A/N: This is…iteration 4 of this chapter, I think. I've been struggling with this one, and man has it been a long time coming. I was really hoping to get this out within a month or two of the last posting, but here we are. Empty promises, I'm sorry. Enjoy.
Juno jerked back to consciousness with a wheezing cough, the shrill cry of an alarm echoing through her shattered helmet, the visor cracked in half a dozen places and her HUD nonexistent. Her vision was blurry and mixed with red, a cut somewhere on her head coating her face in blood as she tried to sit up, only to find herself wedged half-way through a solid wall. Her ears were ringing, and she could hear someone shouting in her ear, but not quite understand what they were saying.
"-up! Juno! GET UP!" By some miracle, she managed to find a grip and push herself out of the hole she'd apparently embedded herself in, stone or concrete crumbling as she fell backwards onto the ground. Her hands scrabbled for a moment at the seals for her helmet, ripping the broken armor piece off and tossing it to the ground as she stood up and began to gather her wits.
"Look out!" was shouted from her right, and she had just enough time to process that and duck as something whistled through the air overhead. A tuft of black hair fell past her eyes even as she whirled around just in time to get body-checked straight back into the wall. The breath was driven from her lungs and her skull slammed painfully into solid stone. As it were, it probably saved her life. A fist, moving faster than it had any right to, slammed into the stone where her skull had just bounced off it, cratering the wall and immediately drawing back for a second try.
Sight still half-blocked by blood and sweat, Juno lashed out blindly and heard whatever was attacking her screech in what almost sounded like binary. The creaking of metal heating up gave her another hint to its position relative to her and she lashed out with a kick, driving the thing back just enough to let her reach up and wipe her face. The sight that greeted her was more gruesome than she had anticipated.
An adult male, maybe in his late 30s or early 40s, half subsumed by singed electronics and black metal. His skin was deathly gray, his eyes sightless, and his chest motionless. By most metrics, he was dead. The sword(Her sword!) clasped in one metal hand and the red glow from one covered eye said otherwise, though. She grimaced, settling into a rough boxing stance. The machine-corpse lunged and she ducked under Eternity's Edge, slamming a fist into the thing's side and wincing as she did. Note to self, don't punch the metal zombie thing, it hurts.
She strafed to one side as the thing swung her sword around again, avoiding the hadium blade by mere inches as she struggled to gain distance. "Surf! Give me Sturm!"
The sudden weight on her hip brought her some small measure of comfort even as the thing lunged again, and she surged forwards as well. Getting inside the damned creature's space allowed her to catch its wrist on the downward swing, and even though it forced her down to one knee with its stupidly overwhelming strength, she brought up Sturm in her other hand and pressed it underneath the cyborg's chin, grinning tightly. "Checkmate, asshole."
The sound was deafening without her helmet, and Sturm bucked heavily in her hand even as the thing's head practically exploded. Bits of gore and machinery went everywhere, and she pushed the thing's body away before even more blood got on her, snatching Eternity's Edge out of its slack grip and returning Sturm to her hip.
10 minutes earlier…
Shane had watched in muted horror as Juno effectively told the city's vice president equivalent to 'fuck off', his reflexive intent to gather intel and meet with the city's leaders stopped cold by the knowledge that he and the other survivors were wholly out of their element and Juno at least seemed to know what she was doing. Her priorities were apparently out of line with his own, but hey, he couldn't really argue with the idea that saving a kid came before dealing with politicians.
Vaz only knew Juno as a 'Foundation Specialist' sent in to deal with the shit his team had dug up in the middle of nowhere. Shane knew her as the Time-Traveling Immortal Warrior-Librarian of a dying God. If she was confident they would get out of this alive, he'd gladly follow her lead. As such, when he found himself following her into the back streets of an unknown underground city, he hadn't batted an eye, simply flipped off the safety on his rifle and formed up with Vaz and Raz.
They hadn't been going for more than five minutes when a little girl came running around a corner sobbing, and something had dropped down from a rooftop and drop-kicked Juno through a wall. There had been a moment immediately after this where it stole her magic sword and tried to stab him with it.
The only thing that had saved his life was trying to block its first attack with his rifle. It…sort of worked. He was alive, unstabbed, but he no longer had a gun, instead holding two halves of a gun. Thankfully, Juno had pulled herself out of that wall just in time to draw its attention away from him. Unfortunately, that still left him without a gun. He tossed aside the rather upsetting remains of his rifle and scrambled for his sidearm, a piddly little M9 that he had zero faith in his ability to kill anything here with. Maybe he could ask Diana for one of those big-ass rifles her Salvagers were using?
By the time he had himself sorted, it was already pretty much over, and he found himself watching as Juno made the thing's head explode with that ridiculous handgun of hers. It was satisfying, but also kinda awful to watch. Doubly so probably for the little girl Vaz was shielding in the rear of their little formation.
Juno kicked the twitching body with a look of consternation on her face. "Surf, get a thorough scan of this one. I want these flagged as hostile on my motion sensor instead of unknown."
The little spark of Light phased into reality just beside her head, floating over to the body and coating it in blue light as it analyzed everything about the nanomachine infected corpse halfway to becoming one of this city's 'Reapers'. "Fascinating…"
"Juno, you recall that science fiction series we ran across in that data-vault on Mars? Star-something? This, on a superficial level, is extraordinarily reminiscent of that. It hijacks the body and repurposes it, and they aren't autonomous like we thought. There's some kind of data uplink connecting back to a central network. Oh…that's not good."
Juno merely sighs, "What's wrong?"
"I thought at first that it was some kind of VI system; upload a task to a drone and receive a report on completion, et cetera. It's a full scale AI, and I think we're its next targets. It's nowhere near Rasputin levels of power or complexity, but it knows we're a threat to it, and it is not happy. I recommend we conclude our business here as soon as possible, but knowing you, we're not leaving until you've atomized this AIs core processors…"
She grimaces and nods along. "You're not wrong, this thing is an abomination, but first we have an appointment with the city's administrator. I've already likely made a poor first impression by making them wait, but I'd like to not exacerbate that issue."
Of course, that was the moment that someone else screamed. Juno was wheeling around with Sturm back in hand before the sound had even concluded, only to find a second cyborg playing tug-of-war with Vaz and Shane, with Raz as the rope. The two men were in fantastic shape and they were still losing their grip compared to the machine-reinforced corpse. "There's the mother, I suppose…"
Where the other had seemed to reinforce its body with the likely limited resources at its disposal, this one had apparently emphasized mobility. Mostly human in appearance still, instead there was a set of mechanical arms bursting out of its clothes on its back, and it was using those arms to pull itself slowly up onto a roof with its other arms wrapped around the struggling woman. Juno scowled as she ran through the reasons it was taking her without killing her. It basically boiled down to 'Hostage or Interrogation', and that was bad. Sturm was locked back on her hip, and she started running. 'This is an awful idea.'
"Shane!" She shouted, "Trust me! Let her go!"
He gaped at her, but after only a moment's hesitation let his grip on Raz's leg go. She screamed bloody murder at them, especially when Vaz followed Shane's lead, a look of utter betrayal in her eyes. On the other end, the sudden lack of resistance had the incomplete Reaper launching itself upwards much faster than intended, a moment of weightlessness as cybernetically augmented strength launched them into the air and clear over the edge of the roof the cyborg had been aiming for. Juno jumped, boosters in her armor launching her into the air. She climbed onto the roof just as the Reaper was recovering and leveled Sturm at its head. "Normally I wouldn't be nearly so careful about this, but you've got one of my people right now. I'll give you a choice here; Let her go, and I probably won't atomize you where you stand, or you can try and run, I chase you until you can't run anymore, I take her back, destroy this platform of yours, and then I come for your Core."
She shrugs with her free hand and stares at the emotionless face of what had once been a loving mother. "Personally, I'd take the first option. Every extra hand you have gives you a slightly better chance when I come for you, and I will be coming for you. I also don't think it'll matter much, me and mine are called Godkillers for a reason, but hey, the choice is yours."
…Juno wrenched Eternity's Edge out of the concrete that made up the building's roof, ashes scattering around her feet as a light breeze swirled around. Raz stood off to one side, massaging the bruises on her throat from where the cyborg had maintained a vice-like grip on her.
"You lied to it…" she rasped. Juno shrugged in return. "Yeah, I did. I wasn't gonna let that thing go, damned if I pissed it off more. I hate this kind of crap, and it was using those kid's parents as meat puppets. I'm going to crush every last circuit of that thing's central processor, sooner or later, and I'm going to enjoy it, too. Nanotech is a curse, I won't watch it kill anyone else."
"Sorry about the whole 'let her go' thing, by the way." Juno comments as she walks towards the edge of the roof, giving those below a thumbs up. Raz huffs and shakes her head, "I get why you did it now, just…try not to do that again, yeah? I thought you were actually gonna ditch me."
"Nah, I told you all that I'd see you through this, right? I intend to follow through on that." She gestures for the other woman to come over. "Let's get you off this roof, yeah? We've got a meeting we're late for."
A/N: So I'm gonna be going back to writing shorter chapters that I can get out quicker, this one's on the VERY low end of what length I'll be writing, but I intend for this one to mostly let people know that the story ain't dead and that I'm still working on it.