Author's Note: This is a sequel series to Amy, Captured. To get the full experience, please read through that one first.
Hello, everyone! Sorry for the rather long delay, but I became a father since the last installment, and that tends to curb one's ability to write continuously. Not that I've given up, and you can expect to see more from this series, hopefully at a faster pace, in future. Many thanks to Allyourbase for editing help, to Isabel for her creative input, and to my slave Logicaldreamer for being awesome and an inspiration. Votes, comments and feedback are super appreciated, so please let me know what you think, okay?
Enjoy!
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Silence, thin and crystalline, descended over the crowd. In some cases, Tsugi's and Kanaria's specifically, it was astonished silence, and in others to wit, the group of mercenaries, it was the highly uncomfortable silence of one for whom the situation has very quickly turned, though in an uncertain way. The silence of one trying desperately to reevaluate the present based on suddenly introduced new information.
For Ren, it was merely the confident silence of one who knew how the next few seconds were going to play out, and was very,
very
happy about that.
But this was a silence designed to be broken, and in this case, it was broken by the soldiers, almost as one, remembering that they did, in fact, have weapons. And that each of them was pointed squarely at Ren.
'Do
not
move!' One of them, presumably the leader, shouted. 'Or we will open fire!'
Ren tilted her head slightly, 'Why haven't you? As if it'd make a difference. Let me show you just how outclassed you are, ladies.'
The fact that she hadn't stopped grinning the entire time was
highly
unsettling, and as she took a step forward, the entire mercenary group took a step back. Seemingly satisfied that she had made her point, Ren flexed her arms, an expression of concentration on her face. And then it happened.
To say it started out innocently would be
wrong,
because taken individually each element of what happened next would comfortably fit into a horror movie. It would be correct, however, to say that it was certainly less than visually dramatic; thin orange tendrils, squirming and alive, began to sprout from the black membrane of Ren's skinsuit, a living, alien patchwork. They kept growing, as the fascinated audience watched in rapt, vaguely horrified silence, and spread, building across her body in waves, like an eldritch tide. And eventually, the little individual tendrils began to make a simple muscular framework, which in turn made something more complex, on and on, bit by bit...
By the time the musculature had been covered up with thin, yet undeniably strong, layers of armor, Ren was having trouble suppressing her laughter. If she had wanted to, she could have grown her hardsuit in the space of a moment, let it ripple across her skin and be done with it, but today she had opted for the longer, more dramatic reveal. The kind she had been asked to show so many different officials and higher ups to convince them to give the research divisions more money. The kind that really put the scare in her enemies.
She twisted her head with a mechanical whirr, feeling the heavy metal shift as though it were her own flesh, and looked over her shoulder at Tsugi and Kanaria, 'You two okay?'
'It was you,' Tsugi said, accusingly. 'All along, that
monster
with the metal skin... That was
you?!'
'I got more famous on Uo than I care to mention,' Ren shrugged. 'Now stay behind me and don't get shot.'
'No argument from me!' Tsugi exclaimed, voice threaded with equal parts shock and relief. 'You boys don't know what you've gotten yourself into!'
'I hope you're paying attention, fellahs,' Ren growled, the featureless, convex orange faceplate of her helmet finally sliding down, obscuring her face. The filters in the hardsuit's audio systems cast her voice with a metallic, unnatural edge, like an echo across steel. It had taken Ren and Shichi a long time to "learn," this power armor, and they had wanted to make the most of it, 'Because class is in session. Today's lesson? How to survive a fight with Ren Syfte.'
'Disengage from your suit, or we
will
kill you!' The lead soldier spoke up again, definitely shaking a little more now. The situation had only gotten worse.
'Well, that leads onto the first rule pretty nicely,' Ren chuckled, the sound cold and artificial through the helmet's speakers. 'Rule one:
Open fire!'
She shouted, as though it were a command. The mercenaries, however it had affected them, had certainly taken it as such, spraying automatic fire with practiced aim right at the armor-clad Half. She actually laughed, the soaring, joyous sound rendered utterly alien by her armor, even as it protected her from the swarm of bullets. They clanked and ricocheted, sparks flying as they impacted the living metal shell and, presented with an impenetrable barrier, scattered. Behind the conflagration, Kanaria huddled close to Tsugi, even though Ren had, in a stunning display of foresight, positioned herself in such a way as to avoid putting them in any danger from the storm of gunfire.
The whole act had only lasted a few seconds; these were professional soldiers, they had been trained to fire in short bursts to avoid recoil tampering with their accuracy. Despite that, this particular group, compelled by fear, or shock, or simply by the conviction that they could end this early before any harm came to them, had given Ren a few more moments than they would normally have, for good measure. Each of them displayed varying levels of visible shock at the complete lack of effect this had.
'Rule two,' Ren continued without missing a beat. 'If you're going to stop firing, make sure it's because you're out of bullets, because I
will-'
And here she rocketed forward, towards the nearest two soldiers. She took hold of their rifles, one in each hand, and before they could react had them aimed, one at the other. '-Take your guns, and use them against you,' Tendrils drew out from the plates of her gauntlets, insinuating themselves into the framework of the weapons, causing them to fire endlessly, filling their unfortunate wielders with their own ammunition. They went down, hard and bloody, followed by the stream of gunfire until two muted clicks indicated the ammo had run out.
Ren hefted the two rifles, one onto each shoulder, as the rest of the soldiers seemed to rally some confidence at the tiny clicks the weapons now made. Tsugi could practically
feel
Ren's grin, obscene and confident, through her helmet, 'Rule three: Don't assume that because my guns are out of ammo, they aren't dangerous.'
With this, she hefted one rifle high, hurling it with all her might at a man at the far end of the throng. He was hit, square in the chest, with the muzzle of the gun, going down with the sickening crack of bones yielding under the impact. The other rifle Ren swung wide, slamming the butt into the face of a soldier that had been unlucky enough to be in arm's reach, before that one flew too, slamming into another luckless uniformed man with the same bone-breaking force.
Now totally unarmed, Ren was apparently harmless enough for the
rest
of the mercenaries to regain their senses and open fire again, half rattling away at her while the others reloaded. The metal-shod Half shrugged off the assault like it was nothing.
'Rule
four:
Never
assume I'm unarmed,' Laughter threaded through her voice like a backing track. It was clear that, despite her unabashed rage, Ren was truly enjoying this, a prospect that filled Tsugi with a kind of unnamable dread. After all, he
knew
who she had been; a government agent during a time where the government in question was on a war footing against its own populace, and brutal police action could erupt on the streets with very little provocation. Anti-government circles had dubbed her Emperor Sagara's attack dog, for how often she had been seen behind Uo's political leader, functioning as a bodyguard, of a sort.
