compressing thought into fleeting yoctoseconds. Even with her impossible perception...... he became little more than a smear.

"Understatement." That one slipped through. For a heartbeat. The impossible became merely extraordinary. His speed dropped just enough. Harmony answered immediately. Its chain shot forward, extending across the corridor before coiling around the Talon's limbs and torso, pulling tight. Katherine spat out the next command before he could break free.

"Synecdoche." The weakening took hold for the smallest fraction of a second.

"PK-KOW!" Onomatopoeia answered. Understatement only diminished an opponent relative to Katherine herself. The Talon had become slower by her standards, but his own perception remained unchanged. His mind still operated on the yoctosecond scale. The bolt didn't care. It crossed the corridor faster than even that. Neither of them saw the lightning. They only witnessed the aftermath.

A shimmering bolt burst into existence from empty air and, by the time causality caught up, it had already torn through the Talon's shoulder, ripping apart armour, flesh and Hexagon shielding that had never failed before. The thunder arrived long afterwards, rolling through the corridor as the Talon was hurled backwards. His suit erupted in light. It refused the outcome. Reality faltered.

The Hexagon intercepted the destruction, bleeding away the force that should've annihilated him, rewriting catastrophe into survivable damage before the universe could settle on the result. But the Hexagon couldn't deny the wound. The hole remained. The kind of damage his suit had never displayed. The kind of violation his body had never known. Flesh parted. Armour split. Blood followed.

Harmony tightened in response to Katherine's killing intent, its chain constricting until it threatened to crush him like an aluminium can. Orange code blazed across the Talon's visor. He imagined himself elsewhere. Reality complied. His silhouette flickered from Katherine's perception an instant before the chain finished closing. He was already farther down the corridor. He staggered. That was the shocking part. Talons didn't feel pain. They were resurrected dead things, stripped of pain receptors long ago.

Katherine's intent had bypassed that certainty. For one impossible moment, the lightning burned nerves that no longer existed, forcing his body to remember agony it had long since forgotten. His hand drifted toward one of the gadgets mounted at his waist. Katherine's expression darkened. Without taking her eyes off him, she thrust a hand into the satchel. The Nonagon pulsed against her palm, answering the desperation in her heartbeat as though she were drawing more of its impossible power into herself.

"Palindrome." A palindrome read the same forwards as backwards. Reality obeyed the same rule. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTT! The Talon's cannons roared. The barrage hammered Katherine's chest, stomach and throat, every round carrying enough force to pierce straight through a planet, each one aimed where the Nonagon had rebuilt her body. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. The bullets stopped. They reversed. Palindrome compelled every action to seek its beginning.

The hail of rounds raced backwards through the air, retracing their exact paths before disappearing neatly into the chambers they had been fired from. Warnings erupted across the Talon's visor. Every projectile. Every mechanism. Every action. Anything his equipment accomplished immediately sought to undo itself. Code flooded the corridor. The Hexagon fought to bleed away the imposed symmetry, tearing holes through the effect one command at a time. Katherine refused to let it recover.

"Herculean!" Strength surged back through her body. Burning muscles tightened, fractured bone steadied, and every fibre drank deeply from the impossible reservoir sleeping within the Nonagon. Ellipsis never crossed her mind. The Hexagon had already begun adapting to her language. She had watched it dismantle Synecdoche through relentless iteration, deleting the command until it could no longer take hold.

Repeating the same mistake with Ellipsis risked handing it another answer, and she wasn't about to gamble her strongest technique on an enemy that learned this quickly. She burst forward. For that single instant...... she moved faster than the Talon's body physically could. It didn't matter. His thoughts were already waiting. Dreamwalk had never been designed to make a Talon faster. It existed because nothing alive could consistently outrun thought.

Even if a hundred speedsters attacked at once, each moving beyond what his body could naturally match, Dreamwalk allowed him to imagine himself where he needed to be before any of them arrived. He imagined himself above her. He was already there. Kicking from the ceiling, he descended like a spear. Katherine had time for only a single word.

"Understatement." His fist crashed into her. BOOOOOOOM! The corridor caved beneath the impact. Stone erupted outward as Katherine cratered into the floor. Blood sprayed across the fractured rock. Bones cracked beneath the force, hairline fractures racing through them. The blow hadn't overpowered Herculean. It hadn't even tried. The Talon abandoned any attempt to contest the impossible layering of Herculean and Understatement.

Instead, the Hexagon redirected its calculations toward the authority sustaining them both. The Nonagon faltered. Only for an instant. The moment passed. The authority stabilised again. She lived. The Talon landed beside the crater before the dust settled. Both hands clamped around her throat. His fingers tightened. He wasn't trying to kill her immediately. He was stopping her from speaking. The shoulder cannons pivoted downward. BRRRRRTTT! They emptied point-blank into her face.

Understatement strained against its limits, reducing each impact from planet-piercing rounds travelling at effectively instantaneous speeds she could barely perceive, into something closer to hypersonic bullets. Herculean absorbed the remainder, dulling every strike until they felt little worse than rubber bullets. It couldn't hold forever. Palindrome hurled them backwards an instant later. With every passing second, however, the reversal weakened.

The Hexagon poured more code into reality, stripping away the linguistic constraint line by line. A handful of rounds slipped through. At this range...... even rubber bullets became lethal. Several smashed directly into her eyes. Others drove into her skull. Palindrome kept reversing them. For now. Katherine clawed at the Talon's hands, choking as she struggled to pry his fingers from her throat. Herculean surged through her. His grip shifted. For the first time, it actually began to give.

The tendons in his gauntlets strained as Katherine forced his hands apart by sheer lifting strength alone, her muscles trembling beneath the impossible effort. Electricity erupted across the armour. KZZZRAAAAT! White-blue arcs raced through his gauntlets and into her arms. Katherine choked. Every muscle seized at once. Her fingers spasmed open, smoke curling from her palms as the shock tore away what little leverage she had gained. Grabbing him wasn't going to work. She changed tactics instantly.

Her fist slammed into his ribs. THOOOM - KRAK! Another. THOOOM - KRAK! Another. THOOOM - KRAK! The corridor convulsed beneath the barrage. Shockwaves burst from every impact, racing through the stone as support columns groaned and dust rained from the ceiling. The Talon barely noticed. Each punch carried enough force to overwhelm a Stepper or stagger an Operative, yet the Hexagon dispersed everything short of the stellar threshold it had been built to endure.

An Apis Prism could already disperse any purely physical force short of planetary devastation. The Hexagon stood on an entirely different tier. Against its layered dispersal systems, anything less than the force required to destroy a star simply bled harmlessly away. Her punches landed. They meant nothing. Harmony answered first. She swung with her free arm. The nunchaku slammed into the side of his helmet, snapping his head sideways. It came again. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.

Katherine rolled her wrist, the chained shafts whipping around his head in a relentless rhythm. Each impact landed with the familiar sting of hardwood striking flesh. CRACK. A hairline fracture spread across the Talon's white visor. His thoughts sharpened. It wasn't merely an anomalous weapon. It was alive. The wood still hummed. The chain twitched between strikes, making tiny corrections Katherine herself never commanded.

It possessed the same impossible awareness as Butter's creations, except it had chosen the form of an object rather than a living creature. Its strength wasn't linear. It was absolute. Harmony didn't care whether it struck a frightened human or a god. It imposed the same sensation upon both. Being hit in the face with a nunchaku hurt. Durability became irrelevant. Armour became irrelevant.

Before Resound had even been invoked, every strike landed with the unmistakable force of a solid metal rod smashing directly into the victim's face. The nauseating impact of a heavy object crashing directly into a skull. THWACK. Another fracture crawled across the visor. He understood. Harmony wasn't simply a weapon Katherine wielded. It was a combatant. It still thought. It still chose. And if he allowed it to continue...... those fractures would become something far worse. He had to stop it.

Before Harmony could strike again, holograms materialised around Katherine. Restraints of solid light seized her wrists and ankles, pinning her spread-eagled against the cratered floor. Shoulder cannons unfolded from each projection, their barrels lowering toward her. She was already blacking out. A low thrum cut through the corridor like a blade. She recognised it before she consciously heard it. The magic revoker.

The same frequency that had silenced Butter's Gloom, pinned Clock to the ground, and reduced gods to frightened, bleeding mortals. It was reserved exclusively for Operatives and Talons. Operatives carried a single unit, one that required an entire month to replace once expended. Talons, by contrast, always carried two. It was here. It was active. It was meant for her. Harmony fell silent. The weapon didn't destroy it. It simply rendered it inert.

For the first time since the fight had begun, Katherine's confidence wavered. Her resolve slipped. Even the faint cobalt pulse leaking from Katherine's satchel diminished beneath the suppression field. The Talon felt it. Palindrome faltered. Hairline fractures spread through the reversal as the Hexagon finally tore enough holes in its symmetry. A handful of rounds became dozens. They found purchase at last, each impact reduced by Understatement and endured through Herculean until they struck like rubber bullets.

It was enough. BANG. A round slammed into her knee. She flinched. Pain lanced through her leg. Her mouth opened to scream. BRRRRRTTT! The barrage erupted. Rubber bullets were harmless. Dozens weren't. They hammered into her face, crushed her nose, burst both eyes, caved in her skull and pulped her brain in a relentless torrent. Katherine died before the sound of the gunfire had finished echoing through the corridor. Silence returned. One by one, the holograms surrounding the crater flickered.

Their shoulder cannons folded away. The solid-light restraints dissolved into drifting particles before blinking out entirely. The revoker's low hum faded with them. Henry kept his grip around Katherine's throat for another heartbeat. Only after every system confirmed the kill did he loosen his fingers. His gaze settled upon what remained of her face. The damage should've looked ordinary. It didn't. Fragments of skull framed an exposed brain that glistened beneath the corridor lights.

It wasn't the colour he expected. The tissue was pink...... but every fold looked as though it had been soaked in cobalt fluid. A faint blue sheen clung to the surface, pooling within the grooves between the gyri and staining the exposed matter with an unnatural lustre. It resembled a brain that had spent years submerged beneath some impossible solution rather than blood and cerebrospinal fluid. Henry stared. The pods. He had seen what prolonged immersion did to the body. Muscles changed. Bones changed.

Apparently...... the brain did too. His gaze lingered on the cobalt-stained tissue. Was she ever truly human anymore? — Henry Kalaway removed his mask. Cold air brushed against his face. He hadn't breathed unfiltered air in seven years, not since they had pulled him from the wreckage of the million-man army, declared him dead, and offered him a choice between the grave and the Talon Program. He had chosen. He always did. Fighting was the only decision he had ever truly known. The girl lay motionless on the floor.

Blood spread beneath her head, dark against the stone, forming an almost delicate halo around the ruin of her skull. Her eyes remained open. So did her mouth. She had died halfway through speaking, caught between one final word and the silence that followed. His attention drifted to his shoulder. The armour was already repairing itself. Hexagonal light seeped through the torn plating, knitting metal and flesh together until the wound gradually vanished. He hadn't been injured in years.

Yet a girl armed with a relic and reckless determination had managed to put a hole through him. She hadn't been a skilled fighter. Harmony had fought for her. Every movement, every impossible block and every instinctive counter had belonged to the weapon rather than its wielder. His combat models had recognised that almost immediately, though one variable kept disrupting their analysis. The Nonagon. Once that foundation disappeared...... everything built upon it failed.

The bullets finished what the revoker had begun. Henry released a quiet sigh. Silence reclaimed the corridor. He had been doing this for years. No one in the Syndicate had risen as quickly as he had. Three years carried him from Stepper to Operative. Four more earned him the rank of Talon. Every promotion had been purchased the same way. Blood. Fire. And the bodies of everything they had ordered him to kill. His first assignment had been infiltration.

A police officer named Thornburgh had survived a gang massacre that should have killed him. The Syndicate wanted to know why. Henry spent six months inside the precinct, learning when to laugh, when to grieve and how to imitate the warmth people expected from a friend. By the time the operation ended, he had everything they needed: blood, hair and the genetic markers that made Thornburgh valuable. He filed the report. Forgot the man. The assignments never stopped. He became whatever each mission required.

A grieving mourner. A cheerful wedding guest. A loyal colleague. A furious victim. Every identity fit perfectly because none of them belonged to him. Promotions followed in quick succession. Stepper. Operative. Senior Operative. Talon. Each one buried whatever person he might once have been beneath another layer of discipline. Seven years disappeared that way. Faces blurred together. Names stopped mattering. Only the next objective remained. Before the Syndicate, there had been a mansion overlooking the hills.

His father was a powerful politician. His mother owned a cosmetics empire that spanned continents. Together they gave him every privilege imaginable. He wanted none of it. At sixteen, he joined a drug gang, finding more honesty in the streets than he had ever found in luxury. The gang chose the wrong enemy. Henry arrived late. Deliberately. Twenty-three corpses littered the warehouse. Blood stained the floor, the walls and even the ceiling. He felt nothing. Only silence.

A Magpie waited among the bodies, white lenses fixed on him. Henry crossed the carnage, stopped before the stranger and spoke four words.

'Take me with you.' The Syndicate tested him relentlessly, flooding his mind with scenes of torture, slaughter and catastrophe. Nothing happened. Their report described him as an ideal psychopath and recommended immediate recruitment. They refined him into the weapon he had always been suited to become. Whenever funding was needed, they turned to the wealthy parents who still believed their son could be saved.

They surrendered fortunes, influence and every remaining hope to support a boy who had already forgotten them. Henry never looked back. His family was no longer waiting in the mansion. It was the Syndicate. They gave him purpose. Impossible weapons. Covert operations that reshaped nations. Comrades whose brilliance matched their ruthlessness. Scientists who rewrote biology. Operatives capable of erasing entire squads. Commanders who built empires only to burn them down at a single command.

They were the only family he had ever chosen. There was only the mission. Only the climb. Only the next kill, the next rank, the next promotion.