Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

Project Astraea

She moved through the maze with an uncanny grace and speed.

Nova could not see her, but the connection allowed him to witness what Amy did somewhere in the back of his mind, and it felt like watching from afar. She had climbed on top of a tall hydroponic rack, and cowered flat among the dark green leaves. Perched like a silver-black bird of prey, she waited for the female hunter to pass by down below.

As Amy jumped down behind her, the suit turned black like coal. She knocked out the hunter with a single, re-enforced punch to her kidneys, while muffling her cry by pressing her hand against the woman's lips. The hunter collapsed and sank to the ground – Amy had vanished again before she even hit the floor. Just then, the next one came around the corner. The man walked up to the unconscious hunter and bent over her.

"Feng?"

He must have sensed some movement in his periphery, and looked up.

"What the-"

Before he could finish his sentence, Amy had delivered a forceful punch to his temple, and he collapsed on top of his colleague.

They're idiots, Amy commented.

Ripples ran across the suit, rapidly shifting between the re-enforced black armor pattern and the white spikes as she scanned the area for her next target. Nova could feel the adrenaline coursing through her veins as if it was his own body. It helped him to snap out of his awe to make his own move.

The first three targets were easy. The gun firing the tranq darts was silent, so they probably had no idea what was going on right until the moment that the poison spread through their systems and they collapsed. None of them got a chance to warn their colleagues, but as Nova and Amy continued to move through the maze, picking off their targets one by one, it slowly began to dawn on the Saiph that something was wrong.

"This is Commanding Officer O'Hara," one of the male hunters activated his com to call his colleagues. "Gamma squad, what is your status?"

There was no response. A few hundred meters away, the two members of gamma squad dropped unconscious on the floor, tranq darts sticking in their necks.

"Feng, Walker, where are you?"

Again, no response.

Eight more to go, Nova remarked.

Seven, Amy corrected him from her position somewhere at the other end of the maze.

Six, then, Nova said, as he took out O'Hara.

He silently made his way through the corridors of hydroponic racks, approaching his next target.

"I think my com is dead," a male voice remarked somewhere close by.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" a female voice asked back.

"You've spent too much time with those guys from IT, Franklin."

I will need your help here, Nova remarked, stepping back into the shadows as he reloaded more tranq darts.

On it, she replied.

He could sense her close by before seeing her, and through their connection it was as if he could perceive the scene before him from two points of view at the same time now. Besides the uncomfortable tingling of a growing headache behind his forehead, it gave him an odd sense of detachment from his own body, and reminded him a lot of the fight on Six. But the difference was that he was still fully in control of his own actions, and so was she. They didn't have an Augur to steer them. Still, they worked together more efficiently than two non-augmented people could probably even comprehend.