Everything I’d seen of the habitat thus far projected a more peaceful, less utilitarian appeal to what I was accustomed to in Ar Telica. The city-state’s architectural style and influence was both broad and varied, but it was primarily focused on efficiency since it had to handle a population of thirty million people confined to an area of a few thousand square kilometers. In contrast, the Citadel’s habitat felt more wholesome and geared toward the comfort of the inhabitants. Again, that’s why I thought of it as a holiday town, a place where the inhabitants could relax and enjoy peaceful days.

And yet here I was tearing it apart with bullets fired at hypersonic speed.

The beauty of the place almost made me feel guilty for shooting it up.

Almost.

Turning in a slow circle while standing in the foyer, I quickly realized a number of things that kept me at a standstill for several seconds.

The first was that I was still overclocked.

When I first experienced the phenomenon back in the desert, I wasn’t able to remain in a prolonged hyper-accelerated mental state without experiencing a headache. This time was different. My consciousness had been transitioning between various degrees of overclocking so smoothly that I was hardly aware of it. When I spoke to someone my overclocking would slow down only to speed up when the conversation was over. Because of this, I had more time to dwell on the situation than a normal person could. With my consciousness moving at an accelerated rate, one second of real time translated to four or five seconds within my mind. That gave me ample time to think things through, leading me to my second realization.

I had less than four minutes remaining to save Erina, and though I was feeling the pressure, I wasn’t overwhelmed by it. Why? Again, because I was overclocked and could thereby afford to spend a few seconds looking about while spending thirty to forty seconds inside my head pondering my next move.

So what was my next move?

To address that, I needed to consider point number three: the tower.

To begin with, it was much larger than I’d thought.

From a distance, the tower looked tall, thin, and wrapped in spiraling wire mesh. But up close and personal it was easily more than sixty meters in diameter. The exterior was covered by a transparent glass façade, and latticework of smooth metal piping then gloved the tower from the base to the peak. Unlike the exterior, the interior was made of translucent glass. The only parts that weren’t made of glass were the seats, the holo-vision display boards, the information desks, and so forth.

Its construction reminded me of Telos Academy’s library – the girls’ lair where no male student dared to enter for fear of having himself arrested or his life destroyed through social media. The big difference between the two was that the library was transparent whereas the tower was translucent with some areas opaquer than others.

I realized this would have solved the problem with Telos Academy’s library where it was easy to look up a girl’s dress while standing on the floor below them.

Regardless, the tower’s glass construction presented me with a new problem.

Even if it was opaque, I could still see through the translucent floors and partitions of the tower. Undoubtedly, someone would also be able see me standing in the ground floor’s immense foyer.

I turned my gaze upwards and focused the Argus System in the direction I was looking, concentrating the sensor-field into the shape of a cone, like that of a flashlight, and thereby extending its range to thirty meters. But with the tower being so tall and wide, I couldn’t sense all the way to the opposite side, and I could only stretch the sensor-field as far as seven floors above me.

This led me to point number four: the Promenade.

When I squinted hard and peered through the floors, I could discern a very faint oblate shadow high overhead. Because it appeared to stick out from the northside of the tower, I assumed that this shadow was the Promenade’s silhouette. The problem was that it was docked to the tower outside of my sensor range, implying it was well above the seventh floor.

And finally point number five: how do I get up there?

Looking back down, I noticed that the middle of the tower was hollow and home to a pair of spiral staircases that wound around each other like a double helix with landings at every floor. Like the tower surrounding it, the staircases were translucent with an equally opaque guardrail.

Oddly, I could see no other way up or down the tower.

There were no elevators in sight.

Was everyone expected to use the stairs?

Where was the architect’s compassion for the disabled and the elderly?

What kind of modern civilization doesn’t have elevators?

Alas, there didn’t appear to be any other choice but to take the stairs.

However, I was troubled at the prospect of being caught in a gunfight while making my way up to the Promenade. If that happened I would have little choice but to fight while fleeing into one of the floors, but in a tower of this peculiar design was there anywhere to hide? Unless the translucent material was a mysterious, miraculous material that rivaled Krono-steel it was unlikely to stop bullets fired from an overpowered sniper rifle.

Climbing up the outside was a fool’s errand. The latticework was constructed out of smooth, rounded beams. Even if I didn’t slip and fall, it would be slow going, not to mention that I would be an easy target for someone shooting at me from inside the tower.

Up the stairs it would have to be.

After expelling a sigh of surrender, I walked over to where Miss Ponytail’s remains lay on the foyer’s smooth floor. After turning her over onto her back, I crouched beside her and studied where she’d been struck by large caliber AP rounds.

As tough as she was, I didn’t think she was going to be much good to me now.

She simply had too many holes in her.

“…bloody Hell…,” I muttered as I straightened, then stood up.

I gave the stairwell a grim look.

It was the bottom of the ninth, the bases were loaded, and my former sister’s life was at stake.

Now wasn’t the time to be procrastinating over my next move, and apparently someone else agreed.

A young woman’s voice blared loudly into the air from hidden speakers.

“How long are you going to keep me waiting?”

Startled, I quickly stared up at the very faint and distant shadow of the Promenade.

“You went through all that trouble to get here. What’s the hold up?”

She did have a point.

“Tick tock, little girl. In less than four minutes, your sister dies.”

The sense of finality in her words unsettled me.

Wasn’t Erina going to be reduced to a virtual existence? Or were they really planning to kill her?

Either way, the owner of that voice was right.

Overclocked or not, I was losing time.

I needed to get up there and fast.

I gave the helical staircase another wary look, then quickly strode up to it.

At the landing, I paused for a second to peer up through the hole running vertically through the middle of the tower. As far as I could tell, the staircase wound its way to a translucent ceiling that glowed bloodred because of the crimson sky-field above it. This cast the top floors of the tower in an unwelcome Hellish light that made me think of Dante’s Inferno.

However, instead of going down into Hell, I’d be going up.

Briefly clenching my jaw, I sucked down my misgivings, then ascended the stairs at a jog.

Carrying the Punisher at the ready in a two-handed grip, I concentrated on climbing without tripping since I wasn’t looking down at my feet. That said, the Argus System’s sensor-sphere was augmenting my spatial awareness. By always knowing where my feet were in relation to the steps, I was unlikely to take an unexpected tumble.

I glanced at the Promenade’s shadow faintly visible through the translucent floors. By my best guess, the craft was docked another ten or eleven floors above me, and thereby at one of the levels dyed in crimson light.

Inside my head, the wetware kept track of the countdown.

Yet even as it ticked down inexorably toward zero, I couldn’t bring myself to sprint up the stairs because I was afraid of being caught off guard.

The Argus System had reverted to a sensor sphere, and it was watching the floors around me with its own keen eyes. At sight of anything dangerous, it promised to warn me, yet it wasn’t enough to reassure me – not when my opponent employed thermoptic camouflage to hide herself. Therefore, I continued to climb at a jog, and with each deserted floor that I ascended, my uneasiness grew.

I honestly felt like I was in the lair of the final boss.

When I finally arrived at the Promenade’s floor, the urge to breathe a sigh of relief almost overwhelmed me, until the wetware reported that the countdown had crossed another threshold.

03:00…02:59….

My decision to ascend cautiously had cost me another minute.

Regardless of my mind being overclocked, I was now definitely feeling the pressure as I stood on the landing to the twelfth floor.

A quick glance upwards confirmed there were two floors above me, but this was where I was getting off.

Stepping out of the stairwell, I switched the Punisher to double-shot mode, then I turned in a full circle to sweep my gaze – and the linear rifle – over my surroundings.

The twelfth floor had the vibe of a waiting lounge where First-Class passengers could convene before their boarding call. The floorspace was littered with low tables, plush chairs, and broad sofas, with some areas partitioned from others with translucent panels. Despite the organized clutter, I expected that none of the furnishings would offer me protection if and when the bullets started to fly.

My attention soon settled on a doorway that resembled a boarding gate like those used at the spaceport by passengers embarking or disembarking from trans-atmospheric liners.

However, what really grabbed my attention was the Promenade visible beyond the gateway.

Like the tower, it was far larger than I’d imagined – as much as three floors high and twenty meters wide. Also, now that I could see its rear profile clearly, I realized that it was indeed shaped like turtle’s shell – minus the turtle – but that it wasn’t upside-down at all. Instead, the Promenade was more like the giant gondolas of the immense zeppelins of yesteryear.

Leaving the Argus System to watch my back, I swallowed quietly, then advanced upon the boarding gate.

The open doors seemed inviting, but I was wary of traps.

I honestly didn’t think my senses could grow any sharper, but I was wrong.

A short tunnel connected the boarding gate from the tower to the Promenade.

The moment I glimpsed movement at the far end of that tunnel, my entire awareness narrowed upon it.

At a sudden standstill, I watched a familiar figure shed her thermoptic camouflage.

She crossed the tunnel, then stopped a foot shy of the boarding gate’s threshold.

With a subtle movement, I shifted my aim from her chest to her head.

Miss Ponytail greeted me with an acerbic smile. “You finally made it. Took you long enough. Did you stop for lunch on the way up?”

With no holo-display in sight, and with the Promenade blocking my view of the habitat, the wetware in Mirai’s head reported the countdown.

02:45…02:44….

After all the pain I’d endured because of her, I wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat, nor did I have the time for it.

“Boom,” I whispered hoarsely as I squeezed the trigger.

Please, stay safe.