Chương 83: 82: The Hummingbird III

The Hukan round crossed the distance almost instantly. The beast's roar twisted into a shrill, agonized wail as the projectile pierced the crown of its skull, buried itself deep within the brain, then ruptured exactly as intended. The suppressive compound flooded the cerebral tissue before racing through the spinal cord and down the central nervous system, the spent round finally dropping harmlessly to the ground beneath it. It threw its head back and bellowed.

Molten essence surged into the wound, sealing flesh and bone with violent cracks until no trace of the shot remained. It didn't notice. The suppressant hadn't begun working yet. It looked up at her. Its eyes were gone. Only pits of burning orange remained. A new warning appeared across her visor. SIN RESONANCE DETECTED The essence wasn't merely healing it. It was feeding. Every betrayal, every murder, every cruelty committed before and after Zeinai spared him had become fuel.

The greater the evil, the brighter the flames. She understood. The creature was burning through an entire lifetime of hatred, obsession and bloodshed to sustain itself. With sins this immense, she could kill it a thousand times and it would simply rise again until the fuel finally ran dry, and by then it would probably have overwhelmed her. Her thumb found the release beneath her collar. APIS OUTPUT: 1% → 10% PROJECTED CORE TEMP: 12, 000°C HEAT DISPERSION: ATMOSPHERIC DUMP SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 53.

9% The suit screamed. Gold became white. Crimson deepened. Violet darkened into black as the wings snapped open, venting impossible amounts of heat into the atmosphere. Ten percent. She'd never crossed that threshold. She couldn't. She wasn't a Magpie. No serum flowed through her veins, no genetic enhancement had strengthened her body. Physically and mentally she was still an ordinary eleven-year-old girl.

The only reason she could survive using Apis at all was because resurrection had left faint traces of it woven through her body, just enough to keep the suit from tearing her apart. Everything else came from the armour. At these speeds she couldn't truly see. The world dissolved into streaks of colour while the suit calculated trajectories, identified threats and fed her only the fragments a human brain could process.

She relied on tiny bursts of Apis to sharpen her perception for fractions of a second before reality blurred again. She trusted the calculations. She had to. Otherwise she'd tear through the ground... or someone standing where she never even knew they'd been. The suit could endure it. Its talons could endure it. She couldn't. Every increase in output brought her closer to frying her own nervous system. She was a girl in a suit, trying not to die again. But the beast kept rising.

The flames thickened, the air trembling beneath the weight of its sins. Kiri's hand reached over her shoulder, unclipping a slim magneta casing lined with glowing orange status lights. CHK-CLACK... KRRRK! She flicked her wrist. The casing unfolded mid-motion into a compact automatic machine pistol, its interlocking panels snapping into place around the barrel and grip before it settled naturally into her left hand. She squeezed the trigger.

The machine pistol bucked firmly with each burst, enough to jolt her forearm but still comfortable to control. It was nowhere near as punishing as the PBM-9 Singularity, whose crushing recoil could almost dislocate her shoulder if she wasn't perfectly braced, forcing its emitter into a cooldown after every shot. The M-20 Gryphon remained her favourite.

It was balanced, gentle by comparison and comfortable enough to wield for extended engagements, which was why she reached for it far more often than any other weapon. BRRRRRT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT! A stream of hypervelocity rounds ripped through the air. They weren't ordinary bullets. Every projectile was wrapped in a transparent resistance sheath thinner than nylon, just durable enough to survive impossible acceleration without vaporizing.

The coating stripped away on impact, allowing the rounds to penetrate and remain lodged inside the target. Against creatures that relied on speed rather than regeneration, they were devastating. The bullets reached their mark almost the instant the trigger was pulled, leaving virtually no time to react. The beast answered with a furious roar. Black-orange spheres of demonic energy erupted from its palms. FWOOOM! FWOOOM! FWOOOM! Kiri folded her wings and dived.

The projectiles screamed past before erupting into vast blooms of malignant orange-and-black explosions that spread through the sky like living roots. Every writhing strand twisted in impossible directions, turning the air oppressive and nauseating.... The beast threw another. Each sphere was larger than the last. It laughed.

"Run!" FWOOOM! FWOOOM! FWOOOOOOM! The growing masses of demonic energy tore after her. Kiri zigzagged through the air, every evasive burst carrying her dozens of meters away before another impossible change of direction forced the creature to pursue her. She refused to let it touch her. Her suit could disperse heat. It could not disperse the demonic corruption saturating those attacks. A single direct hit would destabilize the suit itself.

She slipped between the detonations in jagged, unpredictable bursts of flight. BRRRRRT-TAT-TAT-TAT! The rounds crossed the battlefield. To her astonishment... The creature dodged them. It had become fast enough to evade bullets traveling at Mach 100. The projectiles tore luminous tunnels through the air where it had stood only fractions of an instant before. It laughed.

"Too slow!" Another sphere streaked toward her. She corkscrewed around it as the explosion painted the heavens with another grotesque bloom of force.

"You miserable insect!" it bellowed.

"I'll tear your wings off! I'll grind your bones into dust!" Kiri ignored every taunt. She kept weaving through the sky, forcing it to pursue her, forcing its heart to race, giving the drugs in its bloodstream more time to spread. The beast noticed something. Far away, near a patch of untouched wildflowers, Coconut sat on his hind legs, utterly captivated by a butterfly lazily drifting from bloom to bloom.

His tiny black eyes sparkled with delight as he leaned forward, tail twitching in anticipation, completely oblivious to the battle raging overhead. The warthog's tusks curled into a vicious grin.

"Found you." FWOOOOOM! A sphere of molten demonic essence left its palm and screamed toward the unsuspecting weasel. It struck. BOOOOOM! The flower patch vanished beneath a pillar of black-orange fire. Coconut disappeared with it. The blast eviscerated the little weasel instantly, reducing him to a spray of blood and shredded fur. The beast threw its head back laughing.

"Your little rat is dead!" it jeered.

"Watch closely! There's nothing left to save!"

"COCO!" Kiri's voice rang across the battlefield. She stared for a heartbeat... Then slowly exhaled.

"… Quite the buffoon." She even yawned. The warthog frowned. ZZZT! Dark static erupted where the gore had landed. Tiny fragments of flesh, bone and fur shivered, and surged together around a tiny module still lying untouched at the centre of the crater. In barely a second... Coconut was whole again. The little weasel shot out of the smoking crater at full speed, fur puffed out, squeaking furiously as he sprinted away from the blast site, angrily scolding the monster over his shoulder.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. The warthog simply stared.

"… Huh?" It actually forgot to move. BRRRRRT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT! Kiri's barrage reached him before the question did. Her speed increased. So did the bullets. Mach 150. Mach 220. Mach 300. The beast continued slipping between them. KRAK! A single round, now screaming through the air at Mach 400, slammed into its massive shoulder, punched through layers of dense muscle, and buried itself deep inside. Blood burst from the wound. The creature barely acknowledged the hit as it charged again. It hadn't noticed.

The wound...... wasn't healing. It didn't even rage. The chemicals flooding its system had already begun dulling instinct, pain and reason alike, leaving only a blunt, relentless urge to kill. Kiri noticed immediately. A faint smile touched her lips beneath the visor. So that's the threshold. Her wings snapped open, and she rocketed high into the sky once more. Kiri released the limiter. Ten percent. It wasn't for speed. Her suit could move at lightning-like velocities whenever she wished.

The problem had never been acceleration. It was containment. Without enough Apis, physics demanded payment. Every burst of speed wanted to erupt into catastrophic shockwaves, enough to flatten cities. She might as well have detonated a nuclear weapon simply by flying. The more Apis she released, the more reality itself ignored those consequences, allowing the suit to imprison the violence of its own motion instead of spilling it into the world.

The armour screamed as gold bled into white, crimson deepened and violet darkened into black. For one heartbeat, she stopped holding back. Her wings folded and she didn't simply fall, she became a drill. The long black sensor beak at the front of her helmet pointed straight down as her body spun in perfect control, a vortex of white light, armour and impossible speed. Her HUD flashed. The numbers were still climbing, not because it was growing stronger, but because it was still remembering. Every atrocity.

Every murder. Every betrayal. The greater the evil, the brighter the fire. Any slower and it would simply catch her out of the sky. [VELOCITY: MACH 500 | IMPACT: IMMINENT] The atmosphere ignited around her. The beast looked up and, for the first time, it was afraid. TERMINATE She struck. WHIRRRRRRR. The beak pierced its crown. The molten inferno coating its body shattered, exploding into countless fragments that cooled into black cinders before they touched the ground.

Still spinning, she bored through its skull, through its brain, through its spine. The orange light vanished from its eyes and the flames roaring across its body guttered and died. Through chest. Through the volcanic core beating where his heart should've been. Through gut. Through groin. She became a needle of light, piercing straight through him as the beast's body unraveled behind her. Molten blood poured from the wound, no longer raging, only draining sluggishly into the crater where it cooled into black glass.

She emerged from the other side, wings spread, suspended for a heartbeat. SYSTEM HALT. _ Behind her, the beast collapsed. Its body dissolved into ash and cooling stone, the lava-flames guttering out with a final sigh, leaving behind only the memory of a hatred that had burned far too long for nothing. Kiri landed soundlessly. Her wings folded. The kinetic scales dimmed. A soft chime. THREAT NEUTRALIZED. ROUTE TO ZEINAI: 463 m A small tactical map appeared beneath it. The suit fell silent.

Its wings folded inward panel by panel, scales retracting as Kevlar, Apis and dream-tech compressed into a compact form no larger than a child's hand. Kiri reached for the catch at her throat. The helmet unfolded like petals, revealing a face that looked impossibly young beneath everything she'd just done. The rest of the suit folded instead of peeling away. Wings collapsed into her back.

Scales dimmed from blazing gold to muted brass before flowing down her arm and settling into a small yellow necklace with tiny multicolored lights. She fastened it around her neck. The lights blinked twice, then settled into a slow, sleepy pulse. KZZT-CHAK! Coconut reappeared in a flash of static with a trout nearly as long as its body flopping wildly between its teeth.

The little weasel proudly trotted over, tail held high, completely oblivious to the battlefield it had just returned to, the fish smacking against the grass with every step. Kiri glanced down.

"…Nice catch." Coconut puffed out its chest and chirped proudly through a mouthful of fish before scrambling up her leg and settling onto her shoulder, still refusing to let go of its prize. Zeinai was already walking toward the jet. She fell into step beside him. The meadow was quiet. The grave remained untouched, flowers swaying gently in the breeze.

"Good job," he muttered. She glanced at him, gave the smallest shrug and touched the necklace at her throat.

"I do my best." Its lights blinked once... then again. She was still humming. They walked on beneath the open sky. — After a while, Kiri looked sideways at him.

"You barely reacted," she said.

"When he talked about the genes. The dealer. All of it." Zeinai's pace didn't slow.

"Seen it before." Kiri raised an eyebrow.

"Something like that?" He was quiet for a moment.

"A few years after the Sin War, a cult appeared. Gene-users who'd spliced the same species into themselves. They called themselves the Wolf Breed."

"The more evil they committed, the stronger they became. Murder. Extortion. Entire towns erased. Killing one only made the next stronger. Everything they'd gained flowed up the chain." He looked toward the horizon.

"It took the Magpies a year to find the Alpha. Kill him, and the power had nowhere left to go."

"We found him beneath a mountain in Kyrgyzstan. He'd spent three years hidden in a bunker while thousands fed him strength." Kiri glanced at him.

"How did you kill him?" His prosthetic hand flexed, blue lights pulsing beneath the metal.

"Carefully." She let out a quiet breath.

"…How impressive." She said it with the wonder of a child watching fireworks, only now beginning to grasp the scale of the world she'd inherited. They walked on in silence. The jet's engines hummed ahead.

"The man today," she said.

"He wasn't one of them." Zeinai shook his head.

"Just a copy. Someone bought power they didn't understand from someone who didn't care if it killed them." Kiri's fingers found the hummingbird necklace at her throat.

"He really thought he could beat you."

"He did."

"But you barely moved." Zeinai glanced at her.

"Didn't need to." She smiled faintly, then seemed to remember something. Bending down, she scooped up a small pebble with her left hand and began lazily tossing it between her fingers as they walked.

"Oh. I watched a movie yesterday."

"You watched a movie?"

"Affirmative." The pebble rolled across her knuckles.

"There was a scene where the woman became angry, called the man a narcissist, then left him."

"…I see."

"I didn't know what narcissist meant, so I studied it."

"And?"

"All I found was a definition that described quite a lot of women." Zeinai looked at her, his expression remaining serious.

"How so?" She caught the pebble again."'A person deeply self-centred, characterised by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, a need for constant admiration and a fundamental lack of empathy.'" He considered it.

"What about the empathy? Women are generally considered more empathetic."

"Quite a few people say that." She picked up another pebble without looking, now idly clicking the two together in her left hand.

"But actual empaths are quite a microscopic portion of humanity." She spoke matter-of-factly.

"Most people confuse sympathy, compassion or basic human decency with empathy. Quite a lot of people are only empathetic when it benefits someone they already care about, when everyone else expects them to be, or when it becomes socially fashionable." The pebbles clicked again.

"If empathy is selective or biased…" She shrugged.

"…then it isn't empathy."

"It's sympathy." Zeinai remained silent. The distinction lingered in his thoughts longer than he expected.

"…Perhaps," he admitted quietly. Kiri continued, still absentmindedly rolling the stones through her fingers.

"So the insult didn't make much sense."

"How?"

"A narcissistic man is just the average woman in terms of an inflated self-importance." She tossed one pebble into the air, caught it cleanly.

"It was quite a silly insult. It reminded me of the receptionists back at the facilities."

"How?"

"They behaved as though they were exceptionally important simply because they had employment." She glanced ahead.

"Quite a few of them weren't even half as important as the people actually maintaining the facilities." Another thought surfaced.

"Lest I forget. I also overheard Miss Cashua saying she wanted a man who'd worship the ground she walked on." Her brow furrowed slightly.

"That sounded quite insufferable, vain even." Zeinai almost replied that it was just a common expression. The words never came. Instead he pictured a man calmly saying he wanted women to worship the ground he walked on. … The image made him quietly uncomfortable. Another phrase surfaced from somewhere in the back of his mind. Happy wife, happy life. He'd heard it countless times. Happy life… For whom? The family? Or the wife in particular? He'd never really stopped to think about it before.

The more he turned it over, the stranger it sounded. If someone repeated something often enough, it simply became normal. People smiled, laughed and nodded along without questioning it. No one seemed to notice that the husband's happiness had quietly disappeared from the sentence altogether. After another stretch of silence, he finally asked, "What would the equivalent be for men?"

"A man calling a woman violent." He looked at her.

"Violent?"

"Affirmative." She flicked the last pebble into the grass.

"It's usually quite an exaggerated accusation." A quiet chuckle escaped him despite himself. His thoughts drifted to Sphinx.

"…Actually…" A faint smile appeared.

"She might be the most violent person I've ever met. Man or woman." — The large red-and-gray jet waited with its hatch already open, engines humming softly. Kiri paused for a moment, looking up at it before giving a small hop onto the ramp. Her necklace blinked twice, then settled into its slow, sleepy pulse as she disappeared inside. Zeinai followed. A brown-and-white blur zipped past them.

Coconut scampered into the cabin, leapt onto one of the hanging support chains and curled around it like it had done it a thousand times. Its little belly bulged noticeably from the trout it had devoured, and within seconds it was snoring softly, tail dangling over the chain. It was so thoroughly asleep it didn't even stir at the familiar rustle of Kiri's lunch box, something it would normally have investigated immediately.

Kiri walked to one of the overhead cabinets, opened it and retrieved a neatly packed lunch box before taking a seat. Opening it with her left hand, she quietly arranged its contents: two thick slices of buttered bread, broccoli, neatly cut chicken slices and a large juice box. It was her favourite meal. Simple, familiar and comforting. She ate it almost every day whenever missions allowed. Zeinai glanced over briefly.

"You packed that before deployment?"

"Yes, Commander." He gave a faint nod and looked back out the window. Coconut, still asleep on the overhead chain with his round belly sticking out, gave a tiny contented squeak in his sleep. Kiri quietly pushed the broccoli aside before taking a bite of the bread, sipping from the juice box between mouthfuls, perfectly content. After a while, she glanced at him.

"Commander... may I quite politely request a raise?"

"A raise?" Zeinai asked, finally looking over.

"What do you want?" She chewed thoughtfully before swallowing.

"A more advanced Singularity with considerably less kickback." Another bite.

"And more firearms." Sip.

"Quite a few more Ice-eggs." Another long drink from the juice box. Her eyes drifted to Coconut, asleep on the overhead chain with his round belly rising and falling gently. Tiny metallic glints shimmered beneath his fur. She catalogued them automatically. The compressed bronze dagger. The taser. The Syndicate teleporter. The emergency heal kit. All four had collapsed into dot-sized modules against his body, waiting to unfold the instant they were needed.

The heal kit carried enough regenerative compound to rebuild a grown man from scratch once, more than adequate for a little weasel with an unfortunate talent for getting himself into trouble. It could restore Coconut from fatal injuries approximately one hundred times before exhausting its reserves. Her own was clamped against her thigh beneath her clothes. Smaller. Just enough to restore her completely twice. In simple terms, she had three health bars. Quite important.

Ten percent Apis output and surviving the warthog's pull had already consumed a small portion of its reserves. It was slowly recharging now. If she ever had to push herself to one hundred percent, especially on a rainy day, it would almost certainly kill her. At least the kit would bring her back. It was useful for another reason.

Pain barely registered to her anymore, which made it surprisingly easy not to notice you'd been ambushed or stabbed through the back until the heal kit had already begun repairing the damage. The only downside was carrying it. She could always feel it pressed against her thigh, like a bone caught in her throat. Never quite comfortable, though after enough years... she'd mostly gotten used to it. They were also absurdly complex and ruinously expensive to manufacture.

Unlike most Talons equipment, they didn't rely on Apis at all, making large-scale production impractical. The project had eventually been abandoned as a facility-wide deployment, leaving only a handful of prototypes behind. Commander Zeinai had kept several of them. Fortunately, one had found its way to her. The casing itself was forged from Hukan, making it virtually indestructible. More importantly, it remained linked to its assigned user's biological signature.

Even if the wearer was completely vaporized, leaving nothing behind, the module would survive intact and initiate full-body restoration regardless. Satisfied, she took another sip of juice.

"Oh... and lest I forget, upgrades for Coconut." The little weasel immediately perked up from the overhead chain, raising both tiny paws toward Kiri.

"A fitted tactical wear, a customised utility belt because he's quite invaluable as my partner..." Coconut puffed out his chest proudly.

"…Also snacks." The weasel nodded enthusiastically.

"Shrunken ones that expand when you pull them out." She took another bite, thinking.

"Oh and lest I forget. The velocity drone. I'd quite like an improved version." Sip.

"Ash and yellow. I only had one before." She sipped her juice again.

"I'm going to call them Nightingales."

"Because of the sound they make?" Zeinai asked. She nodded.

"They sing." Silence settled for a moment.

"Already done," Zeinai said. She blinked.

"I sent the order to the engineers before we took off." Kiri paused mid-chew.

"…Thank you, Commander."

"You earned it." She smiled faintly and took another long drink from the juice box, finishing nearly half of it in one go.

"…I think I need quite a long nap when we get back." Zeinai glanced sideways.

"Then don't drink too much juice." She looked at him blankly.

"So you don't pee the bed."

"I don't pee the bed." She paused.

"…Anymore." Another pause.

"I stopped…"

"…Two days ago." Zeinai nodded solemnly.

"Congratulations." Kiri sat a little straighter, looking unexpectedly proud of herself.

"Thank you, Commander." Coconut chirped in agreement before curling back onto the chain, his round belly full from the trout, asleep almost instantly. Behind them, the meadow remained peaceful, flowers bright against the grave. As the jet climbed into the sky, Kiri watched the shrinking fields below and whispered, "That was fun." Zeinai said nothing. But in the reflection on the window... …he was almost smiling.