Chapter 32 - Rain of Shards
The first Cleaner didn't expect the counterattack to be instantaneous.
Naomi didn't fire at the chest plates; she fired three rounds in rapid cadence into the operative’s knee joint, the unarmored throat seal, and the optic visor. The 5.56mm rounds pinged viciously against high-tensile carbon, but the concussive kinetic energy drove the lead Cleaner backward onto his heels, shattering his optical feed.
Without waiting for him to recover, Naomi closed the twenty-yard gap in a blur of sprint and slide, skidding through the mud beneath a hail of return fire. She came up inside his guard, driving the steel barrel of her rifle under his chin guard and pulling the trigger until the magazine locked open.
The Cleaner went limp, his armored weight crashing heavily into the swampy lawn.
"Naomi! Behind you!" Ethan screamed from the terrace, his aristocratic composure entirely shattered by the brutal choreography of death unfolding before him.
A second Cleaner flanked her from behind an uprooted willow, firing a tight five-round burst. Naomi twisted mid-stride, two rounds grazing her tactical vest with violent, bruising force, knocking the breath from her lungs. She rolled behind the trunk of the fallen tree, tasting copper in her mouth.
Her tracker flared hot beneath the skin of her collarbone—a deep, burning sapphire light that seeped through the soaked fabric of her gray uniform. The Division had activated the remote overload protocols. They were trying to trigger a lethal seizure through the neural uplink embedded near her spine.
*Not today,* she gritted through clenched teeth. *You built me, but you don't own me.*
She dropped the empty rifle, drew the sidearm tucked into her waistband, and peered beneath the roots of the fallen tree. The second Cleaner was advancing, his rifle held high, searching the canopy. Naomi reached up, grabbed a jagged shard of sheared wrought-iron fence post from the debris, and hurled it with the terrifying, hydraulic force of her modified musculature.
The iron spike pierced through the operative's thigh armor, pinning his leg to the sodden ground. Before he could cry out or swing his weapon down, Naomi surged over the log and drove her combat blade straight through the soft seal behind his ear.
Silence fell for a fraction of a second, broken only by the thrumming engine of an armored personnel carrier idling in the distant woods and the steady drone of the storm.
Two down. Four left in the perimeter net.
She wiped blood from her brow and turned back toward Ethan. He was staring at her as if she were a demon born of the earth itself, holding the Colt .45 with trembling hands.
May you like
"You're not human," he whispered, rain plastering his dark hair to his temples.
"I am human enough to keep my promises," Naomi said, reloading from the fallen soldier's tactical vest. "Now move. If we don't leave this ground right now, the third wave will level the entire county from thirty thousand feet."
