Arkadia
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Arkadia
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Chapter One: Mnemosyne
“Thirty Seconds”
Kyon-Tae turned around. She crossed her arms, signaling to the rest of her team to ready up. Practice hands danced across her rifle. The charging handle was pulled back, only by two centimeters, to confirm that her gun was loaded. The entire world around her immediately brightened, as her helmet activated night mode. Target this time? Ishida. High ranking Yakuza member who was smuggling large amounts of Nepenthe through the docks. Enough where they had hired a full unit of Old War Soldiers. These were exceptionally dangerous adversaries. Despite pushing the age of 70, these mercenaries had been in their prosthetics for more than forty years. The tech might be old. But practice and familiarity. Those were dangerous.
The next hand signals that went up, Kyon-Tae pointed to her neck. Stims. Whatever the guys had formulated at Asclepius Pharmaceutics worked well. The drugs worked. It kept her focused. The hairs on her skin stood on their ends. A tingling sensation spread from her carotid arteries, through her body, and down to her farthest extremities. Her pupils dilated. The world looked more….sharper. Clearer. It was if someone had slowed down time itself. Needless to say despite the dangers of the job, she relished in the feeling of Stims.
“Katie,” the medic on the team supervising them started, “You’re only at half dose. .”
“Must be a clog in the valve,” she shouted back over the comms. In over sixty combat missions since the drug was introduced, this was the first time that she encountered a slow feed. Maybe the last time she flushed the drug injection site, she didn’t use enough solvent. It didn’t matter at this point. It was five seconds to drop and she wasn’t going to call off the op for something like this. Kyon-Tae quickly flashed to the rest of her team to begin the drop.
Freefall. Her heart lurched. Despite hundreds of jumps, the primal fear of falling never goes away. Only that the training takes over as her body oriented. Slam. As her legs caved under the shock of sudden impact, crumple zones mounted on her knees took the brunt of the load and ejected off of her knees. She heard three more slams behind her. Everyone had landed on target.
“Good Hunting,” the pilot radioed in.
Despite the operation at hand, she couldn’t help but notice how beautiful the city was at the height of the towers. Maybe this was just the stimulants talking.
“Ramirez, Jam all communication within a one mile radius, get a location on anyone who talks. Rest of you, set up the rappel. We’re going to go in hard.”
Despite the operation at hand, she couldn’t help but notice how beautiful the city was at the height of the towers. Maybe this was just the stimulants talking. Regardless, the mission came before any sort of sightseeing. The optic camouflage switched on, turning the otherwise black clad grim reaper into an odd distortion of the world.
Cole racked the charging handle on his rifle. A fresh 6.5 Remington round peeked at him from the chamber. Good. The signal to jump came, and Cole obliged. He’d love to have an elegant plan for hitting the ground silently.
Well, he didn’t. Specs on his tissue upgrade say that they’re capable of withstanding forces greater than his terminal velocity. He leapt from the aircraft same as everyone else, and bent his knees. During the drop, Cole checked and rechecked his software, and loaded mission parameters. He searched the document, and found what he needed.
“LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED.”
Good. These Yakuza didn’t stand a chance.
Cole hits the ground. It’s not comfortable, but his knees held, and ligament remained untorn.
He activated the active camouflage on his suit, and became little more than a shimmer.
The world lit up, and Ramirez phased out of reality. The camo cells activated and bent light around him, assisted by processing units that actively scanned his surroundings to give him near invisibility. He was a ghost, his face covered by a hood, not even the cool touch of the night wind could reach him. That’s how he liked it. His job was to be a curse; an unseen punishment laid upon the wicked. He took a knee. Carbon steel wrapped in tactical gear and padded with dampening pads touched the roof of the building as a map showing a one mile radius around them popped up on Leon’s mixed reality HUD. Neon veins pulsed through the heart of the city, connected to buildings and mega structures that made up the skyline of the Baltimore docks.
“May death watch over any fool that needs to call emergency services tonight,” Leon shadowed keystrokes with his digits, hijacking the tower of the building to send out a jamming signal that would redirect all calls in a one mile radius back to the server pack on Leon’s back.
“Good to go, commander,” leon informed K.T. as blips began to appear on his HUD, indicating all the calls trying to go out from the tower, multiple calls going out from different levels in the building.”
Leon stood and began setting his rappel equipment by the edge of the roof, taking a moment to give a short prayer to the saint of death.
Death arrives tonight
a final breath in summer
To home they return
The sub machine gun to Leon’s side was brought to the front, quickly inspected and readied, he eagerly waited for the signal to begin the assault.
Sai did his final equipment check as the stimulant surged into his veins the call to deploy had gone out and he had follow his teammates off the bird. It wasn’t his first rodeo, but it still hurt even with all his augmentation and the stimulant. For one, his body heavier and denser compared to his colleagues, and that wasn’t counting the drone tied to his back! As a result his landing made quite a dent even with dampeners. The slight stinging feeling he felt when he landed were like small needle pricks that sent a shock from the nerves from his legs all the way to his head. Annoyed the hell out of him.
“I hate that Asclepius crap they keep giving us K. Damn dosage they give barely works on a man my size,” Sai said as he stood up and did quick weapons check again as he began preparing his rappel gear. “Last thing I need is my heavy ass from dropping cause of all this weight,” as he strapped himself with the rappel gear securely.
“Just say the word Boss Lady.”
“Sai, Cole, you’re coming down with me. Ramirez, hold here. Let’s go. Keep it quiet.”
Three faintly odd optical anomalies slowly rappelled down the building, careful not to bump into anything or tap on the windows to make any noise that would draw any attention to the outside. As they finally dropped down to the sixteenth floor, Kyon-Tae took a quick scan on who was inside.
It was Ishida and two of his Old War body guards. Tough bastards. There were legends of these soldiers who continued to fight even despite having holes blown into their head. Quirks from the old cyberization process and the ghosts that seemed to live in the base of the cyberbrain. It is said that the only way to incapacitate some of these veterans was via a thermal lance severing their spinal cord. Cut of all the signal, so to speak. Regardless, the smart thing to do was to capitalize on the moment of surprise. Ishida and his Bodyguards knew someone was up. Probably from the hard landing that they had just done. But so far, they were looking at the doorway.
Without saying a word, she gestured to her two other teammates. One hand pointed to the small charge she kept on her belt and then pointed to three other areas on the window. Then she gestured to Cole and pointed to her head, signaling that he was to be tasked with taking out Ishida. Next she turned to Sai, pointed to her gun and then pointed to the right hand side of the room. Indicating that he was tasked to take out one of the body guards. Immediately, she then pointed to the neck to indicate that he should target specifically the spinal column. You didn’t want to take a chance with these sorts. They were to be taken down hard and with as much firepower as possible.
Once she had set her charge, she motioned towards the thermal lance that was strapped to the small of her back. She looked to confirm that the other two had set up their charges as ordered and held up three fingers. On zero, they would leap away from the glass and initiate breach.
Sai quickly sighted his three targets he was given and nodded to acknowledge Katie’s instructions. He quickly and carefully prepared his breaching charge on the window. A swift and decisive action to take out these Old War boys that he knew from reputation. Summed up to tough and dangerous from it. His thumb flicked a switch to sync his Smartlink systems from his cybereyes to his rifle to his targets, enable flare compensation and cyberear dampening system to see through the breach charge explosion. With his free hand he singled he was ready.
His breathing became steady, muscles tensed and with his cybereye on the reticle. Sai was ready to put some old dogs down.
Cole slid down the side of the building, held up by Paracord and willpower. Once they reached the window, Katie began issuing instructions to him silently.
Breach. Kill Ishida. Aim for the base of the skull. Spinal column.
Easy enough. The moment he understood, he obliged. He slowly and gently placed his charge on the glass, removed the safety pin, locked in his target, and prepared to breach.
Cole flushed any thought of hesitation from his mind.
He was calm, he was cool, and he was ready.
He nodded.
The heat wave passed over Kyon-Tae’s body as she entered through the shattered glass. All three figures turned towards the window. Ishida immediately dived to the ground. The two body guards immediately, almost in unison, reached for their side arm strapped to their hip. Undeterred by the optic camouflage, their eyes locked onto the visual distortion that shielded their bodies. But it was too slow.
Before the bodyguard could center the pistol, Kyon-Tae’s knees had already contacted square in his chest. The thermal lance lit up, blazing orange, temporarily overloading her night vision sensors. It was no matter, at this speed and distance her training had taken over. The momentum of a 400 pound body swinging on a pendulum was more than enough to knock the fully prosthetic old war vet onto the ground. One shot from his pistol went awry, harmlessly knocking out one of the overhead lights. And before his body hit the ground, Kyon-Tae had already driven the thermal lance down into the throat and through the spinal column of the bodyguard.
Despite the fully replaced body and obsolete facial musculo modules, the face still contorted to show expression. It wasn’t an expression of fear. It was an expression of steel cold determination. As if the brain hadn’t fully registered all that had happened. Brain stem instincts, Kyon-Tae called it. Sign of someone who had so much experience that even from the edge of death, they still thought about fighting back.
With her target down, she quickly drew her rifle and scanned the area. She quickly snapped to her two teammates, making sure that they had completed their objective. Of course they did, they were well trained SCAR Operators under her leadership. She would have made sure they were up to the task or ejected from the team.
Sai launched himself away from the glass as it exploded. His dampeners did their job at reducing the effects of the explosion’s boom and flash. As momentum carried him back in, he fired four quick bursts to each of the three targets he was assigned with each burst carefully calculated with use of his Smartlink system with each burst distorting the light of the optic camo. Two to the head & two the chest. While the strategy took down two them, with rather explosive and messy results of exploding heads, the third one was taken out with a lot more prejudice. That one old dog didn’t go down quietly. By the time that one raised his pistol, Sai shot another four-round burst that hit their hand going across, impacting the throat area and head once again, blowing the War Dog’s jaw right off and was still standing after all that damage. Albeit in a disoriented state.
Sai’s breathing remained steady through out as he pressed the trigger to his rifle yet again for another four-round burst that finally knocked the War Dog off his feet. Sai took steady aim once again as the War Dog struggled to sit upright was met with another four-round burst, but this time it was squarely aimed at the neck area. The concentrated fire to that area severed the head right off the body. Once done, Sai signaled his hand with three fingers out signifying his targets were eliminated towards Katie. His hand signal changed as if to ask if they were going to continue through the area or jump out the window to extract.
Cole was given one target. The only one in the room without a drawn weapon.
Cole pushed off the glass, and detonated his charge in sync with the rest. His eyes adjusted and he saw his target perfectly. One burst of rounds put him off balance, another put him on the ground. As a stray bit of viscera flew onto him from his left, Cole continued forward until Ishida’s arms stopped trying fruitlessly to shield him frim the oncoming torrent and fell limp.
Cole fired two more rounds for good measure and swapped the half-empty magazine for a new one out of his rig, then looked to his superior for instructions.
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