Angie and Allen made their way to the back of the dropship. Michael stood out of the way and kept himself further back but carried a loaded rocket launcher. Jane’s two teammates stood on either side. Allen had his plasma minigun while Angie carried her deathdealer grenade launcher.

  The dropship banked sharply to the side and the entire cabin shook from an explosion that narrowly missed them. Jane opened a channel.

  “Pilot, open the door. We’re going to shoot these fuckers down,” she said.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” the pilot said. “For all our sakes.”

  The dropship door cracked open and the cabin was filled with a sudden rush of wind. The door slowly lowered itself and the crack to the outside world was what she expected for Kodak airspace. Dark, red-tinted skies accompanied with overcast cloud cover made it a challenge to see much. Except for two sizeable shapes matching their speed.

  “Angie, swap to the rocket launcher,” Jane ordered. “Your grenades are too slow to catch a speeding aircraft in this atmosphere.”

  “Right,” she said.

  The strawberry blond placed the deathdealer on her back and swapped to the rocket launcher. She placed her eye close to the small view finder on the launcher.

  Jane eyes both of the distant aircraft on their tail. She knew that trying to their dropship didn’t have countermeasures to deal with enemy aircraft nor was it properly equipped to reliably take part in ariel dogfights.

  The dropship toward the far right made its move, ascending before Jane saw the the increased fiery exhaust belch out from the engines. The aircraft was moving quickly to close the distance. Jane gave her order. “Take out that ship first.”

  Allen pointed his plasma minigun and spun the barrels before hot blue pellets blasted out of his heavy weapon. The blue glow of plasma quickly disappeared against the backdrop of the skies. The enemy dropship swerved from side to side, evading Allen’s fire without taking any visible damage. Jane unleashed shots from her crack shot, sending brilliant gold beams of concentrated particles through the dark skies. The dropship began moving erratically, narrowly evading the fire from both.

  The pilot was a skilled one to be sure.

  “Angie, do you have a lock on that dropship?” Jane said.

  “Almost… yeah got it. It’s showing up green through the scope,” she said.

  “Shoot it down.”

  Angie’s launcher briefly plumed with smoke before the winds carried it away and her rocket flew through the sky. Jane and Allen continued harassing the dropship with sporadic shots until Angie’s rocket finally reached its target.

  The strawberry blond scored a lucky hit on the wing of the dropship, knocking out its engines on one side and causing the aircraft to bank sharply. It was now a wounded bird that would inevitably descend low enough to either be shot down by Kodak or crash land. Jane took no pleasure in her current situation. She wasn’t just going to be under scrutiny for her actions in retaliating against her pursuers from the Alpha Corp. Shooting down a dropship that had pilots and agents from the same shard wasn’t a thought she could ever get used to.

  “Uhh, Jane. There was supposed to be two of them right?” Allen said. “Don’t see the other one.”

  Jane snapped out of her thoughts about dealing with the aftermath of this mission and glanced at Allen. Then she tried scanning her eyes out the back. She saw nothing but dark red skies. Jane opened a channel to the pilot.

  “How much further?” she asked.

  “We’re just under a hundred kilometers from Michael’s coordinates.”

  Jane scanned the passing sky, struggling to keep her eyes open against the rushing winds.

  “I don’t like this,” she said out loud. “We might have to risk an early drop.”

  Opening a channel out to Michael, she needed an assessment before doing something drastic. “You think we’ll survive an early drop?”

  “The coordinates I gave to the pilots are a major city deep within Kodak, not too far from the seas. We drop now, we’re laning into a barren wasteland. If you and your team are up for some walking in a desert with radioactive sandstorms, then be my guest,” he said.

  “I’ve lost sight of our second pursuer,” Jane said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  Jane felt the vibrations throughout the cabin and also heard the roar of autocannons through the rushing winds. Her pilot reached out with an incoming call.

  “We have a problem. Positive sighting of the second dropship ma’am,” he said. “That bogey somehow got right in front of us.”

  The autocannons continued roaring outside. Jane initially had no clue what that second dropship was thinking. Unfortunately, Michael had a grim idea.

  His voice cut into her mind through the private channel.

  “I know this maneuver. The pilots I work with have done it before. When things get really desperate and we have to board an enemy craft for whatever reason, our ship lines itself up into a position for a high-ranking agent for boarding action without needed to get close.”

  Jane’s eyes widened. She gripped her crack shot tightly at the idea that crept into her mind. If she wasn’t anxious before, now she was.

  “Not many teams within our shard can pull that off consistently and still live to tell about it,” she said. “You don’t think they sent…”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Either the remainder of my team, or another team that is just as good,” Michael said. “Either way, they know you’re the one on the run. And they’ve probably picked up that I’ve joined you on this crazy ride. Who else would they send to come fetch me back than my very own guys?”

  For such a complex boarding action to take place, the agents attempting it needed to be tier threes at minimum. The overall strength and toughness needed to not have their bones shattered against the high speeds and abrupt boarding was something only a tier three could bear, even with specialized armor that absorbed shock and counteracted g-forces. Reaction times and reflexes also needed to be up to par to coordinate navigating through the air after the jump and sticking the landing.

  Aside from a specialized suit to absorb shock and possibly have magnetic limbs to maintain their hold on an aircraft’s outer hull, an agent needed a jetpack to help guide their moves through the air. Every minute bit of thrust could either land them on the enemy aircraft, or cause them to miss the target and plummet to their death.

  But this was the exact sort of crazy stunt that Michael and his peers would be accustomed to.

  Her ears picked up sudden thuds along the outside of the dropship. Jane swore her enhanced heart skipped a beat knowing that her pursuers were crazy enough to pull of this stunt.

  “Ma’am,” the pilot said. “That dropship has dropped their payload onto us. Enemy agents are crawling on our hull as we speak.”

  “Keep on course as best as you can. Let me deal with them,” she assured.

  If any agent of Michael’s caliber were to reach the cabin, Jane’s mission would be over before it properly began. Everyone here except herself, Michael and maybe Allen would be killed in an instant if a fight broke out.

  She opened a channel to all of her team.

  “Listen up and listen well,” she said. “Start grabbing all of your gear. We’re dropping out of our ride and we’ll make our landing and then regroup on the groun. We have no other option. We don’t go now, the agents that just boarded us will slaughter us all.”

  Allen stared at her grimly. “Understood.”

  “Well guys, didn’t I promise this trip was gonna be fun? Shit is gonna get wild brah.”

  “Not the time Miles,” Zara snapped.

  “I’ll stick around and help you against our pursuers,” Michael said.

  Jane gritted her teeth. “Fine.” She glanced at both Angie and Allen. “You two both have your parachutes?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Allen said. “I told Angie to put hers on just in case before we came up and started blasting.”

  “Good. Get off this dropship and get yourselves on the ground,” she said.

  Michael chimed in and added, “I’ll send you updated waypoints.”

  Both Allen and Angie dropped out of the opened door of the dropship. Jane stepped back and cleared herself from the opening to give more room for Miles and his squad to drop. She glanced at them and saw five fully armed and equipped agents ready to jump and get this mission underway.

  “Good luck,” she said through the channel before cutting it.

  She received a few helmeted nods before all five turned to the back of the dropship. One by one, each ran and jumped off the opened ramp until only her and Michael remained on the ship.

  Jane was anticipating one of her most difficult battles. She braced herself for what was coming, but spotting the arm that curled around into the interior of the cabin caused her heart to race.

  She saw another set of limbs from the other top corner of the opening for a split second before a gun barrel roared to life with muzzle flashes and bullets peppering the interior of the cabin. Jane and Michael stood firm, their energy shields holding up to the barrage. It gave their pursuers just enough breathing room to fully make their way into the cabin.

  Two agents clad in white armor planted their feet firmly into the floor. Their magnetic feet helped them maintain their footing eden with the rushing winds behind. Jane immediately recognized both agents as the same ones who escorted her to the executive board meeting.

  This should be good, she thought.

  Michael immediately spring into action and charged forward at his two teammates. The two agents already had their weapons raised and began blasting. Still, Michael threw himself into one agent and tackled him, sending the two men out of the aircraft and falling through the sky. Jane was left on her own against one agent. She performed a brief scan of the agent that stood before her.

  Agent: Hunter Arcane

  Age: 51 M

  Shard: Alpha Corporation

  Rank: Tier 4 | Level 83

  Strength: 130

  Agility: 88

  Endurance: 102

  Intelligence: 90

  Healing Factor: High

  Reflex: Metahuman ++

  Standing in this confined cabin in the presence of a tier four agent was something Jane knew was coming. But it didn’t stop her initial emotions from bubbling in her mind. It was the few moments like these that reminded her that for all the training, conditioning and on-the-field combat experience she had absorbed in the past fifteen years, she wasn’t fearless. No number of near-death experiences could completely eliminate one of the most fundamental and primal human emotions and instincts.

  Hunter had a substantial stat advantage over her. Across the board, she knew it. Even a recently ascended tier four like Hunter was noticeably above any upper-end tier three in power. Once an Alpha agent reached level eighty, they needed to undergo surgery to transition to the full potential of a tier four. Further improvements to both muscles and bones, the rerouting of viens and arteries and even implnatations of new pathways within the circulatory and lymphatic systems.

  Men like Michael and Hunter weren’t just superhumans. They were post-human considered the extensive changed to their bodies thanks to man-made enhancements.

  Hunter’s face was covered by his helmet. The boxy and angular shape along with the reflective visor stared back at her without any emotion. His feet were stuck to the floor thanks to the magnets in his boots. Unaffected by the rushing winds behind him, Hunter stood so still that Jane wondered if he was a combat android.

  “You know, I always knew a day like this would come. The day where you forgot and took for granted who trained you and taught you every trick you know today,” Hunter said. His voice equally cold as it was condescending.

  Jane didn’t have a snappy comeback. Hunter was almost twenty years her senior and from the rumors she heard, had served the Alpha Corp as an agent since he was only ten years old. Michael truly surrounded himself with powerful allies.

  “I never forgot where I came from,” Jane finally said. She reached for the hilt of her viper fang and ignited the pink blade.

  The tension was palpable, so much that Jane didn’t want to look at her opponent directly. But if she let her guard down, Hunter could end this fight in an instant. She glanced briefly at her pink glowing blade gradually forming into its shape. It was thanks to the nanoscale devices forging the deadly solid that made up her signature weapon.

  “I had the fear literally beaten out of me over the years,” she spat. Even if deep down she was unsure of her odds of surviving this fight, she had to at least project confidence to her opponent. Hunter was in an entirely different league compared to Bobby Obsidian.

  Hunter gave a low chuckle that Jane heard even through the howling winds within the dropship cabin. The agent flexed his gloved fingers as if they were metal appendedges.

  “The only reason why you are this powerful is because Cynosa took pity on you,” he said in a low voice, just enough for Jane to hear. “Women like you always hide behind their more successful and competent peers. But there’s no daddy Michael here to save you from what I’m about to do to you. On behalf of the Alpha Corp’s board of directors, I will either take you back alive or dead.”

  Jane tightened her jaw at Hunter’s generalized comment towards her and women.

  “I’ve always sensed the resentment from you and Tony, even back when I was sixteen,” she said. “I got an updated serum compared to the ones you old fucks received back in your day. My growth in power was accelerated thanks to the newer serum and nanites overcompensating for my cerebral palsy. Frankly, I think it’s amusing that old men like you can’t stand the concept that younger agents are catching up to you in power level. I’ve proven it, and so will Dan Orion and Li Phantom. Give them another few years and watch what happens. Us “kids” might surprise you.”

  The two continued their staredown of each other. Hunter’s lack of a derogatory reply gave Jane a tiny glimmer of satisfaction before the real fight.

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