Kris:

  “I hate this plan, for the record.” She was, in a word, unhappy.

  “Noted.” Mari gave her a reassuring squeeze, but the grin on her face was potentially more concerning.

  “Are you having fun?”

  “False bravado. Works best in times of abject terror.” Nobody responded to Mari’s quip, and that was telling enough.

  With that, they moved as a unit down the hallway and took the first left. Kris made sure she took up the rear, and Relkur kept a hand on her shoulder as he kept pace with the forward duo, ensuring nobody got left behind.

  At the front, Mari was moving in a half-crouch, which must’ve been harsh on her knees. Vilke stood over her, slightly behind, with his rifle and longer scope focused down range.

  Their next intersection had Vilke cursing. The next left was a dead end, and Mari took a knee and started firing her exceedingly loud handgun into something down that hall.

  “Watch right!” Vilke combined the order with a solid swipe of his hand into Relkur’s thigh, indicating who he meant.

  Kris was pleased it hadn’t been meant for her, because a somewhat canine creature came around the corner behind their group, and Kris found herself busy.

  She took a knee, steadied her aim, and pulled the trigger.

  The server behind the monster erupted in sparks as the canine stumbled, but didn’t lose any momentum. She fired again, this time watching a hole open up in the creature’s eye, causing it to go limp, skidding along the stone floor as it collapsed. At the far end, the server she’d hit suddenly arced, then exploded as a capacitor blew out.

  Mental note: server technology is not dense enough to stop sequence penetration at this power level.

  She spared a glance to the group, and noted each direction.

  Mari had been shooting at a snake, and had clearly had trouble tracking it well, so when it got close, she pulled her combat knife and impaled the head of the serpent into the servers. The snake had turned shriveled and nasty looking, while Mari condensed the mist into ear plugs she was in the process of putting in. She had also given a set to Relkur, who seemed less enthusiastic.

  Ahead of them, Vilke had put a bullet into the kneecap of another afflicted Sylpharien that was still crawling towards them, with bloodshot eyes and snapping teeth. Instead, Vilke had turned his attention to the right side, where Relkur had apparently warned about a pair of canines that hadn’t survived long under his rifle’s burstfire.

  Kris turned her eyes back to the path behind them, and just in time, too.

  A rodent the size of a cat was soaked in blood and limping in their direction.

  She aimed, pulled the trigger again, and watched as the smaller creature gained a new hole from nose to tail, with the blood sprayed across the floor behind it.

  It told her a lot about the real mechanics behind her weapon. Namely, the sequence was a gravitational programming that wrote a phenomenon into being at the endpoint of where she aimed, either twenty meters, or when it hit a sufficiently dense surface. That endpoint became the source for a powerful gravitational attraction that was scripted to be contained within the two centimeter diameter she specified. Therefore, everything between the barrel tip and the endpoint were siphoned away from her.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  She had only needed to consider her script ideas for a moment before realizing that drawing a gravitational pinpoint towards herself would be an awful idea. It was much wiser to have the compressed gravity pull things in towards a point decently far from herself.

  What she wasn’t expecting was for Mari’s nanites to have prevented the inevitable gore splatter in their prior fights. With the target outside Mari’s radius? The endpoints for her shots became the new home of whatever had once been between them. In the most recent case, a smear of rodent internals.

  Kris almost felt a bit of queasiness hit her, but she fought it down as more ear plugs were handed out. They felt spongy, and rather than deafening her, they muffled noises while not being uncomfortable.

  “We keep moving.” Vilke’s voice still reached her, which was good. She had to admit, their gunshots had been harsh on the ears. “Kris, take the left side with your shorter range. Mari, the rear. Relkur, warn me if anything turns up ahead, I’ll be covering the right.”

  Everyone gave their affirmations, and the group reorganized as they entered the next section of corridor, with Kris in the front, Mari at the back, and Vilke covering over Kris’ shoulder.

  And then, as one, they paused.

  “Dum~dum~dum, dum~de~dum, dum~de~dum…”

  Mari audibly spluttered, “The Imperial March?”

  Everyone else had a very visceral reaction, minus Vilke, who had taken one hand from his rifle to bury his face into the palm. Kris settled into a kneeling position with her weapon raised. She had the best knowledge of world history in the whole city, and she didn’t recognize the song herself. She wasn’t taking any chances, regardless.

  “Sorry, wrong empire. The song is from a fictional production in my old world.” Mari’s clarification had things no less tense, but layered some confusion onto them anyway.

  And then, they saw her.

  The melodic, youthful voice belonged to a girl who looked to be no more than eight. She was young, with raven-black hair pulled back in a high ponytail that barely kept it from trailing on the ground behind her.

  And she was covered in blood.

  [Affliction: 12%]

  [Affliction: 7%]

  [Affliction: 34%]

  [Affliction: 77%]

  The numbers that appeared on Kris’ HUD were scattered all across the girl’s body.

  Somehow more distressing was how the girl was casually strolling while humming and carrying a pickaxe resting against one shoulder. As they stared, and Kris considered pulling the trigger despite the girl being outside her range, the youth shifted the toe of one foot just behind and to the side of her other foot, then executed a flawless right-face, snapping her heels together.

  “Hehehe!” The girl immediately lunged towards the crippled afflicted Sylpharien that Vilke had downed earlier with her pickaxe held high in an overhead arc, and with a thunderous impact, the entire area around her turned into a crater, painting the destroyed surroundings in viscera.

  “What the fuck?” Vilke breathed out in amazement.

  When the small girl straightened, the pick fell into pieces as she tossed the shattered wooden handle to the side. And then she turned towards them, performing a flawless about-face as her heels snapped again.

  “Oh?” Her cute voice stopped humming for the first time since they’d all frozen.

  She was adorable, if not for the blood all over her. Most entrancing were her eyes, however. The small girl had mismatched irises—one vibrant green and the other a radiant blue. The youth grinned at them, revealing oversized canines, but she was otherwise very human in appearance.

  She bounded in their direction, causing every weapon to snap up, and she held her hands high in surrender. “I~come~in~peace?” Her accent lilted slightly, but then she turned aside, spitting out a glob of black substance before continuing. “I suppose I should introduce myself, since that’s how this goes, right? I’m Anise! Nice to meetcha!”

  Behind her, Kris could hear Mari nearly choking.

  “I’m Kris. Nice to meet you, too. But, if I may, why are you here?”

  “Hm? Oh, some idiots smashed their way into my home, so I’m knocking heads to be polite!”

  “With that appearance and that name.” Mari gritted out terse words, and the tension began to build again. “Who are you really? Who made you?”

  “My mom did. She’s super smart and all that.”

  “And? Who is your mom?”

  “Doctor Sylvia, I guess?”

  Silence.

  Kris turned around to see Mari leaning heavily against one of the server racks, her eyes wide with disbelief.

  All explanation was cut off as another shriek announced the arrival of more afflicted rushing in their direction.

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