Chapter Thirty-Seven - Insatiable Impatience

This was still my fourth loop, and only maybe four hours of total looping, and yet I was already feeling this sort of... insatiable impatience. I wanted into the portal, I wanted to figure it out, and I wanted to get out of it.

My success was more or less guaranteed, but that didn't mean that I wasn't feeling any less anxious about it. And I was working against a deadline. If I screwed it all up today, I could Reload and give up, try again in a day or two with different, more specialized equipment. But that would mean more time for Miss Ojou to be stuck in there, and I... had a very active imagination as to what might be happening.

"Fuck it," I muttered.

There were two people out here. Could I take both of them out?

I gently crouched down behind one of the containers, then leaned over to the side very, very slowly to take in the space around the portal.

They had an entire RV parked there, which I supposed made sense. If they were staying here in the long-term, then having a place to rest was necessary. They could probably get a motel nearby or something, but that would mean leaving and returning repeatedly. Might raise suspicions.

Not that sending out Timothy was helping with that, but whatever.

I could see two people. A tall, skinny man who was chromed to the gills, and this shorter woman sitting on a stolen park bench, reading from a tablet.

Couldn't tell much about either, though I suspected that the woman was either a ranker or some sort, or wanted to be. She was just inside the portal's corona range, where the magical energy was strongest.

With a D-rank portal... it might only take a few dozen hours of sitting there to go from a normie to an E-ranker, if she was lucky.

Or she was a D or more ranker already and was just enjoying the warm-fuzzy feeling of magic washing over her, like standing next to a water mister on a hot summer day.

The man was scarier. Didn't know what rank he was, but his arms were both more metal than meat, and his feet looked more like rubber-tipped claws than normal old feet. He was looking pretty distracted... maybe? Hard to tell, he had metal plates screwed on over his eyes, probably with cameras of some sort within, and... his face was turned my way.

"Come on out!" he snapped.

"Crap," I muttered.

"Huh? What is it, Jack?" the woman asked.

I moved. It seemed like the one sensible option I had at the moment. I darted across the space and while the woman was starting to stand, I ran into her back, hopping up so that I could move and arm over her shoulder, then down and around so that her neck was in the crook of my elbow.

My other hand came up, holding my revolver more or less steady on the borg. "Don't move," I said.

"Shit!" the woman replied, and tried to move, because of course she did. She wiggled, and I tightened my grip. Fortunately, she weighed less than I did, and I had a better grip. She still elbowed me in the rids though.

"Don't... move," I grunted. "Just got some questions."

Borg had moved too, casually pulling out a small compact SMG from somewhere. "Bad idea, girlie," he said.

"Yeah, I'm starting to see that," I replied. I tried to get a bead on him, but the woman I was holding get moving. "Stop moving so mu--- ouch!"

Her hands lit up, both of them turning red-hot where they grabbed onto my arm. My shitty old hoodie had nothing to stop that kind of heat. So I turned the gun on her and poked her in the side of the head with it.

"Try me," I hissed.

She paused, the heat dissipating.

D-ranker, then. Crap.

I was burned good, too, so I chewed on my lower lip and cast one of the only spells I knew. Soothe Minor Pain. I pressed magic from my core into the pathway, then tried to remember what speed it was meant to move at while casting. It was damned tricky. None of my practice had been under fire, so to speak.

It worked, though. I felt warm tinglies running out of my core and across my entire body.

Stolen novel; please report.

Then the woman I was holding gasped. "What was that?" she asked. "What the fuck was that? Shit, she cast something on me. Jack, she cast something on me!"

Her wriggling redoubled, and I had to tighten my grip to the point where I was choking her.

"Let her go," Jack said, sounding damned calm. He took a step towards me.

"Don't, not one more step," I warned, turning my gun at him. "It was just a healing spell, calm down."

"Fuck off!" the woman said.

Jack took another step. "I'm not afraid of you," he said. "I'm bullet-proof."

So... I shot him.

The revolver kicked, but this time I was more ready for it.

Jack had lied. He was not bulletproof. In fact, he was very much the opposite.

We all kind of stared at the hole punched into his chest, past what looked like a thin layer of sub-dermals, and into his mushy, fleshy insides. There was a lot of him that had landed outside too, as a wide spray out the back.

The woman I was holding finally got free, spun around, then aimed an open palm at my face and blasted with a wave of--

I Reloaded.

It was weird, going to nausea to... not. But fortunately, my body caught on and soon I felt like puking again. Fortunately, I was at home. I stomped over to my bathroom sink, stood at it for a moment, then decided to just wash my face. "Fuck," I muttered.

There was a lot wrong with what had happened there. I made a heap of mistakes, one after the other.

Still... learning opportunities. That woman had Fire magic, and she was pretty strong. Maybe? Hard to tell. She was also easy to freak out, which was good to know.

The man was a borg, but his insides weren't. Disturbing to know.

I could kill.

That... yeah. Ideally, in the perfect version of a loop, no one would have to die, but there might be some value in going in gun's blazing. It cleared things out rapidly, and would let me gather intel.

Still... I'd rather not have to.

For one, I didn't want murder on my conscience. For two, I definitely didn't want it on my rap sheet.

I was pretty sure that I could get away with it if I saved Miss Ojou. One kidnapper dying in Fortress ENE? The cops would pat my back.

But they'd also go through procedures, and my ID would be gone.

Killing six or more kidnappers?

Yeah, no. It didn't matter if I saved the nice princess, they'd flag me as a serial-killer and arrest me, at a minimum, even if there were extenuating circumstances.

Society catered to rankers a lot. Society did so because it was a nice, easy way to give rankers what they wanted and needed without them having to use the violence they were capable of to get that.

I rubbed my face.

If a ranker didn't get the message, then they'd get a visit from Special Operations. A group of D and C rankers that worked for the city police.

There weren't any jails for anyone ranked C or above, so the only punishment was rather terminal. I didn't want that for myself.

So no killing. Not unless I could get away with it. Bodies dropped in a portal wouldn't necessarily come out when the portal closed, however... And people who weren't in the boss room when the portal closed and yet were still alive, tended to get hard-ejected.

We'd had entire classes about that at Luna Corp, since E-Rankers were sent into portals all the time, and one might get lost or trapped until the portal closed.

Hard-ejection was deeply, deeply unpleasant. Take a nap for a few days, bruises all over, magic depletion unpleasant.

If I could sneak past the two by the entrance, could I get past the rest within? And if I got past them... would it be possible to reach Ojou and escort her through the portal quietly, then exit?

If we got that far, the hard-ejection would leave the kidnappers who were within in a rough spot, then I'd only need to deal with the two outside.

... Yeah, I think I could do that. But first, I'd need to learn a bit of parkour, and get the lay of the land.

***