The haze was simultaneously exactly and way worse than what Scarlett had expected. It covered her senses in fog; everything seemed and felt like a layer of cotton was wrapped around her. The words of Bearings dully reverberated in her ears, the only sound that she was still supposed to hear. “That this is how you would fall into my hands after all,” he sounded tired. Good. That was how he was supposed to sound. “You were not nearly as smart as you thought you were.”

He looked her up and down. It was no secret that he wanted to take her, and if he had had the time, he most certainly would have. Not because he found her particularly attractive, Scarlett was pretty sure Bearings was more into the balloon-breasted blonde type, but because he would get a giant kick out of dominating the girl with the power he had wanted for years.

Alas, he didn’t have the time. Not if he wanted to live. Scarlett thought back to how she had gotten here. A way to cut through the haze covered her thoughts. Reaffirmation of herself, the individual. Where the drugs ended and she began. Why was she doing this? What was the current plan? Two very different questions.

She was doing this because this filthy mongrel knew she existed. Why did he know? Because she had fucked up. When she had been only fifteen, her powers freshly awoken, she had the brilliant idea to hack into her father’s main competitor. It would have been brilliant had she been as good then as she was now.

Instead she had rummaged through his files and arrogantly left notes for herself everywhere. Notes anyone else could have found and she did so for a whole year. It was no wonder Bearings eventually knew she was there. In the arrogance that only a girl growing up in an ivory tower could develop, she had thought herself cleverer than the world.

What a fucking disgrace she had been, but it was a learning experience. Arrogance had turned into pragmatism. She slowly blinked as Bearings continued to talk; for now his unbearable drivel had to keep falling on her ears. Just until she finally got from him what she wanted, then he finally shut that flabby face of his and she would go on to lay on some beach somewhere.

“Come with me, Scarlett,” it wasn’t a suggestion, just an exact order to make her follow him. “It’s time I pack up and start somewhere else. With a slave such as you, I can rebuild and make money elsewhere.” Right, that would be the natural reaction. Driven into a corner by… by herself. Right, the plan, keeping focus on one line of thought was hard. Focusing on getting a connection to that phone outside the barrier was even harder.

The plan, step by step dismantling the power structure she had inherited and never quite been able to improve, only monopolize. Until he arrived and gave her the excuse to tear it down. Everything her father had built, a paradise for the few crumbled to dust. Gave her an excuse to do away with the sins of her old man and build her own empire, an empire of her mind where she knew everything she desired to know.

What was the point of that knowledge? There was no greater goal than having it. Having it meant the same as ruling communications. If she ruled communications, she ruled over that space. If she ruled over that space, she was safe. That was how easy that was.

Now it seemed like John Newman would rule over her in turn. That was fine. In the first place she wanted the power to feel secure in a world out to displace her. Everything but her parents had always been out to take her out of the picture, hence why her father had done his best to keep her existence a secret. Everyone not at the top wanted to be at the top. Being a second in command wasn’t so bad if the first was untouchable. If it made her an unknown factor.

One couldn’t chase what one didn’t even know was looking at them from the darkness.

Getting him killed would also be theoretically possible once she controlled the communications.

Getting John killed.

Sounded like a waste. Both of life and a business opportunity. The worst kind of waste.

She would need to make that judgement call months down the line. Their first meeting had gone splendidly and her heart had skipped a beat. Love at first sight, a nuisance for her usual thought-processes, keeping her from making optimal decisions. On every turn she had to wrestle down the feelings, but in the end pragmatism prevailed.

Still, she should have been three steps into the plan on how to remove him already, just a contingency in case the Gamer did turn out to be a hindrance to what she wanted. Another scumbag that she needed to rid herself of because he treated her like a hidden tool. She was only at the step of ‘how could this be done’, the ‘who would do it’ and ‘where’ were failing her.

The problem was that John Newman was smart. He wouldn’t be manipulated into situations as easily as the fat fuck currently leading her around. The guy was so sure his drugs wouldn’t fail him now.

“Really, though, how careless of you to start a war you couldn’t win, only to then run straight into my arms after the years you spent evading my spies. You know, I really thought your aide would do the trick.”

What an idiot Bearings was; he had sent her stash after stash of his drugs for her to build resistance to them. She hadn’t thought that would come in handy in the way it now did, but being prepared usually paid off. The important part was to remove the last witness. After Bearings and his back-up were gone, there was no one left that knew of her but John and his inner circle. Which were, admittedly, a lot of people but they seemed good at keeping secrets.

Except that John had a wind elemental. Those things deserved to die in a fire.

“Brother, brother, brother!” a new voice suddenly entered her ears as they went down the white hallway. It was followed by a laughter that reminded Scarlett of a jackal.

‘Right,’ she thought as she saw the man enter her field of view. Burt ‘Jackal’ Bearings, former heir to the Bearings company, disowned after he had disappeared in Alaska for five years and returned in an unstable condition. A body thin like a skeleton with the head of fat person, with three chins and smeary hair that was just greyed out from weird experiments. “I did it! Come with me, you need to see this. Zimmothy looks so much better now! I perfected the battle formula!”

Jackal grabbed his brother by the sleeve but was instantly shoved back by the large bodyguard that followed Bearings like an oversized shadow. Lus’ mechanical leg went to kick while his perceived opponent was down. Scarlett wondered if it was best to kill the man right there, he was an unknown variable, too far gone to predict, but decided that she didn’t want to run the risk of Bearings realizing what was going on so close to her goal.

Instead of saving his brother from the repeated kicks, Jeff fixed his sleeve. “I told you to never touch me.” The leader of the company had none of his fake nice attitude for his own brother, only open disdain. “The only reason why I allow you to work is so you can play the bait while I escape, don’t forget that.”

“Yes, yes, but brother, you should really look at this!” Jackal was still laughing between words even as he got kicked for a third time. “The master has granted me clarity, I want to share it with you.”

“I don’t have time for another one of your revelations about Hydrozyd-Abysstat,” Bearings growled. “I am getting out of here now. Took me too long already to organize a response. And get your neck straight Lus, you look like a zombie!”

Roughly 24 hours. That’s how long that should have taken. The aimed at moment of attack was the earliest possible point in time for Bearings to flee, meaning that the plan was about to come to an end. What did she want again?

“Go back to your laboratory and die for me, be a good brother for once,” Jeff continued to ridicule his brother as he tried to get up.

“Okay, okay, I will keep Izha’s secret to myself then. You would have really liked it, brother,” he sounded very disappointed by all of this. Very, very disappointed indeed. His laboratory coat was wet with fresh blood, clearly not directly from the kicking. It seemed some old wounds had opened underneath.

Not that Scarlett cared about any of that business, but all this thinking was getting her grey matter moving again. The mist was getting less cloudy as Jeff guided them further down the white hallways. ‘These aren’t white at all,’ Scarlett realized, blinking while Bearing’s wasn’t looking to give her eyes some moisture back. ‘Renaissance design, golden carpet, fucking tasteless. All it does is show wealth without any proper function.’

They reached the reason why Scarlett had gone through this entire thing. Nothing of importance, nothing of real worth to anyone and certainly nothing outstanding. It was a server, just a connection of hardware within a glass box.

The server that held the records of her early mistakes. “I will need a complete copy of that, Scarlett, get on it,” he told her, expecting her to just mindlessly start on the task. He looked down and digging through his clothes. “Can’t say how much I will look forward to using electronic systems again. Great thing is, I am the only one who knows you exist anymore; that Newman idiot killed everyone else and he doesn’t even believe you are real.” He rummaged a cigarette out of his clothes. “My life for a fucking cigar, running out is the worst,” he monologued, about to put it in his mouth when he realized Scarlett hadn’t moved a step.

Who, or rather what, moved instead were the mechanical arms of Lus, taking the cigarette out of Bearing’s hand and putting it into Scarlett’s mouth. Then the limbs grabbed a lighter from inside the vest of the person who had never quite developed into a man and turned it on. All under the frozen gaze of Bearings. “You are not nearly as smart as you think you are,” Scarlett puffed smoke into his face. “Thanks for leading me here, I was actually set on torturing you until I found out.”

“Lus!” Bearings shouted at the bodyguard between them; Scarlett just continued smoking and fixing her hat. “Punch her already! You have ensouled limbs she can’t control you!” Obviously, he had missed the part where Scarlett had just done exactly that.

‘Reality is such a hard concept for some people,’ she thought as she put her hand against Jeff’s bodyguard and pushed him over like a tall vase. When she exhaled smoke again, she did so without a satisfied smile on her face. “The fact that you didn’t notice he’s been dead for over ten hours gives me a great story to tell people when they next say I am the worst employer they ever had.”

“How did he…”

Scarlett didn’t feel like playing ball with the guy any longer. “Jeff, you are going to die here, do you really want to waste both of our time before you go to hell with useless questions?” she interrupted him. The answer to that was Bearings jumping at her.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance!” he mocked her, grabbing her throat and squeezing. “Used Lus’ limbs as your weapons. I am just going to choke you and get out of here anyway!” Scarlett kept smiling as the hands around her neck suddenly jittered and relaxed. “Wh-what is happening?!”

It was a common misconception on the part of most members of the Abyss that Technomancers had only come into existence with the advent of modern technology. In reality, the school of Technomancy had always existed, just under the name of ‘the worst possible path an electro-mage could go down’. At the end of the day, a Technomancer really was someone who manipulated electronic currents at an extremely fine level. They sacrificed the ability to generate high energy levels for a level of skill at something that had been useless right up to the advent of the radio.

The normal Technomancer could generate barely enough electricity to power a lightbulb. Scarlett, however, was not of a normal level. While not particularly impressive, she could at least generate electricity to shock a lower middle rank into paralysis. None of this was known to Bearings, it seemed, and the blood-soaked technocrat had no intention of giving the entire rundown to a dead man.

“Jeff, you get an A for effort, but you really should just have grovelled before my father,” Scarlett told him as she kicked his fat, convulsing body off her. She grabbed the sword off Lus’ belt and then rammed it right into the man’s chest. His body kept flopping around, Scarlett had missed the heart. A second attempt at the man’s throat was more successful at the whole slaughtering thing.

“I honestly thought this whole thing would be harder,” she mumbled into her cigarette causing ash to fall off the tip and stain Jeff’s white shirt with traces of dirty grey. His blood quickly soaked into both it and the floor, and Scarlett dropped the weapon and walked away from the corpse before the blood could ruin her shoes.

“You were predictable from start to finish, Bearings, and you died as dumb as you lived,” she took a final huff from her cigarette and then dropped it to the floor. “The idea that hiding the server in a random barrier away from your headquarters wasn’t clever, if you thought that.” ‘But enough of the monologues,’ she then thought and went over the server. It was time to fry the entire thing. She would have done so from a distance years ago, but Bearings had invested an absurd amount into Technomancy protection for this room. Well, just the right amount was more accurate.

‘I should get John a better phone for all this shit I put him through,’ she thought as she touched the server and went inside. No amount of protective measures could ward against physical contact. It wasn’t connected to any electrical source, but that didn’t matter as she methodically wiped everything from any hard drive inside. She also searched for any indications that there had been a previous copy made, but there was none. The extreme paranoia with which Bearings had treated everything with her at the centre worked to Scarlett’s advantage now that she wanted to resolve it as cleanly as possible.

When she was done with the server, she decided she might as well meet him halfway outside. His attack was due right about now, if he followed the schedule. Without Bearings leading them, the drugged soldiers should have run around like headless chickens.

She was about to open the door when it hammered from the other side. “Hellooooo?!” Jackal’s voice reached her ears again. “If you are dead now, brother, just say nothing.”

‘Isn’t that a bummer, worst case scenario,’ Scarlett thought taking the time to light another cigarette before the door was blown down. With the slumping walk of someone whose body was seriously damaged, the older Bearings man slumped in.

“Oh, you killed him, too bad,” Jackal laughed. “Ah, he was a bad brother anyway. Weren’t you?” Jackal stalked over the corpse and started kicking it in the side. “Weren’t you? Weren’t you?” the alchemist started crying even as he laughed. “Just leaving me here alone. You don’t even want to become a puppet of the master.”

Scarlett would have made a run for it while Jackal was distracted, but inside the door stood the Asian spearman with the frankly stupid name Zimmothy. He looked braindead. His tanned skin had gone deadly pale and bloody spit was trickling out of the edge of his mouth. “I thought he is supposed to look better,” she asked drily while exhaling smoke.

“On the inside he does, he does,” Jackal assured. “You should look more afraid, they like it when their victims are afraid. Why aren’t you?”

“Because, Jackal, as unpredictable as your exact behaviour patterns are,” Scarlett took a pause as her cigarette had gone out in a sudden wind. “Getting cornered in this room is still within my calculations.”

A nearby explosion shook the last Bearings’ facility to the foundation. Scarlett had given the signal to attack to John the moment Jeff had uttered the words ‘It’s time I pack up’. Jackal threw his arms into the air. “Okay, fine, fine, fine, FINE!” he shouted, then laughed, it was more a verbal tick than an expression of happiness. “Zimmothy, just kill her then!”

The spearman suddenly sprang back to life and went straight at Scarlett’s throat. The spear closed in on her, much faster than she could have hoped to react. Then her line of sight was covered in darkness. Living darkness, in the hourglass shape of an incredibly attractive woman, with greyish pink hair growing towards the ceiling like a lightless candle flame.

“You scheming types are so unattractive,” Siena bemoaned as she held the spear between her clawed fingers. Shadowy tendrils sprouted from her back; the long, purple blades headed for Jackal. The nightmare elemental did not expect any real resistance from Zimmothy, they had beaten him handily before.

That turned out to be a bad assumption. The spearman suddenly managed to whirl her around with much more strength than he had previously possessed. Jackal darted for the exit. Scarlett tried to shock him with a minor electricity bolt, but it only fizzled over the surface of the man’s dirty lab coat. ‘He is going to take his brother’s exit route,’ Scarlett realized. There was no way to prevent that as of that moment. Well, she had the advantage of taking her own. Now that John was in the barrier, she could just raise her hand and teleport out of the barrier.