Kei

  I leap up, catch the edge of an open trapdoor to a loft above the main loading dock with my offhand, and soundlessly haul myself up.

  I grip the edge with my right hand as an afterthought, not so much to make it easier as to keep my body from slipping into her more fearsome self. So that I was just hauling myself and my gear up a story two-handed on upper body strength alone. You know, like any normal teenage girl. Not a weird one doing it one handed.

  I’m good at self-deception. It’s how I make it through the day.

  Maybe my cartoonish high-tech armor helps. Or maybe I’m just a videogame character, meant to be an unrealistic simulation which happens to be closer to my empowered state than any sane game designer could expect.

  Or maybe my power or my self-image were already creeping in faster than I can contain them, even here.

  Someone or something pushes through the door into the loading dock below me. I glance down through the trapdoor, then around the loft.

  Half a dozen utility bots sit on rails in the floor around me – repair/construction ones – Rep/Cons. Honestly, they look like upside-down, silver-gray wastebaskets with a couple camera lenses, buttons and data ports. Not designed so much for aesthetics, as to be ignored. Those bots are prototypes in the real world, but already dusty and heavily used in this one. I can see a few stacks of the metal sheathing used on the pseudo-futuristic buildings of the city, and tubes of adhesive for the bots to use. No hand tools for humans, but I suppose those are built into the robots. If they’re like their real-world analogues, any servo-arms or other features are probably folded away inside as well.

  I silently pick up a thicker piece of sheathing and hold it ready, lacking any other usable weapons. The slab is less decorative than I thought, perhaps meant to resist advanced weapons fire, and weighs several kilos, despite being half-a-meter square. It feels lighter than a frisbee in my hands.

  Not a good sign. A whisper of the cold fire slips through me as I stand ready.

  I can hear movement below. Not loud, but my hearing sharpens as I listened intently – partly due to my attention, partly to the attention of my Gift. Perhaps three pursuers are below, each moving on two feet. One takes the lead and crossed the room. A second, after a pause, joins it. I hear a tap, then a rumble as the garage door opens.

  The first two edge around either side of the garage doorway, perhaps using it for cover. The third advances into the room, maybe moving to back them up. That one moves almost directly below, crossing into my line of sight as it does so.

  A humanoid robot, like an advanced Atlas-type, strides forward, clad in body armor probably meant for a large human and carrying a huge plasma rifle – another prototype out of the lab and into the game. As his helmeted head becomes visible his gaze turned towards the open trapdoor I was staring through.

  And a slab of metal sheathing catches him in the neck like a guillotine. Two more are in my hands as I somersault through the trapdoor. And cold fire is in my veins.

  He falls, as if in slow motion, decapitated. As I flip over I can see no other robots were coming in from the front of the bodega and the remaining two are turning swiftly by the garage door. Well, swiftly but for the slow-motion of accelerated time.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Midair, I have a moment of helplessness, unable to change direction or momentum for a deadly moment as their plasma rifles swung around.

  Seeming helplessness. The two slabs of sheathing launch from my hands like giant shuriken, too fast for even the machines to dodge. Too late to seek cover, the humanoid drones lurch to either side, trying to avoid the panels turned into cleaving blades. One moves fast enough, the sheathing crunching into its shoulder. The other catches its panel on its rifle.

  The rifle explodes.

  An explosive globe of plasma expands over it, and a wave of energy and crackling microlightnings spread out across the room.

  But I’m landing further away, the momentum imparted by the tremendous force of my hurled makeshift weapons throwing me back towards the door we’d all come in from.

  I land past the pallets of rice and Dr. Browns, drop behind their cover and let the storm wash over me.

  Then I move.

  The last bot still standing is struggling to level its rifle in my direction, but I can hear movement as a larger fire team scrambles into the front of the bodega, apparently having realized that cornering me had not gone well.

  They’re the priority. But if I don’t finish here before they arrive, I’m dead anyway. Virtually, at least.

  The standing bot takes two cans of Dr Browns in the head with enough force to rock back its helmeted metal skull. And more importantly, to drench its body in liquid. Two more smash into it in a blur, and soda flows in through the breach in its shoulder, finding conduits and circuitry. Smoke and sparks spew from the wound.

  The bot staggers, and I’m on him in an instant, a flung 50-pound bag of rice hammering into his head like the last blow in a deadly pillow fight. A snap answers my assault, and his head hits the ground as I reach him.

  I tear the undoubtedly damaged rifle from his inert grasp. Judging from the scrambling footsteps in the room just beyond, there’s no time. And I have no time for a firefight.

  I take a few quick steps towards the center of the loading dock and hurl the plasma rifle like a javelin, but in a long, slow arc for the door. Then a quickstep over the first decapitated bot and I’m yanking the sheathing that killed it from the pallet of canned beans it lodged in, and throw it hard after the rifle.

  They intersect just beyond the doorway, but by then, I’m behind the beans.

  The bots aren’t.

  Over a dozen made it into the store, stalking past shelves and displays of food for foodies and the rising rich, and are about to converge on the doorway to the dock and force a firefight.

  They’re almost in position when the rifle’s power cell detonates, the organic flour bags explode into billowing flames, and the front of the shop becomes a battlefield of broken bins, shifting shelves and ricocheting rounds.

  The AIs running the robots must not have been that good, as they turn trigger happy too many times. Falling focaccia, bouncing bagels, crashing cans – it all draws their attention and then their fire. The building supports must be tough, because a surprising number of railgun rounds ricochet, adding to the confusion.

  Of course, a blizzard of rounds also rip right through the wall and whistle over my head as I stay low and wait for the storm to pass. Or rather, to break.

  A moment later, as a few bots shooting their fellows through the smoke take suppressing fire in turn, I see my chance, catch my breath, catch up a Dr. Browns… and take it. One hop while out of their line of sight takes me up to the trapdoor, and one arm hauls me through it, but not for long.

  Rising smoke is already making this place uninhabitable, but I have a few more cards to play.

  I tap the power button for each of the seven Rep/Con robots inside, then toss my can of Dr. Browns with deadly accuracy below – at the garage door button.

  Once again, it begins to close, and the Rep/Con bots roll out along their tracks like faithful little high-tech wastebaskets-turned firefighting bots, looking for literal fires to put out. I don’t know how much fire-suppressant foam or CO2 they might have, or whatever, but simply moving around inside the walls where paranoid combat bots can hear them gives me more cover than anything short of, well, the entire place literally burning down.

  Which it appears well on its way to doing. I slip quietly through the loft behind a couple of the noisier bots, hoping I won’t be the first interloper blindly shot by patrol bots.

  A plasma bolt bursts through the vent baffles just in front of me, and I decide that’s close enough. An A/C vent is close by, with nothing notable in it beyond the A/C unit itself.

  I lower my shoulder and charge. One body slam later and both the A/C and myself are out on the street.

  Or more accurately, it’s laying in a few dozen pieces on the street, while I’m parkouring along the edge of the roof we’ve ripped out of, looking for somewhere else to flee, certain the chaos in the deli could only confound them for so long.

  The bodega’s roof collapses.

  Patreon page. The first chapters released on here are already up there, even for free subscribers, and you can also see the art which didn't upload to Royal Road.