The split lip was bleeding into her teeth, which is a detail your body insists on reminding you of, and she kept moving anyway.
Useless.
That was the word for them. The man with one working blade dragging his bad leg across the fairway, the woman with two guns and a broken nose painting her chin red with every breath, the officer somewhere behind her trying to remember what his forearm used to feel like before she'd introduced her elbow to his ribs.
All of them broken and still going, still in her way, still existing between her and the place where Proxy was.
Useless, in the way, and still breathing.
She spat blood into the grass, a small act of rejection.
The three of them were problems, but not in the dramatic sense people like to assign to enemies. More like a locked door, something that doesn't stop you, just delays you, and delays have weight when you're on a clock.
And right now time was the one variable she couldn't afford to spend because something behind her had gone wrong. She hadn't seen it, which was already suspicious. Hadn't heard anything she could identify, which was worse.
But the part of her that tracked Proxy the way water obeys gravity had gone strange, the pull stuttering, and that disruption stuck in her chest like a splinter of ice that kept getting colder the more she noticed it.
She couldn't turn. She couldn't look.
Three people in front of her with weapons, with cyberware, with that stubborn persistence unique to people who haven't died yet, and she couldn't afford even a glance away.
That fact, simple and irritatingly absolute, bothered her more than any of the hits she'd taken.
Get through them.
The swordsman came again, which told her something about his personality before anything else.
He swung the right blade laterally at her throat and she dropped under it, the chrome passing through the space her head had just vacated close enough that she felt the air move, which is always a little too intimate for comfort.
She came up driving her elbow into the underside of his jaw. The impact snapped his teeth together hard enough that she heard it, a wet wooden sound that didn't belong in a human mouth, and he stumbled backward.
She was already moving before he'd finished the stumble, because the racer's guns had come up and the first burst chewed through the air at her left side, three rounds slicing past her ribs and burying themselves in the fairway dirt two meters behind her.
Three rounds that had passed near Proxy.
She would remember that.
Then the implant activated.
It sat in the small of her back, flush against the base of her spine, something she'd carried without using, which meant she hadn't needed it.
The moment it engaged she felt a tiny mechanical release she felt more through bone than flesh, and then the compound hit her bloodstream and immediately justified its reputation for being unpleasant.
It spread outward from the spine in a wave of chemical heat, raw, synthetic, aggressive, like the smell of a charged power cell translated into sensation. Her heart slammed against her sternum once, twice, accelerating hard enough that she felt the rhythm climb into her throat.
Heat pushed through every vessel, center to extremities, and her hands went hot, then numb, then hot again, like her nervous system couldn't calm down on a consistent interpretation.
For one long second her vision strobed in high contrast, the morning light too white, the blood on the grass too red, the chrome on the swordsman's arm too bright, as if reality had been overcorrected.
Then it stabilized.
And at the edges of her vision, where the amber targeting overlay had been running since the fight began, the color changed.
Blue.
That cold, deep blue you only see at the base of a flame, where temperature stops being just hot.
She stood in the middle of the fairway with blood drying on her chin and that blue burning at the edges of everything, and the three of them in front of her simplified.
A very simple problem with a very simple solution.
She crossed the distance to the tactical officer faster than she had moved all morning.
He had come back over the rough-edge bank, she had heard him working his way in, the wounded forearm slowing him but not stopping him, and now he had a length of concrete raised in his good hand.
She left the ground with her entire momentum committed to the motion, every kilogram of her mass plus whatever the compound had decided to contribute, and drove her heel into his sternum.
The impact produced a sound she felt through the bone in her own leg.
He left the ground completely.
His back cleared the top of the bank and he went over it, then came down on the other side in a way that strongly suggested his ribs were now brittle.
The concrete fragment landed elsewhere, detached from its original intent, and he did not come back up.
She was already turning.
The swordsman was still there. Of course he was.
One blade gone, the other dragging, his thigh shot through and leaking into his boot, his jaw misaligned from her earlier introduction, still there, still holding his right arm up in something that had stopped working.
She got both hands on his right wrist.
Her left hand wrapped above the housing where the blade mounted into the forearm, thumb finding the gap between chrome and flesh, while her right hand secured the forearm itself.
She dropped her center of gravity and pulled, turning in a single committed motion, exploiting the direction his ruined leg couldn't compensate for.
The arm became a lever against his elbow, and she felt the housing creak before it cracked. She didn't stop at the creak. She continued through it.
It split.
The chrome tore free of its mounting with a sound that was part mechanical failure and part something biological and unmistakably wet, and the swordsman let a guttural roar escape his lips, high and continuous and entirely involuntary.
The blade separated from his arm and hit the turf. The mounting site was ragged, dark, and his hand on that side had ceased responding to intention.
He pulled away. Stumbled. Somehow found his balance on the bad leg, clutching the ruined arm to his body, and began moving away from her in panic.
She let him go.
Get to the racer first.
The racer had been repositioning while Nyx handled the swordsman, using the available seconds to improve her position, and now she had both guns up.
She was fast. Her implants were legitimate, her hands precise, and the burst she opened with was aimed with killing intent.
Two rounds passed a hand's width from Nyx's shoulder, and the third grazed her forearm, tearing through the jacket fabric and carving a line of heat across the skin beneath that immediately began to bleed.
Nyx closed the distance.
The racer tried to backpedal and fire simultaneously, which was correct, tactically speaking, but insufficient in execution.
Nyx got her left hand onto the barrel of the nearest SMG, the heat of it biting into her palm even as the weapon continued cycling, and wrenched her body into the turn, forcing the gun inward toward the racer's own centerline.
She felt the resistance, the other woman's grip pushing back.
The racer was strong.
Nyx was stronger, right now.
The muzzle aligned.
The racer's trigger finger remained inside the guard.
Nyx pushed the trigger.
At that range, there was nowhere for the burst to go except through.
The rounds entered the racer at effectively zero distance, passing through the stomach and up into the ribcage along the direction the barrel dictated.
The exit damage from her back was immediate and significant, painting the grass behind her in a wide arc of dark red.
The sound the racer made lasted less than a second, which might have been mercy or simply mechanics.
Then she went down. She was not getting back up.
The blood leaving her body did so quickly and without any indication of stopping.
Nyx stepped back.
She stood in the fairway, the hot barrel still in her left hand, blood marking her palm where the metal had burned it, the racer on the ground, and the blue at the edges of her vision already receding as the compound metabolized.
The heat withdrew from her hands and face, the world reasserting its usual weight, its usual resistance.
Fucking crazy bitch.
Never, ever, shot at him.
The swordsman had disappeared into the rough.
The tactical officer did not return over the bank.
The fairway stopped into quiet, defined only by grass, by spreading blood, by morning air, and by the sound of her own breathing finding something close to normal again.
She turned toward where Proxy was.