Somnus V - Chapter 38

Kat awoke to the sensation of a bucket of ice water being dumped over her head. The samurai from the truck stood a pace away from her, a sheepish expression on his face and an empty bucket in his hands. Two or so paces behind him, Ice Cobra glared at Kat. At her side stood an overweight bald man wearing a red shirt and pants.

 There was something wrong with the man. Kat couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Maybe it was that his eyes were slightly too far apart, maybe it was that his head was lumpy in a way that she’d never seen before outside of the victims of truly botched chrome installation.

 Unsurprisingly, she was still bound to a chair. This time, the quality of her bindings had improved. The chair itself was made out of metal and was welded to the floor. Her hands and ankles were shackled to it, a big step up from the cheap zip ties that had held her tight in the truck.

 “Good morning Erinyes,” Cobra sneered, hands clasped behind her back as she leaned in to look at Kat. “You look like crap. Next time I’d suggest you try to avoid getting blown up.”

 Kat coughed, wincing at the light spatter of blood that painted her knees as her body convulsed. She took a breath to steady herself before looking up and matching the other samurai’s gaze.

 “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said dryly. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect anyone to be brazen enough to actually attack the arbitration hall. How did you manage to smuggle the bomb and all of those guns into the building anyway? I looked into it, and short of breaking a hacker in and having them constantly alter search results in real time, it didn’t look possible.”

 “That’s exactly what I did,” the samurai preened, motioning to the lumpy man next to her. “Mr. Red here is on Mr. Jackon’s tower squad. He’s the best technopath on Earth. No security system can survive his touch. Breaking through something like a real time weapon’s scanner was child’s play for him.”

 “Ice Cobra,” the man said coldly, turning to fix the woman with his too wide gaze. “I am once again protesting that you have kept Erinyes alive. I have already stolen the secrets I need from her network. There is no purpose in keeping her alive, let alone revealing additional information to her. Simply put a knife in her and be done with it.”

 Kat’s stomach clenched as her breath caught in her throat. The air seemed to be sucked out of the room

 Cobra just pointed at her and laughed.

 “You should see your face right now Erinyes,” she cackled. “Just look at your stupid face.”

 “Nah,” the samurai continued with a wave of her hand. “I’ll put a knife in her when I’m good and ready and not a second before. First we’re going to have a doctor look at her, make sure she’s patched up enough to fight. Then I’m going to kill her face to face in a fair fight.”

 “Fair?” Kat asked, glancing down at her body. Fast Healing had smoothed over the worst of her injuries to her head and shoulder, but the steady throbbing ache from her leg didn’t instill much confidence. “I’m handcuffed to a chair without any weapons or armor and I feel like I’ve been hit by a car. At the very least I need some kind of warm up. Otherwise I don’t see the point in bothering to let me out of these handcuffs.”

 “See?” The bald man said, blinking slowly. “Even the prisoner wants you to kill her here and now. Two to one Cobra. You’re outvoted.”

 She ignored her companion instead shifting her attention to the man with the bucket of water standing next to Kat. When she spoke, her tone was firm, leaving no room for disagreement.

 “Andrew. Watch Erinyes. If the mana crystal goes off, the chair should zap her. If the mana crystal stays on after that, you have a stun baton. Make sure she stays put until the doc can look at her, and if you have to knock her out, make sure the doc wakes her up afterward. Once he’s done with her, I’ll send some more guards and they’ll drag her down to the training ring for our fight. As persistently annoying as Mr. Red can be, he has a point. Let’s finish this today.”

 “My name is Razor Slash,” the male samurai responded, sulking slightly as Cobra turned to leave. Mr. Red stared at Kat with his too wide eyes for a solid second before turning to join her.

 “No,” Cobra said as she exited the room. “Your name is Andrew. You haven’t earned a proper name yet and we both know it.”

 The door closed behind her, leaving Kat alone in the room with Andrew. The samurai watched her. About five seconds after she left the room, he let out a deep sigh and flipped his bucket over, turning it into an impromptu chair.

 “I miss working in marketing,” he grumbled. “Razor Slash has a good ring to it. That’s something that would turn up in net searches. Really pops off the page. You could even put it on shirts. Maybe spice it up with a cool logo.”

 He looked at Kat. The seconds dragged on. Eventually it became obvious that he was waiting on an answer so she cleared her throat.

 “It’s a good name?” She hazarded.

 “I know!” Andrew replied, balling one hand up into a fist and slamming it into the palm of his other hand. “I keep saying that but Colby insists that I can’t have a special name until I do something of note. I was part of the team that blew up the arbitration hall. That seems like it’s something of note, but no. Apparently ‘standing on the upper level and firing a gun’ doesn’t count. Who knows. I might’ve even been the guy that hit you. That would have to count for something, right?”

 Her mind spun. This was the first time that Kat had been kidnapped and held hostage, but it wasn’t exactly what she was expected. It seemed like there should be more torture and less a wannabe samurai gossiping with her.

 As much as Kat wanted treatment, waiting for the doctor wasn’t an option. They’d have guards with them, and given that she was shackled to a chair and unable to use magic, one samurai was probably more than she could handle.

 It was now or never. It didn’t sound like Ice Cobra was going to give Kat a lot of time to prepare herself. That meant that Kat couldn’t count on Dorrik getting to her in time. Heck, she didn’t even know if the lokkel had met up yet. For all she knew, Dorrik didn’t even know what city she was in.

 “Hey An- Razor Slash,” Kat called out. The samurai popped up from his bucket, eyes gleaming. “My shackles are a bit tight. They’re cutting off the circulation to my hands. I don’t think that Ice Cobra will be happy with our big knife fight if my hands are so beat up that I can’t hold a weapon.”

 Andrew was already a half dozen steps closer to her before he stopped, squinting his eyes down at Kat from barely a pace and a half away.

 “Hey,” he said. “You’re not going to fool me with that. You just want me to take your shackles off in order to loosen them. Then you’re going to try and knock me out. I’ve seen entertainment vids. I know better than that.”

 Kat yanked downward with her mind, multiplying the natural gravity in a rough sphere around Andrew’s chest and face. He was barely within range of her domain, the change in gravity only affecting half of his body, but that was almost more effective.

 The man’s upper body accelerated toward the floor, pulling him off balance until he hit the ground with a loud crack. Even though the man had led with his face, Kat didn’t let up, instead reversed gravity entirely and sending him soaring upward until he hit the ceiling.

 She released him, only to once again maximize gravity. This time Andrew hurtled toward the ground, quickly reaching the same speed as someone falling fifteen to twenty paces.

 He hit the floor with a sickening crack, his back and neck bent in an unnatural direction. Kat felt a vague twinge of guilt. Andrew had clearly been in way over his head, more or less press ganged into holding a gun and looking menacing in order to fill out Millennium’s numbers for the raid, but at the end of the day, he was still an armed fighter and he was holding her hostage.

 Kat released a breath, closing her eyes for a second as she dispelled the last vestiges of concern over the dead man. Then, she lightened the gravity around his body until it was practically floating and reached out with her good leg in order to bring him closer.

 Pain seared through her system as twisting her hips to hook a toe in his belt put pressure on her bad calf. Silently, Kat cursed the mana detectors in the room. This entire process would have been much easier with Pseudopod or after she healed herself.

 At the end of the day, complaining would get her nowhere. Andrew’s corpse was now practically hovering in her lap, and Kat glanced at the metal door to her prison cell. The doctor hadn’t arrived with their guards yet, but she was on a clock.

 She tweaked gravity slightly, biting her lip as she maneuvered the limp body through the air. The corpse bobbed slightly as Kat struggled to keep a proper mental grip on it, but she managed to catch it before it hit the floor. Finally, after what felt like minutes, she managed to slip her shackled hands into the dead man’s pocket and pull out an old fashioned steel key.

 A bit more fiddling and she managed to find the lock around her right wrist. From there it was a simple matter of pushing Andrew’s body aside and letting him drift to the floor as she unlocked the rest of her restraints.

 For the first time in what seemed like forever, she stood up under her own power, and almost immediately regretted it. Her leg screamed white hot agony at her, dulling her vision and bringing tears to her eyes.

 Kat switched to her good leg, hopping twice to the nearest wall so that she could slump against it. Almost without thinking the words to Cure Wounds II began to tumble from her lips. Across the room, a pair of green crystals embedded in the sides of the chair she had been sitting in began to glow.

 The chair itself began to sizzle, blue-white arcs of electricity running up and down its length as some combination of magic and science sought to shock its nonexistent occupant unconscious.

 She simply ignored it. Kat pressed glowing hands to either side of the wound on her calf, hissing in pain as she put pressure near the wound.

 It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as she expected, between Fast Healing and Arcane Armor the bullet had only left a small hole, maybe the size of her pinky, most of the way through her leg. For a gunshot, that was pretty good. Most of the wounds Kat had seen on other samurai were much more grisly and immediately fatal.

 Slowly, the hole began to close a bit. Cure Wound II couldn’t fix anything. It wouldn’t cure cancer, reattach a missing hand, or apparently, close a bullet hole in a matter of seconds, but it sure did help. The pain dropped to a manageable level as the angry bruises around the puncture began to heal and fade.

 After almost a minute of applying the spell, the chair in the center of the room shorted out. Kat kept healing her injury for a couple seconds longer, but Cure Wounds II had reached its limit. There was still a hole in her calf. It was much smaller, but given the severity of the wound, it didn’t look like her spell was going to be able to heal all of it in one go, no matter how much mana she used.

 Tentatively, Kat put some weight on it. Her leg throbbed with pain, but it could hold her weight.

 She clenched her jaw, taking a couple more steps as she gauged her effectiveness and mobility. It wasn’t great. Even if she could walk on her injured leg, she couldn’t exactly run or move explosively. So long as she planted herself, Kat would be able to fight, but that wasn’t exactly conducive to her style.

 Just as Kat was getting ready to exit the room, its door opened revealing a bored looking guard. Behind him, a man in his early fifties slouched against the wall, both hands in the pockets of a bloodstained white duster.

 Dazzle exploded in both of their faces. Before they could react, Kat launched herself toward the two of them, flipping gravity so that her ‘down’ was the started blinking man standing in the doorway.

 She hit with enough force to knock her target off of his feet and back into the civilian behind him.

 The second Kat’s gravity domain surrounded all three of them, she altered the flow of gravity slightly, guiding them into a wall some five paces away with bone shattering force. The samurai under her wheezed as the blow knocked the wind from his lungs, but the unarmed man behind him wasn’t so lucky.

 Heightened gravity plus the weight of two other people slamming down on top of him was more than enough to crush the man’s chest. He wheezed for breath, the air crackling in Kat’s sensitive hearing as she picked up the tell-tale sound of a punctured lung.

 She cast Pseudopod, letting herself and the doctor slip to the ground even as she flipped the samurai’s gravity to send him rocketing upward. Silently, she thanked her constant training with Jaalin and Dorrik. Without the two lokkel pressing her, there was no way that Kat would have been able to independently tweak the gravity of multiple objects simultaneously and smoothly.

 The man’s head cracked against the ceiling, but the low roof of the safehouse didn’t give him enough time to accelerate to truly deadly speeds. Even if Kat could apply gravity at three to four times Earth’s standard rate, that wasn’t enough to do fatal damage with only two to three paces to accelerate.

 Still, the man’s eyes went hazy as the rest of his body flopped bonelessly to the ceiling around him, pinned there by Kat’s ability. She let him drop to the ground as she hobbled over to the body of the man in the white coat.

 After pulling the jacket open, Kat confirmed that he was the doctor Cobra sent to patch her up. The inside of his coat had a couple dozen unlabeled syringes tucked into pouches alongside a pair of scissors and some suture thread.

Kat picked up the scissors, hefting them thoughtfully in her hand as the samurai behind her groaned and rolled over. They were hardly a knife. The scissors barely even had a pointed end. Really, all that they were good for was cutting through thread or fabric, but at the end of the day they were the only real weapon she had on hand.

Her Pseudopod reached out, grabbing hold of the injured mercenary’s wrist and yanking him toward her before he could get any smart ideas about the handgun at his waist. As tempting as the firearm was, it would make enough noise to alert the entire complex, and Kat didn’t have any faith that Ice Cobra’s desire for a ‘fair fight’ would persist through an escape attempt, especially after Kat had already offed two of the other woman’s subordinates.

She dropped the knee of her bad leg onto the man’s chest, planting it square in his solar plexus and forcing the wind from his lungs. Before he had a chance to react to her presence, Kat flipped the scissors open and drew its bladed edge across the man’s throat like a razor.

His eyes widened and blood gushed from the wound. Kat slapped a hand across the man’s mouth to muffle his shouts as the pain shocked him out of his concussion induced stupor.

A hand grabbed hold of her shoulder, pushing Kat away from her opponent. He was larger than her but not stronger thanks to the Tower, but what Kat was really lacking was leverage.

The samurai arched his back, planting one shoulder into the floor as he pushed with the other arm. Kat fought to stay on top of him, but with only one foot scraping across the cement, it was hard for her to maintain her mount.

Just as he managed to push himself free, she cast Overpressure. The man opened his mouth to scream for help only for his torn jugular to pour blood like a waterfall down the front of his shirt. Whatever he was about to say disappeared, replaced by a gurgling rattle.

He slipped to the floor, clawing at gash in his throat. Kat leaned against the nearby wall, a hint of pain flashing across her face as her abused body voiced its displeasure over the exertion she’d forced it through.

About ten seconds later, the samurai’s hands went still and his body slumped. Kat’s Pseudopod reached out, grabbing onto a nearby doorframe and pulling her weightless body over to him. She dropped down on one knee next to the man and put the back of her left hand over his mouth and nose, feeling for any sign of breathing even as she kept the bloody and now fairly dull scissors at the ready.

Nothing. She let out a sigh of relief. The samurai was dead. At least for the moment, no one knew that she had escaped.

Kat pulled the man’s hand gun from his belt, freeing a spare clip with it. She tucked the gun into the waistband of her torn and bloody suit pants, silently wishing that she had worn something else to the arbitration hearing. At least the pantsuit had pockets, giving her a place to stow the spare clip.

Her Pseudopod flowed to the doorframe, pulling her back into the room where she’d been imprisoned. She floated through the air and touched down next to Andrew’s dead body. Kat picked his stun baton, thumbing the switch on the weapon’s hilt to activate it.

Electricity crackled up and down the club’s length and an indicator near the button flashed on, displaying a picture of a battery that was mostly filled with green light. Evidently, other than Kat’s experience with the weapon in the truck, Andrew had managed to keep the baton at full charge.

Kat closed her eyes for a second, taking a deep breath and holding it before exhaling. She reopened her eyes.

She was injured and behind enemy lines, buried in a hidden compound with an unknown number of heavily armed enemies. The building almost certainly had some sort of internal defenses, and in all likelihood they were being operated by the high level technopath that Ice Cobra had brought with her. Kat’s friends were coming, but she couldn’t possibly know when. Even with a full mana pool, fighting all of them was impossible. For now, her only option was to hide and hope that Dorrik managed to find the safe house sooner rather than later.

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