Mistrunner 3 - Chapter 24 - A Great Big World (Patreon)

Mira believes the world is doomed. I hope she’s wrong, but everywhere I turn, I see evidence that if the aliens don’t get us, we’ll just do the job ourselves.

Patrick Ward

I stepped through nothing, using Teleport to avoid a hail of gunfire aimed at my previous position. Even as a wave of vertigo assailed me, I kicked off the ground and sprinted away. The pounding of my heartbeat echoed the sound of my feet hitting the tiled floor, and panic suffused my mind as I turned a corner just in time to avoid another series of gunshots. Behind me, I heard a few slower members of the crowd cry out. Had they been hit? Or were they just frightened? I didn’t know, and I had no way of finding out as I tore down the hallway.

My broken hand throbbed, and with my entire store of Mist having been drained by Teleport, I had little choice but to effect an escape. Or try to, considering that the blue-robed guards were already hot on my heels. Usually, the skill left people momentarily confused as to my whereabouts, but my pursuers had reacted with terrifying alacrity. If I didn’t move – and fast – they were going to close the gap. Never was that more apparent than when I reached the end of the hall, and before I could turn the corner, another barrage of bullets came. I managed to avoid most of them by dipping around the bend, but one lodged itself in my shoulder while another hit me in the hip.

It was all I could do to maintain my balance as fiery pain ripped through my body. Some part of my mind managed to catalogue the fact that the bullets had made it through the high-quality infiltration suit I wore under my rags as well as the subdermal sheath that was normally enough to stop gunfire. But even as I recognized those necessary bits of knowledge, I ignored them – because they wouldn’t change my course. I was already committed to escape, and so, knowing that they had weaponry capable of penetrating my defenses was a confirmation I didn’t really need.

Still, if there was a silver lining, it was that the bullets, while being capable of getting through my armor, were incapable of doing much else. My defenses weren’t enough to stop the rounds cold, but the combined barriers of my sheath and infiltration suit had robbed the bulelts of much of their momentum. As a result, what should have been a pair of debilitating wounds was little more than an inconvenience.

But even through my Pain Tolerance, an agonizing one.

Turning the corner gave me a precious second or two to take stock of the situation. There were at least a dozen blue-robed guards in pursuit, and, suck as I was on their home turf, I counted it an unlikely possibility that there weren’t plenty more where they’d come from. On top of that, the guards were far and away more powerful than any random mook had a right to be. The one I’d shot had taken a bullet from Ferdinand II in the face – two of them, in fact – and I knew from experience just how powerfully destructive that could be. But he’d shrugged it off without any problems at all.

And then there was the result of my punch to worry about.

I’m not the strongest person in the world. Certainly, my Constitution is high enough that I an hold my own, but most of my physical training is focused on speed, balance, and agility. And in those areas, I excel. My raw strength lags a bit behind, but it’s still more than respectable.

So, the fact that the guard hadn’t even been fazed by my punch was very concerning. The force I’d brought to bear wasn’t the issue. Rather, it felt like I’d punched a mist-infused wall. Or, belatedly, I realized another possibility.

“Uh, Pick – I think we’ve got a problem,” I said through the Secure Connection. I hadn’t contacted him since beginning my mission, but I thought it was more than appropriate to break the silence. “Like, a big one.”

Only a second passed before he groaned, “What now?”

“I think I might’ve just punched a robot in the face,” I said. It was the only thing that made sense. I’d fought plenty of cyborgs – Ashleigh, the so-called Crimson Terror and Dierdre, Gunther’s number-one henchwoman came to mind – but none had taken a punch like that unaffected. That led me to the conclusion that either I’d met someone with incredibly advanced cybernetics or a robot. Neither was a comforting thought, but I was particularly distressed by the notion that some random guard would be equipped with enhancements that put mine to shame. So, I’d latched onto the more likely scenario – robots.

All of that flitted through my mind in the time it took Patrick to respond. When he did, it was with a resigned sigh. “You promised, Mira,” he said.

Skidding around another corner and barreling through a crowd of dust addicts, I said, “Not my fault.”

“How is it not your fault? You were the one doing the punching, right?” he asked.

I vaulted over another group, hoping that they would act as a barrier for my pursuers. When I landed, I responded, “They pointed guns at me. You know how much I hate that.”

“Why did they…you know what? Never mind,” he said. “What do you want me to do? I can be in the Leviathan’s cockpit in about fifteen minutes.”

“Just hold steady,” I said. “This isn’t over.”

Indeed, the mystery had only deepened. Cults were vile enough on their own, but the idea of an organization that had access to advanced robots that could mimic humanity? That was terrifying.  And interesting. Suddenly, the disappearance of Cyrilla’s brother was a lot more intriguing.

With a moment to spare, I yanked a Mist booster from my arsenal implant and jabbed the needle into my uninjured hip. The moment it discharged its payload with a hiss, I felt a surge of Mist suffuse my body. With that taken care of, I reached the building’s lobby only to find myself facing off against another dozen blue-robed guards.

Which probably should have been a problem. But the fact that these were robots presented an opportunity as well. After all, I had a Ghost deck built specifically for dealing with fully mechanical creatures. And without the use of one hand – I had to have broken every tiny bone in there – using my Ghosts was probably the best option. So, I embraced Misthack and targeted the center-most guard.

Like all the rest, she looked almost identical to the first couple I’d encountered. That, as much as anything else, suggested that they were artificial creatures. The moment I used Misthack, the familiar menu appeared. I selected the appropriate response, broke through the laughable defenses, and chose the intended deck. It all happened in less than a second – my processing speed was unreal, and it had been further enhanced by intense training – but in that time, the guards had already raised their weapons.

I let the Ghost loose as I once again teleported to the side, avoiding another hail of gunfire that instead ripped into the crowd of addicts. They’d barely begun to scream when the Ghost took hold. By that point, I’d infected the other guards as well.

Robot Disposal, despite its mundane name, was a masterpiece. Aside from Time Bomb – and its various incarnations – it was the most complicated Ghost I’d ever written. Against humans – or mostly biological creatures – it was almost entirely useless. It would cause a bit of a headache, but beyond that, it had no effect at all.

But for robots and drones, it was an entirely different story.

One by one, the not-people dropped. Outwardly, there were no signs as to what had happened, but I knew the internals would tell a different tale. While writing the Ghost, I’d practiced its use on hundreds of cheap bots that Patrick had made, and in that time, I’d gotten a very good picture of what it did.

The basic gist of it was pure devastation. In the beginning, I’d been happy to fry a few key circuits, but the latest version wrought absolute havoc on anything mechanical. I still wasn’t sure why it didn’t affect people – it would be an incredible boon if it did – but I wasn’t going to complain too much. After all, I had plenty of other tools at my beck and call if I needed to deal with people.

I was just patting myself on the back when everything went wrong.

Not only had the other guards caught up, but I was distressed – and horrified – to see that my vaunted Ghost, tested hundreds of times and seemingly foolproof – had only a temporary effect on the robots. Were they, in fact, human? The fact that they were already picking themselves up from the floor suggested as much. But I had a niggling feeling that there was more to the story.

After all, I didn’t know everything. In fact, I knew almost nothing about being a {Mistrunner}. It wasn’t as if I had a teacher. Instead, I’d been making my own way after my uncle had died, and I was sure there was an entire galaxy of details of which I was not aware.

Thankfully, Robot Disposal had left the guards in front of me disoriented. Even as they tried to fight through it, I crashed through their ranks and through the building’s front door. The moment I stepped outside, I summoned the Cutter, mounted it, and took off. By that point, the pursuing guards had caught up. As I sped away, I was further distressed to see that those guards – seemingly mundane – were capable of running almost as fast as I could.

Fortunately, the Cutter was leagues ahead in terms of speed, and I quickly left them behind. Over the next few minutes, I rocketed through the streets of Fortune, weaving between the self-driving rickshaws as well as the few other hovercars on the road. I didn’t return to the Leviathan, though. Instead, I made one haphazard turn after another before, almost twenty minutes later, I reached a dark alley in a less-populated part of town. Once there, I dismissed the Cutter, and entered what appeared to be an abandoned building.

Inside, there were a couple of vagrants, but they were far too high to notice me – especially when I’d already wrapped myself in Stealth. It didn’t take me long to find an out-of-the-way room. Inside, every surface – it had once been a domicile, I was sure – was coated in a thick layer of dust, so I felt confident that it was just as abandoned as my first impression suggested.

Reassured that I wouldn’t have some junkie barging in on me at the most inopportune time, I engaged my defenses. First came a holographic display that I hoped would hide me from cursory examination. That, along with my Stealth and Camouflage abilities, would keep me hidden. Then, for good measure, I canceled the Bastion I had left around the Leviathan and activated it to protect my current position.

“Took Bastion down from the ship,” I told Patrick. “Needed it more out here.”

“Understood,” he said, responding through the Secure Connection.

That was one of the things I loved about Patrick. He didn’t complain. Nor did he ask stupid questions – not when it mattered, at least. Instead, he accepted that I knew what I was doing.

That made one of us.

Even in the best of times, my confidence was almost entirely composed of bravado. Certainly, I trusted my abilities as well as my training, but I always felt like I was scrambling and making things up as I went along. And I was constantly discovering just how much I didn’t know.

Case in point, those guards.

Were they robots? Or the humans they appeared to be? Maybe they were just a different sort of cyborg. There was nothing to say that they all had to look like Dierdre, right? Some people probably preferred the flesh-and-blood aesthetic as opposed to the walking tank look.

But I’d gotten a brief look at their systems, and I could say one thing for certain: they didn’t have Nexus implants. Not any kind I’d ever encountered, at least.

“Not that that means anything,” I muttered to myself as I finished setting up my defenses. There was an entire universe of things I’d never seen, which effectively made my ignorance infinite.

I cleared the dust from a patch of floor, then laid down a clean blanket for good measure. Then, I commenced with my least favorite activity: cataloguing and treating my injuries.

Curiously, the hand had gotten the worst of it. It was just further evidence that I needed to use the Hand of God for that kind of thing. Thankfully, though, only two bones were broken. Hopefully, my Constitution, combined with my abilities, would heal it fairly quickly. I’d also picked up a few abrasions I didn’t know about, as well as a third gunshot wound in my upper thigh I hadn’t even noticed.

After undressing, I inspected each wound, then applied foam bandages and a generous dose of antibiotics and anesthetics via one of my higher-quality med-hypos. It was telling that the entire process was mechanical; I’d treated so many injuries over the years that even gunshot wounds were uninteresting.

With that taken care of, I sighed and leaned back against the wall. Once again, I’d cut things incredibly close. And the worst part of it was that I hadn’t even hurt my attackers. They’d shrugged off everything I could bring to bear. Granted, I hadn’t broken out the big guns, but still – it rankled on my pride that I’d left any of them alive.

It wasn’t the first time I’d lost a fight. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if I’d call what happened in the Pillar of Heaven headquarters a fight, per se. It was more like running away. Or a strategic retreat.

Yeah – that sounded so much better.

With my pride assuaged by self-delusion, I started to contemplate how to combat the situation. For the time being, I was safe enough. Hopefully, the guard hadn’t truly seen through Mimic. Usually, that was the case. On the rare occasions when someone had recognized the ability, they hadn’t actually seen my real face. Rather, they just knew the one I was wearing wasn’t the real one.

If that was the case with the Pillar of Heaven guard, then I could keep going with my investigation. If not, then I’d probably have to leave the city. And given that Patrick had barely even begun his project, that wasn’t what I wanted. Besides, the organization – cult, really – had garnered my interest. I didn’t much care about Cyrilla’s brother, but a cult of robots? That was intriguing.

But I had no intention of heading back out until I’d had a chance to adjust some things. As proud of Robot Disposal as I was, I’d fallen into the trap of resting on my laurels. I’d made the mistake of thinking it was perfect just the way it was. And in most cases, it was good enough. I’d just had the misfortune of running into one of the few circumstances where it was woefully ineffective.

“Good is the enemy of great,” my uncle had once told me, and never was that statement truer than when I’d found out that my Ghost was completely incapable of doing its job.

But that was fine. It simply gave me the motivation I needed for improvement. So, with nothing else to do, I dove back into Robot Disposal, searching out impurities in the structure. There weren’t many, but with fresh eyes and proper drive, I could see precisely how inefficient the Ghost really was.

I’d gotten around the problem by simply throwing more power at it, but clearly, that wasn’t always a viable solution. It was like trying to drive in a nail with a sledgehammer. Sure, it could work, but it wasn’t the best way to go about doing the job. So, with that in mind, I went through the Ghost with a fine-toothed comb. And predictably, I found plenty of problems.

Hours passed as I continued to examine Robot Disposal, but my focus never wavered. In fact, I found the entire process oddly comforting – probably because it was a problem I could immediately work toward solving. The same couldn’t be said for the Pillar of Heaven or their robotic guards.

Again, that was probably for the best. If I never encountered enemies that pushed me to my limits, I would never improve. And considering the impending alien invasion, improvement was probably the only way I could hope to survive, let alone thrive. There was an entire universe out there, and I’d barely scratched the surface of what was possible. The whole idea was a bit overwhelming, and I knew the only way to combat that was to continue working towards smaller goals, one step at a time.

For now, I would rewrite my Ghost. Then, I would solve the mystery of the Pillar of Heaven. After that, I would worry about the gnomes. And eventually, I would take on the entire universe.

One step at a time.

I sighed and got to work.