Sometimes you need to backtrack in order to go forward.

That’s what I decided when I ran back to the building and the balcony where I’d left Miss Ponytail’s mechanical avatar for dead.

At sight of her broken body lying on the wrecked balcony, I briefly dropped to my knees and almost cried tears of joy mingled with relief.

Then I bounced back onto my feet, and I hurriedly pulled her body into the apartment.

In order to get to the balcony, I’d run back to the building, broken into it through a ground-floor entrance, then hurried up to the sixth floor where the apartment that was home to the scene of the crime was located.

Getting inside the apartment was easy.

Guided by the Argus System, I fired through the walls at the security bolts that locked the apartment’s entrance. This released the sliding door that I then pushed aside with ease. Venturing hastily through the spacious residence, I arrived at the smashed remains of the glass wall leading out onto the wrecked balcony. And there she was, just as I remembered her – a bloody mechanical mess with her head still attached to her neck. Nonetheless, regardless of the state she was in, finding her on the balcony was cause for celebration, and once I had her inside the living room, I studied her remains with a critical eye.

She’d taken a lot more of a pounding than I’d realized.

The Punishers ten-millimeter AP rounds had done a number on her clothes and skin, punching narrow craters into her skeleton that were between one and two inches deep. Her breastbone was pitted and cracked, and some of the heavy bullets had penetrated all the way through to the power core that served as her heart. I was surprised when I saw that, and then wondered if she had a second power core.

I decided to take a closer look at Miss Ponytail’s innards and asked the Argus System for its help.

When I’d fought the Gun Queen of Ar Telica, I’d failed to inspect her body.

As such, beyond Mirai’s imprinted memories, I knew very little of what a Gun Princess was like on the inside.

But it wasn’t curiosity that drove me to study Miss Ponytail’s internals.

I needed to know if her beaten remains to could serve me as a shield.

In other words, could she survive a dozen sniper rounds of the fourteen-millimeter variety?

The Argus System scanned her body and provided me with a clear picture of her internal structure.

Miss Ponytail’s avatar had no organs. Beneath her layers of artificial musculature was a flexible honeycomb structure surrounding a complex arrangement of gel packs filled with GER fluid. Several of those packs had been ruptured by AP bullets and showed signs of having resealed afterwards, indicating they had the ability to self-repair. There were no hydraulics inside of her, but she did possess dozens bio-electric motors operating numerous tiny pumps. Some of them were embedded within a network of arterial conduits that emerged from her power core and spread throughout her body. By tracing through her arteries, I was able to locate her second power core.

So she has two hearts. Good to know.

However, while that was all very fascinating, it didn’t interest me nearly as much as knowing whether she could stop the sniper rounds from penetrating her body.

The Argus System against scanned her body, and replied with an ambivalent—

[*Maybe….]

I grumbled in my throat.

*Come on! Give me a better answer.

[*Your plan may work.]

*What? That’s it?

[*It has an eighty-seven percent chance of success.]

“Eighty-seven percent, huh?” I straightened as I looked down at the dead machine. “Fine. I’ll take those numbers.”

I glanced at the countdown displayed on the apartment’s holo-vid system projected against a living room wall.

No matter where I went, there was no running away from that clock.

05:37…and counting.

My plan to use Miss Ponytail’s mechanical body as a shield had cost me eighty-three seconds thus far.

I couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

However, before I could venture forth, there were a few things I had to take care off.

After unholstering the damaged Punisher that was no useless as a weapon, I removed both of its battery packs and then slapped them onto a skirt flap. Then, I detached the Punisher’s magazine feeder and quickly attached it to the working rifle. Now, I had a Punisher that could source its bullets from two magazines rather than one. This made the rifle a little heavier, but nothing that would trouble Mirai or affect my aim.

Next, I queried the weapon for an ammo count.

There were sixty rounds in the right magazine, and thirty-two rounds in the left one.

For a second, I debated swapping out the half empty magazine, but ultimately chose not to because than the magazines fitted to the Punisher, I had two fresh magazines remaining, and both of those were stuck to my skirts.

In other words, I’d spent more than half the ammunition I’d started with.

Upon realizing that, I holstered the Punisher against my left shoulder blade, then hurriedly searched Miss Ponytail’s body for spare ammunition.

Turning her over, I found a slim ammo mag stuck to the back of her short skirt. I had to pull it free, just like I would with the magazines attached to my skirt. The Argus System scanned it, and I discovered it was loaded with twenty-four, .50 caliber explosive tipped, caseless rounds.

The magazine in my hand made me remember leaving behind Miss Ponytail’s two guns on the balcony, and so I hastily ran out to retrieve them.

Returning to the living room, I inspected both weapons.

Mirai’s wetware took a couple of seconds to link up with their A.I.’s. Apparently, the guns had no qualms about who they worked with, because they readily reported their status to me.

The heavy gun with dual ammo drums was worthless. During the firefight, I’d shot an AP round through both drums and destroyed the electric motors that drove them.

However, the second gun was undamaged.

The weapon resembled an oversized submachinegun and there were ten rounds left in the slim magazine. The bullets it fired were like anti-aircraft shells, exploding in close proximity to their target rather than on impact.

This was the gun that had brought me so much pain, but it was now working for me.

That didn’t stop me from giving it a sour look as I handed it over to the right holster arm.

Despite having a chunk bitten out of it by a sniper bullet, the armature continued to function properly. It took the gun from my hand, then fluidly swung back to its holstered positioned against my right shoulder blade.

As for the gun’s spare magazine, I slapped that to my left skirt.

Thus prepared, I fixed a grim look upon the mechanical corpse lying at my feet.

I wasn’t going to salvage anything else from Miss Ponytail.

It was time for her to become my shield.

Lugging Miss Ponytail on my back was rather uncomfortable because I had to drape her body over the mechanical holster arms.

Fortunately, she didn’t suffer from rigor mortis, though it had been only a few minutes since her death.

Thus burdened with her, I chose to avoid exiting out onto the street. Instead, I travelled from building to building by making use of the enclosed bridgeways.

I kicked and shot my way through the closed glass doors I encountered, expending twenty AP rounds in the process, before I finally arrived at my destination – a ground floor exit with a perfect view of the parkland, and the tower rising high about 150 meters away.

Like the other glass doors that I’d smashed my way through, the ones across the exit were locked shut.

I was going to have spend more bullets weakening the glass so that I could crash through them.

However, this time I chose to rely on Miss Ponytail’s super-sized handgun to do the honors.

That said, I decided to swap out its half empty magazine with the fresh magazine I’d appropriated from her back at the apartment.

Once the weapon was loaded and ready, I used Mirai’s preternatural strength to pick up the dead mechanical avatar.

Hefting Miss Ponytail off the ground with my left arm, I wielded her gun in my right hand as I took aim at the glass exit.

“…here we go…,” I muttered, then fired six shots into one of the two doors.

The explosive rounds blew fist sized holes into the glass.

Thus weakened, I would have no trouble crashing through it.

But no doubt, my shooting of the door had alerted the sniper to my location.

“…can’t be helped…,” I whispered as I holstered the oversized handgun, then grabbed onto Miss Ponytail with both hands.

Holding her aloft such that her feet dangled off the ground, I held Miss Ponytail out in front of me as I charged at the glass door.

The Argus System was projecting into my mind an image of the ground ahead of me.

This way I didn’t need to look around Miss Ponytail to see where I was going.

Since I’d already given myself away by shooting at the door, I decided to belt out a war cry.

It really served no purpose other than to psych me up.

Feeling my blood burning with both desperation and determination, I was stilling yelling loudly when I smashed into the glass door with big holes in it.

A heartbeat later, I crashed through it, and then out of the building.

I stumbled.

The impact, combined with Miss Ponytail’s hundred kilo weight, adversely affected my balance.

Her limp feet dragged on the pavement, almost pulling me down onto my knees, but I somehow managed to regain my balance.

In desperation, I hoisted Miss Ponytail before me like the shield I intended her to be.

I had to hold her high such that she would hide me from anyone standing on the dorsal hull of the Promenade.

That’s where the Argus System had determined the sniper was shooting from, and no sooner had I lifted Miss Ponytail up before me when I felt a tremendous blow strike her chest.

My arms buckled a few inches as the impact knocked her body into me.

The Argus System issued a harried report.

A sniper round had punched through Miss Ponytail’s armored sternum and lodged deep in her chest. Without her blocking the way, the bullet would have penetrated my exposed neck that wasn’t protected by the Princess Regalia.

I suddenly wondered if I was wrong about the sniper.

Was she trying to kill me after all?

That question sent a chill running through me and I willed my legs to run faster.

However, I was weighed down by Miss Ponytail’s body, and my running speed was compromised. Instead of an eleven second sprint to the finish line – the northside entrance into the tower – I was facing a fourteen or fifteen second dash. In addition, with Miss Ponytail shielding me, I was having to rely on the Argus System to be my eyes, and the view it provided wasn’t picture perfect. Thankfully, I had sense of the ground ahead of me because of the sensor-field the Argus System was manifesting, and the paved path I was following led directly to the tower.

All I had to do was keep Miss Ponytail’s body between me and the Promenade, and not trip over like some hapless damsel in distress.

A second round punched deep into the mechanical avatar’s chest.

The bullet lodged into the laminated armor that lay beneath the breastbone and ribcage.

The blow again buckled my arms, but I kept my footing and raised Miss Ponytail a little higher as I closed the distance to the tower.

In contrast, the sniper was having to aim lower with each shot.

My breathing sounded loud in my ears, as did my heart pounding away in my chest.

My footfalls felt heavy on the hard pavement.

I certainly didn’t feel like I had wings at my heels as I ran down the wide path.

A third round ripped through Miss Ponytail’s torso, tearing a path through the honeycomb structure that strengthened her abdominals without compromising her flexibility.

The armor-piercing bullet tore out of her lower back and slammed into the Princess Regalia protecting my midriff.

I gasped sharply at the sudden pain that flared across my gut, feeling as though I’d been knifed, and I struggled to regain my breathing’s rhythm.

Despite the pain I was enduring, I strongly believed the Regalia had kept the bullet from puncturing into me.

Then again, I was reluctant to look down and discover that Mirai had sprung a leak.

Leaving my well-being to the Regalia and the Angel Fibers, I concentrated on what I could see through the Argus System, doing my damnedest not to stumble and fall.

Then a fourth buried itself into Miss Ponytail’s left shoulder.

The impact twisted her body around in my hands, and I almost lost my grip on her.

Just as I succeeded in righting her above me, a fifth round struck her right shoulder, rocking her the other way.

Again, I struggled not to lose my hold on her.

As strong as Mirai was, she was much lighter than Miss Ponytail, so having to hold the avatar high overhead threatened to tip me over.

Widening my running stance helped a little, but it was uncomfortable and further compromised my speed.

However, I had no choice but to continue raising her higher the closer I ran to the tower.

That was because the angle of elevation between me and the sniper atop the Promenade continued to increase.

Groaning loudly through gritted teeth, I now held Miss Ponytail above me like an umbrella against a tremendous downpour.

On the plus side, I could now see ahead of me since I was carrying Miss Ponytail well overhead.

The sixth bullet struck her so hard I almost believed someone had dropped onto her.

The seventh bullet staggered me when it tunneled through Miss Ponytail’s belly and out of her lower back, striking my right shin in mid-stride.

The eighth bullet almost had my number on it.

It sailed through the tunnel in Miss Ponytail’s neck, and grazed the back of my head, taking some of Mirai’s hair with it.

Stunned by the near miss, I reflexively looked up through the opening in her neck, and straight at the sniper.

She had dropped her camouflage field and was aiming a huge anti-material rifle at me while standing on the leading edge of the Promenade.

I had but a heartbeat to duck my head as the ninth bullet centerpunched Miss Ponytail’s forehead with an awfully loud crack.

For a brief moment, I thought the heavy AP round would penetrate out the back of her head.

But Miss Ponytail had a thick skull, and the bullet failed to break through.

However, the impact knocked her head back, almost snapping it off the remains of her neck.

A split second later, I had run under the Promenade.

Now I was like the shark that had swum beneath the fishing boat.

Yet for another anxious moment, I feared the sniper would start shooting at me through the glass hull of the Promenade, but there was no tenth bullet.

Nonetheless, I was too wound up to relax.

With her legs and arms dangling around me, I continued to carry Miss Ponytail over me as I ran for the tower.

Ahead of me, the ground floor entrance was coming up fast, and I needed to do something about its closed glass doors.

The obvious solution was to shoot my way through them, but I had both hands busy with Miss Ponytail.

Then I remembered that the holster arms swung down under my arms, and right now my arms were raised high overhead.

With a thought pulse to the right holster, I instructed it to target Miss Ponytail’s oversized handgun at glass doors.

With gun in hand, the armature smoothly swung forward from below my right shoulder.

*Fire, I yelled at it in my head, and the gun belched fire as it pumped ten rounds across both glass doors.

Heavily fractured, they refused to shatter.

But I was out of time and distance, so I quickly commanded the holster back into its stored position against my right shoulder blade.

I may have been weighed down by Miss Ponytail, but Mirai was carrying a Hell of a lot momentum, and that momentum was going to help me get through the weakened glass doors.

Lowering Miss Ponytail so that I held her out in front of me, I used her like both a battering ram and shield.

The doors shattered almost immediately when I crashed into them.

However, I’d no sooner stepped into the tower when I tripped like a damsel on the run.

I dropped Miss Ponytail in an effort to lighten my load and recover my footing, but it was to no avail.

Landing on my belly, I yelped in pain as Mirai’s large breasts were crushed beneath me.

Then I was rolling uncontrollably across the smooth floor, eventually sliding to a stop on my back.

Staring up at a translucent glass ceiling, I breathed heavily with sudden exhaustion, then silently patted myself on the back…until I turned my head and caught sight of the countdown on display on holo-vid projection inside the tower’s ground floor foyer.

04:01…04:00…03:59….

Swallowing down the bittersweet taste of success, I used my elbows to push myself up off the floor.

Then I stood up on unsteady legs.

With a thought-pulse, I summoned the Punisher, and it was delivered smoothly to my waiting hand.

Holding the linear rifle at the ready, I gave my surroundings a closer look.

I honestly felt like the fly who’d driven an armored truck into the spider’s parlor.

The only problem was…where was the spider?

Please, stay safe.

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.