The Core: The First Guest

34. Someone lost and something gained

The moment I saw that I was being ambushed I slowed time down to a crawl. I had no worries about being caught, I just realized that their movements would cause talking on the phone while driving to be a little dangerous. I mean, I am sure that they all thought that they were moving at a high speed towards me. When in reality, it felt like I was watching a snail crawl across the ground and that was even without using my Prime Speed Control. I needed to contact Meditati and ask her for the best way out of here.

I picked her out of my contacts list as I looked at the gang of convicts surging down from around the carrier. They all seemed to be better equipped than anyone else that I had just spent the last two hours saving. The topping on the cake was the guy who had yelled for everyone to jump on me. He didn't look like he belonged here at all. His harvester robot body seemed to be custom with stripes of paint along the sides and down the legs. As I looked closer it appeared that his harvester robot was slightly bigger than all the others as well. Was this guy a normal citizen scalping off of the hard work of the convicts?

Having time to think was nice. It wouldn't have occurred to me earlier but my escape from this situation was actually pretty simple. I just had to sow a bit of chaos.

I turned tail and ran. Well, more exactly, I slowly crawled back towards the surface of the sun, making sure to keep just a hair in front of the lead convict's grasp. My teardrop shape made it so that the five who were in the lead had nothing to grab onto. They each started to string together and build a net out of cr to catch me with. So they were free to manipulate cr at will? This wasn't an option for normal convicts. Someone here must have the Authority to unlock certain restricted abilities. My guess was that it was the brightly painted stooge running his mouth back on the carrier.

My speed was just slightly faster than the maximum extra 7% that these guys could pump out. I had to turn off my ability to speak while I watched them, it was all I could do not to laugh right in their faces from how determined they all seemed to catch me.

"Get him! He is getting away!" I heard their leader shouting over the top of his gang's shouts. Many of them were yelling threats and insults at me as if that would somehow slow me down enough for them to catch me. I let a minor close call happen just to keep up the perceived tension, not wanting anyone to focus on the fact that no matter what they did, they couldn't fully overtake me. Four of the closest guys managed to fling a net out in front of my path, making it look like they had surely caught me. At the last moment, I spun in place, using my tail to catch and flip around the edge of the net. I tried not to make it look too easy, but I was doing this all in slow time so I had as much time as I needed to make sure my flip caused the tip of my tail to just graze and crumple the edge of the net, letting me slip past. I had done it so smoothly that the four who had thrown the net were already in the middle of pulling trying to cinch the sides together. They realized too late that I had slipped past, letting me enter slowly into the surface of the sun just moments later.

Once I was out of their sight I called Meditati.

"No no no! You losers let him get away! He could have had so much cr! Get in there and get him!" The leader shouted when I made sure to slow down, letting them all think that the fatigue was making my entry into the sun difficult.

I didn't really care to see if they came in after me because the moment that I was hidden from view I picked up my speed to dart away, letting the leeches do what they wanted.

"Hello!" I said when I got the feeling that I had connected to something.

"Please state my designation." I heard a drab and featureless voice say a moment later. Something had happened to Meditati.