204 Ice Queen, Pt Amal quickly slid over to Claire’s side, unclasped her armor with expert precision, and tossed it aside. Underneath, blood poured out of numerous bullet wounds across her body.

Claire herself was hyperventilating, even as her blood flowed away.

“Take it easy,” said Amal. “Breathe slowly. I’ve got you, don’t worry even for a second.”

She didn’t hesitate to inject Claire with a good dose of ultrafentanyl which numbed much of her pain.

Despite that, Claire could still easily feel the bullets inside her. Large, foreign chunks of metal that had ripped their way into her body – there was no way she wasn’t able to feel them. She felt them tear into her even further with each breath she made.

historical

Her body filled her brain with signals, and flooded her pain receptors. Luckily, Amal’s medicine numbed her to most of it.

Still, Claire looked around while in a haze, and reached out for her beamlance.

“I gotta-” she slurred.

“You gotta lay there and shut up,” interrupted Amal.

.....

“But I-”

“Listen to your doctor.”

While Claire struggled, Amal’s nanites deconstructed the bullets into their base elements and deposited the remains straight back into the MedGun. Though it only took a few moments, it still seemed like an eternity to Amal. To her, every moment counted.

Once every particle had been removed, Amal removed the vial filled with grains of metal from her MedGun, and replaced it with a Biocell Ampoule.

She pulled a small silicone block from one of her pockets and held it in front of Claire’s mouth.

“You’d better bite down on this,” she told her.

Claire nodded, reached up with her head, and grabbed it with her teeth. As she adjusted it around in her mouth, Amal kept going with her trauma treatment. This was something she had practiced hundreds of times.

But this was the first time she was doing it while actually under fire. She felt the pressure hit her, and began to count the seconds. The slower she was, the faster Claire would die, and that was something she would never allow.

“You’ve already got my painkillers in you, but you might still feel this, okay?” she said. “And it’s not gonna be pleasant, but it’s necessary.”

Claire nodded again in response. Then she reached over and grabbed Amal’s hand. They held each other tightly as Amal worked.

She reinjected her nanites a second time, but this time with a payload of biocells. However, instead of rebuilding her tissue like she did with Max, the nanites strung threads made with the biocells.

Clumps of them wove the biocell thread through many layers of her musculature and skin, all over. They crossed across each wound and wove around on the other side before returning. In essence, Amal had programmed her nanites to perform micro sutures at the molecular level.

She found this method to be far stronger than using standard biocarbon threading. And far more natural, to boot.

And once her nanites had sufficiently ran thousands of microstitches across each bullet hole, they cinched the threads and closed the holes tightly.

Claired groaned with pain, though it came in dull waves and abated quickly. Mostly thanks to her numbed receptors.

“Hold on,” said Amal. “It isn’t quite over yet. It’ll be quick though, I promise.”

Amal’s nanites went into the next phase, and swarmed around where her skin and muscles were split and torn. Though she had sewn them closed, there were still open gaps where the blood could easily spill out.

They covered each of these gaps with as many biocells as they had left, then each of them vibrated with supersonic speed and superheated themselves. In a flash, they completely cauterized Claire’s bullet wounds.

She groaned with pain and bit down on the bite block as the burning sensation swept through her. This pain was far more acute and intense than when her wounds were stitched closed. But this too abated quicker than she expected.

Claire breathed in and out for a moment as she recovered from the pain. After a moment, she sat up painfully and spat out the bite block into her hand. Then she reached over to her armor’s chestplate and reattached it to herself.

“Thanks,” she told Amal. “I thought I was done for, and...”

Amal simply hugged her tightly in response.

“Not while I’m around,” she interrupted.

“Uh, a little help?” cried Max.

He was busy fending off the Hallowed, as they peeked around the corners and fired into their cover. The desk was riddled with rifle fire, and was itself close to weakening from the stress.

“I mean, super happy you’re alive right now,” he continued, “but we still aren’t guaranteed a tomorrow.”

Claire grunted as she pulled herself up to one knee, then reached over to her beamlance and propped it over the desk.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “No goddamn way they’re gonna get us.”

She then pointed her beamlance at a section of sheet metal, punched right through it, and into the Hallowed that was hiding behind it. It didn’t even make a sound as she severed its spine and killed it instantly.

~

Miko felt transcendental as she dove head-first into her True Multitasking State. She felt vibrations and pulses as electricity swept throughout the entire logic circuit. Waves of code washed over her as she conducted her three Mirrors, and in turn they orchestrated a massive attack.

Both of her Mirror selves in the Operational and Diagnostic Intelligence circuits poured out streams of Sparks in every direction. They tore apart critical code as they chewed their way through the circuit.

At the same time, entire swaths of code were randomly replaced with broken and invalid code. She felt as though she was a giant monster that was rampaging through a city made of digital occupants.

With swipes of her arm and stomps of her feet, her Mirror Ghosts toppled data structures and crushed digital denizens with equal ease.

The vast Security Intelligence worked diligently as it caught up with each of her movements. It snuffed out Spark after Spark and repaired any code they tore apart. They stitched data structures that she had torn down, and restored their residents wholesale.

It did its absolute best to contain Miko, and slowly but surely, restricted her Mirrors’ actions. It eliminated Sparks before they could do much damage, and reinforced any data structures before she could do further damage to them.

The Prophets’ Security Intelligence was utterly uncompromising with its methods, which Miko was in awe of. She knew that she needed to disseminate it, take it apart, and improve on it.

She felt compelled to.

It was such a powerful and beautiful technology that she couldn’t help but try to understand it. To defeat it fully. And to make it hers.

Just as it had reduced all her Mirrors’ movements to an absolute minimum, just as it was prepared to eviscerate all of them and shut off access, they all vanished.

It immediately sent out probes across every Intelligence in search of her, but found nothing. Even despite multiple probe counts, Security Intelligence’s wary eyes couldn’t spot her. With that, it retreated back up into the dark cloud, but elevated the circuit’s warning state up one level. Then it cycled up some countermeasure code and waited for another attack.

Miko had reverted to masquerading as a standard communications instruction code, and sped around the circuit at top speed. She took a good look at her handiwork and inspected her changes.

While two of her Mirrors threw up a massive ruckus and caused perilous storms in Operational and Diagnostic, her third Mirror was far quieter in comparison. She surreptitiously swapped out smaller sections of code, mere slivers of data.

Here, there, everywhere.

Certainly far too small for Security Intelligence to notice, at least, while all that ruckus was happening elsewhere. But more importantly than that, just before she reverted to a quiet state, she initiated a database backup request.

Once the Security Intelligence was done repairing Operational and Diagnostics, and had confirmed the code had been restored properly, it approved the backup.

Which meant that Miko’s changes to Network Intelligence were logged as valid and canonical.

She grinned widely as she watched Security Intelligence’s scans pored over her altered code, and yet saw nothing wrong. They glanced right over them and verified their validity in an instant.

But she didn’t consider her Injection Attack a success quite yet. To do that, she needed to verify their validity, beyond the simple surface scan they were subjected to.

Security Intelligence looked over the entire circuit with watchful eyes. Its logarithms spun in endless loops as it waited patiently for any disruption. It watched out if even a single digit was modified or destroyed.

Its code knew to expect another attack, after all, it didn’t get the chance to eliminate the intruder the first time around. It knew that the disruptive infiltrator was still out there, and hid itself amongst legitimate code. And it knew that all it needed was to set its logic Codemines and lay in wait.

Its patience was soon rewarded, as Miko spun up her Mirror selves yet again, and assaulted the logic circuit in its entirety. Unlike before, she spread herself across half of the Intelligences and threw out reams of Sparks in her wake.

Once again, she tore apart entire swaths of code, and replaced it with jumbled nothings and empty data.

She lent more time to tearing up Network Intelligence, and made sure to make it nearly unrecognizable. With sweeping gestures, she battered at the code like an unrelenting storm. And she didn’t even bother to place in new data.

Miko simply left it all to ruin, and let their disparate pieces fall apart uselessly.

The data structures that held up Network Intelligence crumbled under their own weight and shattered to thousands of strands of code. She shook the very foundations of it all, and broke everything down to their fundamental core.

And as quickly as she came in, she disappeared outright yet again. Only this time, she left everything in utter chaos.

Though Security Intelligence sprung its defenses in time, it was left completely baffled by her sudden disappearance. Still, it diligently swept up her Sparks and undid all of the damage. It pulled together all of the data structures she had torn down yet again, and stitched them back together.

And every line of code that it put back, it even strengthened and immunized. Entire blocks were put back the way they were, stronger than they were before. And on top of that, it left mini-snippets of stray code.

Miko looked at the snippets closer, and realized that it had left behind self-contained processes designed to act as fast alerts and delay tactics at the same time. Essentially, Watchdogs that would help stem any future attacks.

More than that, they had been immunized from the chaotic rewrites that her Sparks were capable of. Their structural integrity was upgraded to be resilient to her attacks.

Their presence most certainly made the circuit that much harder to defeat. Dealing with them meant having to spend time dismantling them.

Miko was alarmed by this behavior. Clearly, the Security Intelligence adapted its responses to her attacks. It was being more pre-emptive with its defenses, which made her wonder about its true programming.

Does it actually have the capability to self-improve? she asked herself. Or is it merely activating new layers of defenses automatically?

She theorized that it was some mixture of both. Although it deployed defenses that were useful against her, they didn’t seem custom-made to answer the threat she posed. Miko calculated that if the Security Intelligence was capable of creating its own countermeasures, it would have attacked her ability to Multitask.

Instead, it concentrated on limiting the actions of her own subprocesses – a bandaid solution at best.

Despite this flaw in its logic, she knew she couldn’t play around with it for too long. The more she messed around, the higher the chances of a full systems lockdown. And that was something she absolutely needed to avoid.

On top of that, her friends were still dealing with the Hallowed, and every moment counted. The longer she stayed here, the higher the chances of her friends getting hurt.

She glanced over her code in Network Intelligence and gladly noted that Security Intelligence had restored every line she had injected. Secure in knowing that she owned the network, she focused in on herself and started up Multitasking Mode once more.

Then, she launched her third and final attack on the Prophets’ incredibly powerful, all-seeing Security Intelligence.

.....