Kofuku’s eyes scanned the scene before her. Though she could see they were quite literally surrounded by weapons, the majority of them were behind bulletproof glass and locked securely, fastened to a rack in the case of the blades, or likely in one of the opaque metal boxes. The other thing she could actually see as being within reach was what seemed to be the employee’s sidearm, a small-caliber self-defense pistol that was now in the cyborg’s other hand.

Her gaze snapped back to him. “So you do remember me?”

“Hasn’t been that long,” the cyborg said. “From my perspective, at least. You know how my brain is. Well, I assume you do, if you’ve found me.”

“I just want to talk.”

“Is that why you turned up with an armed squad?” With his hand that was holding the other gun, he waved at the shelves behind Kofuku. He tapped the front of his mask. “Don’t think I don’t see you.”

“That’s a precaution. You’re not an easy man to find, Mr. Duran.” She started walking, placing herself between the shelves and the cyborg. “I actually almost thought you were a character I made up or something.”

“I’m flattered.” The barrel of his plasma pistol tracked her seamlessly thanks to the servos in his limbs. “Unfortunately I don’t have time for a tea party.” He tilted his head at Oscar’s prone form on the ground. “You people will just kill my fun. Let me leave, and maybe you have enough time to get him to a doctor.”

She shook her head. “Train’s not going to be here in time for you to leave.”

He made a strange electronic noise, likely a scoff. “Who says I’m taking the train?”

“Just let us take him and this won’t have to get ugly.”

“That’s downright disappointing, you know? Where’s the fire? Did daddy not teach you how to negotiate with people like me?”

“He’s dead.”

The motorised lens of his one eye shifted. “Oh. My condolences. Guess he took any vestiges of competence with him.” He prodded the employee again with his gun. “Don’t worry. By this time tomorrow I’ll go back to being a made-up childhood story and we can both forget this ever happened. Really, there’s much better jobs back inside.”

“Then why’d you exit?”

Duran shrugged, as much as a man who was mostly made of metal could, anyway. “Vacation. A man can dream of some peace and quiet every once in a while.”

“I just need to know about the sword.”

The lens in his helmet dilated, zooming into look at her. “What sword?”

“You know what sword. You helped him forge it.” She set her jaw. “Talk to me and that’s it. You were never here, at least to us.” She could practically hear Drummond and the team captain screaming at her in the back of her mind. This wasn’t the deal, and of course it wasn’t. “Deal?”

“You think you can wield it? You understand that kind of weapon needs a specific kind of person, right?”

She said nothing to that.

“Oh. Oh!” He started to cackle. “You don’t have it.”

“It was lost. It’s mine to reclaim.”

“We made that sword over a decade ago. You had a decade and then some to try to track me down. But that wasn’t your priority. What gives? Didn’t have daddy issues until very recently or something?”

“It shouldn’t matter why-”

“Then you really don’t get it.”

The sound of engines in the distance interrupted them, and Kofuku turned to look over at the high walls of the back part of the MobiusMart. That sound was interspersed with a series of faraway detonations, which meant that they were firing at something. She turned back to Duran. The “parachute” pack, the lack of a real ceiling to the building, the fact that where they were had a higher height limit than most parts of the Multiplex…

Skyhook.

She wanted to kick herself for that. More than likely what was coming was some kind of maneuverable aerial drone to slip past MobiusCorp’s defenses on the outside, and the pack would simply fire something up for it to grab. Whether he would survive the trip out…well that wasn’t exactly her plan or problem.

“Looks like my ride’s here. Sorry, princess, but I’ll have to catch you later. Maybe in twenty more years?” He tugged at a cord and the pack blew open, a small bar and hook rocketing from inside it rocketing up on a small but rapidly ascending balloon.

The rest of the assault team had at this point run out of cover, firing up at the balloon and at Duran, but their bullets only glanced off the balloon, which just wobbled in the air. Veld turned to shoot at Duran himself, but the cyborg simply raised one arm, a small component popping up from his forearm, and a swarm of micro-missiles issued forth, spiralling at them.

Kofuku dove to the ground as the tiny rockets whizzed overhead, each detonating with the force of a grenade against counters, shelves and the ground, causing the shelf behind the topple over backwards. The force of the explosions knocked all the sound from her hearing, and her ears rang like hell when she stood back up to remove the talisman from her sleeve and toss it at the cable above Duran. Realistically, a rectangle sheet of paper had no aerodynamics whatsoever, but with a twist of her wrist and crossing some of her fingers, she pushed it through the air, closing a fist to wrap it around the middle of the tautening cable. Kofuku stood up, focusing on the piece of paper that was already primed with a spell, connected the thumb with the middle and ring fingers with her right hand, and snapped her fingers that way.

The talisman burst into flames, brighter and hotter than most conventional flames, and burned into the cable. Duran, seeing this, whipped his pistol around towards her but before he could fire, a torrent of bullets from the assault team struck him in his arm and torso, absolutely wrecking the limb at the elbow and quite literally disarming him. The gunfire stopped when more compartment popped open at his shoulders to stream rockets, and Kofuku in that moment found herself trying to give-slide under the collapsed shelving and avoid the most of the salvo, which to her sounded like the popcorn in a microwave as they went off and destroyed even more of the military section. The chunks blown out of the concrete floor sent up a cloud of dust that made it impossible for her to see anything from her little hidey-hole between two partially toppled shelves, but she tapped her watch and reached back to grab another talisman. This one she scrunched up in her hand and punched forward, creating a blast of air that displaced some of the dust and allowed her to spot Duran squatting near the floor, ready to jump and be carried off. The cable seemed to still be intact despite the damage she had done to it, and with this, he was free…at least until the employee who had been held hostage tackled Duran mid-jump, throwing his trajectory off and forcing the balloon to shift down with their combined weight. The noising drone passed overhead, missing the hook, audible even with her reduced hearing, but it was sure to try again. She wasn’t going to let him have that chance. Kofuku crawled out from between the shelves and got herself another talisman. After double-checking the characters on it to make sure she had the right thing, she folded it a few times, creating a rudimentary paper plane, and as Duran, half-crouched on a counter and kicking at the employee, spotted her and flipped the stolen gun around to fire, Kofuku lurched forwards, throwing the paper plane and crossed her fingers and twisted her arm around.

The talisman corkscrewed through the air, speeding up with her magical push, and sailed right over duran into the weakened section of cable she had melted earlier just as his bullets grazed her shoulder, ripping her jacket and sending a searing pain rippling down both her arm and her back simultaneously. She hit the floor hard, skull bouncing off the concrete, though not hard enough to cause any real damage. Her vision now blurry, and still not hearing much of anything, she rolled into some more smoke that hadn’t dissipated, and then tried to get into a crouch. The particles in the air made her eyes sting now too, depriving her of full use of another sense. When she finally got the courage to step out of the cloud, she found the skyhook pack discarded on the ground, the cable trailing from it properly severed and the balloon rising uncontrollably above them.

She reached behind herself again, but this time on the opposite side of the dispenser, grabbing the hilt of a short revolver from its holster and drawing it with her left hand. She stepped around the shelf, and recoiled as the strike team popped out from behind it, aiming at her. Kofuku fell on her butt, cradling her head as the force of it triggered a brand new migraine wrapping around the back of her skull.

“Sorry,” she faintly heard Veld say as he picked her up.

Another team member knelt next to the fallen Oscar and took his pulse for a moment, before shaking his head.

Kofuku tried to get up, but a pulse of headache grounded her once more. “He’s…” She pointed back at the aisles closer to the front section, where they had come through.

“He’s going for the front door?” Veld asked.

“No, I sense him,” Kofuku said. “But he’s just standing around there. If he goes outside that’s suicide. He’ll…come back in.”

“Then you should get back.” The captain helped her up and pulled her behind a counter. “We’ll handle this.”

Kofuku pointed at the barriers between their section of the MobiusMart and the train station beyond. “That’s his only way out.” While she couldn’t exactly hear it, one hand on the ground told her another train was approaching. “They’re not gonna shoot past their customers. He’ll get away.”

The captain looked over the barriers into the station, where a couple of Mobius Securities personnel in their full body armour stood the station, waiting for the moment Duran made it back through.

Kofuku turned around to try and focus on the faraway talismans. She felt one vanish from her senses, ripped apart, and then we felt another wobbling. First slightly, then more violently, before it stopped. “He’s climbing,” she breathed. “He’s going to try jumping past us.”

The team fanned out from the collapsed shelves immediately and aimed up, firing at the lanky cyborg hopping between the tops of each aisle. But he was already too close, and dove off the top of the closest standing shelf, tucking into a ball as he cleared the barriers-

Kofuku fired once, the little revolver kicking in her hand and hurting her wrist, but the slug tore straight into Duran’s side in midair, adding unexpected momentum and causing him to crash right into the barriers themselves instead. The captain took the opportunity to kick him to the ground and fire a burst of rounds into the joint of his other shoulder, severing it for good. Veld followed up by grabbing the curved bits of Duran’s mask, and with some force, peeled it right off his face.

Kofuku wasn’t sure what she thought he would look like, but it was nothing like that. Years of media influence pushed expectation towards a pale, hairless look, perhaps disfigured from hundreds of implantations and augmentations over the years. In reality there was no face at all, at least not anything real or flesh: Duran’s visage was a series of malleable composite plates that folded close to present a human look, and from a distance, it might have seemed normal. She could tell that underneath the cosmetics, the front of his skull was simply a series of inputs and outputs, particularly his eye sockets which were shifting back from their configuration where they had been plugged into the mask. Once everything had stopped configuring itself, he actually looked like a normal young man, clean shaven  and with a decent crop of hair.

He grinned. “How are you doing?”

Veld pressed the barrel of his pistol to Duran’s forehead. “Don’t you move.”

“Careful, officer. That plating’s expensive,” he said.

The train finally rumbled into the station at the far end of the area past the barriers, causing Kofuku to shift her focus. She was about to tell them to move Duram, but as the doors opened, no crowd appeared. There was a lone wiry man in a pair of spectacles as thin as he was, clutching a tablet in the crook of one arm, dressed in the most unremarkable business suit she could imagine. And yet as he walked, each security officer on the other side saluted him in turn. Kofuku realised she had straightened her back subconsciously in preparation for his arrival, and staggered over to the barriers. Behind him, an officer unloaded a large, rugged crate from the train and began wheeling it over to them.

“Akiraka Kofuku?” the man asked, peering at his tablet.

“That’s…me.” She and the captain gave each other a look.

“I represent the MobiusCorp Board.”

“O…okay?”

“The Board would like to make you aware of the termination of Mr. Falano’s Duran’s contracts with any and all affiliated contractor guilds under the MobiusCorp umbrella, effective immediately.”

Duran groaned. “Oh come on! What did I do!?”

“You took actions that led directly to the death of registered MobiusCorp personnel.” The man adjusted his glasses.

“Personnel…” Kofuku whipped around towards the military section, where the employee who had bravely tackled Duran laid against a counter, his neck broken presumably due to the force of the latter’s retaliatory stomps. “Fuck.”

“By violation of your contracts with us, you are no longer associated with MobiusCorp in any capacity,” the bureaucrat said. “All favours and values accrued and associated with your person are rendered void. You are hereby banned from MobiusCorp territories for all eternity, and your possessions are hereby seized for free redistribution at our discretion.” He stepped aside, allowing the guard with the box to hand it over the barrier to one of the strike team members.

“What’s in there?” Kofuku asked.

“You’ll find spare parts for Mr. Duran’s…unique physical composition in there. It was acquired from one of his known accommodations.”

“That was rather fast, don’t you think?”

“Time works a little differently in here, Miss Kofuku. I’m sure you of all people would understand the expediency and efficiency in honouring an important deal - or rather, delivering consequences should that fail.”

“I do, actually.” She smiled down at Duran. “There won’t be any issues for all this destruction?”

“It will be dealt with internally. I bid you the best of luck with recovering your sword.” He turned to head back to the train.

Her eyes widened. “Wait! What does the board know about-”

The man didn’t respond, simply getting onto the train and checking his watch, like she didn’t even exist. The doors closed, and moments later, it sped off along its tracks.

Veld sighed. “What the hell was that?”

“Looks like someone’s watching me,” Kofuku muttered. The ringing in her ears was finally fading. “We should move him.” She kicked Duran in the side of his armour.

“What kind of transport do we need for…this?” the captain asked.

“No need.” She glanced at her watch. It ticked over exactly onto half past four. “My lift should be entering low orbit right about now.”