Cyberknight: One Path

⁕ Sea of Broken Shards (part 4)

Inside a dimly lit room, McCree consolidated the security footage of a depot recently attacked by Seratov's men, including the mysterious cyberknight so feared by Ivanovich. As McCree clicked on play, he immediately noticed the side door to the depot burst open without an ounce of attempted discretion. With a level of confidence bolstered by a belief in their own invulnerability, groups of unarmed men began to rummage through the shelves. Soon, they began to fill their bags full of contraband drugs hidden inside pallets of products meant for wholesale.

Alerted by the intrusion, Ivanovich's men stormed into the depot from the front door with their weapons raised. However, the men transporting the goods weren't even bothered by the guards' presence as they carried on with their duty. That was when McCree overheard the clear and distinct voice of a woman among the shouts of the guards.

[Danica] - "Guilt Extension: Forgeworld's Hunger! "

There she was, Danica, a cyberknight of the order of guards from the Empire. Unlike the few known classes of cyberknights, such as your average knight or martial knight, the guardian knights are hand-picked to watch over important imperial installations. Though defensively oriented in training, it didn't mean they can't go on the offensive, as most of them are, in fact, selected for their ability to deal with a foe quickly to protect their assigned asset. Slamming her obsidian sledgehammer against the ground, she stared at her enemies with an unflinching expression hidden behind her helmet.

All of a sudden, the guards opened fire, only for the bullets to quickly lose their kinetic energy and fall to the ground right in front of the barrel. Meanwhile, the guards who fired their weapons received horrifying levels of physical damage as if an invisible force had boiled them from the inside. Each man's body began to swell up and burn before cooked skin peeled off their bodies. It was a horrifying sight which even made McCree recoil in shock for a moment.

The men were screaming in pain with a level of agony one could not imagine. To the outside view, the phenomenon can only be understood as divine wrath sanctioned by a higher power. McCree understood it was actually the work of a crystal's ability. However, he now felt a level of empathy for Ivanovich's madness. No man should witness or be subjected to this kind of abuse.

Then, without mercy, Danica approached the incapacitated men one by one before finishing each one of them off with a hammer strike to their bodies. However, even more terrifyingly, each strike didn't result in blunt force trauma, but instead in an even force which shattered their entire body uniformly like being crushed by a hydraulic press on all sides. That's when McCree decided that he had seen enough to understand what kind of foe he was facing.

Though McCree refused to acknowledge his own fear, his hands were clearly trembling with his pistol tightly gripped in a ready-to-fire position. That was the double-edged sword of a confrontation between two crystal users. Either you go in blind in a fight without the fear of knowledge, but risk your own life as the enemy executes its unknown attack. Or you can fight with the knowledge of your enemy's ability, but risk being handicapped by fear. At the end of the day, crystal users are humans too, and a bag of flesh is never a match in the face of an attack which disobeys the rules of this universe.

McCree paused as he reminisced about the old days when he was surrounded by his friends, as they fought together. His first fight against an actual cyberknight was only won because Oltevin intervened to save him. Then came regret. McCree regretted ever allowing his personal ambition and honour to get in the way of his logic. If only he had seen through Jagger's manipulation and lies, maybe things would've been different.

Meanwhile, as Dane began to work on the body inside the human-sized test tube, he began to notice the injuries on the subject's skin. There were indeed burn marks, but more disturbingly, he noticed scars that were impossible for a KD-series assassin. In normal circumstances, an assassin of this type possesses a healing factor, which is powerful enough to prevent scarring. However, after taking a biopsy of the assassin's flesh, he noticed that the genetic code was so eroded due to the constant cycle of repair that scar tissue was the only way the body could compensate for the damage.