Acting Like Lucy
Inmate number 26644. Elena Blavatsky.
As her looks and her name made plain, "she" had been born in Russia. But her birthplace did not matter, and neither did the genes she had inherited. What mattered was the concept that defined her.
Ten inmates closing in. About three teams, give or take. And those unidentified monsters... fewer of them are coming for us than I expected. Drawn by the commotion at the warehouse, most likely.
There is a stereotype that Westerners cannot see well in the dark. It did not apply to her in the slightest. Not because she had inherited excellent genes, and not because she wore high-performance implant eyes. If anything, her body was as untouched as any Purist's. In fact, she had never once had a blade taken to her flesh since the day she was born. No—there had never even been a being capable of taking a blade to her.
"There they are! That goddamn Super Rookie and his partner!"
"Get them! Tear those bastards limb from limb and strip their packs clean!"
"Don't touch the little one. Don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but as long as it tastes good, who cares. Been a while since I had some fun. Heh heh."
Vile garbage, their filth cutting clean through the slap of the waves. An ordinary person would never have parsed a word of it through the overlapping noise, but her hearing—and her own noise-cancellation—were astonishingly sharp. She could pluck the words she needed from between layers of static as if running a filter, and amplify any voice she chose. Of course she could. Which was why she could not help but be disappointed.
The fact that the ones chasing them were this pathetic felt like watching the obvious twist ending of a B-movie with neither fun nor feeling in it.
In Russia, if you wanted to keep your life—or die cleanly—the one thing you could not do was disappoint the other party. Whether for good or for ill, you had to satisfy them. Only then would you receive a corresponding price. But these things charging in like single-celled organisms reeked of a stench you would not even find at the bottom of a Russian gutter. It was the stench that clung to truly pathetic beasts.
Livestock that don't even qualify as human. I won't need to borrow his hands for this.
Asking for help here would be admitting she was even lower than those animals. That was unacceptable. She was currently operating under the alias her leader had given her—Lucy—and she decided to act like Lucy. The feeling of a diligent teammate who gave everything her best and burdened her leader as little as possible.
"I'll take this one fiiiirst!"
An opponent hurled a throwing dagger at her arm with everything he had. Lucy twisted her shoulder a fraction and slipped it with room to spare. She could track incoming bullets with her eyes and react. A dagger flung at random was enough to make her yawn. And since she had already twisted her shoulder, she released the string of the compound bow she had drawn in advance.
The arrow tore the air with a faint whistle and punched clean through the man's skull. The force was so tremendous it put a neat wind-hole through the human body's most durable structure—the cranium.
"That's one."
The leader was still focused on lockpicking the lighthouse door. Dual security, apparently—it was taking longer than expected. Which meant she could cut loose.
CLANG!
This time it was not a throwing dagger. A hand axe came flying. Lucy batted it up with the metal riser of her compound bow, then hopped lightly and snatched the spinning axe out of the air.
The inmate who had closed the gap in that brief window seemed certain of victory now that she could no longer shoot. A greasy smile tugged at his eyes. The instant he stretched his arm to swing his blade, Lucy jammed the bow's riser into the crook of his arm and crushed down. An ordinary person's strength could not have managed it. For her, it was nothing.
"Wha—?!"
"This is what happens when you don't have an eye for people."
There is a saying that judging someone by appearance alone makes you the lowest of amateurs. Naturally, he had assumed her strength and reaction speed would be far inferior, and he had charged in like an idiot. He never even got to swing. He lost the strength contest he had been so confident about and locked up in an awkward stance.
Lucy brought the hand axe down without hesitation on the exposed nape of a man who could neither swing nor run.
CRACK!
First the tough neck muscle. Then the taut carotid. Last, the hard cervical vertebrae, sheared through in sequence. He never even screamed. He sprayed blood into the air and said goodbye to his own body.
Eight left.
The inmates who had already seen blood were worked into a frenzy, charging her with even more passion. One came with a short spear. Another wore a buckler. Each meant to ruin her in his own way. There was something almost funny about fighting by the most primitive methods in the cutting-edge 2040s—but nobody here was smiling. The only one who got to wear a triumphant grin was the last one standing.
"Die!"
"If your skill matched that big mouth, this would have been so much nicer."
She slipped the first inmate's machete with a few backsteps, then flicked a fallen throwing dagger up with her toe. Then she swung the still-bloody hand axe hard enough to fling a spray of blood. Droplets hit the goggles of a gas mask. The man flinched; his attack went wide and his stance broke.
Making a mistake at that range was a tacit agreement that you would not complain even if you died. Lucy diligently granted him what he wanted.
THUNK!
She slipped past his side, drove the dagger into his temple, and used the collapsing corpse as a springboard to leap. The buckler-bearer tilted his head to track her. The spearman angled his point upward. Lucy yanked a club from her waist and swung with everything she had.
The short spear ricocheted hard to the side, opening a gap. The buckler-bearer moved to fill it with his blade. Too late. Lucy yanked the tripwire tangled around the tip of her glove. The compound bow lying on the ground came whipping in and smashed the buckler-bearer's legs out from under him.
"What the—?!"
"You should have noticed the moment I dropped the bow so fast."
There had been enough distance. A quick reload and she could have put two more arrows in them. Instead she had stopped shooting without hesitation and let them close. To make them drop their guard. If you could not even read a play that simple, you did not have the minimum qualifications to stay alive.
CRUNCH!
She landed by stomping the fallen man's face flat, then swung the club in the same motion and shattered the spearman's wrist.
"AAAAAGH! My hand! You bitch!"
A spear a meter or two long was still weak in extreme close quarters unless you were an expert. A spearman who had already missed his opening attack would never win a melee. Lucy fed the groaning man a clean spinning back-kick and took his jaw off. A hard attack for someone as short as she was—but fortunately, she had an excellent stepping stone.
Six left.
WHIIING! WHIIING!
Steel pellets ripped the air in rapid succession, entering her field of view. As she had said—if she could see it, she could react even to a bullet. Steel pellets were nothing.
"I didn't bother reacting last time because it seemed like you missed on purpose. Looks like you've changed your mind?"
"You hit harder than you look. How many illegal implants are you packing in that tiny body?"
While another four-man team of inmates tangled with the monsters that had followed them, an Orange walked slowly toward her and asked. The last one was out of sight. He had either moved elsewhere first, or he was lining her up from somewhere she could not see.
The question was so bizarrely stupid she almost laughed out loud. Of course she did. She had never put an implant in her body—illegal or otherwise. Because her body occupied a realm that no artificial implant could ever approach.
"Everyone wonders at first. How a body this small puts out that kind of strength and reaction speed. Why I never get tired. The truth is I just worked as hard as anyone else. The method was just a little more fucked up."
She had not inherited particularly good genes. She had not received any extraordinary education. But from the moment she was born, she had been half-forced to put in effort for nearly ten years inside an incubator blended with every kind of drug. The result had sublimated the human being called Elena Blavatsky into the concept of a superhuman.
"...So the real monster was somewhere else. No wonder your inmate number sits so high when you're not even an Orange."
"So. If you're going to run, now's your only chance."
"Bullshit. Even if I ran my ass off, you'd catch me in a minute."
"Wouldn't even take ten seconds."
The Orange with the modified slingshot seemed to measure the distance between them, then pulled four different steel pellets from his jacket pocket and slotted them between his fingers. A sharp-tipped bolt-type pellet. A steel ball of an oddly bright color. One so black it seemed to drink every scrap of light. And last, a pellet webbed with cracks like a spider's silk.
"My partner's got some business with your partner. And I've got business with you."
"Lucky me. I can clear two unscheduled appointments today."
"You arrogant... little—!"
WHIIING!
To a third party, it would have been too fast to even register what had happened. The slingshot snapped. The loaded pellet was the one webbed with cracks. The instant it passed the slingshot's metal frame, Lucy saw it bloom into a spray of shrapnel like a shotgun blast.
A simple strategy: pin her feet with unavoidable fragments, then reload and fire in the opening. Simple—but reliable. Then she just would not dodge.
Lucy snatched the buckler from the wrist of the inmate lying face-down at her feet, his face caved in, and kicked it hard into the air. The whole point of a scattershot was securing the minimum distance for the fragments to spread. Too close to the target and it was just a slightly harder clump of shrapnel. Using that principle, she caught most of the fragments on the buckler, then snatched up the short spear and charged. For someone with her reach, even a slightly longer weapon was better.
He seemed to read her intent. He backstepped hard to open the distance, reloaded, and fired. Next came the pitch-black pellet. But the target was not Lucy. It was the ground at her feet.
So the goal is to lock down an already-wounded ankle and strip the mobility completely.
A cheap trick—but a textbook cheap trick. Close enough to a technique. If it had not been her, she would have dodged the shrapnel pellet only to have her mobility stolen for nothing, reduced to a living target.
Lucy flicked the black pellet aiming at her feet with the butt of the spear. It shattered with surprising ease. As expected—the moment it took even a light impact, it burst and sprayed something sticky, like adhesive, in every direction.
"You thought that was just to pin your ankle?"
He muttered to himself and fired the next load—the bright pellet—in rapid succession. Again, not at her. At the ground.
Incendiary!
So it was not just for binding feet. It was also for burning the bound target alive. Lucy immediately flung the spear away and threw her own body in the opposite direction. The combustible black adhesive scattered around her ignited in an instant, radiating tremendous heat.
"And after a dodge that desperate, even a physical freak like you can't move easily. This—this is the true completion of the hunt."
She had thrown herself so hard to evade that following up was difficult. He lined up the last round—the sharp-tipped killing bolt. Wound the target. Bind the ankle. Burn them alive. And even if they broke every previous step, they still ended up in the kill zone of the final bolt. That was the aesthetic—and the creed—of an Orange who hunted humans in the Dark Zone with nothing but a modified slingshot.
"Now di—!"
THUNK!
"...Huh?"
The Orange stared, unable to believe it, at the burning short spear lodged diagonally in his side. Tripwire was bound around the shaft, where the black adhesive had not touched, and she was drawing it taut. Because she had thrown the spear the other way and rolled hard, the Orange who had stepped into the space between had already become excellent prey inside an excellent trap.
"That's why I said—if the other person gives up a weapon too easily, you start by being suspicious."
With strength no one would believe came from that slight frame, Lucy yanked the tripwire in one pull and drove the spear even deeper into his body. Having finished him for certain, she regulated her breathing lightly and looked back.
By now her leader, stunned by her unexpected skill, would be overflowing with emotion, pelting her with questions...
"What? Where'd he go?"
The lighthouse door was already open. The leader was gone. All that remained was a single Glow Stick, shining with fluorescent light, as if to say: when you're done, come up on your own.