The street outside the Diamond North station was deafening.
Liam stood behind the open rear doors of the SUV, the customized M134 minigun whining like a mechanical predator as he swept the barrel across the neon-lit avenue. In front of the vehicle, Toby crouched low over the hood, his standard-issue Glock tracking the shadows. Inside, Kit remained perfectly still, monitoring Sol's shallow breathing.
They were shooting at a ghost.
Skid didn't just run; he glided. He slapped his palm against the side of a parked delivery van, dropping the friction to absolute zero, and used it to launch himself forty feet across the avenue. He hit a glowing holographic billboard, tagged the glass, and skated vertically up its face, laughing.
"Too slow, big guy!" Skid's voice echoed down the avenue. "You're trying to hit the wind with a sledgehammer!"
Liam gritted his teeth and tracked the movement, squeezing the trigger. A storm of heavy caliber rounds shredded the billboard, sending sparks and pulverized glass raining down onto the asphalt.
Skid dropped off the board, sliding upside down along the side of a bus stop shelter, completely unaffected by gravity or friction. Liam tracked him, hauling the heavy minigun to the right—just as the station's underground gate kicked open.
Hannah and Charlotte emerged first, followed closely by Kira.
Liam's finger was already down. The stray volley of minigun fire ripped across the pavement, tearing straight toward the stairwell exit.
Kira didn't flinch. He raised a hand from his pocket, and a solid wall of geometric carbide dust snapped into existence. The heavy rounds slammed into the barrier with a deafening, grinding screech, sparking violently against the violet corona before disintegrating.
"Watch your fire," Kira said. The dust dissolved back into a shimmering cloud around his shoulders. "You are aiming at the principal."
Liam lowered the smoking barrels, wincing. "Sorry. Having a bit of trouble out here."
Three blocks to the east, a lone figure crouched on the edge of a mid-rise commercial roof. He lowered a pair of high-magnification binoculars, his eyes locked on the group emerging from the stairs. He pulled out an encrypted phone, typed two rapid keystrokes, and sent the signal.
Down on the street, Skid's phone chimed. He checked his wrist-mount as he skated across the hood of an abandoned taxi. He spotted Hannah.
"Jackpot," Skid grinned.
He drew his pistol, tagged a lamppost to kill the friction, and swung his body around it to generate massive centrifugal force. He launched himself off the pole like a bullet, hurtling straight down the avenue toward Hannah at highway speeds. His left arm was extended for balance, his right leveling the pistol at her chest.
"Watch out!" Liam roared.
Before Skid could pull the trigger, Miguel exploded from the station stairwell. He didn't hesitate. He launched himself into the air, intercepting Skid's trajectory with a right hook that burned with blinding, molten-red heat.
Skid's eyes widened. He threw his arms up to block, taking the punch on his crossed forearms. The impact sent him tumbling backward, sliding uncontrollably across the asphalt.
Skid scrambled to his feet, smelling burnt synthetic fabric. He looked down. The sleeve of his reinforced jacket was sparking furiously, the bio-thermal heat eating through the material and building toward critical mass.
"Oh, shit." Skid ripped the jacket off and hurled it away.
It detonated mid-air, a concussive blast of fire that shattered the nearby storefront windows. Skid let out a sharp breath. "Close call."
"We need to move," Charlotte said, her handgun drawn and scanning the rooftops. "Get her to the vehicle. There are multiple hostiles on the board."
Liam looked past Miguel at the empty, smoke-filled stairwell. "Where is he?"
"Handling things below," Miguel said, shaking the heat from his knuckles. "Said to go on without him."
"Will he be alright?" Liam asked, his grip tightening on the minigun.
Miguel smirked. "It's King."
"Focus," Kira interrupted, his voice dropping the temperature of the immediate area. "The principal is exposed. Get her out of the open."
They broke into a run toward the SUV.
They didn't make it five steps before the sky above them buzzed.
Miguel dug his hand into his pockets. Empty. He swore, pulled out his own cell phone, charged it until the lithium battery screamed, and hurled it directly into the descending swarm.
The phone exploded like a frag grenade, incinerating a massive chunk of the hornets in a ball of amber fire.
But Skid was already moving again.
He dropped low, skating past the edge of the explosion, both hands dragging along the asphalt. He tagged the street. He tagged the tires of a parked sedan. He tagged the front bumper of Toby's SUV.
The friction died. The entire street became an ice rink.
The heavy SUV, parked on a slight incline, immediately began to slide backward.
"It's moving!" Toby yelled, scrambling backward as his boots slipped on the tagged asphalt. "Liam, grab the back!"
Liam dropped the M134. It clattered against the street and slid away into the gutter. He lunged for the rear of the SUV, wrapping his massive arms around the spare tire mount. He dug his boots into the pavement, grunting with effort as the four-ton vehicle tried to drag him down the avenue. He began to slide, the rubber soles of his boots smoking, but his sheer mass dragged the acceleration to a crawl.
Skid banked sharply off a wall, circling back around. He leveled his pistol and fired a single shot on the move.
The bullet tore straight through Liam's left thigh.
The giant let out a choked roar and dropped to one knee, blood spilling onto the asphalt. He didn't let go of the bumper.
"Forget the vehicle!" Kira barked, stepping between Hannah and the sliding car.
"Kit is inside!" Liam grunted, his muscles straining as he held the sliding steel with everything he had.
The avenue was descending into total chaos. A civilian sedan, caught on the zero-friction asphalt, slammed into a fire hydrant, sending a geyser of water into the air. People were screaming, scrambling into doorways to avoid the sliding wreckage.
Miguel vaulted onto the roof of the slowly sliding SUV to get the high ground. He patted his pockets again. Still empty.
"Fuck it," Miguel growled. He balanced on one foot, ripped off his left shoe, and charged it with thermal energy. He hurled the glowing sneaker like a fastball straight at Skid's head.
The shoe blew up in Skid's face. The shockwave caught the skater, blowing him backward. Skid dropped his gun, tumbling wildly across the frictionless ground. Toby didn't hesitate, leveling his Glock and firing three rapid shots. Sparks flew off the pavement near Skid's head, forcing the skater to scramble blindly into an adjacent alley to survive.
Meanwhile, Charlotte, Kira, and Hannah were moving fast toward the edge of the intersection. As they passed a narrow, trash-filled alleyway, the shadows shifted.
Mirage lunged out of the darkness, his chromatophore skin dropping its camouflage. He thrust a serrated combat knife directly at Hannah's ribs.
Charlotte was faster. She stepped into the strike, parrying the knife arm with a brutal forearm block, and delivered a crushing front kick to Mirage's knee. As the assassin stumbled, Charlotte drew her weapon and fired point-blank.
Mirage wove backward with terrifying, fluid speed, deflecting one of the rounds with the flat of his blade. A spark of sheared metal lit the alley before he melted instantly back into the camouflage of the brick wall, vanishing completely.
"Keep your eyes open!" Charlotte yelled, pushing Hannah behind her. "They're trying to box us in!"
Then the buzzing returned. Louder this time.
Hive stepped out from the shadows behind the sliding SUV. His oversized coat fell away. His torso was a nightmare of hollowed-out flesh and pulsating hives. With a sickening, wet tearing sound, his chest cavity flared open, releasing a massive, black cloud of genetically mutated hornets. The swarm blotted out the streetlights, moving toward the team like a living storm front.
On top of the SUV, Miguel swore loudly. "Bug spray would be nice right about now!"
He ripped off his right shoe. In his socks now, he pumped every ounce of bio-thermal energy he could spare into the footwear until it glowed like a miniature sun, and hurled it directly into the center of the swarm.
The explosion tore the street apart.
The swarm split violently into three sections. The center mass was vaporized instantly. The left section surged toward Hannah and Charlotte, crashing uselessly against Kira's rapidly deployed violet shield.
The right section found Liam.
The hornets swarmed the giant's bleeding leg and arms, stinging relentlessly. Liam let out an agonizing roar, his massive hands finally losing their grip on the SUV's bumper.
Freed from Liam's weight, the zero-friction SUV suddenly accelerated down the incline.
"No!" Miguel yelled, leaping off the roof of the sliding vehicle and dropping toward Liam to swat the swarm away.
Toby lunged, diving headfirst into the open driver-side door of the moving SUV. He slammed his hand onto the brake pedal.
It was the worst thing he could have done.
On absolute zero friction, locking the wheels completely destroyed the vehicle's center of gravity. The heavy SUV snapped sideways and began spinning wildly out of control, a four-ton steel centrifuge hurtling blindly down the avenue.
Standing paralyzed in the middle of the street, frozen by the explosions and the chaos, a lone civilian man clutching a briefcase looked up.
The spinning backside of the SUV was rushing straight toward him.
"Help!" the man screamed, throwing his hands over his face.
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To Be Continued