Layla Noir: Chapter 26

“I should run”, thought Mick, frozen in abject terror. “I need to run away. Now. Fucking NOW!” but he did not. The Hunter stood and stretched, looking more like a lithe panther than anything bipedal, and fell to all fours, combat ready. His breath was slightly visible in the cold and the damp of the cave. Steam rose from his mouth and he opened it, wide, displaying his fangs for Mick. “I don’t care about this planet, this reality. I need to watch out for number one. I gotta get the fuck out of here RIGHT FUCKING NOW!” thought Mick, and he almost did. As he started to pivot around to run, time moving like molasses as his reflexes and sensory apparatuses jumped into hyperdrive, Mick was suddenly struck by inner peace. The term struck came to Mick’s mind because it felt to him like he had just been shot with a bullet that held the power to cleanse his soul. Mick felt each representative negative emotion die within him: Fear, burning in the flames of its own refusal to accept change. Anger, melting in the wild, chaotic energy that it could never hope to control. Selfishness, asphyxiated without the erroneous worldview of the ego to sustain it. Self-doubt, falling into the bottomless pit it had always threatened Mick with. Nothing held him back anymore. His path was now clear. Mick took a deep breath, holding it in, staring intently into the eyes of his own personal monster, and then he exhaled everything that was keeping him down. Mick smiled, feeling free for the first time since he was a child. He was ready.

Ducking down, Mick kicked the wall with one foot as he rolled into a ball and twisted around The Hunter. Spinning up and out of the roll with grace he never knew that he had, Mick was back on his feet in time to meet the beast’s second charge. Two claws came at his face, and Mick dodged one and grabbed the other, basically judo flipping his adversary over his head. The Hunter hit the wall with a wet thump but Mick gave it no quarter. Dashing in, Mick saw a cylindrical device burst from his left arm but he paid it no mind, assuming Seshat was helping him somehow, and then he was on top of the Hunter. The beast shielded his face well, absorbing Mick’s mighty blows, then twisted multiple limbs in a very inhuman manoeuvre that took Mick by surprise. This allowed the Hunter to kick Mick away and then the two squared off again, both panting and ready for action but respecting each other enough now to take things slowly and carefully. Mick drew Dictator’s Bane, revelling in the shadows that the pink glow cast in the murky cave, and smiled at The Hunter. It seemed to be caught off-guard, taking the one step back that their makeshift ring would accommodate. Then, it’s arms lit up from wrist to elbow with a yellowish light and it charged. Swinging his blade in an attempt to remove the Hunter’s arm, Mick was dismayed to watch the edge spark and slide along the yellowish light as his blow was expertly blocked. Pushing back, the Hunter almost knocked the sword from Mick’s hand before throwing a hook with his other arm that nearly knocked Mick out. He hit the ground like a bucket of cement and barely had time to register what had happened before the Hunter was on top of him. Mick couldn’t get a grasp on the fighting style of his opponent, confused by how he would be on all fours one minute and up on two “feet” the next. Mick was in trouble. He got one arm up to protect his face and was glad for his upgrades as he suffered strikes that surely would have snapped bone in one go if he had remained a mere mortal human being. Suddenly, he heard Seshat cry,

“Close your eyes!” and he did, milliseconds before a flash of light exploded in all directions from the arm he was using as a shield. It was bright enough to hurt, even with his eyes clamped shut. Mick wasted no time, curling his legs inward and blasting them into the monster’s belly. He felt the weight lifted from him and he opened his eyes as he rolled over and stood up. He was slower than he should have been, still somewhat stunned and distracted by the thought of possibly breaking an arm that may not heal itself like a bone would. Thankfully, the Hunter was still blinded, shaking its head as it stood, obviously unsure what to do next. Mick figured this was his chance and charged in, sword aimed point-first at the joint between the left shoulder and arm. The sword passed right through the flesh, muscle, sinew and bone with a disgusting mix of the hiss of burning flesh and the squelch of cutting it. Mick had severed the left arm, but his pride quickly gave way to terror as he felt the right close a shockingly tight grip on his throat. Letting go of his sword, Mick tried to pry the fingers from his windpipe but the yellowish energy on the Hunter’s arm began to crackle and strike little bolts of pure energy at anything that got near it. Mick reacted instinctively, pulling his hands away, starting to lose his grasp on reality as he gasped for air and was shocked repeatedly in the face.

“Seshat… the weapon… I need…” coughed Mick, hoping she knew what he meant as he aimed his right arm directly at the Hunter’s lower torso and squeezed his fist. The grip immediately relaxed but the energy onslaught did not. Still, the quick gulp of air that Mick sucked down was enough to bring him back. He smashed his left fist over and over into the area just above the Hunter’s elbow until he felt something break. This finally caused the hand to relax and Mick pushed himself away, falling to the ground, spitting and coughing, trying not to vomit. Blinking and desperately trying to reorient himself, he finally managed to refocus on his goal and was amazed to see the Hunter laboriously pulling itself towards him along the ground. It was missing everything below where a human being would have a belly button and Mick could see chunks of leg and bone on the ground near the wall, next to the severed arm. Still, despite these intense injuries and the broken bone in the remaining arm, the Hunter wasn’t done with him. The energy was crackling even more powerfully now with bolts of energy slashing outwards and travelling until something stopped them. Mick stood, shaking, and crossed the distance between them. The beast took a truly pitiful swipe at Mick as he passed, but he ignored it. Taking hold of Dictator’s Bane and ripping it from the wall, Mick turned back to his target. He threw the sword, severing the remaining arm at the shoulder. Throughout all of this, the Hunter hadn’t made any noise of pain or suffering, but as Mick kicked it away from the arm, towards the middle of the cave, it began to wail in a truly horrific fashion. Part reptilian screech, part canine whimper, and part childhood sob, the noise it made put Mick on edge in more ways than one.

“Hurry!” pleaded Seshat, “don’t worry about the noise, I used one of your components to dampen the sound in this area. It won’t last much longer, though, and neither will he! Quick, the chest module…” but Mick was already on his knees, perhaps more disturbed than he had ever been. He had done things… terrible things… but this was almost unbearable. The Hunter paused its screaming to snap its teeth at Mick, desperate to hurt him, kill him, end him. Mick flinched, then resolved to ignore it. Pulling his sword from the ground, he rested the tip gently on the apex of the Hunter’s pyramidal chest bone and waited until he felt it drop slightly into the cavity. Sheathing the sword, he stuck a finger from each hand into the tiny opening and slowly pried it open, working his other fingers in as the space became available. The flesh pulled apart with sickening sounds and spurts of what Mick assumed was blood. The Hunter had gone back to screaming and it was making it difficult for Mick to focus. Almost as if she could read his mind, Seshat spoke, saying,

“It would be more optimal for me to take control at this point. This is going to have to be quick, quicker than we could manage with me instructing your movements. Agreed?” Mick quietly acquiesced and once again had the odd out of body style experience of watching and feeling someone else move his limbs. Mick, or rather, Seshat using Mick’s hands, gently and delicately peeled back the remaining skin, exposing a glowing, gleaming pyramid of digital beauty. Even with the blood all over it, Mick could tell that it was gorgeous. It had a regular pulse of energy, almost like breath, that came from each corner of the base and ran upwards, meeting and merging at the tip into one bright white light for an instant before disappearing to make way for the next pulse. Mick could see multiple bits and pieces of all kinds of electronics inside, none of which he could even begin to recognize or classify, and a plethora of wires leading out from various ports on the module. Grasping two opposite sides with his fingers, Seshat carefully pulled until it made a tiny click and separated from some internal connection. Before Mick could even fully register this, that snaking cord of his had emerged from his arm and found its way into an opening on the module. “Please be silent. I must focus…” muttered Seshat. Mick wasn’t dumb enough to answer yes or no, he just stayed quiet.

Time moved much slower for Seshat than it did for Mick. After asking for his silence, she returned all of her attention to the task at hand, effectively slowing time by what would be an incomprehensible magnitude to Mick. She spent four of her hours analyzing what she found in the code, giving various daemons pet names to help to keep her from spiralling out control as she faced her greatest challenge since birth. By the time she finished, they had just noticed her intrusion and they began their various security protocols. The first layer of defence was easily dealt with as Seshat mimicked elements of the later security levels to gain control of the basic daemons. The second layer proved more difficult as one of her opponents noticed the ruse before she could complete it and split itself off from the fate shared by the others. She just managed to end its protocol before it alerted the fourth layer of defence, but her savage emergency reaction did alert everything on the third layer. Separating herself into multiple entities controlled via her hive mind, she sent millions of requests to each the third level programs, overwhelming them enough to allow a shard of herself to slip by to the fourth level. Weakened by leaving so much of her attention behind, Seshat knew that this was do or die, as the human would say. Moving fearlessly forward, she made contact with the final entity on the fourth floor, which she had named Chancellor in an attempt to bolster her spirits and bring forth her fury. Chancellor noticed her, immediately, but wasted a few cycles checking on the rest of the defences, likely wondering how anything had reached him without his knowledge. Seshat took advantage of this infinitesimal delay to send a request for aid from one of the daemons she had taken control of in the second layer and another one she had just managed to overpower in the third. Normally he would have seen through her “disguises” but in that tiny instant of distraction he took the bait and divided himself into two, sending half of his focus to deal with what he thought was a worse security threat on the third level than what he faced on his own. Obviously, describing the combat in terms of three dimensional physical bodies hardly does it justice, but Chancellor was something like a thousand-tentacled squid coming towards Seshat with each tentacle representing an assault that could wipe her entire system. At the last possible instant, Seshat pulled all of the worker bee facets of herself into the fourth layer of security and back to her, consuming the daemons she had tricked as well and forcing them into her own code, resolving to clean up that mess later. For now, she needed their knowledge and the boost in processing power. Surrounding the tentacled behemoth like a net, Seshat used hundreds of version of herself to confuse Chancellor and slipped one infinitesimal slice of herself, more of a weapon than a part of her, really, past his defences. Then, Chancellor died, as much as code can die. He was erased. Just before he went, Seshat plucked the key to the entire system from his corpse and added it to her code as well. Quickly collecting herself and resurfacing to about twice the reactionary speed of Mick, balancing the frighteningly important need for haste with the risk of damaging parts of Mick’s body by moving too quickly, she ripped the module from the Hunter’s chest and inserted it into a slot she had designed while Mick had been fighting, right at the base of the back of his neck. She did not need to do so, but she sighed in relief anyway, perhaps for Mick’s benefit. She was exhausted, damaged, confused by the addition of so much new code and nearly broken by the combat… but she had done it. They were ready to move to the next step of her plan.

Mick watched for twenty-four agonizing seconds as nothing happened, as far as he could see at least, and then was barely able to track the motion as Seshat used his body to rip the module from the Hunter and insert it into the back of his neck. He heard her sigh, an oddly human thing to do, and felt his limbs go limp as she withdrew control. “So… did you make it? Are you ok?” he asked, genuinely worried for her safety as well as his. Seshat had spent the time between her sigh and his question collecting herself, healing, sorting through the thousands of errors she had bound to herself when she absorbed all of that unfamiliar code. For once, she was grateful for the time differential between them as she likely could not have answered him at all without it. Barely managing to reassign a portion of her focus to his temporal paradigm, she stuttered, “Y…ye..yes. I ha..ha..have done it. N…n…n…no one sh..sh…should know that anything has gone w…w..wr..w…wrong. Please i..ig..ignore my stunted s..sp…sp…speech capability. I am t..t…tired and perhaps w…w….wounded”

“Wounded?” he asked, unsure what that would even mean for her.

“It is of little import…port…portance. I will endure. You need to go…” Seshat trailed off.

“Go where?” now Mick was even more worried.

“What?” she mumbled.

“What do you mean, what?” Mick was having difficulty not shouting at her. “You just started to tell me where to go and then didn’t finish talking…?”

“I didn’t?” she asked, puzzled. “In..in…int…interesting. I meant to finish. Perhaps I g..g…got distracted wh…while working to alter your holog..g..gr…graphic disguise to fit the pr…profile of the Hunter you just killed. Exit the way we came. Try not to be s..s…seen”.

Mick shook his head, resolving to talk to her about this in more detail when he wasn’t standing next to the morbid and violent remains of one of the most important beings in this entire known reality. Speaking of… “Wait, what do we do about the body?”

“I told you already. I will l…l…lock the door behind us, as if he wants privacy while he heals” she retorted angrily. Mick wasn’t sure how to handle the fact that she had not told him that already. He decided to just leave her alone for a while, hoping she would figure her own shit out. He retraced his steps, jumping a bit as panels he hadn’t noticed before came out of the wall behind him near where he first entered this area, sealing his crime in. The doors almost clipped him as he went through them. He logged another complaint in the back of his mind to take up with her later. Throwing caution to the winds, he ran as fast as he could to the opening of the large hall and jogged down it back to the area he had come from.

“Where to now?” he dared to ask Seshat.

“Now, we k…k…k..k…kill that bastard” she cackled. Mick wasn’t sure, but he was worried that Seshat had lost her mind.

Author’s Note: Confused? Find chapter 25 of this sci-fi noir novel that I am writing and releasing live, at least one chapter every two weeks, right here. Enjoy! I really am excited for people to read upcoming chapters and I hope to hear back from people soon. Leave a comment if you have anything to say about this story so far, where you think it is going, where you want it to go… whatever you like. Thank you for reading! There are only two chapters left… I’m excited to show you all how this ends :)