Chương 17: At A Disadvantage

They attacked in the dead space of the first fraction of a second, a perfectly choreographed killing sequence. Under normal conditions, a Talon's Apis-enhanced mind operated within the microsecond-to-picosecond range. That alone placed them beyond conventional notions of speed. A microsecond was one millionth of a second. A picosecond was one trillionth. Their suits, however, had been built for a different purpose. They were designed to engage entities whose capabilities approached the boundless.

Dream Walk existed for that reason. It allowed the suit to push perception, thought, and movement far beyond what its pilot could safely sustain. The strain was immense, which was why it was normally reserved for brief bursts. The Talons had 1. 2 seconds. They chose maximum output. Apis reactors screamed. Neural lattices glowed white-hot. Dream Walk flooded every system at once, and the world slowed. A picosecond became leisurely. A femtosecond drifted by like a falling leaf.

An attosecond stretched into a meaningful interval. Then the acceleration continued. Zeptoseconds. Yoctoseconds. One yoctosecond: 0. 000000000000000000000001 seconds. 10⁻²⁴. A trillion-trillion times shorter than a microsecond. To a human mind, the gap between a microsecond and a yoctosecond was greater than the gap between a second and tens of billions of years. Within that impossible frame of reference, the chamber appeared frozen. Dust motes became drifting worlds. Vibrations crawled through steel like glaciers.

Drops of Butter's blood hung suspended in the air, seemingly motionless. And the Talons moved. For 1. 2 seconds of real time, they experienced what felt like an eternity. Millions upon millions of calculations unfolded before a single blood droplet could fall another fraction of a millimeter. The chamber stood still. The Talons did not.... The Talon on the right remained stationary as shoulder panels slid open and twin railguns emerged with a rising whine.

Predictive algorithms mapped every likely escape route and filled them with relativistic slugs. The Talon on the left surged forward in a blur of amethyst and gold, his Nova Shroud twisting local physics to funnel her into the incoming fire. The strategy was brutally efficient. Remove the impossible and overwhelm what remained. Butter felt exhaustion settling deep into her bones. Five years after the Last Stand, the war still refused to end.

Every victory only led to another battlefield, another enemy, another reason to keep fighting. Today made it worse. It was her twentieth birthday. The Syndicate hunted her, so she hunted them harder. Outposts, laboratories, fleets, entire factions. She tore through all of them because she refused to let anyone else suffer the same fate. As an anomaly, Butter perceived time differently. It existed as a constant backdrop to her awareness, woven into her biology as naturally as sight or hearing. It didn't help.

Perception was not movement. Her mind remained fast enough to follow the battle. Her battered body did not. Butter moved. 0. 01 A monomolecular blade sliced through the space her head had occupied. The railgun round aimed there followed a fraction later, taking only her ear. Compressed air moving at relativistic speeds tore across her cheek and shoulder, peeling away flesh in bloody ribbons. She spun through a smooth Tai Chi turn, keeping both Talons in view and denying the encirclement.

The Talons' HUDs recalibrated. ERROR. MOVEMENT OUTCOME INCONSISTENT WITH CURRENT PHYSICAL STATE. Butter's mind still tracked everything. Railgun trajectories. Blade angles. Closing vectors. Her thoughts remained faster than the battlefield. Her body simply couldn't keep up. They saw not the Dancing Ghost, but a trapped animal, jerking in desperate twitches. The smallest possible movements needed to survive.

She twisted beneath a blade, jerked aside from a slug, dropped a shoulder by millimeters, and somehow remained alive. The calculations grew increasingly unstable. Within the frozen eternity of Dream Walk, the Talons abandoned their previous attack patterns as new weapons unfolded. The Talon on the left extended both arms. Alloy plates slid apart along his forearms and locked into place with heavy mechanical clunks. Matter condensed from internal fabrication systems, expanding into a colossal sledgehammer.

Serrated spikes protruded from both ends of the weapon's head, each tooth larger than a combat knife. Blue-white electricity crawled across its surface in violent arcs, snapping loudly enough to split the silence. The Talon on the right altered his legs. Armor around his boots peeled back as long, shimmering claws erupted from both the front and rear of each foot, transforming them into something closer to a predatory bird's talons than human equipment.

Along the sides, rows of miniature rocket thrusters unfolded and ignited with a soft violet glow. One had become a weapon built for mobility, the other a weapon built for annihilation. The Talons moved. Butter's prosthetic fired. Compressed force exploded beneath her foot, launching her sideways before the hammer could reach her. Another burst followed, then another reposition.

That was all she'd been doing - dodging, surviving, using the prosthetic to throw herself across short distances before their attacks connected. The Talons adapted. They separated, one moving left, the other right, steadily pressing inward, closing angles and stripping away space. Smoke grenades deployed. The chamber disappeared beneath a curtain of gray. Butter immediately felt her stomach drop. Visibility collapsed. The smoke erased every sightline, leaving her unable to track either the hammer or the kicker.

The prosthetic fired. BOOM. She launched backward. Again. Again. Until her shoulders nearly touched reinforced steel. A wall. Good. At least they couldn't surround her now. Alarms screamed through her instincts. The kicker emerged from the smoke in a violent corkscrew spin. Rockets erupted from his feet as the gleaming claws accelerated toward her. He spun faster and faster before transitioning seamlessly into a flipping descent, one clawed foot extending directly toward the crown of her head.

Butter's eyes widened. Panic hit instantly. That kick would've split her in half. The rockets blazed brighter. The attack accelerated. Too fast. Too close. Butter twisted violently. The claw missed her skull by centimeters. Harmony swung on pure instinct. CRACK. The wood connected directly between the Talon's legs. The impact wasn't lethal, but it was spectacularly inconvenient. Warning symbols exploded across his visor. Suit systems stuttered. His spin collapsed and he flew backward through the smoke.

Butter almost laughed. Almost. The Talon landed halfway on his back, then immediately threw himself forward again. Rockets screamed. Purple exhaust tore through the chamber as he launched into a dropkick. Butter's prosthetic fired. Her leg shot forward. STOMP. The collision detonated the air between them. The dropkick stopped instantly. Momentum reversed, blasting the Talon backward as though he'd been struck by artillery. But the second Talon had already moved. The hammer swept low.

Butter's support leg disappeared beneath her. The world tilted. Gravity hadn't even begun dragging her down before the sledgehammer was already descending toward her skull. She was falling, completely off-balance, with neither leverage nor time to recover. Butter gritted her teeth. Her hand shot out. Her palm struck the hammer's handle and redirected it with the smallest possible adjustment. Enough. The hammer missed her head. BOOOOOOM.

The weapon buried itself into the reinforced floor beside her, detonating concrete and steel in every direction. Then Butter realized her mistake. She'd touched it. Electricity exploded through her body. Over five hundred billion joules - enough electrical energy to power a city, unleashed through her in an instant. Her muscles seized instantly. A scream tore from her throat as every nerve ignited. The world became white agony. Her hand locked onto the weapon. She couldn't let go.

Current flooded through her body, racing across her heart, through her spine, and into every shattered bone. The smell of burning flesh filled the chamber. The Talon pushed harder. More power. More current. Butter convulsed violently. Blood burst from her mouth. For an instant she thought she was done. Then instinct took over. Her body began vibrating.

The movements were microscopic at first, then faster, and faster still, until she reached a specific frequency - a trick learned through years of surviving things that should've killed her. The vibration disrupted the contact. Her hand tore free. The current broke. Butter immediately fired her prosthetic downward. BOOM. The force slammed into the floor, generating enough counter-momentum to restore her balance. She landed upright, barely managing to stay on her feet as blood sprayed from her lips.

The droplets remained suspended in the air. Butter wiped her mouth. Her arm trembled. Half her body still smoked. The hammer was nowhere in sight. The kicker was nowhere in sight. Smoke drifted silently through the chamber. The Talons had already withdrawn into the haze once more, recalculating, searching for another answer. And somewhere inside their impossible flood of predictions, the same conclusion continued appearing. ERROR. EXPECTED FATALITY NOT ACHIEVED. ERROR. TARGET REMAINS COMBAT EFFECTIVE. 0.

07 Butter took a slow breath. The pain remained. Pain, however, wasn't unfamiliar. Before the Gloom, before Melody, before Harmony, there had only been training. Her eyes unfocused for a fraction of a moment as memories surfaced. Winter's Boyte. One of the rare suppression devices Winter had somehow acquired years ago. It stripped away everything extraordinary and left only Butter herself. She remembered standing atop a pond beneath a pale winter sky, then running across the water.

Every step had demanded perfection. A little too much force and she'd sink. Too little and she'd sink. A fraction too early or too late and she'd sink. The exercise had never been about strength. It had been about timing, coordination, precision, and knowing exactly where every part of her body existed at every instant. She remembered bouncing from leaf to leaf as they drifted along a stream, touching each one for only a heartbeat before springing to the next. Then came the droplets.

Thousands of them flowed across her arms, shoulders, and fingertips, each moving independently through nothing but perfect control. A flick of her wrist, a turn of her shoulder, a shift of her stance, and the droplets would launch away like tiny bullets, crossing one hundred meters, then two hundred, striking butterfly wings without touching the insects themselves. They never missed. They never caused harm. The lesson had always been the same. Precision over power. The memory faded. Butter exhaled.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Her right hand rose. Two fingers tapped against her left wrist, then another point, then another, then another. Pressure points. Nerve locks. Temporary stasis. The muscles in her left arm seized and locked into place. The pain didn't disappear because the damage was still there, but it became distant enough to ignore. Good enough. The smoke shifted. The hammer emerged first, raised overhead. Butter moved.

Her prosthetic exploded with force. BOOM. She shot forward, collapsing the distance instantly. The Talon barely had time to react before a single Shaolin knuckle strike crashed into the underside of the hammer's handle. CRACK. The weapon shattered completely. The force traveled through the entire structure and detonated it into fragments. Warning symbols flashed across the Talon's visor, but Butter was already continuing the motion, driving the same strike toward his chest. He slipped low.

A kick erupted toward her face. Butter shifted her head back and snapped a hand downward, catching his ankle. She twisted and threw. The Talon became a projectile launched directly toward his partner. The kicker was already airborne, already accelerating, already descending. The two collided. Instead of crashing apart, they adapted instantly. The first Talon grabbed the second, twisted with him, rotated through the impact, gathered momentum, and hurled him forward. The kicker transformed into a missile.

Straight toward Butter. She planted one hand. Pain exploded through her shoulder, but she ignored it. A one-armed handspring carried her over the incoming strike. The clawed foot sliced beneath her by centimeters. She landed awkwardly and immediately winced. Everything hurt. The kicker didn't care. Attacks erupted from every angle. Spinning kicks, hook kicks, rocket-assisted axe kicks.

The claws carved silver arcs through the air as Butter slipped between them, weaving, leaning, pivoting, surviving by margins so small they barely existed. Then she stepped closer. Much closer. Distance was the kicker's greatest weapon. Butter gave him none. She glued herself to him at chest-to-chest range. His kick chamber collapsed. His rotations shortened. His options began disappearing one after another. Butter threw a punch.

The Talon spun instantly, a backhand elbow tearing toward her skull with enough force to remove her head entirely. It struck empty air. They were suddenly back-to-back. The Talon turned. Butter turned with him. He pivoted. So did she. Every movement denied him room. Every attempt to create distance failed before it could begin. The Talon's predictive models started fracturing again. Butter moved first. Her leg shot backward, hooking both of his and ripping them out from beneath him.

The Talon lost the floor and became airborne. A laser launcher unfolded from his wrist. The blast erupted instantly. Harmony flashed. CRACK. The beam deflected sideways, carving a molten trench through distant pods. Butter's left arm moved. The frozen arm. The stasis arm. Her palm struck his legs with surgical precision. The impact wasn't powerful, but power wasn't the point. Force reverberated through the structure, traveling into joints, claws, and every component already strained by extreme motion. CRACK. CRACK.

CRACK. The talons shattered. Fragments scattered through the smoke. The Talon hit the ground, rolled, then immediately backflipped away to recover. Across the chamber, the second Talon emerged from the haze. The two stood side by side once more, motionless and silent as fresh calculations raced through their systems. Recalibrating. Then Butter's left hand twitched. A tiny movement. Barely noticeable. The pressure-point lock was fading. Pins and needles surged through her fingers.

The numbness vanished first, followed immediately by pain. White-hot agony flooded back into the arm all at once, racing from her fingertips to her shoulder. The fractures, torn muscles, and damaged nerves she'd temporarily forced into silence returned with vicious enthusiasm. Her jaw clenched. The hand trembled. A thin stream of blood slipped from between her teeth. The stasis had bought her a moment. Nothing more. Butter inhaled once. The prosthetic detonated beneath her foot. The distance between them collapsed.

As she accelerated, her body began vibrating. Not visibly. Not enough for the eye to catch. Every muscle, tendon, and bone oscillated at impossible speed, millions of vibrations compressed into a fraction of a microsecond. A technique copied from NuniT. The principle. The shockwave. The Talons' sensors immediately recognized the pattern. WARNING. ENERGETIC DESTABILIZATION EVENT DETECTED. Butter crossed the final meters. If it worked, the vibrations would interfere with Apis for a fraction of an instant.

A tiny disruption. Long enough for a strike to land against an undefended body instead of an armored system. Her left fist snapped forward. One-inch punch. At the exact same moment Harmony blurred toward the second Talon in a horizontal swing. Two attacks. Two targets. One plan. The Talons already knew. Their predictive models had seen it thousands of times before she arrived. Both moved simultaneously. The left Talon stepped into her strike. One-inch punch. His fist met hers. Knuckle to knuckle.

The second Talon drew a blade in a flash of silver and intercepted Harmony before it could complete its arc. For a single frozen instant, the entire battlefield held its breath. Then everything exploded. BOOOOOOOOM. The collision erupted through the chamber like a detonating star. Butter's copied shockwave crashed into the Talons' counterforce. Pressure rippled outward in concentric rings, shredding smoke apart and hurling debris across kilometers of reinforced flooring.

Nearby pods rattled violently inside their containment racks. Cracks raced through concrete. Steel screamed. The Talons were blasted backward. Butter was blasted backward. All three lost their footing simultaneously. The left Talon skidded across the floor, armored boots carving trenches through reinforced metal. The second spun away with his blade raised defensively as shockwaves chased him through the haze.

Butter stumbled in the opposite direction, Harmony scraping sparks from the ground as she fought to stay upright. For a moment, all three combatants stood separated once more across the vast chamber. The shockwave had scoured the battlefield clean. The smoke that had choked the chamber moments earlier was ripped apart and hurled outward in rolling walls of pressure, exposing kilometers of reinforced flooring, endless rows of glowing blue pods, and the amber-lit batteries lining the distant walls.

Nothing remained to hide behind. Butter could see them again. Every movement hurt. Tendons screamed, bones ground together, and blood dripped across the floor as Butter fought with a body barely holding itself together. The Talons pressed the advantage. Butter gave ground in measured steps, blocking instead of contesting. A knife slash glanced from Harmony. A kick met her forearm. A thrust missed her ribs by millimeters. She weathered the storm, conserving movement wherever possible.

Harmony's storage mechanisms were gone, but the weapon itself remained. Despite resembling carved wood, it was still a drawn object, an idea imposed upon reality by the Aria. Conventional matter had never truly applied to it, and weapons built by the Syndicate found little purchase against its impossible existence. Butter could still intercept strikes with it effortlessly. Destroying their armor was another matter. The Talons had already calculated her diminished state. They knew her current speed.

Her remaining strength. The mass of Harmony itself. The armor held, but each impact sent violent shockwaves through the suit, flooded sensors with noise, strained internal systems, and dumped enough heat into the frame to push cooling mechanisms into overdrive. The Talons could absorb the punishment. Enduring it repeatedly was another matter. It wasn't enough to break the suits. It was more than enough to make them cautious. Their formation widened, surrendering ground rather than risk another direct hit.

Butter had room to breathe. The left Talon suddenly flicked a blade from across the chamber. Butter spun. Clink. The knife locked between her teeth. The right Talon reacted instantly. A shot cracked through the chamber. Butter's arm blurred. CLANG. Harmony intercepted the round. A second shot followed. Then a storm. The chamber filled with shrieking impacts as hypervelocity rounds crossed the distance between heartbeats. Butter flowed between them, Harmony becoming a streak of motion.

Bullets ricocheted, throwing sparks across the pod-lined walls. One round slipped past her guard. Butter tilted her head. The knife still clenched between her teeth flashed outward. CHK. The bullet split cleanly in half. Both fragments spun harmlessly into the floor. The right Talon lunged, fist driving toward her face. False. His hand opened. FLASH. White light detonated. Heat lanced through her eyes. Sound disappeared beneath a screaming ring. Sight and hearing burned away instantly.

Butter grunted and staggered backward. Instinct took over. She spat the knife. At the same moment, her prosthetic leg snapped outward, kicking the blade toward where she expected a Talon to be. They dodged. As expected. The knife struck the floor at an angle, ricocheted off steel, and shot backward. The left Talon had already moved into its new firing position. Directly into the returning blade's path. He ducked. That moment was enough. Butter was already there. Her hand closed around the knife.

She twisted, blocked a strike from the second Talon, and drove her prosthetic knee toward the first Talon's lowered head. He avoided the worst of it. Not enough. The knee grazed the crown of his helmet. CRUNCH. Chunks of armor tore free. The impact blasted him backward across the chamber. Butter jerked her head toward the second Talon. A laser beam cut through the space she'd occupied an instant earlier. She lashed out with her prosthetic leg. Empty air.

The Talon had already withdrawn, Apis predicting the attack before it fully formed. As it flipped backward, one hand snapped forward. Something black left its fingers. A sphere no larger than a marble. Harmony flicked toward it automatically. Then she stopped. The nunchaku froze inches from interception. Every instinct screamed. Butter twisted sideways instead. The sphere sailed past. A fraction of a second later it struck a distant support wall high above the chamber.

For an instant, nothing happened, then the wall exploded into a cloud of microscopic black needles. The barrage punched through reinforced alloy like it wasn't there, carving a hole the size of a bucket straight through the structure. Millions of needles continued beyond the impact point, shredding metal and stone before finally exhausting their momentum. Butter felt a cold knot settle in her stomach. Impact activation. If Harmony had touched the sphere, it would have detonated directly in front of her.

The needles would have burst across her face, neck, and torso. There would've been nothing left to regenerate. The Talon landed lightly several meters away. Apis had predicted the deflection. It hadn't thrown the weapon to hit her. It had thrown it where Harmony would be. For several exchanges they traded blows without commitment, each probing for an opening neither could find. Then the Talons disengaged. They regrouped. Butter shook her head. Slowly, painfully, sound began returning. The ringing faded.

Shapes reassembled from blurs. Her senses crawled back online just in time to see the right Talon driving a Shroud Punch toward her retreat path. It was a feint. Apis had already predicted her evasive options. The punch existed to remove them. To herd her exactly where he wanted. Butter jumped back. 0. 09 The floor exploded. A concealed plasma mine erupted beneath her. With her magic suppressed, there was no warning. Harmony snapped out instinctively.

The wooden nunchaku clipped the mine's casing a fraction of a second before detonation. BOOM. The blast sheared sideways instead of upward. A compressed plume of plasma, momentarily approaching a million degrees, ripped across her back.

"AHH!" Butter jerked violently, eyes widening. Shock flashed across her face an instant before pain followed. The heat blistered skin on contact, searing through fabric and carving angry burns across her shoulders and back. She winced, teeth grinding together as white-hot fire flooded the chamber. A second black sphere entered her peripheral vision. The angle was wrong. No room to dodge. She flicked the knife. The blade crossed the distance in a silver streak and struck the sphere. The reaction was immediate.

The knife ceased to exist. The black sphere detonated into a cloud of microscopic needles that erased the weapon from reality before continuing toward her. Butter raised her prosthetic leg. THRRRRRRRRRKKK. The barrage struck. Hundreds buried themselves in the artificial frame before exhausting their momentum. Others glanced away at lethal angles, punching through walls, pods, and support columns behind her. A handful slipped past. Thin lines of blood appeared across her cheek and neck.

The explosion had been designed to throw her directly into the waiting Shroud Punch. It succeeded. The pressure wave caught her and hurled her toward the Talon's outstretched fist. 0. 1 Butter flowed into it. Instinct took over. Her right palm met the attack. The force arrived before conscious thought could finish forming. The plan was simple. Take the impact through one arm. Channel it across her frame.

Drive every stolen ounce of momentum back out through the other arm in a single punch powerful enough to overwhelm the Talon's defenses. In theory, it was elegant. In practice, the force was monstrous. Two fingers dissolved instantly. Her remaining three locked around the Talon's wrist with a wet CRACK as bones and tendons sacrificed themselves to hold the line. She flowed into a Tai Chi redirect. The Talon's HUD analyzed the motion.

COUNTER-TECHNIQUE DETECTED: KINETIC REDIRECTION FLAW: ENERGY TRANSMISSION RATE INSUFFICIENT CONCLUSION: TARGET TERMINATION PRIOR TO COMPLETION The Talon reached the same conclusion a fraction of a second before Butter did. There was simply too much force. More energy was entering her body than she could transfer through it. 0. 3 The second Talon blurred toward her spine, monomolecular blade descending for the kill. Butter adapted.

Her left hand remained occupied with the kinetic torrent threatening to tear her apart. Her right arm was already failing under the strain. There was no time for a clean solution. Harmony flicked from her grip. The nunchaku spun through the air toward the first Talon's face. Specifically, its lenses. The calculation was instantaneous. If the Talon ignored it, trillions of newtons compressed into a tiny impact point would strike the sensor array.

The armor would survive, but the heat and force would destroy the lenses and scatter enough kinetic energy through the frame to stagger it for a crucial moment. If it blocked, she bought time. Either outcome worked. Apis reached the same conclusion. The Talon's arm snapped upward. CLANG. Harmony slammed into its forearm. Good choice. The impact still rippled through the suit, heat blooming across the armor as warning indicators flashed through its systems, but the lenses remained intact.

More importantly, the block cost time. A microscopic interval. Exactly what Butter needed. Instead of guiding the force of the Shroud Punch through her body, she redirected it back through the same arm. Her left shoulder snapped forward with a brutal CRACK, dislocating instantly and forcing a new alignment. The cost was immediate. Every cell in her right hand died. Muscle collapsed. Tendons unraveled. Bone became brittle. Then the Shroud Punch turned around.

Fifteen-point-seven nonillion tons of reality-defying force reversed course and surged back toward its owner. Enough force to pulverize worlds down to molten debris, and treat solar systems like sandcastles. It traveled back through the Talon's suit. More accurately, it ignored the suit. The redirected force bypassed every defensive mechanism, appearing directly inside the Talon's frame, erupting through the pathways that linked body, suit, and Apis Core. It reinvented backlash.

His Apis Core, a microscopic prism of impossible energy density, attempted to absorb and disperse the incoming force. It failed. The force uncreated him. The core cracked. The energy had already arrived past every layer of defense before the system even recognized it as a threat. The Talon and his suit folded inward and collapsed in a BANG without a medium, a flash that consumed itself.

Space briefly held the outline of where he had been before even that disappeared, leaving only a Talon-shaped absence hanging in the air. Reality localized the event. The chamber shook violently but remained standing. Payment was exacted. Butter's right arm, from the elbow down, simply wasn't there anymore. The limb ended in a smooth void as though that portion of her body had never existed. The remaining Talon's monomolecular blade arrived within the same moment, aimed directly at her throat.

Butter, her body screaming and blood pouring from a dozen wounds, leaned back. The blade passed millimeters from her skin. The Talon landed and skidded across the floor. His HUD flooded with data: Krav Maga pressure kills, Bakom knife dismembers, Sambo breaks, Lin Kuei heart strikes. Hundreds of lethal techniques simulated against her. 0. 5 Every outcome failed. Her skill remained beyond prediction, forged through battles against gods, monsters, and things that should never have existed. Then the HUD glitched.

TARGET SKILL (POST-AMPUTATION): 110% ANALYSIS: LOSS OF LIMB ELIMINATES PREDICTABLE BIOMECHANICAL CONSTRAINTS. THREAT INCREASED. A final protocol surfaced. TACTICAL UPDATE: TARGET PROTECTS NON-COMBATANTS (KATHERINE, POD OCCUPANTS) SIMULATION: INITIATE MASS SLAUGHTER OF PODS. FORCE DEFENSIVE REACTION. PREDICTED OUTCOME: TARGET WILL INTERPOSE. DEFENSIVE OPENING: 0. 0008 SECONDS.

EXPLOIT OPENING WITH: NEURO-SEVERANCE STRIKE His lenses shifted from Butter's bleeding form to the rows of silent pods and the trembling teenager behind the console. Katherine. Logic rewrote its objective. If Butter couldn't be struck directly, strike what she protected.