"Now, then, what have we here?" Shepard grinned from his end of the connection. "A doctor's surgery? Oh, dear me, could it be that I've managed to break something important? I do believe I have; you're wheezing, old boy. A collapsed lung, perhaps? Well, I bring glad tidings. I know just the thing to fix your little issue; it'll render it entirely irrelevant..."
At the other end, Charon fought feverishly to regain control of his omnitool, trying to hack through Shepard's firewalls even as the N7 raised new ones and even managed to lock him out of the system still further. Hacking had never been the focus of the terrorist's computing expertise, more focussed on science and invention as he was, even if his skills were more than adequate to deal with the Alliance's systems. For Shepard, however, it was an essential vice that allowed him access to what could transpire to be crucial information- and it was one of the few things that the Alliance had neglected to note and put in his file. Probably because Shepard had never been caught.
Charon had little choice but to wrench the processor out of his microcomputer before Shepard had him locked out of the system entirely, at which point he would doubtless have started to play with some of the omnitool's more interesting functions. Fortunately, he had had an adequate window with which to memorise his route to the surgery. Less fortunately, Shepard now knew his current position and wouldn't have to resort to memory to be able to intercept him as he still had his own computer. Furthermore, his omnitool had been the key to using most of his armours advanced upgrades. Shepard had the upper hand, now, and both men knew it.
The terrorist ran at a half crouch, leaving his sniper rifle as a dead weight and desperately trying to stay below the assassin's line of sight as he made his way towards the stairwell that would allow him to leave the building and proceed towards his salvation, yet in his admittedly necessary haste, he gave away his position once too often, allowing Shepard to pepper the walls around him with fragments of shattered glass every time he shot out a window, forcing his quarry to flinch away from the projectiles lest they blind him.
Charon reached the door to the stairwell, braced himself for a moment, having the fortunate effect of causing Shepard's aim to continue past him. Then, the terrorist burst through the opening door, and dived away from his hunter's reflexive shot, which luckily only smashed through the fleeing man's kinetic barriers without so much as brushing against his armour. Wheezing, the nihilist scrambled to his feet and made for the ground floor, each bound carrying him at least three steps, and more often than not sending him slamming painfully into the wall at the end of each flight.
By the end, his legs were attempting to give way with each new impact, his heart was hammering such a fast tempo that he felt the pounding in his ears stronger than his faltering steps, and his diaphragm was taxed such that each and every breath was a fresh agony. He practically fell through the door to the floor that opened out onto the street, and cut his way through the back of the building to the supply entrance, following a route that was intended to put as much distance between himself and his pursuer as possible, whilst keeping him under cover and still bringing him to his destination.
His harrowed appearance, covered liberally in his own sweat and blood in equal measure, brought him more than a few appraising glances in the streets, still patrolled by ruffians and rioters of varying ages, yet the cavalier sprays from his customised machine pistols discouraged them from looking his way twice.
His mind, in the meantime, was flitting frantically between the two options of deviating still further from his course, and hoping to lose his assailant, along with the driving need to fix what would shortly become a crippling injury, and only hadn't already due to certain improvements he'd made to his genes retroactively.
He was caught between the two fears that the N7 assassin would catch up to him before he could reinflate his lung, and that he'd cut his losses and simply ensure he got to the surgery first. The latter was unlikely; the man had to know that it would simply drive Charon elsewhere for his treatment... taking time I just don't have, the nihilist realised.
Meanwhile, Shepard had returned to the streets himself, having retrieved his Kessler sidearm, and was sprinting along a route that would allow him to intercept his quarry before he lost his hard-bought advantage. He was, furthermore, debating the exact same options as his prey. I can move faster, surely, so he'll have to deviate to have any hope of buying himself time for treatment before I reach him. And yet, his time is limited before he'll simply collapse... running on fifty per cent respiratory efficiency isn't something one can simply shrug off...
He hurtled out onto the street where he'd originally expected to cut the terrorist off, sidearm at the ready; span around wildly, looking for some hint of his target-
And caught a glimpse of a silhouette flitting round a corner some way ahead of his position and off of the other man's predicted route, moving into yet another alleyway. Bringing up his omnitool as he ran, Shepard took an approximately parallel route, aware that he'd be as likely to run into a bullet as catch his prey if he followed the man's own route; and both probabilities combined were still lower than Thaddaeus would be willing to accept.
The effort required to maintain Charon's exertions was constantly increasing at a rate that he couldn't possibly sustain for long. Black spots were appearing in his vision as a result of oxygen deprivation, and his muscles ached as a result of having to respire without it. The effect of him pushing himself as hard as he could, furthermore, wasn't even the equivalent speed of his long-distance running gait. His wheezing gasps became still more ragged and painful, and he felt ready to enter tachycardia, if not full on cardiac arrest. The probability that he would survive was becoming more and more remote by the second, he knew.
Shepard felt far from fresh himself, but the tantalising prospect of immanent victory drove him onward with a powerful chemical high, the pleasure centres in his brain humming to such an extent that he found himself stimulating a pressure point on his wrist to ensure that he stayed focussed. Whilst Charon's disadvantages might make him a weaker adversary, and potentially more prone to mistakes, at the height of his desperation, he could also feasibly be at his most dangerous. Underestimating him would be a large enough mistake to render the N7's hard earned advantages meaningless, at which point they might keep fighting for days before one of them broke the stalemate again. Not the most attractive of concepts.
Charon paused, leaned against a wall, trying to quiet his pounding heart and strained, ragged breathing, before he moved into a building, pistols drawn and senses arrayed cautiously against the prospect of an ambush. The building was sterile in its lifelessness; no movement of any kind within, although to the terrorist's paranoid gaze, each shadow merited a second glance and each corner a third.
Shepard stalked through shadow at with at minimum an equivalent level of caution to his prey; his own hands occupied carrying a knife and his sidearm and ready to employ them to lethal effect at a fragment of a moment's notice. Wraithlike, he slipped through a door, before vanishing once more.
At his wit's end, Charon finally staggered through a door into the room within which his salvation awaited him.
Or so he thought. On closer, desperate inspection, the nihilist saw that all the medical equipment, drugs, and supplies in general had been roughly removed. He groaned, realising he hadn't considered the possibility that looters might get there first and be foolish enough to take equipment that didn't hold much in the way of value. Then, as he turned to leave, he saw something that ached in his diaphragm like a blow, something that informed him that he had in all likelihood been killed by a far more actively malevolent party than mere looters. A single word was carved into the wall, crudely and hastily, in block capitals.
CHECK
At last perceiving his folly, Charon raised his machine pistols and scanned the room, even examining the ceiling, horrified and certain that he must have missed a spot in the room from which Thanatos would leap-
And saw a shadow moving outside the room, via the translucent viewing port in the door.
Charon didn't wait, but immediately opened fire, unleashing a torrent of rounds into the door, many of which penetrated, although the terrorist managed to avoid damaging circuits crucial to the door's functionality. Tensely, with little choice left open to him, he moved towards the door, and activated the panel, commanding it to open, watched as it complied far too slowly for his liking-
Nothing awaited him on the other side. No body, no blood, and no ambush. Of that last, he was unconvinced. He edged out into the corridor, spinning a full three hundred and sixty degrees as soon as he was capable of seeing around the corners, and still finding nothing. He checked the ceiling immediately afterwards. Still nothing. His nerves screamed at him, now, his heart hammered in his chest even louder than it had been during his flight, and his breath rattled in his throat like that of a man on his deathbed. It was an appropriate simile.
He edged slowly down the corridor, twitching the aim of his weapons between each of the many shadows multiple times a second. Perhaps it was just his hands shaking. The door, sighing ponderously to a close, had him spinning to face the source of the noise, his fingers already locked on the triggers of his weapons. He had to force himself to cease fire before his weapons overheated. He tried desperately to force himself to calm down, and failed abysmally.
And then-
Something moved in the shadows. It wasn't a significant movement, and he didn't react for a moment, considering the chance that he had mistakenly identified another dark spot in his vision as a threat. Then he realised what he had seen. A human shaped shadow, shifting ever so slightly, as if leaning on one foot before the lunge, arms seeming to raise-
Charon opened fire, his muzzle flashes serving to light the area slightly as he retreated, aware that he was in no condition to tangle with Shepard at close quarters at that moment-
It took him another moment to recognise two other new pieces of information his senses had seen fit to provide him with. The first was that there appeared to be nothing where he had actually seen the movement. No, not quite nothing, there was an ever so slight hint of a shadow, in between the strobing flashes coming from the barrel of his gun.
The other piece of stimuli was that there was someone behind him.
That someone had a knife at his throat. It was held carefully, so that only a backwards or an upwards movement would allow him to escape the blade. Yet, his back already right up against this person, with no room in that direction, and the man's other arm was draped around his shoulders, exerting a noticeable pressure in order to keep the terrorist's feet firmly on the ground.
No prospect of escape beyond some miraculous distraction-and even then, it was likely that his assailant would simply slash his captive's throat as he turned to regard this new threat. After all, only a mild movement would provide a sufficient increase in pressure to break the skin of Charon's neck, which would at minimum rupture his carotid artery, and would probably ruin his jugular and his windpipe simultaneously. It would be a quick death, if not entirely painless. After all, Shepard was a professional.
"Check and mate." The N7 hissed in his defeated rival's ear. "I think you ought to know that you actually came significantly closer to ending me than any other single person I've ever encountered. You've done impressively well-for an amateur."
It was unclear who truly caused the terrorist known as Charon's death, in the end. It had been at that specific moment that Shepard had intended to make the cut that would open his enemy's throat and set in motion the man's demise, yet at that same moment, the nihilist, in one final absurd, defiant gesture, lived up to his creed and pushed forward against the assassin's blade.
Shepard reported the fatality as his kill.
Had he been alive, Charon would doubtless have protested to the contrary.
It would probably be most accurate, at least according to Schrödinger, to say that the man was killed by mutual consent. Both parties had certainly contributed to his destruction.
Shepard didn't release the body until it had ceased its throes, and its temperature had begun to descend to that of room temperature. It paid to be certain, after all.
Then, he activated his omnitool and set up a communications link with Command. "Operative Thanatos reporting in. Tango is down, and unlikely to arise again."
"Please clarify, Commander."
Shepard sighed exasperatedly. Someone always had to ruin his moment, didn't they?
"The job's done. The bastard's dead."
In spite of his annoyance, his lips stretched into a wolfish grin as he looked down on the corpse of the man who had claimed to be his equal. In terms of ability, and intellect, and vanity, he had been correct. But he was dead, and Shepard was alive, and what matter if it had only been down to circumstance, in the end? After all, as Napoleon famously said; "Give me a lucky general."
Most of all, it was pleasant to experience victory. Unqualified, unequivocal, pure, simple, victory. It had been a while since he'd last been able to; he was elated to have finally broken the trend.
Shepard glanced down at his microcomputer to receive the co-ordinates of the extraction point, before lifting the body up onto his shoulders, careful to avoid staining his coat, and going on his way.
Charon's body would likely be useful in a variety of ways; for one, there was the technology he'd put into his armour, including, most importantly, his cloaking device. Secondly, it would doubtless be beneficial to the Alliance's image to be able to prove that the perpetrator of the bio weapon strike was indeed dead. This might also have the happy effect of demonstrating that not all of those who worked for the Systems Alliance were woefully incompetent.
At least, not anymore...