The maintenance wall at the course's edge was low, half-collapsed, and thick with plants climbing both sides. In other words, it was the sort of cover that looked like absolutely nothing from twenty meters away, which is precisely what good cover aspires to be.
Proxy rested his elbows on the stone and watched the situation unfold across the fairway like someone spectating a sport he didn't particularly respect but couldn't stop watching.
"Okay," he said after a moment of observation that quickly became interpretation. "I give it thirty seconds before this becomes ugly."
Nyx crouched beside him with her chin almost touching the stone, watching the fairway with the same attention she normally reserved for threats directed at him personally. Which was either reassuring or concerning depending on how one framed the implication.
"Which one do you think gets there first?" she asked.
"The one who already drew the blades."
On the fairway, a man with mantis blades had already reached the crate.
He was large in the way that suggested extensive internal reinforcement rather than simple gym dedication. Both forearms had deployed long chrome blades, slightly curved at the tips, extending nearly a meter beyond his knuckles.
With one blade he tore the lock panel off the cargo crate the way someone might peel an orange. He was hauling the panel open when the woman approaching from the northeast burst out of the tree line at a run.
She was fast. Her legs devoured ground in tight explosive bursts that suggested speed augmentation. She had two SMGs raised, one in each hand, and she opened fire on the crate without introduction, greeting, or anything so socially complicated as warning.
"Ay, what the-" the swordsman began.
The burst caught his left arm just above the blade housing. The chrome absorbed most of it, but the flesh above the mount tore open in a sudden red spray. He spun toward her wearing a truly disgusting expression.
"Drop it, gonk!" the woman shouted while moving and firing. The second SMG joined the first in a crossing pattern that chewed up fairway grass around him. "That crate's got my name on it!"
"Your name?" He swung both blades forward. Even from forty meters away the sound of them cutting the air carried clearly, a low whistling that had absolutely no business existing on a golf course. "I'll carve your name somewhere else, choom."
"They're going to kill each other before they even open the crate," Nyx observed.
"That would honestly save us some effort," Proxy replied.
The blades man charged.
He crossed the ground between them far faster than his size should have allowed. The blades acted as balance points, and he used them the way a gymnast uses extended arms, letting his entire body rotate around their reach.
The woman had to break sharply left to stay outside the sweep of the right blade. The left blade clipped her jacket across the shoulder.
The fabric split. Blood welled up instantly along a line that ran from shoulder to mid-back.. She made a sound that was mostly anger and kept moving because stopping in that moment would have been considerably worse.
"Kurwa," she hissed, spinning away. One SMG stayed trained on him while her other hand went instinctively to the cut. "Piece of shit chrome freak-"
"You want to dance, querida?" he called. "Come on."
To the left, behind the low bunker embankment that circled the far side of the green, a figure moved.
Proxy had been tracking that man since the resort pair exited from the east. He moved with patience, letting the other two start the fight. Now he changed position smoothly, and brought the barrel of his sidearm over the lip of the embankment.
The shot was clean.
It hit the swordsman in the right thigh. The big man staggered two steps to the right, both blades sweeping outward on instinct. For exactly one second the fight completely reset itself.
"Hijo de puta-" He turned, scanned, located the bunker embankment, and redirected every available unit of anger in that direction.
"Hm," Proxy said. "The one in the bunker waited for exactly the right window."
"The woman with him hasn't done anything," Nyx said.
Proxy glanced at her.
The woman from the resort pair had moved sideways along the rough at the edge of the course, quietly. She had arrived at a position that Proxy found interesting. She was simply standing somewhere that would matter later.
"I know," he said.
The swordsman rushed the bunker at full speed, both blades forward.
The man inside moved, but not backward. He slid laterally below the embankment line, staying just low enough that the blades chased him across the top without ever finding a target.
Every time chrome descended it struck turf or sand instead. The swordsman was bleeding steadily from the thigh, each step leaving the leg slightly less cooperative than before.
"Stay still," he snarled.
"No," the man in the bunker said simply, and shot him in the shoulder.
The round punched through muscle, and the swordsman's left blade dipped in a way it hadn't before. Something in the control mechanism had been compromised.
He looked at it. His expression moved through several recognizable phases.
"That's my good arm, you corpo bastard-"
Meanwhile the woman with the dual SMGs had reached the crate.
She worked fast. One hand inside, rummaging through whatever the corporation had packed. Blood from her shoulder soaked through what remained of her jacket and ran down her forearm, dripping onto the crate's contents. She pulled something out, didn't even check what it was, and stuffed it into the pack slung at her hip with the urgency of someone fully aware she had maybe thirty seconds before the swordsman remembered she existed.
She was correct.
He remembered.
The charge back toward the crate was uglier than the first. He was bleeding from two wounds, his left blade dragged slightly, and his entire body ran on raw volatility.
But he still crossed the ground quickly enough that the woman had to abandon the crate and move. The blade crashed down across the top of the container instead of across her spine by roughly the margin provided by her speed augmentation.
"That," Proxy said, "was close."
"She's fast," Nyx replied in the tone of someone talking about a sports superstar.
"Not as fast as you."
She glanced at him with eyes he dared not to analyze and returned her attention to the fairway.
The fourth contestant, the quiet woman from the resort, had finished whatever she had been doing.
She now stood at the natural exit point leading from the course back toward the resort. The racer noticed her across the course, and something in the woman's momentum shifted.
"What's she doing?" Nyx asked.
"Who knows," Proxy said.
He had been passively mapping the course infrastructure since they arrived. Through the deck, he found the physical infrastructure. Especially the service tunnels running beneath the fairways so irrigation could once be repaired from below.
And there was a hatch.
Fifteen meters to their left along the maintenance wall, almost completely hidden beneath overgrowth. The maintenance passage beneath ran the length of the course and emerged within three meters of the cargo crate's location.
"There's a maintenance access under the course," he said. "It goes straight to the crate."
Nyx turned her head toward him. Then toward the hidden hatch. Then back toward the fight, where the swordsman bled through his jacket while inventing insults and the racer kept both SMGs suppressing him at exactly the distance that kept her outside blade range.
"Now?" she asked.
"Now," he said. "While they're occupied being each other's problem."