Rain pattered down outside the cafe window, painting the streets in blue and gray. Four people sat, crowded into a small wooden booth that had been painstakingly engineered to look old and battered.

The black man, not quite middle aged but with the faintest hints of silver creeping into the close-cropped hair around his temples, brought the cup of steaming brownish liquid to his mouth.

Across the table from him, a bald white man, his eyes slightly too far apart and his nose slightly too low on his face, cleared his throat.

“Mr. Jackson,” the bald, lumpy speaker’s voice was raspy, like he’d spent the night before shouting. “What is the reason for this delay? We should be back in North America, eliminating the other ascendant candidate. At this point, she’s the only one that could harm our plans.”

“And we can’t get at her with our current strength,” the black man replied, gently putting the cup back down on the saucer that had come with it. “After the last attempt, she’s become paranoid, and as much as I hate to admit it, Erinyes was a tough target even before she knew that we were still gunning for her.”

The slightly off bald man stared at him, eyes unblinking. It was beyond unnerving. Mr. Jackson couldn’t even see the man breathing, and his senses were tuned far beyond the human average.

“Then why bother?” The bald man asked, his untouched cup slowly growing cold in front of him. “If she is untouchable, you should just focus on the Tower. With the help of my associates you will be able to ascend levels much faster than her. You already have a starting advantage, it shouldn’t be that hard for you to win the race.”

A sputter and a spray of brownish water interrupted their back and forth as the woman next to Mr. Jackson spat out her drink, spraying the bald man and his companion.

“Colby,” Jackson said, not turning to look at her. “You have better manners than that.”

“But sir,” she replied hurriedly, “someone poisoned the tea! We need to get you to a healer as soon as-”

She paused.

“My name is Ice Cobra,” the woman said frostily. “I earned that name almost a decade ago. We’re on a mission so you have to use my name.”

“We haven’t started the mission yet,” Jackson responded easily, taking another sip of the tea. Colby was right. It was definitely poisoned. “Until then, you’re still my daughter so that will be enough of that young lady. Now apologize to Mr. Silver.”

Colby shifted in her seat, face flickering through emotions as she clearly struggled to reign in her temper. Across the table, the misshapen bald man looked blankly back at her, brownish liquid dripping slowly down his face.

“Sorry Mr. Silver- Wait,” she whipped around jabbing an accusing finger at Mr. Jackson. “How come we’re using Mr. Silver’s name but not mine? I want you to call me Ice Cobra.”

“Mr. Silver and Mr. Red don’t really have names,” Jackson replied, setting his teacup down. “There’s no mundane day to day identity there for us to protect so it has nothing to do with the samurai code. Rather, we wouldn’t be able to have a proper conversation with Mr. Silver without some way of addressing him.”

“I have a serial designation number, but it is unpronounceable in this language,” the misshapen bald man cut in. “This is all a waste of time. We should be in America or the dreamscape. At a very minimum, you should be finding the person that poisoned your drinks to punish them. My masters would be very displeased if you were to simply die after all the effort they put into developing you.”

“I’m not going to die,” Jackson chided. “We are simply in this cafe to draw attention while the real work happens elsewhere. VodCom has goons monitoring us right now. At least eight of the people in this restaurant are corporate security or hired samurai. They’re just waiting for us to start keeling over from the poison before they swoop in and grab us.”

The last man, a wiry samurai with a green mini-mohawk, cleared his throat.

“The infiltration team is in position,” he said, his fingers rapidly tapping on the cafe tabletop. “They’re good to go as soon as we give the signal.”

Mr. Jackson turned his attention to the misshapen bald human. The man nodded his head, confirming the samurai’s words.

“Remember,” Jackson said. “No deaths, here or at the communication node. This is a stealth mission. We don’t want VodCom to have any idea what we’re doing. Mr. Red can handle altering the memories there, and Mr. Silver will handle the extraction team here.”

The two samurai at the ends of the table nodded, muscles tensing as they prepared themselves.

“Go.” Mr. Jackson was speaking to a half empty booth. The bald man was still seated across from him, tea slowly dropping down his face.

The rest of the cafe was chaos. Slivers of ice rippled through the air at supersonic speeds pinning corporate agents to the walls like butterflies to a page. A pair of them managed to draw their guns despite the barrage of magic only for threads of steel to wrap themselves around their wrists. Electricity crackled through the whisper thin wires.

Both of the security officers froze, bodies twitching rapidly before they collapsed bonelessly to the ground. The metal strings zipped away from their bodies, pulled by miniature overclocked motors back up into the cybernetic arms of the mohawked samurai.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the cafe, Ice Cobra was flinging magic back and forth with abandon. Four of the guards were down, and a large number of mundane customers were frozen to their chairs. Even as Mr. Jackson slid out of the booth and stood up, Cobra fired a blast of frost from her left hand toward the counter.

A strangled scream marked where her magic froze a fifth guard solid, pinning her to the floor before she could even draw a weapon and attempt to take a shot. That left one gunman.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

He stepped out from behind a potted plant, a man in his early thirties wearing a jean jacket covered in patches that shifted and changed as they advertised a wide variety of subpar local bands and designer street drugs. The plant was a small tree, nowhere near large enough to hide the man’s silhouette, yet somehow it had concealed him perfectly during the one-sided battle. Just as he lined up his silenced pistol on Ice Cobra’s head, Mr. Jackson spoke up.

“Stop.” The word seemed to echo, like a distant thunderstrike, one you could feel in your chest as the sound rolled over you.

Everyone but Mr. Silver froze, and Jackson walked casually over to the man. He could see the fear in the samurai’s eyes. That shouldn’t be possible given that they were featureless balls of chrome concealed behind sunglasses, but impossibility had never been a real impediment for Mr. Jackson.

He took the man’s pistol, gently pulling it from the mercenary’s frozen grip. Jackson checked the weapon over once, making sure that there weren’t any genetic locks on it that would stop him from using it. Satisfied, he turned to face the samurai.

The gun coughed twice, each bullet shattering one of the man’s thigh bones just above the knee.

Mr. Jackson released the spell, and the samurai collapsed. He opened his mouth to scream, but Jackson cut him off-

“Quietly now.” The command was more direct. Jackson had been able to make eye contact with his victim so the spell could be more selective, mana efficient.

The samurai screamed, a muted and desperate sound, no louder than a whisper. All around the cafe the groans started as the injured finally realized that they were maimed. Mr. Jackson surveyed the scene for a couple of seconds before nodding, satisfied.

“Mr. Silver,” he prompted, nodding at the still seated bald man. “I believe it’s time for clean up. Remember, we don’t want them to have any absurd memories. Just that we had a conversation about Millennium’s expansion plans in East Asia. Then something simple. Poison gas knocked them out and when they woke up the cafe was trashed and our group was gone.”

At his feet, the injured samurai shook with pain and fear. He shouted, begging for someone, anyone, to come and help only for the croaking whisper of his voice to be swallowed up in Mr. Silver’s waddling footsteps as the misshapen man approached.

Silver didn’t say anything, instead going right to work. He dropped down to both knees, extending a hand toward the injured samurai’s thrashing head. A purple glow surrounded his limb for a fraction of a second and the human went still. Then, purple energy covered the samurai’s body and the wounds in his legs began to close.

“Ice Cobra,” Mr. Jackson remarked, turning away from the scene. Mr. Silver was good at his work, but he needed to be perfect and perfection took time. “You missed a member of the ambush team. That is an uncharacteristic mistake on your part.”

“But there were eight of them!” She half-yelled. “I took out five of them in five seconds and Razorcloud got two. If anything you should be yelling at him for only disabling a quarter of the security officers.”

“Colby,” Mr. Jackson said sternly, switching away from her samurai name now that the conflict was over. “Razorcloud is an electronic warfare officer first and a field operative second. You should be able to identify and eliminate hostile forces without his help. Plus, I told you how many people to look out for. I taught you better than to lose count in the middle of combat.”

“I have high hopes for you,” he chided gently, his polite tone not concealing the steel in his voice. “You’re my only remaining heir, and if everything goes as planned, I will need someone to take over for me when I move off world after I ascend and become Earth’s representative.

She sputtered for a second, but Jackson didn’t pursue the issue. He’d made his point. There was no need to push her further. Colby knew what happened to those that failed Millennium. After all, she’d been adopted off the streets along with seven brothers and sisters.

“Razorcloud,” he continued turning his attention to the man with the short mohawk. “What’s the status of the infiltration team? Have they neutralized the defenses yet?”

The samurai cocked his head to the side, his eyes distant as if he were listening to an unseen voice. A second later, the man smiled revealing a mouth full of silver teeth that he’d carefully filed into knife-like points.

“They just took down the last security guard Mr. Jackson. Mr. Red froze their entire security network. A couple of them managed to call out for support, but he spoofed the responses from VodCom central. No one even suspected that reinforcements weren’t on their way.”

“Perfect,” Jackson said with a tight nod. “Are there any dead? Something we will need to invent an excuse to explain?”

“No,” Mr. Silver interjected from where he was on his knees next to a second downed guard. “My other unit is healing and altering the memories of the disabled employees at the communication node. None of them are damaged beyond repair and none of their levels appear to be high enough to resist my efforts.”

A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. The entire operation was almost too easy. Multiple moving parts, each working in concert without any difficulty or complication. He’d almost forgotten what that was like.

He wasn’t one to run away from a problem, but Erinyes made it tempting. She’d gone from a thorn in his side to a shareholder. Even as a minor problem she’d had a way of making plans self-destruct without any explanation or reason. Now, as one of the most powerful individuals in the world, she’d graduated from being an annoyance to a mission critical problem.

Still, as talented as the young operative was, she couldn’t be everywhere at once. The cost of modern efficiency was interdependency and integration, and that created weaknesses that no one person could address on their own. A corporation or samurai could be strong, but even the strongest institution was ultimately a sitting duck. Enough time and effort sniffing around the edges and a sufficiently skilled team of infiltrators could always find a gap in their armor.

“All guards are down and the payload is being attached to the VodCom communication network,” Razorcloud said. “There aren’t any reports that they noticed our team at the node. It looks like your plan worked. All attention was on the café and no one was looking for another avenue of attack.”

“Are there any reports that VodCom has noticed our other incursions over the last week?” Jackson asked. “I wouldn’t want everything to fall apart because someone overly clever started putting pieces together.”

“If it’s happening, it’s not at an executive level,” the man replied easily. “I have remote access to all of their executive and shareholder networks through Mr. Red’s connection right now. Really boss, this is something else. I didn’t even know it was possible to hack into files like this. Half of these aren’t even connected to the main network. It’s like Mr. Red is using magic or something to gain access to them.”

“Mr. Red is using magic,” Jackson said, not elaborating any further. “Mr. Silver, how is the resonance going. Has Mr. Red been able to connect his intrusion with the other four nodes.”

The bald human turned to look at him, blinking his too wide apart eyes, incredulous that he was being asked such a foolish question.

“Of course. The humans are only using digital encryption. No matter how good it is, without mana constructs to defend their systems it was only a matter of seconds to slice through their security.”

“And the communication network?” Jackson prompted, the first hint of excitement fluttering through this body. “Do you have access?”

Mr. Silver nodded. He didn’t smile or react to the question, but then again, Mr. Jackson didn’t actually know that the creature was capable of emotions.

“VodCom’s entire communication web, internal and external, is at your command.”