Chapter 203 - EVO

***Tirnanog, Mount Aerie***

***Daman Salb***

It was finally time!

The thrill of the mission that got the blood pumping. The split-second decision-making that could cost lives at any moment, either those of your enemies or your own. The feeling of being a part of a greater group. To be one with your comrades.

The joy of connecting to the combat group mind shared between all of the special forces. To be part of something greater and to let all doubt and hesitation fall away.

It was the reason why I had joined special operations all those years ago.

And the time had finally arrived.

Grabbing the worker’s bag, which normally stored my tools, I headed for a store-room that should be unoccupied at this time of day. Instead of tools, the bag held all my gear today. Unfortunately, the load-out was limited to what could be smuggled into the compound without getting caught.

It reduced our overall combat ability, but each member of the team should nonetheless be comparable to the men and women who guarded the compound.

The movements of gearing up were familiar, trained to perfect efficiency, and within less than five minutes I was ready for the mission.

The group mind finally activated, controlled by our psychics.

I left the store-room and walked quickly down the corridor. The group mind told me exactly where my team members were, so we advanced in perfect synchronisation, ensuring that nobody ran into a guard patrolling one of the compound’s many corridors.

In front of me, two of our people had already taken out the guard who was blocking the path to the living areas. Deep inside the estate, the security wasn’t tight enough to stop us. We had already determined that getting to the targets was not the problem. The difficulty would be getting out once an alarm was triggered.

An inevitability, given that these people had the nanobot user interface activated, so it would be essential to delay the alarm for as long as possible.

I strolled past the security checkpoint and down the corridor that led to the living area of the targets. Once I reached the door, I knocked politely.

There was at least one caretaker supposed to be with the targets – one of the weaker ones.

As soon as the door unlocked and the handle lowered, I didn’t hesitate.

With a kick, the door flew open the rest of the way, hitting the woman behind it and forcing her to stumble back while I already had a hand on the hilt of my dagger.

Three quick steps brought me close enough to sink the long dagger through her Adam’s apple, cutting off any call for help she could have made. The blade went further, going all the way through her spine and out the back of her neck.

With my free hand, I grabbed her shirt to prevent her from dropping to the ground like a lifeless meat sack and making noise.

Letting go of the dagger, my hand went to the silenced tranquillizer gun at my belt.

Hesitating not a single second, I double-tapped the little girl who was staring at me with wide, shocked eyes from right in the middle of the entrance hall. The narcotic used was the strongest that was still deemed safe enough by the scientists, but we didn’t expect it to work for long, given the target’s potential resistance to poisons and other substances.

Even if it only worked for a few minutes, it should be enough.

The girl looked down at the two darts in her chest in disbelief, then dropped like a doll.

The rest of the team surged into the living quarters from behind me, and I lowered the dead caretaker to the ground. The blade stayed inside her neck for assurances, just in case she had some sort of fast-acting self-healing ability. Once her brain was out of oxygen for a few minutes, it would be much harder to come back to life.

While the rest of the team began securing the living quarters, two operatives efficiently began bagging the girl in a transport harness.

Five men stayed behind to secure the entrance, which turned out to be a wise decision.

There was a scream from down the entrance hall, and a boy charged out of one of the doors, dodging one of the other operatives.

The group mind told me where he was going even before he came around the corner, and my silenced tranquillizer gun hissed out two more projectiles.

I missed, but the boy’s escape path was still cut off by an entrance so full of bodies that speed didn’t matter in the slightest.

One of the operatives in the entrance hall got in a kick and grabbed the boy, who promptly tried to use his electrocution ability. Forewarned, our gear was already altered to protect against such attacks.

He and a second operative quickly brought the child down and began tying him in another transport harness.

Three men brought the second girl struggling out of the living room. For their size, they were extremely hard to subdue. The main reason for the difficulty was that we weren’t allowed to injure them unless necessary.

Only a few seconds had passed, and the operation was going smoothly, perfectly even.

I aimed my gun at the boy to take him out of the equation, but something growled at me from beneath a small cupboard that was filled with all the little knick-knacks two adults might leave lying around in their home when they emptied their pockets after a day of work.

My gun changed targets automatically, as the group mind identified the sound as an unknown threat that wasn’t accounted for. I moved as if on my own, not even having to think about what I was doing.

When I saw the cat, I hesitated, deeming it unworthy of one of the limited darts we had, so I changed my target back to the boy.

The next moment, a furry ball of anger was right in my face, clawing at my cheeks and eyes like a leaf shredder.

I closed my eyelids just in time, but it still felt like I lost the right one.

Moving in accordance with what the group mind told me, I backhanded the animal away from my face. I managed, but the animal felt unusually weighty and strong for its size. Like a little medicine ball of compacted muscle and fur.

Then several things happened at once as the orderly mission suddenly turned into a madhouse!

One of the operatives who was holding the still-conscious girl screamed as a furball attached itself to his ankle, biting and scratching as if it was about to fell a giant by cutting its Achilles tendon.

The cat I had backhanded twisted in mid-air and bounced off the wall, going for the man right behind me.

A furball rushed out of a room further down the entrance hall, and with a jump, went right for the nuts of an operative. The unholy critters were so fast, there was nothing you could do to stop them before they attached themselves to something vital.

I cursed as a fourth and a fifth of the little monsters joined the mayhem, and then they were bouncing around the entrance hall, going for unprotected skin or weak armour wherever it presented itself. Cloth was nothing to those sharp claws and tiny, needle-like teeth.

They were so fast that it felt like there were twenty of them. The little monsters didn’t kill any of us, but they were distracting, and the only hits we got in were when they overstayed their welcome to do some damage.

One of the men managed a lucky kick to the animal that was mangling the other operative’s ankle, but I felt through the group mind that it was like kicking something far heavier than the animal’s size implied.

It rolled like some martial artist over the floor, then twisted in mid-air to dodge one of my tranquillizer darts, and pounced on another man’s ankle.

The girl and the boy suddenly got loose, as the animals suddenly concentrated their attacks on the men and women who held the kids, and in the next moment two of our people went down twitching as they got electrocuted. The children had wisened up and reached for bare skin instead of non-conductive armour.

The girl went to hide beneath a table, and the boy zipped out of the hall, somewhere deeper into the living quarters.

Then there was a sudden flash of light, and the group mind had even more things to worry about.

One of our psychics turned and concentrated on Magnus, who had appeared out of nowhere!

Wasn’t he supposed to be somewhere in the main living cavern? Even at their fastest, the parents shouldn’t have been able to return before the mission was over.

The psychic barely managed in time to lock the fully armoured man down, halting him mid-step.

Then there was a second flash of light, and Astra stood in the hallway, therefore instantly occupying our second psychic.

“Dad!” the girl beneath the table cried.

Cursing, I turned on the unmoving Magnus, fully intending to take him out while the psychic prevented him from moving.

Pulling out a second knife, I tried to pry apart two of the armour plates at the neck joint, but they were locked tight. The strange filaments that were holding them even seemed to pull tighter together when I tried to pry my blade into the gap.

Suddenly, the armoured figure in front of me screamed like a madman, grabbed my hand, and whirled me around like a toy. Only the wall broke my momentum and drove the air out of my lungs.

Then Magnus was in front of the psychic who had tried to lock him down, both hands landing on the sides of his head and thumbs digging into his eye sockets. The armoured lunatic lifted and slammed the operator’s head against the hallway’s wall.

“You don’t get to be in my head!”

Slam!

“I have already too many people in there!”

Slam!

“This is not a democracy, and even if it was…”

Slam!

“You are not part of the voting pool!”

Then the psychic’s head lit up red, as if someone had switched on a light strong enough to shine through the skull! Most of the flesh evaporated instantly, flash-fried by the lightning arc between Magnus’s palms.

A moment later, the head came loose, and the mostly untouched body dropped to the ground, followed by the carelessly dropped charred head, which bounced and rolled in front of the little girl’s hiding place – who promptly expelled the contents of her stomach at the sight.

Two operatives charged the newly arrived hassle, but clashed over empty air as Magnus blurred out of the way, right towards the psychic who was concentrating on Astra, almost carefully placing a hand on the side of their head.

The operative’s head hit the wall with a cracking sound, his helmet providing little protection as it cracked. That didn’t deter Magnus as he mechanically repeated the action as if cracking a coconut. Once, twice, thrice, before the dead body slid to the ground, leaving Magnus with bits and pieces of brain in his hand.

The group mind reassessed the situation as Astra began to move, now free of the psychic’s restraint.

All the remaining operatives who had entered the living quarters threw themselves at the two armoured figures to buy time. Those who could do so dropped the specially prepared grenades, which popped and filled the air with tiny metal tinsel, hopefully impairing the ability of the two speedsters to seemingly teleport at a whim.

We had prepared them in advance, acting on the best guess at how their short-range teleport ability worked. Originally, they had been intended to lock down the kids, in case they had inherited the ability of their parents. Nobody anticipated that the parents could use the ability to return home on a whim!

Ignoring the small, furry monster who had attached itself to my calf, the group mind chose me to go for the already drugged and packed-up girl.

It took only a few steps to grab the small body before I charged out the door.

The operatives in charge of keeping the exit clear were already occupied with a female warrior, clad completely in a silver, smooth, skin-hugging armour. It was the invincible one.

With the ancient involved, there was no longer a point in fighting. The remaining operatives bodily piled themselves onto the invincible one, one of them going so far as to impale himself on her weapon to buy me time.

I rushed past the pileup, shrugging off the cat as I went and followed the pre-planned escape route as pre-installed explosion charges were triggered all around the compound. We couldn’t smuggle in enough explosives to do serious damage, but the general chaos it caused would be enough to cover the escape route, which was, strangely enough, right out one of the main exits towards the central living cavern.

It provided the widest pathway to get through the groups of treemonae which covered all entrances to the estate.

Pulling out a gas mask, I covered my face as the – sadly – non-lethal, irritating compound which was mixed in with the explosion charges began spreading throughout the facility.

Only two of the secondary operatives joined me as we rushed out the main gate. They hadn’t been involved directly with the operation and were only intended as a secondary group to watch out for unforeseen complications. That the progenitors of the targets could teleport right past them without giving us any warning was completely unforeseen.