Starfall: A LitRPG Adventure (Tower of Somnus Book 3), page 13
Kat turned around, waving to get the large man’s attention before hooking a thumb out the window.
“You’re going first,” she shouted hurriedly. “I can use magic to slow your descent while I hold off whoever’s coming.”
“What?” he asked, looking from the open window to Kat.
She put a hand on Otto’s back, pushing him toward the exit as she began pumping mana into Levitation. Behind them, she heard more shouting from the stairwell as the invaders made their way up.
He ducked through the opening, leaving a smear of blood on the frame before he lost his balance and tipped into the alley below. Levitation caught the huge samurai a half second after he left the building, slowing his fall to a manageable rate.
Just as Kat put her hand on the top of the frame, the door from the landing burst open. A woman lunged inside, the green glow of night vision goggles on her face and a shotgun pressed to her shoulder.
Almost without thinking, Kat aborted her second casting of Levitation, spinning on her heel and unleashing Dazzle around head level at her attacker. The woman grunted, recoiling backward into the doorway and the samurai behind her.
Kat flashed into motion, grunting as her left forearm slammed into the shotgun barrel, slamming her opponent’s weapon to the side before she stabbed upward with the knife in her right hand. The blade moved lightning quick, finding a gap underneath the woman’s arm and sinking hilt deep into her armpit.
She released the dagger, letting her injured opponent slump backward, limbs tangling with the rest of the combat team as she clogged up the narrow passageway. Kat drew her unsilenced pistol, drawing a bead on the head of the man behind her victim and opening fire.
In the split second as Kat brought her gun to bear, he tried to wrestle his own weapon free, unable to extricate it from the back of the wounded and disoriented woman before she opened fire.
The handgun barked, Kat’s perks protecting her hearing in the enclosed hallway. The first shot caught her target in the upper shoulder, staggering the man but unable to penetrate the layered Kevlar and polymer of his armor. Her second shot took him in the neck, and the third hit his forehead, shattering the faceplate of the night vision goggles and killing him instantly.
She shifted her aim, firing at the third and final invader as they tried to backpedal away from the clogged doorway as they brought a rifle to their shoulder. Kat wasn’t sure how many of her three shots hit the figure, but they stumbled at least once before ducking out of her line of sight.
There was no way for Kat to know whether her shots made it past her attacker’s armor, but they were moving under their own power and still had their weapon, meaning it was time for her to go before reinforcements were called.
Kat fired a final shot into the injured woman’s face, killing her instantly. She shoved her pistol back into its holster before ripping her knife from the body’s armpit.
A gun barrel popped around the corner, prompting Kat to duck as the final attacker fired a three shot burst over her head. Plaster rained down on her shoulders before Kat lurched away from the doorway, leaving the pair of dead bodies behind.
Barely a second later, Kat was pouring mana into Levitation as she pushed her way through the bent bars guarding the window and tumbled toward the alleyway below.
The dirty pavement drifted toward her, slowed by the power of her spell. Kat glanced over her shoulder toward the window above. She suspected that the samurai inside wouldn’t be equipped to jump down the three stories needed to follow her, but at the same time, he had a rifle. For the moment, she was little more than a sitting duck as she hung in the air.
Gunfire erupted from the mouth of the alleyway. Kat’s head whipped around, rotating her entire body in the air. Otto shouted something indecipherable from the street just around the corner only to be silenced by another rattle of gunfire.
She judged the distance between herself and the cracked pavement and cut off her spell, landing on her hands and knees with bruising force. Kat sprang to her feet and sprinted around the corner only to find another trio of samurai standing around Otto’s still body.
Cat Step silenced her movements, and before any of the three gun-wielding individuals could react, Kat was amongst them, her Tower-enhanced agility speeding her movements past the point where they could be tracked by the unaided eye.
Her knife flashed in the distant streetlights, drawing a crimson line across a man’s throat and finding a gap between two plates of armor to stab a woman in the bicep.
“Target is down!” Kat couldn’t tell which of the two women was shouting as her remaining targets scattered. “We are under attack and retreating.”
She ducked behind the staggering body of the injured male samurai as one of the running figures sprayed rifle fire in her general direction. He jerked twice, his hands still clutching emptily at his throat as bullets slammed into his armor as the remaining attackers tried to keep Kat in place while they escaped.
“Chiffon!” Kat screamed into her microphone as she slipped back into the open and pulled her hand back to throw her knife. “Otto is down and they’re scattering. Give me some help here!”
Kat didn’t wait for a response, investing stamina into her arm as she activated her new Throwing ability, whipping her hand forward. The knife tore through the air, glowing a gentle red before it tore through one of the samurai’s armor and buried itself between her ribs.
Mana surged out of Kat as she sprinted toward her victim, activating Overpressure. The woman stumbled and screamed as a geysers of blood sprayed from her wound, almost dislodging the weapon.
Blood loss slowed Kat’s target just enough for her to catch up. One leg snapped out, hitting the stumbling woman just below her right knee and knocking her feet out from under her.
Before the target could fully hit the ground, Kat grasped the back of her head with both hands, crunching the woman’s face and night vision goggles into the street.
Skidding to a halt, Kat turned around. In the distance, the other samurai made her escape as Kat flipped the body over. Whoever the woman had once been, between blood loss and the shards of ceramic and hardened lodged in her face, she wouldn’t be answering questions.
Kat pulled her knife free and scanned the empty street. A black SUV pulled off the curb down the block, tires squealing as it peeled off into the night.
She turned back to the apartment building and winced. A good portion of its top right corner was blown open, shattered bricks covering the nearby structures. On the ground level, men and women ferried valuables out of their apartments as the entire edifice began to list to the side.
“Erinyes.” Whip’s voice made Kat’s head jerk upward. “Both of their vehicles were on the move, and I wasn’t able to get off a shot.”
“Don’t worry,” Kat responded, shoving her knife into its sheath as she started making her way toward the other woman’s hiding spot. “I only wanted you to take a shot if you had both a clean angle and the drop on someone. I’d rather you be safe than take a risk when I’m not around.”
“Actually…” Whip’s voice trailed off. Kat kept walking, making sure to keep her paces steady and measured to avoid attention. The pedestrians behind her had their own concerns, what with massive damage caused by the various grenade blasts, but she still didn’t want to give them a focus for their ire.
“Got it,” Whip continued exultantly. “I’m riding piggyback on the Chiwaukee traffic security camera system right now. The SUV is drawing all sorts of chatter. It’s practically edged at least three cars off the road already. Apparently, at least two people have called for assistance from the precinct’s private police force.”
“So we know where they are going?” Kat asked as she slipped into the alley mouth where Whip was crouching, her cranial jack plugged into the terminal at the base of the nearby light pole.
The other woman sat in silence for a couple more seconds before she looked up, excitement and concern in her eyes.
“It’s sure looking like Homan Square, Erinyes.” Whippoorwill nodded her head slowly. “If it isn’t Homan Square, it’s almost certainly going to be somewhere nearby. The security system doesn’t have enough cameras to cover every side street, but still—”
“You’re thinking about the Millennium black site, aren’t you?” Kat replied.
“What else could it be?” Whip asked.
Kat nodded her head thoughtfully. There wouldn’t be enough time to scout the target out. The survivors would bring enough information to put the entire hideout on high alert. If she gave them time, Kat could almost guarantee that she’d be sneaking right into a state of the art security system complete with razorwire, landmines, and automated turrets.
If she was going to hit the black site, she’d need to do it now.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“What are we looking at?” Kat asked, shifting slightly as she crouched behind a dumpster. Dawn was only a couple of hours away and she’d been wearing her infiltration suit all night. The same properties that prevented her from leaving behind DNA evidence meant that the watertight outfit literally didn’t breathe. In short, she smelled like a locker room that had been left to bake in the sun after a long day of exercise.
“At least four independent networks that aren’t actually connected to each other,” Whip grunted back. “This security isn’t any joke either. Some of these counter-intrusion programs will scramble my brain if I’m not careful.”
Kat contemplated the building across the street. Its windows were unlit and boarded up and its concrete facade was crumbling. For all the world, it looked like an abandoned warehouse. If she didn’t have access to Copper Spook’s files, Kat could have walked past the structure a dozen times without noticing that there was anyone inside.
She turned back to Whippoorwill. The other girl brushed her pink hair out of her face, gaze vacant as she sat cross-legged next to the smartpanel terminal that Kat had unplugged some ten minutes ago.
“So are we going in completely blind, mostly blind, or with just one eye closed?” Kat nudged her friend.
The other girl just waved a hand at Kat dismissively, her face still lined with concentration as she focused on her connection to the information network.
Kat leaned backward, opening up her own wireless connection to the local entertainment networks. The reception wasn’t great, but it was more than enough for her to catch up on Chrome Cowboy recaps while she waited for Whippoorwill to finish.
“Good enough.” Whip’s voice startled Kat out of a pop-culture-induced stupor almost five minutes later. “I’ve only managed to worm my way into some of their peripheral systems, but I can confirm that this is the place.”
“Do you have the layout?” Kat quirked an eyebrow under her mask. “Do you know anything about the security systems they’re using? The number of people involved? I want to take them down, but as much as I want to lash out, I’d prefer to avoid kicking a steel plate.”
Whippoorwill’s eyes glazed for a second as she slipped back into the network. She turned back to Kat with a brief grimace.
“I couldn’t find full floor plans or any sort of roster. If that sort of thing exists, it’s on one of the internal networks I don’t have access to.”
“That said,” Whippoorwill continued, “the actual black site is buried in the warehouse’s basement. It uses a lot of power siphoned from neighboring buildings, but it’s only about forty feet by forty feet and the keypads to get in were last used about fifteen minutes ago. The compound might have defenses, but I’d be surprised if there are active traps while it’s occupied.”
“How do the nearby buildings not notice a power draw?” Kat asked, peeking her head up above the dumpster she was hiding behind to scope out the ‘abandoned’ building once more. “I feel like they should notice something like that when they check their monthly statements. Eventually someone would have said something.”
“I’m pretty sure the remnants of Millennium own everything on this block,” Whip replied, shrugging helplessly. “Every business is owned by four to five layers of holding companies, but everything in this area changed hands a couple of months ago. It looks like most of the other shops are more or less legitimate. If they’re doing anything untoward, it’s probably just laundering money made by Millennium’s more clandestine activities.”
“So we’ve been on their turf for the last half hour without knowing it?” Kat responded unhappily. “How do we know that they haven’t been watching us through security cameras as we drove in? Hell, for all we know, there’s a bomb waiting for us under your car when we decide to leave.”
“Maybe,” Whip shrugged sheepishly. “But I don’t think so. The black site is barely connected to the outside world, and I definitely didn’t find any sort of direct feed from local security to it. Honestly, I don’t think that I would have even been able to find it without Copper Spook’s records and using traffic cameras to track the strike team.”
“Seriously,” she continued. “The entrance is a false maintenance closet attached to the building’s far north wall. This isn’t the sort of place you find unless someone gets sloppy, or you devote serious resources to unearthing it. We just got lucky.”
“Or it’s a trap,” Kat mused, chewing her lip as she kept scanning the ‘abandoned’ building. “Millennium wasn’t the type to slip up like this, and we already know that they want me in the ground. They’re more than ruthless enough to sacrifice a dead ender like Copper Spook to lure me into an ambush.”
“True.” Whippoorwill sighed. “I honestly think they just got jumpy when you made contact with Otto. If they were going to ambush you, that would have been the time and location. They had you in a building with an unreliable contact with a light loadout. Rather than make a serious attempt, they silenced Otto and ran. I might be wrong, but as dangerous as going in blind is, I think it’s our best bet.”
“Fuck.” Kat stood up, checking both of her pistol holsters as well as her knife sheath. “Dawn is coming and we could argue until noon about what maybe possibly could happen. Either I dive in, or both of us go home and get a nice night’s sleep. Enough of this hemming and hawing.”
Whippoorwill unplugged her cranial jack and stood up beside Kat, hands clenched tightly around the grip of her submachinegun.
“No time like the present.” Whip’s voice cracked slightly as she shifted from foot to foot.
A smile blossomed on Kat’s face as she turned around and put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. She shook her head gently while responding.
“I appreciate the sentiment, Chiffon, but as much as another samurai would help, this doesn’t sound like the sort of mission where it would be a good idea to break in a beginner. Stray shots have a tendency to hit friends and vital equipment. Once we work on your accuracy a little more, then you can hit a target with me.”
“Erinyes,” Whip pouted back. “I’ve managed to complete a dungeon in The Tower of Somnus. I’m not completely helpless.”
“Really?” Kat couldn’t help but smile under her mask. “How is all of that working out?”
“Pretty well.” Whippoorwill perked up. “A couple of four armed lizard-aliens came up to me on my second day and offered to help me out. Right now, I have an artificer class and a crossbow skill. According to Paatek, my class skill will let me create temporary modifications for the crossbow and my bolts once I practice it a little more.”
“Paatek?” she prompted.
“Oh, she’s— sorry, they’re one of the aliens,” the other girl caught herself before continuing excitedly. “Paatek has been helping me a lot. They say that they’re doing a favor for someone, but I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to manage getting a class let alone conquering a dungeon without their help.”
“I’m glad someone is helping you.” Kat turned back to the warehouse. “I have some people looking to party up with you once you reach the second level, but it sounds like you’re in good hands until then.”
“Great,” Whip responded, nodding eagerly. “If I can handle myself in the Tower, I can handle myself in there. You don’t know what it’s like watching you run off into danger, to be stuck and unable to do anything while your best friend is risking her life.
“You mean too mu—” The other woman stammered for a second before biting her tongue. She looked away for a second, composing herself. Finally, when Whip turned back to Kat, her voice was steadier. “I’ve already lost Xander. I’m not losing you too. This time you’re not leaving me behind.”
“Yes, I am.” Kat let her voice soften as she put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “I don’t want to lose you either. I’m ready for this and I have training. Once you have a level or two, range time, and some hand to hand experience, you’ll be ready too.”
“But—” Whippoorwill began only for Kat to silence her with a squeeze of her shoulder.
“Next time, Chiffon,” Kat cut her off, shaking her head.
Kat turned away from Whippoorwill before the other girl could restart the argument and began jogging across the street. Nothing moved in the early morning. All of the other shops on the street were shuttered, and the only real lighting came from some sputtering neon signs that clung to the poorly maintained walls of the nearby buildings.
She didn’t even try the barred and boarded front door, instead hurrying past it en route to the back of the building. Kat peeked her head around the corner first, taking in the quartet of SUVs under camouflage tarps before sneaking toward the rear entrance.
This door had modern security, cameras carefully hidden around its frame and a state of the art keypad concealed under a loose piece of siding. Rather than try her luck, Kat made sure to stay out of the camera’s line of sight as she worked her way along the building’s wall.
One story under a barred window, she activated Levitation and Leapt upward. The combination of magic and skill brought her smoothly up to the next level of the building. She grabbed onto one of the bars, wedging it into the crook of her elbow.
