Among Dying Stars: Prologue

Author's Note:

Hey, all! This is my first action scene, so I'm very eager to take criticism on things like pacing, tension, etc. Please don't hold back, as I'm a glutton for punishment in regards to reviewing :)

Anyways, this is the beginning of a hard sci-fi book I am writing, and since this is extremely hard sci-fi, I have dedicated myself to making sure all concepts, ideas, and action scenes make mathematical sense and align with our knowledge about the properties of the universe. In other words, this scene was a royal pain in the buttocks to write because I had to do the calculations to figure out if what the characters do/survive is possible. There is one part where I have yet to finalize calculations, but this will be corrected shortly.

As well as a hard sci-fi novel this is also a mystery book, so you as the reader aren't meant to entirely understand what's going on here in regards to seemingly superhuman abilities possessed by the main character of the prologue.

Well, that's about all I've got to say, so enjoy! Leave a review if you have time, don't leave one if you don't have the time. Thank you, dear reader!

-Wizard

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Prologue

Dr. Felicia Nelson, top tier geneticist and microbiologist, took another swig of her drink. She figured that it was better to not be entirely sober while committing what was arguably the most heinous crime ever carried out in the history of mankind. That way at least she wouldn’t be distracted too much by the implications of what she was doing.

She sat casually in the bar overlooking the shallow ocean that flowed higher than it normally should have, as it was a spring tide today. Brussels had used to be an inland city, but the centuries of disregard for melting ice caps had turned it into a port city. It could even potentially be on a peninsula if it weren’t for strategically placed dams that prevented such an occurrence.

People around her laughed and drank themselves to the point of near unconsciousness, celebrating the Day of Unity, the only Council sponsored worldwide holiday in existence. This night had been chosen to carry out her deed, of course, because many people would be off of work celebrating in bars like these. While that didn’t make Felicia’s job any easier, it meant she would have to kill less people along the way.

Finishing her drink with a final gulp, the troubled doctor stood and solemnly strolled outside. This had to be done. The night sky twinkled with the few stars and planets that weren’t outshone by the city’s light pollution. That was one of the many things Felicia hated about living in a large city like this, but then again one didn’t accomplish much scientific research while living out in the wilderness.

Felicia walked over to her car and opened the trunk. Inside were all the things she needed to carry out what would undoubtedly be the most deadly act of terrorism committed in two centuries of history.

First she double checked the contents of the backpack that would be her companion throughout the night. She first brought out a six kilogram bag of thermite that she’d made by purchasing powdered aluminum online and combining it with some rust from a few old pipes she had lying around, as well as six complementary homemade magnesium detonators.

Next she rummaged around for a short range radio transmitter set to a barely used frequency which was hooked up to an old prototype of a particularly powerful smaller desktop computer which she’d borrowed from a friend in the CPU development field that weighed only around 3 kilograms. If she was lucky she’d have 3 hours of battery life to run that thing. Fortunately, the task at hand would take an hour at most. Finally there were 2 extra sets of shoes for her in case she burned through her first pair too quickly.

Felicia nodded to herself and placed her equipment back into her bag, the rest of which was filled with foam peanuts that would hopefully cushion any potential shock which could damage some of the more fragile contents.

She grabbed the kevlar mask lying to the right of the backpack stretched it over her head. Felicia knew she looked ridiculous in this thing, but it would do the job of hiding her identity well enough. Shouldering the backpack, she picked up a rather long metallic tube and carried it like a pair of skis as she shut the trunk of the car.

A quick scan of the street confirmed no one was watching, but even so Felicia took the caution to back into the nearest alleyway. She held the tube in her left hand and shook it up and down, enjoying the maraca-like sounds that emerged from it before unscrewing the cap and inverting it. A thin silvery dust poured out of the tube and made a large pile on the ground. It sat still for a few moments before suddenly dispersing even though there was practically no wind present.

Satisfied, Felicia slipped on a pair of gloves before heading up a nearby fire escape to the rooftops. From here she could see her target in the distance. Many people called it the Grand Arch of the Zenne, a very fancy bridge that allowed the public to cross the Zenne river. To the scientific community the Arch was known as Lab C, possibly the most expensive structure dedicated to Biology in the world. Doubling as a bridge was simply a secondary feature. Her shoes would probably last the 2 kilometer journey.

Felicia sighed. This had to be done. She pressed a button on her watch which activated her Skate algorithm. Felicia lifted up her left foot for a couple seconds before setting it down again and sliding it back and forth. The ground beneath it now had nearly no friction as far as she was concerned. She was ready.

Her right foot, still experiencing the regular friction between a shoe and concrete, thrust off of the rooftop and sent her forwards. The only feeling Felicia could compare the action to was sliding across a hardwood floor while wearing a pair of socks. She set her right foot down, feeling the same lack of friction that she did on her left before thrusting off with her left foot again. Again and again she repeated the process, gaining more and more speed before she was nearly at the edge of the rooftop.

The doctor had done this enough times to not have any hesitation. She jumped higher than any human should reasonably be capable of, landing onto the roof of the adjacent building and not losing any momentum as she kept Skating across that one as well.

Felicia didn’t know exactly how fast she could go across the rooftops before the small amount of friction she was experiencing would become equal to the force she was exerting from her legs, but regardless of what that point was her velocity was already great enough that anyone who saw her from below on the streets would probably conclude that their eyes were playing tricks on them.

Felicia continued on like this for a few minutes, losing herself to the rhythm. Thrust, Skate, Thrust, Skate, Thrust, Skate, JUMP! Land, Thrust, Skate, Thrust, JUMP!

Before she knew it, Felicia had arrived. On this jump she turned off her Skating and slid to a stop across the final rooftop. Just across the street was Lab C.

A small security detail stood on either side of the structure, as even though terrorism had become increasingly rare under the totalitarian world rule of The Council, public monuments like this could be great targets for anyone who wanted to cause trouble. This one, for example, would be dumped into the river it stood above within the hour.

Felicia checked the bottoms of her shoes. They’d almost been worn through by the journey over the rooftops, so she swapped them out for one of her spare pairs. She had one pair left after this one. Hopefully it would be enough.

Dialing a few extra settings into her watch, Felicia walked to the edge of the roof and looked down. It was a four story fall to the ground from here. For her, this wasn’t even an inconvenience. Putting her faith in her algorithms, Felicia calmly stepped off of the roof.

Without the Cushion, Felicia wouldn’t have been able to walk for months. With it, she only felt a slight sting in her more sensitive bones as she landed onto the road with her legs bent, shocking those in the crowd who saw her stunt.

“Are you okay?” one woman shouted as Felicia stood up. Felicia ignored the bewildered mob as she picked her way through the crowd. None of them would be able to understand what was about to happen, much less warn any Law Enforcement stationed at the bridge.

There were two ways into the Arch of the Zenne. The first was the public access route, where one could use it as a bridge across the massive Zenne river. From what she heard the Zenne had been a small waterway for most of its existence, but rising sea levels had changed nearly the entire layout of Brussels. The second way into the Arch was to the left of the public walkway, which led into the underside of the Arch where Lab C and all of it’s scientific equipment was located.

Although the view from the top of the Grand Arch was beautiful on a night like this, Felicia started approaching the leftward entrance. She kept dialing in preferences to her watch, making sure her algorithms would best suit her in the situation ahead.

“Hey! You!” a voice called. Felicia ignored it. She just needed to put in a few more numbers…

“You! In the mask! Identify yourself!” the voice called again, this time clearly addressing her. Just one… more… setting….

A hand roughly grabbed Felicia’s shoulder. That setting would have to wait, apparently. She looked up at the face of the man who had stopped her. Thankfully he wasn’t someone she knew, although Felicia knew she’d undoubtedly be killing people she knew on a personal basis tonight.

“Ma’am I’m going to need you to remove your mask and open your pack.” The guard said, looking her over for any visible weaponry. Felicia scanned her surroundings. Three other guards stood next to the entrance. None of them looked to be carrying lethal weaponry. Just nightsticks. They wouldn’t be an issue. The crowd of people bustling across the Arch behind her would probably be able to buy her some time as well. Felicia took a deep breath in. This had to be done. Felicia met the man’s eyes.

“What? What do-” Felicia rammed her fist into the guard’s larynx faster than should be humanly possible, sending him sprawling across the ground. She tried to ignore the fact that this man had a life of his own as she went back to inputting her final setting. Maybe he had a family. Perhaps he was a good person. Perhaps not. It didn’t matter anymore.

It took a few moments for the three remaining guards to unfreeze. They couldn’t understand what had just happened, but what they did understand was that their friend was dead.

“Intruder!” One of them shouted! “Hostile in the entrance to the lab!” Seconds later alarms sounded all across the Arch, warning security personnel of the danger. Perfect! The crowd went into a complete state of panic, streaming off of the Arch. The rest of the security would have a hell of a time forcing their way through that mess. Felicia estimated that she had a good 4 minutes before the Law Enforcement response would be able to reach Lab C.

The three guards brought out their nightsticks and rushed Felicia. It was true that she had very little combat training, but her algorithms would enable her to throw her adversaries about like child’s playthings. As they grew near, Felicia extended her left hand towards the left and center guards and made a gesture with her index and pinky fingers. The guards immediately crashed to the floor as they slipped on the new nearly tractionless surface of the ground beneath them.

The guard on the right ignored the loss of her numbers advantage, swinging her nightstick in an overhand fashion towards Felicia’s face. Felicia raised her right hand to block the nightstick and felt the Cushion take control of the situation, forcing Felicia’s arm right in order to push the nightstick left and away from her body.

The guard stumbled as what she must have perceived as being an invisible force pushed her blow off course. After completing a spin in order to recover from her own end of the force, Felicia wasted no time in taking advantage of this, stepping past the guard before turning around and making the gesture to Push towards the guard.

The guard yelped as she was thrown away from Felicia with such force that her feet left the ground. At the same time Felicia started Skating again, using the force of the Push to propel herself towards the entrance, leaving the three guards behind. There would be more.

As Felicia entered the lobby she pointed towards the sides of the entryway with her index and middle fingers, signalling her algorithms to carry out an Explosion between the two locations she’d indicated. Moments later the sides of the entryway folded outwards and collapsed, the struts pushed too much for their structural integrity to bear as the doorway caved in on itself, preventing the guards from following.

Felicia made her way into the lobby that she passed through nearly every day on her way to work, casually kicking the ground again with her left foot in order to not lose the momentum of her Skate. It was a tragedy that such a beautifully decorated building would have to be brought to its end in order to fulfill the doctor’s goals. Her building, in fact.

A guard attempted to fire a taser at Felicia as she sped past him, but with how fast she was Skating it would have been a miracle if he’d hit her. There wasn’t time for anything fancy with this one, so Felicia gestured towards him with her middle and ring finger in passing, not looking back to see the man as he coughed and hacked as an alien substance filled his esophagus.

Felicia walked, or rather Skated down the first hallway of Lab C, trying to not pay attention to the gaping looks of scientists that she passed. She cringed every time she saw the face of someone she knew.

Finally, Felicia arrived at her destination, creating an Explosion between the two sides of the wall. The walls cracked and then buckled as they were pushed against one another, eventually giving way to a fist sized hole in each of them. Felicia only needed the one on the right, taking a peek through it. If the blueprints of the lab she had were good then… yes! A large steel support beam sat on the other side of the hole.

Felicia brought out her bag of thermite and reached her arm into the hole in order to dump a handful of the stuff onto the beam. Inserting the magnesium detonator into the pile, she checked her watch. It would be another 2 minutes until Law Enforcement arrived on the scene.

Five to go. Felicia thought to herself as she turned around and headed into the room nearest to her. The 3 lab workers inside panicked and ran out of the room through the other door. They weren’t going to be any trouble, so Felicia didn’t bother attacking them. She strode into the middle of the room where countless fragile instruments surrounded her on the tables adjacent to herself. She brought her hands together in front of herself, grabbing her balled right hand with her left in the gesture which would signal her algorithms to generate an Omnidirectional Push.

Felicia underestimated the weight of the instruments around her. As the equipment flew off of the tables, shattering on the floor, she immediately felt like she was being punched on all sides of her torso at once. The air left Felicia’s lungs as she stumbled backwards and had to lean on one of the tables simply to standing up.

Alright… she took note. Let’s not do that again. Felicia steadied herself and Skated out of the room. That destruction was unnecessary when the entire structure was about to be sent crashing into the Zenne, but Felicia’s main goal here wasn’t to destroy, to kill, or even to cause a disturbance in general. It was to steal. And in order to hide her intentions, she needed to make it look like she was visiting rooms at random before she grabbed her prize.

After she skidded to a stop at where the next structural weak point was located, Felicia repeated the process of creating an Explosion between the walls and placing her ordinance. She only really needed to do this four times in order to bring down the Arch, but she had to be sure that this would work. The consequences of failure were too great for her to take chances. Four to go.

Felicia heard the sounds of a blast coming from the direction of the Lobby. Law Enforcement was already here? This wasn’t good. People with guns were much less easy to fight than people with nightsticks. She needed to move quickly.

Felicia Skated to the end of the hallway before jutting her thumb out to the right, signalling the Skate algorithm to turn her in that direction. The friction on the inside of her left foot returned to normal while the outside remained slippery, allowing Felicia to execute the turn.

Like a photon in a mirage! Her friend Yumi had described it. Felicia wished that she had the same poetic tongue her partner possessed. She skated into a few more rooms that she chose at random and destroyed much of the contents within them, making sure to only use basic Pushes in order to avoid a repeat of the previous incident.

At this point Felicia could hear the shouts coming from around the corner she’d turned earlier. She was running out of time. The doctor quickly skated over to the next weak point and planted more thermite on the beam. Three to go.

The shouts were getting closer. Felicia had to pick up the pace. She turned on her heel and Skated deeper into Lab C, not stopping to destroy any more equipment along the way. After a dozen or so seconds of Skating, Felicia stopped in front of her goal, Room 137.

The doctor strode into her own working area and started Pushing materials and tools all over the room before eventually Pushing a microscope into the camera that rested in the upper left corner of the room, trying to make it look like she wasn’t aiming for anything in particular.

Glancing up towards the camera, Felicia saw that it had been completely destroyed. The doctor sighed and relaxed for a moment, knowing that she wouldn’t be seen by the security system while in this room. But there wasn’t much time for resting. She glanced towards the window where, as planned, a quadcopter hovered outside the room, patiently waiting for Felicia’s arrival.

Felicia picked up the case that she’d set on her desk earlier at work that day and walked over to the window. She unlocked the window and pushed it open, hanging the case around one of the drone’s legs and giving the drone a nod, knowing that Yumi could see her through the camera mounted on the device.

There was no time to watch the drone retreat with the contraband as it flew away from the Arch. Felicia turned around and Skated out of the room. Just a few doors down was the next weak point.

As she created an Explosion at the fourth beam, Felicia saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned and saw the beams of flashlights shining around the corner of the hallway.

Not good, not good, not good! Felicia would need at least a half minute to plant the thermite, and based on the fact that she could hear the footsteps of the Law Enforcement coming for her, she didn’t have that kind of time. She needed to fight. A hallway wasn’t the ideal place for her algorithms, but it would have to do.

Felicia opened the door next to her and slipped into the room. She considered hiding, but the cameras had her in sight, and she didn’t want to bet her life on whether or not the Law Enforcement troops were in contact with the people watching the camera feeds.

Moments later gunfire sounded down the hallway as the troops gave covering fire to their squadmates. So they were in contact with the cameras! Felicia scanned the room for a weapon and found a one meter metal pipe lying on a table near her. Grabbing the pipe, Felicia took a risk and quickly peeked around the door frame before she was forced back by a hail of bullets.

If it hadn’t been for the Cushion pushing Felicia's face back into cover as her algorithms detected the bullets, she would be dead. Even so, Felicia swore as she brought her hand up to her face where a bullet had grazed her cheek. Her algorithms went to work, recreating her capillaries so that no blood would escape. That would hold her together until she could receive proper first aid. The pain had been worth it, though. She now knew that she was facing six enemies.

Hmmm… those troops were sticking awfully close together… Felicia stretched her arm around the doorframe and gestured at the soldier’s feet with her index and pinky fingers. She heard most of the troops fall to the ground and one more trip over the pile that the rest of them made.

They would recover quickly. Felicia didn’t look behind her as she Pushed in the general direction of her back. Evidently, her algorithms found something to latch onto, because she was propelled forwards out of the doorway and into the line of fire. She started Skating again and used her momentum to propel herself up the wall before switching to a Grip as she felt the surface of the wall become extremely rough beneath her feet, allowing her to run on the wall for far longer than she should have been able to.

She’d missed one soldier who was currently looking at his inexplicably fallen comrades. He heard the doctor coming and whipped his head back in Felicia’s direction and started firing, but he’d expected to see her on the floor, not the wall. Before the man could correct his mistake Felicia rammed the metal pipe into his face with enough force to put a hole in the very wall she was standing on.

The man was dead before he hit the ground, the metal pipe fully impaling him through the jaw and out the back of his neck. Felicia quickly made gestures with her middle and ring fingers towards all the troops lying on the ground who were attempting to get up, whose priority quickly switched from standing up and fighting their assailant to clutching at their throats once their airways were cut off.

Felicia knelt down next to the man that she’d put the bar through, grabbing his sidearm. If she left the troops alive then there was a chance that they could escape the Arch in time, but Felicia couldn’t allow that. If the camera feed showed that a woman who had killed so many had spared mercy for those that she could, it would be revealed that her goal wasn’t to simply murder and destroy. If that happened then that was just one more thing that could potentially trace this back to her cause, and unfortunately the four lives she was creating were worth more than any of the lives that she would take tonight.

She spared one last glance at the troops, their faces turning blue, before she emptied a bullet into each of their heads. Felicia finished planting the thermite. Two to go.

Felicia tossed the gun aside and Skated as fast as she could towards the fifth weak point. Law Enforcement was almost undoubtedly coming at her from the other side of the Arch as well, and they would be far more cautious after losing an entire squad to one woman. The plan had been to only encounter any resistance on the way out. Obviously, this whole ordeal wasn’t going as planned so far.

The fifth and sixth weak point were nearly at the middle of the Arch, which meant that Felicia needed to ascend a few flights of stairs since Lab C was located inside of a bridge, after all.

Felicia smiled once she reached the stairs. With ceilings that stretched ten or so meters upwards and a width that matched if not surpassed that height, this place was much better for her algorithms than the cramped hallways at the beginning of Lab C.

Skating wouldn’t do much here, but the stairs happened to be lit above by a bunch of dangling florescent lights which would bear the weight of the doctor just fine. She used a combination of Skating and Gripping in order to run halfway up the wall before Pushing off of it, flying towards the lights, pointing three fingers towards the first light.

It didn’t work fast enough. Felicia felt her stomach drop as she fell towards the floor before suddenly she felt a supporting force yank her arm back upwards towards the light. Felicia hung there in mid air for a few second, hyperventilating as she looked at the ground she almost fell to. The Cushion would have saved her anyways, but that did nothing to subdue primeval fears.

No time for fear, no time for fear! Felicia extended her other arm towards the next light and Pulled on it, drawing herself in its general direction. She stopped her Pull on the first light and switched to Pulling on another light.

She continued swinging from light to light with her Pulls for a minute or so like a child on a giant invisible set of monkey bars before she’d nearly reached the top of the stairway, dropping down onto the floor fully expecting a fight. No one was here. Felicia swept her gaze around the room, searching for any signs of an ambush. Nothing. She turned around and looked down the stairs she’d just flown over. Nobody was following her.

Maybe she’d gotten here more quickly than Law Enforcement? Unlikely, considering how much she was slowed down on her way to getting here. Something wasn’t right.

For now Felicia was just thankful that there weren’t any bullets whizzing over her head as she knelt down next to the fifth weak point. The wall was weak enough here that Felicia was able to just use her own inertia in a standard Push in order to open a hole in the wall.

As she finished piling another handful of thermite onto the fifth beam, Felicia heard a loud crash come from the direction of the Arch’s peak. That was where she needed to be for the sixth weak point. It was probably Law Enforcement, but why had they taken so long getting here? Felicia hurriedly but carefully placed the fifth detonator into position. One to go.

As Felicia stood another crash echoed down the stairway. What the hell was going on up there? Felicia proceeded cautiously, actually using the stairs this time as she made her way towards her final destination. The crashes were almost certainly coming from the dining area of Lab C, which resided at the very highest point in the Arch.

Felicia reached the top of the stairs, faced with a windowless double door, painted red like a wall of blood. She had no idea what would be on the other side, so she created an Explosion between the set of doors and the ground beneath her feet, forcing the doors to fly open inwards even though that wasn’t the way their hinges were meant to bend.

Silence. Felicia edged her head around the frame of the door, seeing nothing in the room but a bunch of tables. The windows on both sides of the room provided a decent view of the Zenne. A few of the tables were overturned, though. Someone had obviously been through here before she had, so where were they?

They couldn’t have gone after her, she would have killed them by now. And they couldn’t have started out here since there was no nearby entrance. That meant they were still inside the room… outside of what she could see from the doorway!

Felicia leapt away from her position just in time to avoid a massive metallic hand shoving itself through the wall where her body had been. Wanting to have the more open territory to fight in, she quickly Pulled on the entry to the dining area, ducking under another grabbing hand as she Skated into the dining room.

“Heh, I almost got ya!” A male voice sounded from behind her. Felicia turned around to face her opponent as she skidded to a stop. The man she was looking at was encased in an exo-suit that had looked to be modified for combat. She never knew that local Law Enforcement had weaponized those things! That wasn’t an encouraging fact, since the ones used in building construction could let a man easily lift a few hundred kilograms of material at a time. Felicia guessed that this suit was part of Law Enforcement’s anti-riot arsenal, as it didn’t appear to have any ranged weaponry.

“Ya see the grunts weren’t slowin’ ya down much, so they had to call me in to put a stop to ya!” The man remarked confidently. His accent seemed to be from somewhere in North America, though Felicia couldn’t tell where. “I will give it to ya, though. You’re fast as hell. How’s ya do that anyways?”

Felicia didn’t respond to the man. If her voice were recorded, her identity would be revealed immediately and nothing she had done here would matter.

“Silent type, huh?” the man chuckled. “Well that’s just too bad then. Let’s me and you have a fight then, right?” he said as he reached behind his back, drawing out a massive sword, if it could even be called that. The thing had to be at least 2 meters long, and would have been unwieldy but for the exosuit. It resembled more of a long metal beam than it did a blade. Felicia’s opponent adopted a two handed stance and gestured that she was to make the first move.

Felicia set her jaw, surveying the situation. In the suit the man easily towered over her by half a meter, and a single direct punch like the one that had driven the man’s fist through the wall would kill her, Cushion or not, and there were no questions about what that blade could do. He didn’t seem to have any non-melee weapons on his person, but that didn’t exactly lessen the threat that he posed. The hydraulics of his exoskeleton protected his legs back and arms well, but his chest and head were left exposed by the suit.

(Author’s Note: This scene is extremely rough. More calculations are required in order to finalize the action.)

Testing her opponent, Felicia gestured for the ground beneath one of the tables to become slippery and Pushed it towards the man. She slid back a few meters while the table shot towards the man who promptly knocked it aside and charged her.

He’d apparently seen what she could do with the friction of the floor, because he intentionally started sliding on the ground beneath him. That didn’t work for long though, as Felicia returned the ground back to normal and the man had to stop his charge and windmill his arms in order to not fall over.

The man cursed as he was forced to drive his blade into the ground before him to act as a balancing point. Felicia used this opportunity to Push off of the tables behind her and punch the man in the face as she Skated past him, narrowly escaping the vengeful sweep of his blade that followed her.

“Yer not half bad, huh?” He remarked, rubbing his jaw. This wasn’t working! Punches would only get Felicia so far against an enemy like this. She needed a plan and she needed it fast. There was little time to think of one, though, as the man ran at her a second time and Felicia was forced to Push and Skate out of the way of yet another stroke which would have cut her in half.

The pair continued on like this for a minute or so, the man in the exo-suit swinging his blade again and again in various fashions and trying out several different stances, and Felica dancing out of the way of his strikes every time.

The man had apparently been thinking of his own plans, because he surprised the doctor by dropping his blade after feinting one of his strikes and just rushing at her with his hands. Felicia almost maneuvered away from the man in time but his right hand grabbed her by the backpack and threw her across the room.

As Felicia sailed through the air she Pushed on the tables below her in order to slow her velocity before she hit the floor. She cried out in agony as she rolled across the ground. Her chest felt like she had a few broken ribs, and while the Cushion had softened the impact severely it did nothing for the whiplash that she’d experienced in her neck.

The man laughed and said something that Felicia couldn’t understand through the layers of pain she was in. Felicia slowly rose to her feet. She’d come too far for pain to stop her!

“First rule of battle, lady!” The man shouted. “Ya can’t dodge forever!”

Felicia screamed in an animalistic rage and ran blindly at the man, Pushing off of the ground at the last moment in order to jump over the swipe of his sword. Both of her feet made contact with his upper chest, which would not have been very effective had she not gestured behind him at the same time and Pulled on the table closest to them with one hand while transforming the ground under it with the other one. The table used her as an anchor while she used it in order to keep standing horizontally on the man’s chest. With gravity still keeping the table firmly on the floor, it slid and swiped the man’s legs out from under him.

This time Pushing directly against the man’s face, Felicia launched herself away from the man while throwing him onto the table fully. She quickly noticed that the man had dropped his sword upon landing and Pushed it on near-frictionless ground to the other side of the room where it crashed through the window and fell into the Zenne below.

The man stood up from the table and roared, apparently now taking his enemy seriously as he threw the table at Felicia. She Skated out of the way of the projectile and Pushed a few tables of her own in the man’s direction.

Felicia heard more crashes in the distance. Apparently more exo-suit wearing Law Enforcement was arriving on the scene. She would have to cut this fight short. The sixth weak point was only a back-up anyways. Five destroyed weak points would have to do. Felicia pushed two very specific buttons on her watch.

At first nothing happened, and after a few seconds Felicia started to become concerned about her placement, but then the structure of the Arch started creaking and buckling under its own weight.

The exo-suit wearer’s eyes widened in realization at what Felicia had one. “No!” He cried. “Ya monster! YA MONSTER!”

Felicia Skated as quickly as she could manage towards the window nearest to her and created an Explosion between it and the floor. The glass shattered, allowing her to jump out of Lab C and into the cold night as she Pushed with both hands on the floor, hurdling her away from the Arch as it collapsed into itself behind her.

As Felicia plummeted towards the icy waters below her, she pressed another button on her watch which would divert all of her algorithm’s work to maintaining the Cushion. When she hit the water the impact that Felicia felt was as if she’d taken a casual jump off of a diving board.

She shed the backpack. It was weighing her down and her algorithms would be useless now that she’d been dunked in the water anyways.

By the time Felicia swam to the edge of the Zenne she was exhausted. The various cuts, wounds, and scrapes that had been temporarily kept under wraps by her algorithms had re-opened and were dripping blood. Her clothes were sopping wet and the air of the night wasn’t exactly warm at this time of the year. Her legs protested with the strain they’d been put through and her ribs screamed in need of resetting.

With shivering fingers Felicia pressed the only button on her watch that she hadn’t used yet, signalling her location to Yumi. She turned back and gazed at the Arch, or what happened to be left of it. The structure had relied upon having its sides lean against each other over the Zenne, and so when the half Felicia had been on had fallen, the other half had been plunged into the river as well.

Emergency sirens blared into the night as Law Enforcement tried to recover anyone who had been left alive after the Arch’s collapse. So much death had happened tonight, but in the end, of course, it would all be worth the cost.