Finding myself in front of that very door I froze.
Yes or no...
Yes...
Inhale, exhale...
There's no choice.
I activate sandi on the hollow and kick the door with my foot, but I don't fly in and it's the right decision as I hear the start of the queue, but that's not the most dangerous part, it's the fact that the place where I should have been if I had thrown myself forward was cut through by the katana.
Bitch, I thought he wasn't using them!
Five seconds of subjective time and I see Smasher's figure appear in the doorway, except I still haven't deactivated the cloaking system, and it's still working, even though it doesn't hide me completely. I'm an extremely smeared blur now...
Let's go!
Smasher doesn't move any slower than I do, his speed is equal to mine, so this fight is not going to be as easy as it was when Becca had my back.
Forward thrust!
I ducked under the katana in a stabbing stance and stabbed him in the wrist, but it didn't do anything. The goddamn Borg only jerked from my blow and tried to kick me, but I shifted my body position slightly and my leg flew past me.
When I was about to hit him, Smagscher used the inertia from his leg kick to step and roll out of my attack zone, and I was forced to rush again, but not to him, he was a dangerous opponent, but not the only one, so I took advantage of the moment and penetrated the room and fired several shots at my accomplice.
But I couldn't spend any more time on him, and I couldn't hold a gun, which was useless when fighting at such speeds and which I had only taken out to avoid taking a couple extra steps. So when I let go of the gun, I immediately pulled out my tonfa and activated them to take Smasher's blow on the block and crossed energy blades. But the metal from which the body of this Borg was made did not melt from the thermal effect of my weapon. So we have to hit the critical points...
Except that I only know of one such point and hitting it would be problematic...
Kick!
Bitch! It's a good thing he threw the sword away after the first unsuccessful strike... Why did he do that?! I can't complain about that, though...
I fly into the wall of the room.
Glory to synthetic muscles and reinforced skeleton! This blow was sensitive, but I didn't lose consciousness from the pain, I didn't even pass out, so I was able to group myself in flight and my feet hit the wall, from which I pushed off using all the strength of my legs.
I hit several tonfa strikes on the body and limbs. If I just hit the body, I tried to hit the joints when hitting the limbs.
Even if my tonfa didn't melt metal, a few dozen of these blows should begin to affect the Borg's body, if not the joints themselves, then the electricity inside.
Punch-bounce-punch-roll...
That's what our fight with Smasher turned into.
This Borg could not hit me, and if it did, it was not critical and I grouped in flight to the nearest wall, they turned out to be enough ...
It was at the moment of that thought that I felt my feet go into the unknown... They just broke through the wall I was supposed to be against and I flew further into one of the containers. I managed to group myself and landed on it...
Smasher landed a little later than me and made some kind of speech...
Is he fucked up?
Or...
I grinned.
I think he mistook my stop for a Sandy shutdown! Bitch, what a cliched villain! He decided to chat before he killed his enemy! You idiot!
Throw it forward!
I managed to get to him and jumped up slightly and even threw a punch at that weakest spot and...
Bitch!!!
I managed to jump back, watching as my tonfa failed to penetrate the layer of defense. The asshole just grinned and continued to say something.
Fuck, either not all of his bodies have the same critical points, or he's done some reconnaissance and changed his body structure. However, the latter is unlikely, since the Borg is a very complex mechanism and it doesn't just change. So he wouldn't have had enough time.
So that leaves the first option, the vulnerable points are located in different places...
A new spurt...
Right in the mouth!
Tonfa bursts into the Borg's mouth and the Borg recoils from me. Smoke comes out of his mouth, he opens it but can't close it, but no other effects came from it. I think I was wrong...
Smasher's snatch!
I rolled to the left at the last moment, adjusting my route so I wouldn't fall off the container where the fight was going on. Smasher's foot lands where my head had just been.
Two more rolls and I can finally get to my feet to start attacking my opponent's joints again. It seems the only chance I have of winning is to get his limbs out of commission and then just rip his head off...
Well...
It seems that our fight is turning from an epic brawl into an ordinary "beat the crap out of your opponent" type fight, when you have a little more mobility just because your opponent has chosen a different direction in his own development. And if Smasher had relied on mobility instead of armor, he would have been one and a half or two times faster than me and would have already dealt with such an annoying bug...
And so...
The race continued, I was like a flea jumping around my opponent, he periodically tried to strike me with powerful sprawling blows...
Kha!
I flew into the wall of another container, and spitting blood I pushed off of it and falling to the deck rolled to the side.
And sometimes it hits me!
Another bump and I finally noticed that his mobility was getting less, the height of his leg lift before he put it down on the spot where I had just rolled was less, so here we go!
Really this time around there's still a bunch of different...
Hmmm... if I recently compared myself to a flea, who are these Arasak's miscarriages?
Infusoria?
I continued the senseless fight, which was not as beautiful as they usually describe fights with villains. I just kept throwing the same blows over and over again...
And then I noticed that Smasher's hand had frozen for a fraction of an instant of real time, but at our speeds, even that fraction of an instant seems like an eternity. So I jumped at him from the side of the frozen hand and started throwing punches. Of course he tried to kick me sideways, tried to turn around, but during the time he was forced to limit his mobility he missed more than ten blows to the joint of his arm!
Perhaps that was the beginning of the end of Smasher, as the next time such a hiccup cost him a completely disabled arm and a significant increase in my abilities...
He realized it himself, but he kept fighting, just as I kept hitting his joints over and over again...
And so, Smasher froze, and I was in front of him, delivering one powerful kick to his body, throwing him back toward the nearest container.
During this fight we killed ten people, and not only I, but Adam himself was not embarrassed if a representative of the corporation he worked for was hit. And especially we were not embarrassed by the fact that they exploded a few seconds after their death.
But I didn't freeze for long, I even had a thought to chat with him, but I dismissed it as idiotic, and then just walked over and ripped his head off. It was hard to do, but I managed to do it by literally ripping it out of the Borg's body, along with his neck. But I didn't stop there, time after time I tore off his limbs, and then pierced them from the torn end with my tonfa. I burned out any electronics that might be in there, and only after I'd burned them all out did I lower my acceleration and calmly walk around the ship, killing Arasaki's staff.
"Finally..."
I breathed a sigh of relief and turned off the sandi when I was sure there was no one else on the ship.
"So I was left to my own devices."
I reported to the girls that I was fine and immediately heard a sigh of relief.
"You've been out of contact for twenty-nine minutes!
I blinked in surprise then looked around.
"Well, uh. the fight went a little long."
"A fight?"
You could hear the tension in Panam's voice, and the readiness to lash out.
"Yeah, that Smasher was in too good a position, so I had to confront him directly because there was no way to deal with him quietly and discreetly. There wasn't in the first place, to be honest with you."
"What do you mean?"
"The vulnerable point that Scribe hit was not in that body, even when I shoved the energy blade of the tonfa into his mouth, all he could do was stop talking. In short, it was a highly armored platform with abnormally high speed. I'm afraid that if it had been built with speed rather than armor, I would have definitely lost out."
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
"No..."
I shook my head.
"He was as fast as I was, except that his high armor made it a little difficult for him to move. Anyway, never mind all that, I'm alive and well and ready to give you a job. I guess you'll have to work through me like you did in the beginning."
"Well, uh. we could take one of the boats and come over."
Judy sounded slightly agitated, but unlike Panam, at least she was not fountaining with emotion. Though in her performance such emotions were perhaps even louder than what Panam showed.
"Well. you can, but you have to start working as soon as possible, although I could just destroy everything, but..."
"Yeah we get it, this ancient ruin must have a lot of nitty gritty that will be left without an owner once we completely zero it out."
Kiwi joined the conversation.
"Exactly..."
I confirmed her words.
"Okay, plug in, just be careful and let one of us take control of your chrome first."
Kiwi continued the conversation and I immediately agreed to her plan.
"Giving access..."
"Access gained..."
Lucy's voice echoed exactly in my head, and I grinned with the corner of my lips.
"You be careful out there..."
"Come on, I'm not your first."
"But one of the favorites..."
"Flatterer. Come on, get to the computer and plug in, the sooner we start, the sooner we're done."
"And you can't argue..."
I shook my head and walked over to the nearest computer, where I connected to it and let Lucy work with the information it contained.
The next forty minutes passed in silence and calmness, Lucy was working, I just moved from computer to computer without even approaching the control room or those rooms where there were especially powerful computers. Finally the girls arrived.
"Yeah, you guys had a lot of fun."
Becca looked around seeing the dents from Smasher's blows on the containers and deck.
"Only Ironhead was having fun, I was mostly jumping around him and trying not to get hit too often. So, uh."
I shrugged.
"Okay, enough chitchat, we need to delete all the backups of this asshole and get to the bottom of the data that's in here. And frankly, I'm sick of sitting around on store-bought food, so I really want to get this done as soon as possible.
"I could open a teleporter to the clan and we'd get some food that one of us would cook..."
All the girls shifted their gaze to me.
"Hey! I want some warmth and care, too! I was really hurt by the ironwood man, by the way!"
"Well, D-Evid.
Becca made a pitiful face.
"...you're a better cook than any of us."
I looked at her muzzle for a bit, with the other girls making similarly pitiful faces, and I gave up.
"Okay, uh. but it's no big deal, I'll make everyone pizza and hot sandwiches. Assuming the galley's in working order."
"I'll check it out!"
Panam rushed to the annex and three minutes later the intercom reported that the ship's kitchen was in order, so Triss had to open a portal, where I hid while the girls continued their work. I'd disconnected from the local computers when the girls got to Ebunica.
I was to get groceries and cook for everyone...