The group made it down to the next platform in-between floors and spun around. This was where they were going to make their stand.

  Ko went to the far side of the platform and wearily backed her mother against the wall and used it to slide her slowly to the hard floor.

  Without saying anything the two guards unsheathed a single sword each, along with an automatic pistol. They ignited the plasma swords and blurred up the stairs. Each individual movement they made was faster than Trace’s or Ko’s eyes could keep up with creating that blur effect.

  At the top of the stairs, where the prior platform was, they ran into their pursuers just as they turned the corner and began cutting into them. In those first few moments of confusion, they managed to cut their way through half a dozen people with ease. Then suddenly, the tides began to shift as first one, then a second, and finally, a third person began to blur as well, their own movements now keeping up with Cerys’ guards.

  They didn’t appear to be quite as smooth or fast, but three on two, combined with all the rest, was still enough to make up for the difference in skill and quality of modifications that had been done to them.

  As soon as he saw what was going on, Trace shook himself from his amazed stupor, raised his stolen SMG, and began to fire.

  His first few sprays of automatic fire proved to be the most damaging, as the two female guards had temporarily stolen everyone’s attention. That only lasted until he needed to reload the first time. That short break of swapping magazines with the unfamiliar gun was enough time for the swarming guards to leap over the stair banisters -and the hole in the middle- avoiding the dangerous sword fight that was destroying sections of wall nearby.

  As soon as the new magazine slid into place, he started firing again. All the while crouching slightly in front of Ko and her near-comatose mother. Ko, for her part, snagged the pistol from Trace’s holster and carefully began to fire the gun. It was more powerful than the one she kept in the small of her back, which was also empty.

  Despite their efforts to thin the herd, there were simply too many of them.

  The alert that had been sent out did what it was supposed to, and the resulting number of guards trying to reap their lives showed that. They might not have been elite corpo agents, merely building security or the like. But when they came in the numbers they were showing, it no longer mattered.

  The stairs above them ran thick with a mix of blood, and the viscous liquid used in cyberware. Bodies piled up as Trace swapped to the fifth magazine he had stashed in his pockets for the SMG. His own body wasn’t doing so hot, as more than a few new holes had been introduced to his system. Adrenaline and a general feeling of cold numbness were the only things keeping him going at the moment.

  He had stopped paying attention to the constant blinking red of his notifications a minute earlier.

  The platform above them had gone eerily still after the two guards had won their sword fight. Only to be shot in their already thoroughly injured chests a moment later by regular guards.

  Ko, meanwhile, had swapped out his empty pistol for the revolver. She needed to hold it with both hands due to the extreme recoil, so each shot she fired took several seconds. Still, they proved to be as devastating as always as they tore through two to three guards at a time, gradually destroying the stairs and wall behind them.

  Trace tried to swap magazines as the SMG clicked empty, only to fumble as the fingers of his left hand felt strangely numb and cold. They refused to obey his commands. He glanced down, wanting to see what the problem was, only to be flung back into Ko as several rounds hit his metal shoulder and arm at once.

  *** Ko ***

  How had everything gone so wrong? Ko really wanted to know. This was supposed to be a simple visit to her mother, nothing more. Now, Trace was pressed against her chest, bleeding out from a dozen different holes. The nanites in his body were undoubtedly attempting to clog the worst of the holes, but there were just so many.

  She grabbed the SMG from his fingers, along with one of the magazines he had stored in his pockets. Thankfully, he had already ejected the previous one, so all she had to do was slip it into position, pull the rod like she had seen him do, and start firing.

  Tears were streaming from her eyes as she felt additional bullets smack into Trace’s body. He had collapsed directly against her, and she didn’t have the strength or the time to push him away. For the moment, all she could do was let him keep soaking up the hits for her.

  As the magazine she had put in ran dry, she fumbled for the release button as her ears continued to ring. It was only when she finally managed to drop the empty magazine and grab another from Trace’s pocket that she realized that was all it was. Ringing.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  There were no more impacts, pieces of concrete flying around cutting the synth-skin of her arms, or the regular skin of her cheeks. No more gunshots to be heard. Only the lingering effects caused by the last few minutes of firing in an enclosed area.

  Looking up with no small amount of trepidation, she took in all the still bodies, letting her eyes rove over them. They were stacked three or even four high in places where their uncaring compatriots had shoved the dead out of the way, letting them slide down the stairs.

  What she didn’t see were any living, or at least not any living, that could still put up a meaningful fight.

  Carefully, she extricated herself from behind Trace. After taking a moment to ensure he was still breathing, she began checking the bodies of the dead. Trace wasn’t the only one who had been hit during that exchange; unlike him though, she had gotten away with relatively minor injuries. However, she was hoping that at least some of these guards carried med-kits, or something useful.

  They had been sent into an expected dangerous situation. Surely some of them had come with something, right?

  The answer was yes, but it took her several minutes to find what she was looking for. By that point, the ringing in her ears had faded enough for her to hear the stomping of boots and the sound of people yelling as they ascended and descended the stairs toward them.

  Gritting her teeth, she grabbed every PlugDoc she could find and got to work. First on Trace and then on herself. By some miracle, her mother had gotten away with only minor injuries caused by shrapnel cuts and nothing more. Once all the appropriate holes had been plugged, she grabbed them both, one after the other, and dragged them back up the stairs.

  The shots she had fired from Trace’s revolver had done a real number on the place and created a depression of sorts. She pushed her mother into the corner, as gently as possible, followed by Trace, and stacked bodies on top of them. With less than a minute to spare, she crawled under the bodies that had slid together on the platform and closed her eyes to mere slits.

  Moving the bodies around had reopened her wounds, but there was nothing she could do about that at the moment. All she could do was keep her breathing shallow and try to desperately not move, as she felt blood and other liquids running across her back and hair. She wanted to scratch the ever-growing number of itches and wipe away the blood, but she forced those urges down with a force of will.

  Instead, she occupied her mind with the perk she had received. Trace had told her about the feature a long time ago, shortly after he first received his own perk. Yet, she had never received one until that moment.

  Ko had a few theories on why this might be, though that is all they were. It seemed to her that the perk function was something only granted to those with a certain level of access. It had been the same as when she first became a Regular User and the nanites began fixing her bones and muscles. During their recent dinner together, Atraxia had upgraded the permission of her system account. She was no longer a Regular User. Now she was something called a Power User. Which looked as though it was a quasi-administrative account.

  In other words, the perk function required full access to the G.H.O.S.T. System to work. Which obviously she hadn’t possessed prior to becoming a Power User. There was also likely another factor, though that was truly just based on her guesses from what Trace had told her about his own perks.

  Before she could continue down that train of thought, a pair of boots stopped right in front of her face.

  “Would you look at this mess? Ah, man, that’s jimmy’s body. The slick-faced gonk still owed me credits from our game last night. Figures he would die rather than pay.” The boots moved closer to a body just out of her line of sight. “Pah, his crypto-vault is empty as well, cheap-snake.” There was the sound of a boot hitting a body as the man kicked his dead… frenemy in disgust.

  “I don’t see our targets anywhere,” Ko saw some climbing up the piled-up bodies and destroyed stairs. “Cerys’ two guards are up here. They did a real number on the sergeant and the two lieutenants he took with him.” There was another sound of kicking. “Rest in piece you three pieces of scat-flavored scav pimples. I only wish I had been the one to kill you three.”

  “Hah, all of us wish that, but if we had been strong enough to do that, then we would have been in charge of a security team and not them. Either way, good riddance. Check their crypto-vaults. The three must have been loaded. Maybe I get the money this loser owed me from one of them.” More boots and voices drew closer. “Hurry up, and check on Cerys’ guards, see if they’re alive. I heard they haven’t caught her yet. If these two aren’t dead, then she’ll owe us a favor.”

  There was a dark chuckle. “It’s faint, but yeah, they’re alive. Quick, help me cover them with bodies. We’ll distract the others and then double back and get these two before the cleaner team arrives.”

  Ko slowed her breathing even more and hoped desperately that neither her mother nor Trace would wake in the next few minutes.

  More guards arrived and one after another they cursed, with several of them leaving the contents of their stomachs on the stairs and platform.

  “What in the-”

  “How did this happen?”

  “I thought there were only five of them?”

  “What kind of insane cyberware mods were these freaks sporting?”

  “Where are they? Are you telling me they killed over forty people and then just vanished before we all arrived?”

  There hadn’t been time for Ko to get a count of how many people had been killed. Forty seemed a little high though. Sure, the stairs were absolutely covered in bodies and stacked three or four thick in places. Still, she would have guessed a number closer to…???? Actually, now that she thought about it, she didn’t know. This wasn’t her area of expertise at all.

  She was a mender, not a killer, normally at least. In this city, or rather world, everyone was prepared to defend themselves if the need arose. There was no hypocritical oath like people used to take when they became healers. Not that it would have prevented her from shooting people anyway. All it would have meant was that she would have worked to save their lives after she was done thoroughly injuring them.

  However, saving a life could come in a lot of forms and reap a hefty debt for the person being saved in the process. Which was why the oath had eventually been done away with. The purpose of saving their life was that you were going to make it better. If that wasn’t the case, then there was no point in doing so.

  Thank you to all the people who have taken the time to rate the story and to my latest Patrons! I have other stories up on my Patreon, including my current WIPs. Which are now Created G.H.O.S.T. System(My Cyberpunk story), WetWorks2, plus The Restaurateur and His Daughter and DungeonFall. :)

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