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"Advancement." She bit the word off harshly. "Of both myself and the world as a whole." Killing was a good way to cull the population. Narrow the gene pool. And while she was at it, she proved herself to be better. Better than anyone. Better than the best.
She waited while he complimented himself. "The kills were remarkably unoriginal, if I recall; I wondered if it was only one of you people. But I will say they were effective."
She looked haughtily at the running Shadowman as she followed briskly. "Weapons. He needs his weapons." The question was clearly meant to be left unanswered, but her mind threw out possibilities just as a way to cool her nerves. Idiot had woken her up mid-REM cycle; she had had to consciously shift her biorhythms to deal with the disorientation. Luckily, with her combined biochemical and psychic knowledge, it wasn't as hard as it might have been. Even so, she was not pleased with how the Tyrgani had deemed to treat her.

Patrick arrived back at his room. Since he served more or less as special forces, he was allowed personal weapons. While his Five-seveN was already belted to his thigh, he didn't make it a habit of carrying around his absurdly huge sniper rifle.

The M82 was an ex-American rifle - Patrick didn't think that the Tyrgani Alliance actually produced any anymore, so it was sort of a collector's item. The Barrett .50 cal BMG round it fired was actually designed for a machine gun, and there had been later versions that were nearly as powerful and slightly more accurate. Patrick didn't care. With all the Shadowman equipment, he could more than make up for it, and there was something satisfying in the kick the .50 cal gave that just wasn't there in the smaller rounds.

He hefted it, opening the chamber just a touch to see if it was unloaded. It was, and there wasn't a magazine in it, so he let it snap back shut and slid it onto his shoulder. He had his own ammo too - just some he brought back with him, not like he purchased it - but it could stay here. It was here in the case of an emergency, and this wasn't an emergency.

The UMP45 was not much less of a relic, since it was designed in Germany, which was now controlled by the Coven. It was just as beautiful, and Patrick loved it just as much as his M82. The .45 ACP rounds were the same sort of clean satisfying things as the .50 BMGs, for whatever reason, and although the magazine wasn't large, the rounds would stop just about anything made of flesh. Other rounds might pierce, but this one would slam. Patrick loved that.

It too was unloaded, and quite a few empty magazines were scattered here and there. Many of them were carefully attached together professionally, side-to-side, since other orientations were likely to damage the magazines. Patrick generally brought these with him - he collected them, and right now he had maybe twenty or thirty with him, way more than he could possibly want to bring with him. He'd load the magazines during the flight; he scooped them up and jammed them into his jacket and vest until he had eight or nine - the actual number of magazines being carried was then sixteen or eighteen, which was a very substantial amount of ammo. .45 ACP and .50 BMG could still be provided, since they were still used by plenty of people.

Patrick began jogging back, now feeling the weight of the M82 on his shoulder. Oddly, it felt better than without it - more homey, more natural. That was ironic; most people hated going into combat with extra weight. This wasn't extra, though, not as far as he was concerned.

Patrick paused for a moment in the middle of a bridge. Something seemed wrong. He'd experienced enough missions to know this feeling - imminent danger.

Above.

Patrick took two steps forward and went into a rolling dive. Behind him, a man in brightly-colored clothing slammed a blade clear through the bridge's floor, landing in a kneeling position. He drew it up from the crystal and stood as Petrachkov glanced up. The man had jumped from a bridge above - if Patrick hadn't moved on instinct he'd have a blade entering his skull and leaving through his groin. Not fun to think about.

"Why'd you have to go and do that? Now we have to make a big old scene of things," the man complained, adjusting the jester mask on his face and bringing his sword into an aggressive stance. "So tiresome. So very tiresome."

--

--

"Codename is 'Agent Kaiser,' of Glorious, rank classified... as most Glorious things are. Nobody and nothing in the Alliance I'd rather work for, though," the Ghoster replied. "It's weird. I've been going by 'Kaiser' for so long it's how I think of myself now. I have trouble remembering my real name at times."

Cling!

"So..."

Cling cling!

"Very..."

Cling cling cling!

"Tiresome!"

After deflecting the six bullets Petrachkov fired with the blade, he continued to advance on Petrachkov, jumping into a two-handed overhead slash - a cruel, calculated move based on the lack of lateral maneuvering space.

--

--

"Gunshots? That's never good. Miss Jacobson, run to the Dreighton mall, stop for nobody and nothing, take the restricted bridge, sprint for the aeropad at the top. Captain Blackstone is there, he'll guard you if this is what I think it is. I'm going to repeat this because it's important - stop for nobody and nothing, no matter what. Not even if it looks like a legitimate Tyrgani government or military man." The Ghoster grimaced, stepped to the the edge of the bridge, and launched himself off, Ghosting and flying like a rocket towards Petrachkov.

The blade made a soft clang against the metal platform before the man spun into a horizontal slash. "You may call me the Jack of Diamonds. Though you won't do so for long." As Patrick dodged backwards again, unable to slip beneath the horizontal swing, the Jack of Diamonds brought his off-hand behind him and suddenly was throwing three knives of indeterminate origin at Petrachkov in a single swing.

On a list of things Catalena didn't expect, "the crystal bridge exploding in front of her" was probably pretty high up.

Of course, in the world of 27, nothing is that easy.

Catalena threw herself back and to the ground, avoiding the worst of the fragmented crystals, to see a man in a relatively light suit of black plate armor with a lance of some type - no, a guandao - walking towards her on the same side of the gap in the crystal bridge. She probed his mind and met cold, hard resistance - he was no psychic himself, and his defenses were unaugmented, but this was a man who had been trained to fight psychic probing and was well aware of what Catalena could do. As the man crushed a detonator in his hand and annihilated its with a small burst of energy, Catalena decided this was probably related to the orders Kaiser had given.

"That did not answer my ARGH," Patrick shouted as he twisted sideways, not quite avoiding the knife that slit across his arm, almost lodging but it wasn't deep enough, so that was okay and it was painful but it didn't matter, he leapt forward as the man had left himself open while the knife pulled through Patrick's arm.

Patrick was jumping for a tackle, more or less - the man might be fast, but there was only so far he could run before Patrick could force him from that bridge to a lower one or at least get clear enough to run for his ******** life. Hopefully the tackle would be effective.