“Are you seeing any movement from security, Chiffon?” Kat asked urgently, left hand on the bleeding hole in her sternum as she rolled off of the dead samurai.

“I could barely see them move,” the Haupt guard babbled.

“Nothing at the moment,” Whippoorwill replied, her voice clipped, “but give me a second. There aren’t any public alarms, but that doesn’t mean the Phantoms aren’t preparing a response team on a private circuit right now.”

“One minute she was jumping over the edge,” the infiltrator continued, “the next it was a flash of color and she was throwing the guard across the room.”

“I think we’re good,” Whip said with a sigh. “I’m not seeing any other movement on this or the third floor. If they’re aware of our presence, they aren’t letting on.”

“Then they circled each other for maybe a second and she was bouncing him off of the ceiling before I saw either of them move.” The guard was speaking rapidly, his words almost blurring together.

“Yes,” Hestia noted dryly. “We were all here when it happened. It was a very impressive display, made even moreso by the fact that I believe the man she just killed was Lancelot. A rather impressive name for a rather middling samurai, but I suppose he wanted everyone to know that he was a swordsman.”

“Wait,” the guard blurted out. “That guy was named? She tossed him around like a sack of potatoes, and he was a named samurai?”

“I said his name, didn't I?” Hestia asked bitingly. “Lancelot wasn’t particularly impressive by the standards of named samurai, but he still isn’t someone I would want to deal with up close. Of course, it’s hardly surprising for Erinyes to dismantle him that quickly.”

Kat tuned their conversation out, quietly mouthing the words to Cure Wounds. The hand pressed against the bleeding wound glowed gold for a second, and a dozen mana later it closed up, leaving nothing more than pink skin and a button-sized hole in her infiltration suit.

“Enough gossip,” she said, standing up. “We need to get back into the stairwell. The longer we stand around, the more we’re asking to have another little altercation.”

The Haupt guard shut up instantly, and Kat swore she could feel a smug smirk from Hestia through the older woman’s infiltration mask.

About thirty seconds later, they were continuing down the stairs, stopping at a landing a floor down for Whippoorwill to disable the final sonic detection network. As soon as Kat saw her girlfriend give the thumbs up, she spoke up again.

“I don’t suppose they have Jasper on the ground floor?”

Whip cocked her head to the side for a second before shaking it in the negative.

“It’s a maze of defenses. Corridors filled with portholes for defenders. Mechanical gun turrets behind hidden panels, mines concealed under the floor, and spigots hooked up to a massive tank of nerve gas. This place is a fortress, Erinyes. We need to let Merrimack know what he’s walking into before he sticks his neck into a trap.”

“Download the schematics,” Kat replied, shifting her gaze toward where the stairs continued downward into the power plant’s basement.

“Wait,” Whip said, raising a hand to stop her. “Most of these systems are new, installed in the last week. I think the Silver Phantoms expected an assault. This entire setup looks like it’s designed to bleed an attacker with superior forces dry.”

A chill went down Kat’s spine.

“So we shouldn’t be surprised if the basement has an even more imposing welcoming party,” she observed evenly.

Whippoorwill shrugged.

Kat looked down the staircase a second time. The cement steps and bare steel railing stretched down without end, black and white in her nightvision. It looked like something out of a cheap entertainment channel horror movie, a fact that did little to calm her racing heart.

“Oh well,” Hestia replied. “I suppose we have to fall back on the old street samurai saying about traps.”

Kat cocked her head to the side, silently urging the older woman to finish her thought.

“Sometimes,” Hestia continued, “the best way to disarm them is to shove a stick in and trigger them. Then it’s just a matter of shooting whoever shows up to clean the mess in their face. Very simple and straightforward.”

A quiet chuckle tore its way from Kat’s throat as she rolled her eyes. The older samurai’s advice might not have been the most prudent, but it went a long way to break the tension growing in the dark stairwell.

“I think we should try to avoid setting any traps off Chiffon,” Kat responded dryly. “But Hestia’s point is well taken. Waiting here forever won’t lead to anything positive. Jasper’s waiting for us.”

She began walking down the steps, stopping at the landing above the door into the basement. Whippoorwill halted a half step behind, her body going stiff as her mind retreated into the wireless network as she started dissecting the Silver Phantoms’ security systems.

“Wait,” Whip yelped, practically jumping. “How did that-”

Lights flashed on up and down the stairwell, a deep strobing red. Kat’s gaze jerked to Whippoorwill just as siren began screaming, filling every floor of the complex with loud warbling shrieks.

“They have a full AI running on an analogue system down there,” Whippoorwill yelled, barely audible over the screeching klaxon. “I might be able to punch through their defenses, but it will take time. Until then, we’re about to get swarmed with Phantoms.”

“Jasmine!” Kat yelled. “Call in Merrimack and send him the schematics for the first floor. We’re done with stealth. It’s time for us to make some noise.”

“As for everyone else-” She continued only for Hestia to cut her off.

“Don’t worry darling, if nothing else i know how to make an entrance”

The older samurai raised both arms. Small spheres of blueish flame popped into existence around her, flowing toward her body where they traveled up toward her hands and began circling her wrists like incredibly dangerous bracelets.

Then she lowered her arms, pointing both of them at the steel door below them. Twin beams of fire blasted downward, exploding against the metal and concrete and shaking the entire stairwell.

Kat jumped over the railing before the afterimages of the explosion had completely disappeared, landing amidst twisted steel and burning chunks of concrete and asphalt. Four unmoving bodies lay contorted and unmoving in the wreckage.

She swung her railgun back and forth tracking the snub nosed weapon over the corpses before jogging into the hallway they had been defending, Shadow slipping into place over her and hiding her from casual observation.

Seconds later the three geists followed her down, weapons at their shoulders as their barrels scanned back and forth, looking for threats. They passed her, moving with quick practiced movements as one operative would drop to a knee and cover the other two as the leapfrogged their way down the corridor. Distantly, Kat heard shouts over the ever present alarm, a sure sign that the situation was about to get exciting.

Whippoorwill and the two Haupt soldiers entered the hallway next. One of the guards was shaking his head muttering “Oh my God” over and over again to himself.

The other guard sighed. “Shut up Frank, we’re in the middle of an op with a blaring siren. Get your head in the game.”

Hestia appeared in the wreckage of the doorway, looking around once and nodding in satisfaction. Up ahead, Kat heard the crack of railgun flechettes breaking the sound barrier as the geists opened fire at something.

“Move down the hallway a bit,” the older samurai said matter of factly. “I’ll collapse the stairwell so they don’t send any reinforcements down. That way, once we grab the elevator we should be able to hold out until the cavalry arrives.”

Kat barely registered what Hestia said, instead jogging to catch up with Whippoorwill and the geists. She barely made it a dozen steps before an explosion shook the entire complex, followed an eyeblink later by a wall of hot air that practically knocked her off of her feet.

She stumbled forward a step or two before looking back at the rest of the team. Hestia stood smugly in the doorway, hands on her hips and breathing heavily. Beyond her, the stairwell had simply ceased to exist. The cement walls lining the metal stars had collapsed inward, leaving nothing but a burning pile of steel, rock and asphalt where their entrance had been.

“I hope we don’t need to retreat,” Kat remarked dryly. “I doubt we’ll be able to get anywhere with that mess.”

“Just as Hernán Cortés burned his ships to motivate his men,” Hestia replied, bowing as she swirled a hand theatrically, “I have burned our route of escape. Not only can we not be attacked from the rear, our only path is forward.”

“You.” She pointed at Frank, the Haupt soldier that had been gawking at the previous destruction. “Tell Erinyes that you feel more motivated.”

“The asphalt is on fire,” he replied with an audible gulp. “Asphalt doesn’t burn. How in the name of all that is holy is the asphalt on fire?”Stolen novel; please report.

Gunfire from down the hallway followed shortly thereafter by the crack of railgun flechettes tugged at Kat’s attention.

“I don’t know,” Hestia responded, unperturbed. “Magic?”

“On a related note,” she continued. “Fire Blast is an incredibly powerful ability, but it uses a lot of mana. More specifically, I am currently out of mana so you will have to handle whatever that unpleasantness is without me.”

Hestia waved vaguely in the general direction of the gunfight further down the corridor. Kat rolled her eyes inside of her mask, but she didn’t bother with wasting any energy on arguing with the samurai. As blase as Hestia was being, Kat had seen the slight tremor in her hand from mana exhaustion. Collapsing the stairwell would let them focus all of their attention on moving forward. They might regret it later, but more likely than not it was the right call.

She brought her short barreled railgun up to her shoulder and jogged forward. About twenty paces ahead was an intersection with the geists and Whip were pressed to either side of main hallway, using the corners as cover. Even as Kat watched, one of the defenders popped out of cover about forty paces down the hallway, peaking around their own corner.

Before they had a chance to fire, she raked the hallway with flechettes from her railgun, driving the soldier back into the corridor they had been using as cover.

Kat sprinted the last half dozen steps, slamming her back into the wall next to Whippoorwill. She looked down, checking the charge on her rifle as the capacitors rapidly spun back up to full.

“Talk to me Chiffon,” she said hurriedly. “We don’t have great cover here. Are you in? If not, can you at least give me a flanking route on that defensive position?”

One of the geists leaned into the open, his railgun humming with electricity as he switched from a flechette to a penetrator. He fired a single shot, ducking back behind the concrete wall as his slug blew a massive crater into the cover used by the defenders.

Whip didn’t say anything, instead tossing a drone into the air. It made it slightly past the apex of its arc before its fans kicked in, catching it and sending it scooting down the hallway.

A hail of gunfire from down the corridor forced both of the geists back under cover, and on a hunch, Kat cast Gravity’s Grasp in the center of the hallway. Barely a second later, a grenade went off in the passage where her spell had pulled it to the ground, safely ten or so paces away from Kat’s team

Another geist leaned out into the open gun humming with overcharge. They rocked backward, firing a second penetrator slug that practically collapsed the already damaged cover on the right hand side of the corridor and drawing a pained scream from a defender.

The two Haupt guards sprinted to the other side of the intersection, guns at the ready and pointing down the hallway that the seven of them were using as cover. Kat glanced at the corridor in her direction. There were a couple of doorways built into the concrete walls before it eventually ended in a turn toward where the defenders were hiding.

The clack of a rifle on concrete was the only warning Kat got, but it was enough for her to cast Gravity Plane and grab Whippoorwill by the shoulder.

They slammed into the concrete wall together just as a swarm of bullets filled the air, deflected just enough to the right by Kat’s spell to miss their cluster of infiltrators. On either end of the hallway, a pair of Phantom samurai had stepped into sight, trapping their entire team in a crossfire while the guards straight ahead kept them pinned down.

On the other side of their formation, the Haupt soldiers hadn’t been so lucky. Frank was down, a pair of bullets to his chest more than his suit and cybernetics could take. His partner was in better shape, but her left arm flopped uselessly, red already beginning to seep through her clothing.

Kat dismissed Gravity Plane with her mind, shifting the mana to Dazzle as she broke into a sprint toward the two samurai on her end of the hallway. One of them fired blindly, bullets chewing up the panels of the ceiling, but none coming anywhere near her.

The spell bought her the half second she needed to cast Shadow and activate Shadow Step simultaneously.

Time seemed to slow as Kat’s vision narrowed on the two warriors at the end of the hall.

The first samurai staggered backward, their hands slapped over the facemask on their helmet as they tried to clear their vision while the second pushed past, their rifle tracking the black blob that concealed Kat.

She blurred forward, Shadow Step dragging her through space even as the Silver Phantom’s gun barked, shredding the air a half step behind her.

Kat’s body tensed, weapon sliding up to her shoulder. She kicked off the ground, practically teleporting from one side of the corridor to the other an eye blink ahead of another three round burst of rifle fire that ricocheted off of the cement wall where she had been standing.

The railgun jerked against her shoulder, the snap of her flechettes bursting through the sound barrier the only sound as the weapon drained charge from its capacitors.

Her shot was hurried and off balance, but barely a pace from Kat, the projectile separated, transforming into twenty needles of steel that expanded until they pummeled a circle the size of a watermelon at the other end of the hall.

The gunman stumbled backward, armor and chunks of flesh missing from their bicep, hip and upper thigh.

Distantly, Kat heard the man scream, but the sound barely registered as her barrel slipped sideways, lining up on the chest of the other Phantom. They staggered back, frantically trying to locate her through stinging and half blind eyes.

Her gun kicked a second time, destroying armor flesh and chrome with equal ease as it turned the soldier’s torso into a mess of raspberry jam.

She rounded the corner only to run face first into another three Phantoms. They were clearly unprepared for her appearance, instead hugging the wall as they prepared to burst out into the open.

Kat fired again, the close range working against her as the flechettes barely had time to split before they cored through the first samurai, blowing a fist sized hole into the cement behind them.

The railgun dropped from Kat’s grip, swinging toward her side on its carrying sling.

Her left hand slapped the Phantom’s rifle aside, pinning it to the wall while her right snagged her knife and brought it up in a quick underhanded stab.

Crippling Blow guided her hand, twisting Kats wrist slightly to avoid a ceramic plate in the samurai’s armor as the blade sank deep into his stomach.

The man jerked once, and Kat ripped him away from the wall, interposing his body between her and the final gunman a fraction of a second ahead of a burst of gunfire. The bullets thudded dully into the injured man’s back, and Kat’s foot snapped upward, kicking him in the chest and pulling him off of her knife and into the uninjured samurai.

She activated Overpressure. Blood sprayed wildly, coating the cement and Kat as both of the remaining samurai went down in a tangled heap. The topmost warrior groaned weakly, his chrome heavy form pinning his partner even as Kat flipped her railgun back up and flipped the ammo select to penetrators.

It hummed to life before bucking against her shoulder like a mule. Both of the Phantoms practically exploded as a slug that could knock a divot out of a main battle tank turned them both to pulp and left a crater underneath their lifeless limbs.

Almost absently, Kat switched the weapon back to anti-personnel flechettes, firing another round into the groaning body of the Phantom she had grazed earlier.

Kat looked up and down the hallway. Two of the geists were still trading fire at the main corridor alongside Whippoorwill, but other than the singular dead Haupt commando, everyone else was nowhere to be seen.

A flick of her eyes brought up Kat’s communication system and connected her with. Whippoorwill.

“Chiffon,” she said evenly, trying to calm her breathing after the burst of activity. “I need a situation report. What’s your status, what does the floor plan look like, and where are the baddies? If you don’t have complete information, give me what you have, we just got flanked and I don’t like it.”

“A second.” Whip’s voice came back garbled, the crack of the flechettes much louder through her mouthpiece. “I’ve got better tech than this AI, but it has so much more processing power. I’m beating it back but, it’ll take-”

“Got it,” Whippoorwill cut herself off. “I’m uploading a map now. My drones are verifying the data I’ve pulled from the system, but it appears to be accurate. Things are stable here, but we aren’t making much progress. Hestia and Ander have pushed the Phantoms back out of the far hallway, but all of the ordinary Haupt commandos are down. Right now Hestia has some sort of fire screen up that’s keeping the samurai from getting a bead on her, but-”

“But she’s critically low on mana,” Kat replied, cursing under her breath. “Thanks for the heads up, I’ll think of something.”

The map popped up in her smartpanel, and Kat practically snorted. The entire floor was basically a box with a plus sign in the center. She was in the bottom right corner, and the samurai her team was fighting were in the absolute center, guarding the pair of elevators that serviced the floor. Around the four large squares created by the hallway were various rooms marked with tabs as to their suspected use.

Kat dismissed the popup. She hopped up and down twice, shifting her head either side to pop her neck.

The instant her feet touched down the second time, she broke into a sprint. Her legs moved with whisper quiet grace as blazed toward the intersection, throwing herself to the ground activating Levitation and throwing herself to the ground just before she reached the main passage.

Her back bounced off of the concrete, drawing a quick spray of sparks. Then, for a fraction of a second she was skidding across the opening.

Two samurai stood in the center of the hall, their backs to the wall as they peeked toward the contested corridor. Another lay on the ground, next to the demolished corner, their chest armor shredded by shrapnel from when the geists had torn their cover apart. At the far end of the passage another two samurai leaned around the corner, exchanging fire with Hestia and Ander, one of the geists.

The final Phantom was a woman, her helmet ripped off to reveal long brown hair as she cradled an injured arm next to the dead soldier. She was the only one to see Kat, and her eyes widened.

She didn’t get a chance to warn her companions. The railgun bucked against Kat’s shoulder. Once, twice, and then Kat came to a halt on the other side, kicking against the floor to arrest her momentum.

The floor erupted in screams. Kat couldn’t be sure that her attacks had gotten everyone, after all even with the separation on the flechette rounds, they could only cover a modest chunk of the hallway. Still, she had done her best to spread that chunk of the hallway out, and it was clear that her effort had born fruit.

With a soft grunt, Kat hefted herself to her feet. She checked her gun to make sure that the capacitors were spooling back up before creeping toward the hallway again and gathering her mana.

Once both were full, she cast Illusory Clone, making an image of herself that jumped into the open gun blazing, following it with her actual body a half second later. Bullets tore through the hologram, crushing the cement wall behind it into powder, and buying Kat the moment she needed.

Of the three Phantoms clustered around the main corridor, all of them were down. One unmoving, another prone and groaning, and the helmetless woman holding a flashing submachine gun in her good hand.

Kat didn’t give her a chance to realize that she had shot a decoy. Flechettes cracked through the sound barrier, taking the woman in the upper chest and killing her instantly. A second shot finished off the injured samurai that was starting to crawl toward the elevators.

At the far end of the hallway, the remaining two Silver Phantoms didn’t stand a chance. Kat missed with her first shot. Despite her flechettes expansion, the weapon was fairly new and unfamiliar. They barely had a chance to begin turning when her second and third shots peppered them with almost forty metal needles.

One guard fell into the open where he was immediately shot by Hestia. The other simply folded up and collapsed on the spot, her body a wasteland of torn armor, ruined chrome, and pulped flesh.

Kat stopped, tracing her gun back and forth as she looked for any sign of movement. The two geists at the top of the passage fired a couple more times, unaware that their targets were on the ground, still and leaking steadily. Other than the crack of the flechettes, there wasn’t any other movement or sound.

She blinked and flicked her eyes, opening up a general communication channel to everyone on the floor.

“Central hallway is clear.” Kat could hear her voice echoing back to her over the network, garbled by the same jamming that had interfered with her talking to Whippoorwill. “Once Chiffon manages to break her way through-”

The ‘ding’ of an elevator reaching its destination cut her off. Her eyes widened as she looked up at the steel doors to the lift even as they began to hiss open.