Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

66 - Last Stop on the Line

The AmpCore agent was older than Piper, badged and owned by Kaysar Munitions, and leading a small troop of guards and codewraiths that attempted to head them off as they blasted their way towards the heart of the facility.

The clash had been brief and bloody. Ferra's sheer anger obliterated the two codewraiths, and very nearly brought the whole corridor crashing down around them with the aftershock of her attack.

Bullets whickered through the passage from the unaugmented guards, but Odiye and Toran were equal to the task, their buckling of gravity sending the projectiles zinging off at random angles, cracking harmlessly off walls and ceilings.

And while they did that, Piper made straight for the AmpCore agent. A combustive bolt ricocheted off her own barrier, and she replied in kind. Great molten furrows erupted in the walls, and Piper felt gravity warping as the woman reached out trying to rip her legs out from under her.

Lightning crackled around the tip of her amplifier as she conjured a miniature storm into existence. Dark clouds wreathed her, pouring rain sleeting through the narrow corridor, and Piper gathered the whole thing together in single, churning mass.

Then she threw it at her opponent.

A stray snarl of lightning blasted one of the corporate soldiers who was unlucky enough to be in the way, hurling them away in a smoking heap of burned armour. Then it smashed into the AmpCore agent.

The woman was ready, and Piper felt the backwash as the storm collided with her foe's barrier, residual energy crashing back down towards her, but she was already moving – sprinting straight through the chaos and confusion. She could feel the woman ahead of her, and her implants roared like an animal. The thing in her head roared with them, eager to fight, and kill.

As the clouds and rain cleared, she launched a blast straight through it. The AmpCore agent, took it head on, but the force of the attack sent her stumbling.

Piper was on her then, and right then she wasn't fighting like a member of AmpCore. The street kid erupted forth and she leapt forward, smashing a knee into her opponent's stomach, doubling her over.

In an instant she had a hold of the agent's collar, jerking the woman back up with her free hand. Gritting her teeth, Piper reared back, and then slammed her forehead right into the woman's nose.

She felt and heard the crunch of breaking cartilage and released her hold. The agent fell with a shriek, blood streaming down her face, unleashing a blind, wild eruption of fire all around her as she went down. Piper drank in the heat, gathering it up with her amplifier and then flinging it straight back into the prone figure.

The burst of concentrated energy bored through leather, fabric, flesh and bone, and burned the woman's heart to a cinder.

Her foe went limp, eyes glazing over in death. Two of the surviving guards were already sprinting away down the passage, hollering for backup into radios and leaving several bodies behind.

"Everybody alright?" Odiye panted.

"Walking and talking," Toran replied, flexing his wrist as the residual waves of power from his amplifier faded away. "Piper, we getting close?"

"Very," she replied, turning the mangled husk of a wraith over with her boot.

Ferra strode past her. "Then let's finish it."

No-one argued. Right now, Piper was happy to let the other girl go first. There seemed to be no stopping her when she wanted to kill something. The power cascading out of her was a terrifying thing to behold; Piper could actually see the shimmer in the air around her as the atoms of the world tried to cope with this disruption.