32 - Mohawk [Cherno]

The woman raised her split eyebrow to him, and he let out a frustrated sigh, clarifying: “Number sixteen. Same holding place as Silberblut.”

At that, the lanky woman nodded, turning on a bootheel. Krahe took one last long, long drag, creating a reason to leave by burning the last of the Cassia as well as a time gap between the lanky one’s departure and her own.

Krahe made the incautious choice to trail the woman without knowing the extent of her sensory or combative capabilities. The utter brashness of her decision only grew more obvious when she spirited herself away from the smokery and actually started trailing, finding that the lady had at some point been joined by a quartet of henchmen; rather, two henchmen and a henchwomen each. Nonetheless, Krahe’s skills in evading detection and keeping track of a target remained sharp. It was true that she would’ve loved to have her WBX-4 Chameleon Field Generator, but on the other hand, she didn’t have to worry about cameras and network ping traps behind every other corner. Such had been the state of Megacity Gamma’s surface levels, the price its people had paid for an illusion of safety. In truth, the violence on the surface had been just as bad as in the undercity, it just got covered up or was perpetrated by the dogs of the state to begin with.

Her target was cautious, but not cautious enough. Krahe managed to follow her through the city’s tangled intestines to a residential district without being seen. It was full of ancient buildings that had been rebuilt into apartment structures, with richly-detailed facades and bulb-pointed towers reaching skyward. The only businesses she caught sight of were small general stores on the ground floors of some buildings. The place all but screamed “nobody comes here”, and thus it made sense that a mafia would use such an area to hold captives. Their holding place was hidden not by elaborate or extravagant means, but by simply being in as uninteresting a part of town as possible, an area that others were unlikely to investigate, an area filled by normal people too set in their comfortable lives to risk them by rocking the boat. She’d seen it a thousand times; people grabbed off the street in broad daylight with hundreds of onlookers, none of whom did anything and all of whom conveniently didn’t see the kidnappers’ faces, license plates, or any other identifying marks.

Eventually, she reached a point from which she could see where Semzar’s lieutenant stopped. An unassuming building with a butcher’s at the ground floor, with the conspicuous selling point of being open 24 hours a day, every day. Never unguarded, and a good way to dispose of corpses.

Things, inevitably, went sideways. She couldn’t tell at first, as she made her way back the way she came. There were plenty of chokes amidst that tangle of back alleys, and she intended to set a trap there. Her plan was to kill off the escorts and liberate Casus as he was being brought to the smokery, but that wouldn’t come to pass.

It was some ways in, after she had lit a cigarette, when she heard footsteps fast approaching from the butcher shop’s direction. Enough pairs of footsteps that she couldn’t pick them apart; at least five people. That lanky woman’s voice echoed with authority.

“Find her!”

She’d been seen. When or how, she didn’t know, the only fact which mattered was that she had been seen.

Sprinting through the back alleys, the barking of her pursuers behind her, Krahe formed a Smoke Eruption grenade in her left hand and a Deathsmoke Burster in her right, bottoming out her entropy tolerance. She dropped both of them, hoping that the adjustments she’d made to their formation would cause them to detonate as intended. First the smoke bomb, then the burster a few seconds later, the timing based on a rough estimate of how long her pursuers would take to reach that point. She didn’t have the sensory precision or mental computing power to gauge it properly, but going by the mixture of confused and agonized screaming, she figured she had gotten the timing right.

By her estimate, three pursuers had not only survived the trap, but did so in a good enough state to continue their chase.

For all her tactical sense, however, these were their streets. Not hers. She wasn’t familiar with the many twists and turns of this place, and soon paid the price for that ignorance when she found herself cornered at a dead end. Two clips in a pocket, one-fifth Anathema capacity in her arm, and one-third of a cigarette between her teeth.

The lanky woman raised one of her guns, grinning threateningly.

“So? What happens now?” Krahe asked nonchalantly, taking a modicum of control.

“You’ll come with us, tell us exactly what it is that gave you the moronic idea to trail Semzar Hashem’s lieutenant, and maybe, if you’re very lucky, you might wake up in a dumpster missing a couple weeks of memory, an arm, and a leg.”

Before her stood a superior opponent with sufficient firepower to end her in one shot, and allies to boot. This was a fight Krahe had taken many times. She mentally stuck the lanky woman with the name “Mohawk”, and her henchmen with “Fatboy” and “Slim” based on their respective builds. Slim looked to be the same ethnicity as Monochrome, though more on the grey side overall.

Fatboy leaned in and whispered something into Mohawk’s ear, prompting a reluctant utterance from her as she pulled back her pistol’s hammer: “Bad luck. Guess you’ll just have to die.”

Mohawk pulled the trigger, and a killing light built within its barrel. Krahe had begun to dodge before it even fired based purely on the tensing of Mohawk’s arm and the way she leaned into the gun anticipating recoil. A classic aim dodge, invented by the first users of Reflex Accelerator implants and polished to such a degree over two centuries that even non-augments could learn it by the time of Krahe’s generation.