Chapter 13
The helmet fit well. It should; I'd made very few changes to it. The onboard computer was slightly more powerful, and I'd replaced the visor with one far more resistant to acid. The biggest upgrades were the camera and a much better radio.
I moved through the dark confines of an old steel plant. I was sure this was the place; the information I had practically screamed it was.
The camera was the most useful addition. It would let me review missions afterward and identify weaknesses in the suit, problems I could fix before they cost me again.
The night was storming. Heavy rain pushed through the ruined roof, and the lowest parts of the building were already starting to flood.
I stopped and used the new radio scanner, checking for anything already here that could get in the way. I hadn't expected it to find anything, and the dead air confirmed it.
I wasn't sure where Electrocoil was. The forum had been very clear that she was here, but vague about where exactly in the old steel plant she'd set up.
I'd come in through the back door and started searching. The path had taken me downward, and I was fairly confident she wasn't below.
I climbed a metal staircase and emerged onto the mostly open factory floor. If she wasn't down—
I looked up.
There weren't many places someone could hide above the main floor. The only structure up there was a walkway leading to a glass-walled office overlooking the entire factory, a supervisor's office, maybe. It looked tacked onto the far wall as an afterthought.
What made it stand out was the light.
The building had no power.
Someone was in there.
I followed the walkway with my eyes, mapping a route back toward the office. A bolt of lightning cracked across the sky, backlighting the glass enclosure.
A human-shaped silhouette stood there, looking down at me.
Before the sky had fully gone dark again, the silhouette exploded forward, crashing through the glass wall as tendrils of electricity arced off her body.
I barely registered what was happening in time to move. I dove aside, the attack screaming past where I'd been standing.
A jagged, red-hot line was burned into the metal floor where I'd been.
The woman released a pulse of power just before hitting the ground, the energy flaring beneath her like a cushion.
She landed no harder than if she'd hopped in place.
I drew one of my blasters and fired twice.
Both shots missed. Electrocoil didn't even bother turning her black-haired head to track them.
"Oh, tin man," she said, her voice sharp with amusement. "You've made a mistake coming for me."
Her green, malicious eyes flared bright blue as she drew in power.
She swept one arm upward, releasing a wide arc of lightning that tore through the air toward me.
I didn't avoid it.
The electric wave struck my right hip and crawled across my body, ripping through to my left shoulder.
The grounding system I'd built, meant to protect me from my own discharge, saved me from the worst of the shock.
But not the heat.
A white-hot line of pain followed the path of the strike, even as the suit absorbed most of the damage.
I staggered back, the pain catching me off guard. It was hot, like I was fighting a fire-user, not someone throwing electricity.
My HUD flickered and surged too bright.
I avoided the next bolt by pure chance and started firing my blaster.
As my vision cleared, I saw Electrocoil disappearing around a section of tall machinery.
What surprised me wasn't that she was retreating.
It was how.
Tendrils of power extended from her body, latching onto handholds and metal edges, letting her pull herself around the structure with impossible ease.
She looked like a spider made of electricity.
I switched out my blasters, raising one and sweeping the area she'd disappeared behind.
The moment she was out of sight, the light vanished.
She must have cut her power.
I stood alone on the factory floor, swallowed by a sudden silence that felt… malicious.
I tried to watch every walkway at once.
I jerked at every sound. Most of them were lies, the building was old, the rain heavy.
Metal groaned. Water hammered. The whole place was loud in the wrong way.
I heard it before I felt it.
The crack and sizzle of her bolts.
I couldn't stop the cry of pain as it drilled into my back.
I staggered forward, barely catching myself before pitching headlong down the stairwell I'd climbed minutes earlier.
Grinding my teeth through the burning pain, I spun—
—to find nothing but empty space.
"Damn it," I growled.
I turned and ran for the nearest stairwell. By chance, I caught sight of her appearing on the upper walkway.
I stopped long enough to fire several shots upward before she returned fire.
She twirled out of view. I swear I heard her laugh.
I was running up the spiraling staircase when she attacked again.
This time she didn't fire at me. She surged power into the stairwell itself. The metal steps lit up, and the shock tore through me.
"You made a big mistake coming after me," her voice echoed from the darkness. "Maybe your last."
I still couldn't see her.
I reached the top and broke into a sprint along the walkway. Standing still—or slowing down—was proving painful.
She appeared in front of me, suspended in the air, swinging from tendrils of electricity.
I raised my blaster and fired.
She cut the power instantly and dropped beneath the walkway.
A second later, another tendril snapped upward and yanked her back into view—behind me.
I spun, my blaster swinging wide—
—but instead of taking the hit, she blasted us apart with a burst of energy.
Another cry tore out of me as I collapsed to my knees.
I sucked in air, gasping, as her laughter filled the space.
"That's it? Really?" she said, sounding delighted. "Landslide has trouble with me. What chance did you think you had?"
I looked up at her, fighting to steady my breathing and ride out the pain.
Water streamed down her straight black hair. Her small frame steamed where her power crawled over her skin, crackling and snapping like an overcharged battery.
She tilted her head. "What? No quips?"
I can't keep taking hits like this, I thought.
The suit was protecting me from being electrocuted to death, but it was doing almost nothing to stop the heat.
I groaned and put a hand to my chest, the instinctive human urge to cradle an injury cut short by the armor.
"How about this?" she said, sliding her booted foot closer to me. "Kiss it, and I might let you go."
She wiggled it as she spoke.
My anger burned through the pain, washing most of it away.
The pulse emitter was primed.
I lifted my arm and fired.
She reacted the instant I moved—but I must have surprised her by using the hand without the blaster.
I hit her.
I know I did.
My heart nearly skipped a beat when she rolled backward off the walkway—
—until a tendril of power snapped out, caught, and swung her away. Laughing.
"What?" I snarled. "Why didn't that work?"
The frustration boiled over.
"That tickled!" she said as she swung over me and loosed another bolt of power.
I tried to shoot back, but the bolt struck my blaster, and my hand.
I jerked back with a cry of pain as she landed in front of me, wrapped in an aura of crackling energy.
But my attention snapped to something else.
My blaster was shaking.
It glowed red-hot, hairline cracks racing across its surface. I knew what was about to happen an instant before it did.
I threw it, not at her, just away.
It exploded with a small but violent boom beside the walkway we'd both been standing on.
I had just enough awareness left to fully experience the impact as I was hurled into the ground. Hard.
I tumbled until I hit something solid enough to stop me.
For a few seconds, I couldn't move.
When I finally did, it was slow. Painful. I pushed myself up to my knees and looked around.
We were outside.
A power substation.
I looked up at the outer wall of the steel plant. Fire burned around the shattered remains of a large window.
The pieces clicked together.
Her attack had overloaded my blaster.
I stared at the damage—the flames, the ruined equipment. The power the suncore produced was still a mystery.
And I'd just learned another way it could go very wrong.
The real danger snapped back into focus.
I forced myself upright, movement slowed by pain.
Where'd she go?
I scanned the substation. Debris and rainwater pooled beneath humming machinery, electricity thrumming through the heavy overhead lines.
This was not a safe place to stand still.
Movement caught my eye.
Slowly, a bloodied woman pulled herself up from a pile of wreckage.
"You…" she spat, blood flecking her lips as she wobbled on her feet. "You just volunteered to be the object example of what happens when you cross me."
Her eyes burned brighter—blue bleaching toward white as her power surged.
I guessed the explosion had surprised her too.
Tendrils of electricity burst from her body and lashed outward, anchoring into the transformers around us.
She hauled herself into the air.
Her left arm hung wrong, clearly broken, and her left leg didn't look much better.
I didn't know what she was planning.
But I wasn't going to stand there and watch.
I drew my remaining blaster and fired.
She yanked herself out of the line of fire and ducked behind one of the transformers.
That's when I noticed the tendrils gripping the transformers were getting thicker—
—and less stable.
Bolts of electricity began arcing wildly from each transformer, throwing harsh blue light that mixed with the red glow of the fire slowly consuming the steel plant.
Perfect, I thought grimly as I looked around. The transformers were discharging power at random intervals and in random directions. Worse, several of them were already starting to glow red.
I felt like I was standing in the middle of a giant bomb.
I had to do something. I had to end this quickly.
So I charged forward.
Unlike inside the factory, there weren't many places to hide. I could track her movements as she darted between and behind the transformers—
—still taking shots at me, never letting up.
I chased her, firing whenever I had a clear shot.
I had to stop her. I had no desire to be ground zero.
As I rounded another corner, again a second too slow, I looked up and saw one of her tendrils latch onto the top of a transformer.
I took a chance and fired.
The impact tore the tendril free, ripping a chunk of the transformer loose with it.
I heard her surprised cry as she hit the ground.
I rounded the corner and found her struggling to get back up and fired again.
My first bolt missed.
I never saw where the second one went.
A few rows over, a transformer exploded.
The blast hurled me through the air, ending in another bone-jarring crash.
I groaned, clutching my left shoulder. I could feel something tear where flesh met prosthetic.
I shook myself and forced my way back up—
—just in time to be hit by one of the discharges. I felt it rip through my suit.
My HUD flickered, then fully rebooted. When I stood again, all my low-light enhancements were gone.
It didn't matter. The fire had spread enough now, casting erratic, twitching light across everything.
Chaos.
I heard sirens in the distance.
I looked up at the night sky, already stained red by the rapidly growing fire.
It would have taken a miracle for all of this to go unnoticed.
I didn't have that kind of luck.
I had to finish this.
I turned back just in time to take a tendril to the gut.
The impact drove the air from my lungs as I was slammed to the ground. Before I could recover, a steady stream of electricity poured into me.
I screamed.
I don't know how long it lasted.
Seconds. Minutes. Years.
The pain became everything.
Eventually, it stopped.
My vision cleared just enough for me to look up at Electrocoil. She was barely holding herself together, bloodied, unsteady, half her hair burned away. One eye had gone dark.
She was breathing hard.
"I will fucking end you," she said with unrestrained rage shaking out of her.
Then she turned the power back on.
I don't know how long it went on.
I only knew it hurt.
Then there was another boom—
and everything went dark.
I came to slowly, face down in some weeds, the world returning one sense at a time.
I blinked several times until the weeds came into focus. The sound of sirens rushed back into my world, like someone had unmuted reality.
There wasn't even enough left in me to jolt upright when the adrenaline followed.
It took what felt like a monumental effort just to roll onto my side, then into a sitting position.
How was I going to keep fighting?
As I took in my surroundings, a few things became clear.
First, I was in a small, unused patch of scrub next to what was left of the substation.
Second, the entire area was on fire.
Flames rolled toward the scrub where I'd landed. From where I sat, I couldn't see a single direction that wasn't burning.
I got up slowly. I wished there was a wall or something solid to brace against, but there wasn't.
I struggled to my feet anyway.
That was when I finally registered the shouting.
It didn't take long to spot firefighters running through the smoke, trying to contain the blaze. And if firefighters were here, then the police were too.
And probably heroes.
But where was Electrocoil? Why hadn't she finished me off?
I couldn't get those answers now, or here.
I turned and, after taking a second to get my bearings, headed toward where I'd left the van. I moved through the thinner patches of fire, avoiding the worst of the flames, keeping my head down and hoping I hadn't been seen.
I didn't make it far before I spotted an ambulance on the road ahead, its rear doors open as paramedics loaded a stretcher inside.
A white sheet covered the body.
One recognizable boot stuck out from beneath it.
That answered that.
I pushed through the fire. I couldn't linger. The suit would protect me from the flames, but it had a very limited tolerance for this kind of heat. If I wasn't fast, I'd cook.
Navigation was getting harder. Everything looked the same when it was all burning. I was just starting to worry I'd gotten turned around—and the heat was becoming a real problem—
—when I heard the first impacts.
I didn't feel them at first.
Then the scattered hits became a torrent.
My world of fire turned into water.
I stepped out of the flames and into the spray, facing a line of firefighters. They spotted me almost immediately and swung the hoses away.
"Fuck."
I'd really hoped to avoid people.
The firefighters were still spraying the blaze with their hoses, pointing at me and talking among themselves as I approached. I'd hidden the van in another warehouse, behind where they'd parked the firetrucks.
As I closed in, I decided to just walk straight through the middle of them and pretend no one was there.
As I passed, I caught more of what they were saying.
"That's definitely not Techshield—that's the Grey Knight."
"Did he do this?"
"Who'd he kill now?"
They didn't try to stop me, but as I moved past them my scanner finally picked up a radio transmission.
"Truck Eight to Captain… we just had Grey Knight walk out of the fire on the south side."
"The guy from the news?" came the reply. "Is he threatening any of you? Stay away from him."
"No, sir. He's just walking past us."
"Fuck it. Let him go. I'll tell the police he's here."
That was exactly what I'd been worried about. A call to the police would go straight to the FOH next.
I picked up the pace and disappeared into the darkness of the warehouses.
I reached the van and started stripping off the armor. As soon as it came loose, I felt my skin peel. It felt like my entire body was sunburned.
I guess it kind of was.
I'd parked the van mixed in with other abandoned trucks. I usually tried to hide it, tuck it away somewhere out of sight.
That paid off.
Only a few seconds after I dropped into the driver's seat, a car rolled past.
My heart stopped. I watched it go by without taking a single breath. It moved slowly, unhurried, until it vanished behind a wall.
"Shit."
I finally let out the breath and dropped my head forward.
"Now what?"