Bryce's eyes snapped shut for a fraction of a second, not in fear, but to let his other senses take over. His fingers found the grip of his Kinetic Side Arms.
He fired, and as the bullets left the barrel, the nanites in his arms manipulated the air currents around them, propelling the projectiles into hypersonic streaks. The rounds were too fast to track, their impact devastating, punching through the Marshals' crude steel forms with ease.
He launched himself backwards, his feet landed on the vertical wall near the ceiling, clinging there like a spider. He needed a moment to think.
Nine against one. Even with their inferior, pirated systems, they possessed most of the original's offensive tools. But they lacked its core refinement, its resilience. A user of his true system wouldn't have been knocked out by a blow to the head, nor would their body be so easily pierced. Their glucose-dependent systems were a ticking clock. He would make this a war of attrition, draining them until Park and Raymond finished outside.
"Let's end this." He dropped from the wall, a silver blur passing the Marshals who were scrambling up towards him. They leaped down in pursuit.
He willed the nanites to concentrate in his legs and hands. The world around him slowed, his movements becoming a smear of motion. The Marshals were treated like puppets, they were hit and flung by an invisible force, their bodies crashing against the concrete only to rise and fall again.
Then, they adapted. Their own nanites flooded their limbs, and the room became a dizzying rat-race of blurs. They were faster now, matching his speed, their blows whistling through the air where he had just been. Bryce's goal was the same: a precise strike to the neural board at the base of the skull. But they protected their weakness fanatically.
He was so focused that he was blind to their true strategy—the micro-bombs they were spreading across the floor with every step they took.
Suddenly, they broke away, leaping through a shattered window into an adjacent room. They all clicked on their arms simultaneously.
The world turned white, then orange. The concussive wave hit him like a physical wall, followed by searing heat. His nanites scrambled to reinforce his body and disperse the thermal energy, but the cost was brutal. A notification, cold and damning, seared itself into his vision: -5.3 HDC. The number was a sharper pain than the burns already fading on his skin.
They returned, each now holding a heavy, snub-nosed Pulse Cannon. These weapons didn't fire projectiles, but raw concussive force.
They fired as one.
BANG.
The single, monstrous sound lifted him off his feet and hurled him backwards. Before he hit the ground, every circuit on his body flared a brilliant, warning red. During the earlier flurry of blows, his nanites had left trace magnetic markers on their armors . Now, he activated a pulse, and those eight specific signatures were violated heading towards him.
The eight Marshals he had physically touched during the fight were yanked off their feet, helplessly catapulting through the air towards him as if pulled by giant, invisible strings. Only one, whom he'd never made contact with, remained standing.
At the last possible instant, Bryce killed the polarized pulse and rolled.
The eight bodies collided mid-air with a sickening crunch of metal and bone.
Another notification hit Bryce. -0.14 HDC.
This isn't sustainable, Bryce thought, a sliver of cold strategy cutting through his rage.
The Marshals were more furious than he was. They had received their own notifications, far more catastrophic. -25 HDC.
"This fight will turn us into Noids!" one of them screamed, his voice cracking with static.
Another let out a sharp whistle and produced a remote. He pressed the remote and others reacted. They didn't retreat; they fled, one of them scooping up The General's limp body.
This time, Bryce didn't wait. He couldn't afford another heavy loss of HDC. He flee.
The Marshals saw him running, they stopped and fired their pulse cannon at him. A volley of pulse fire forced him to swerve, the blasts cratering the ground where he'd been. He sprinted back into the building, planning to exit from the far side. He never made it.
A missile strike hit the structure dead-on. The world dissolved into noise and falling concrete, burying him under a tomb of rubble.
The blast wave hurled the fleeing Marshals like leaves, scattering them across the battlefield. As they picked themselves up, they stared at the chaos—and began to regret ever taking the fight outside.
---
Park and Raymond were unleashed.
Over Seventy militants had been in the garage. Bryce had culled their numbers, but up to fifty remained. Now, only nine of the specialized ambush team were still standing, the ones who had avoided the agents' initial onslaught.
Park faced four. The thrusters on his back whined, allowing him to move with the precise, unpredictable grace of a hummingbird. He dodged a hail of gunfire, closed the distance, and delivered a devastating Muay Thai knee to a soldier's ribs. The crack was audible over the gunfire.
He was a martial artist, not a brawler. Every move was efficient, brutal, and designed to disable. All his opponents were already on the ground, groaning but stubbornly conscious. He and Raymond had decided to subdue, not to kill.
Seeing two more prone soldiers below, Park propelled straight up, then switch off his thrusters. He dropped like a stone, a human meteor. The two men on the ground, believing him in control, saw his uncontrolled descent and scrambled aside in a burst of pained adrenaline.
Park grinned. "Just as expected." He landed between them, and in one fluid motion, kicked out. With his feet, he slammed the backs of their heads together. Their skulls connected with a dull thud, and they collapsed, unconscious.
A heavy BANG drew the Marshals' attention from Park to Raymond.
A body flew through the air and landed in a heap at their feet, completely inert.
Raymond stood amidst the chaos, all his opponents were unconscious, he held two advanced stun pistols. They fired non-lethal rounds that used pure kinetic force to disrupt the nervous system. He had beaten his opponents into a state of unconscious.
Park landed beside Raymond, and without a word, hoisted Raymond into his arms. His thrusters flared, carrying them both toward the mountain of rubble that pinned Bryce.
The remaining militants watched in stunned silence. They had expected a prolonged fight, but Park and Raymond had dismantled his opponents with terrifying speed.
The duo landed beside Bryce and began heaving slabs of concrete, Raymond's grip slipped. A massive piece of debris started to fall back into the floor, only for a steel hand to shoot out from beneath, catch it, and fling it aside like a toy. Bryce sat up, his form glistening and whole, but the nanite matrix underneath flickering erratically around a deep, large puncture in his abdomen—a wound his depleted system is struggling to heal.
Raymond's specialized B-Wax, a prototype of his own design, provided a perfect 360-degree battlefield awareness. It was how he'd survived against the odds. Now, it flagged an new anomaly: a military chopper, hovering at the outskirts of the barracks like a vulture waiting for the kill.
He tried to zoom in, but that was when he lose focus and nearly hit Bryce with the debris he was holding.
"Focus, Raymond! For once, focus!" Bryce barked, his voice raw.
Raymond shoved the thought of the chopper aside, turning just in time to block a surprise attack from a Marshal. But the chopper remained, a silent, ominous spectator in the sky.