Alpha Agent: A Post Apocalyptic LitRPG

Colleen

Colleen Odyssey walked alone on the rain-soaks streets away from the Revelation. Even she got tired of sitting on her ass barking orders at her people. Sometimes, there came a time when even someone of her rank and stature within Kodak-Cresh had to take matters into her own hands.

She briefly stopped and looked up at the sky. The dark clouds with occasional red streaks through the darkness in the air brought a strange sense of euphoria to her. As much as humans have screwed this planet over, the weather still remained a fundamental part of this planet, even with all the shit her and the rest of humanity have put Earth through. Something as simple as a heavy rain storm was oddly serene to her in a way that would draw confusion from her agents.

Colleen then looked down at her feet and saw the rainwater rising up to her lower ankles. Once again, Kodak had proved inadequate in their infrastructure and didn’t update their city planning to account for flooding. Kodak, the same shard who can literally change the sky to a different color as punishment but couldn’t build a city for shit. It was the kind of hilarity that always brought a twisted smile to Colleen’s face.

Resuming her walk, she knew she had to investigate the odd activity she noticed in her local comms network. Aside from chatter between the hotel’s staff along with the standard Kodak guards, she only had a handful of agents left under her command after stealing the Arctic serum shipment from Michael Cynosa’s convoy. She was left with even fewer numbers from the botched alliance with a resistance group thanks to Jane Sunheiser and her comparatively small force of Alpha agents.

With such a dwindled and cut down force under her direct command, her monitoring comm lines in her down time revealed strange activity. According to the techies she had to put up with, the strange activity matched patterns of numerous foreign communications and also a potential outside party listening in on all comm activity between Kodak agents.

Colleen immediately knew something was up. She knew she had been given enough authority that Overlord didn’t have to have someone spying on her every move. She was a competent force within the shard that had to make miracles happened with such limited staff and resources.

The lack of contact from numerous agents guarding the VIP floors as well as the two assigned to watch over the container of Arctic serums further fueled Colleen’s suspicions.

Only one possibility entered her mind: someone had infiltrated the hotel. And the only thing that this hotel possessed that was of any value was the batch of stolen Arctic serum. She knew she had to be on the money on such a leap in logic, but she was about to make sure through taking matters into her own hands.

She recalled sending Adam Torrent along with his bitchy girlfriend Kate Razor, an agent poached from the Alpha Corp, over to investigate what had happened in the VIP floors, as well as the status of the container. No response from them yet.

Once Colleen had hopped down to ground level with intentions of going out for a “walk”, she ordered the hotel staff to activate signal jammers, jammers placed surrounding the hotel in case of an attack from enemy shards.

Until she walked up to the control room itself, any and all signals within the hotel and the area surrounding it within the perimeter of jammers were now jammed. Doing all this, all Kodak communications seized, except for a few of the abnormal signals.

The signal jammers deployed by the hotel didn’t completely shut down all forms of communication. It simply scrambled them so that no two parties could communicate with one another past a certain distance.

Colleen’s HUD led her to one of the suspicious signals, the one linked to an outside party potentially monitoring their network. The glowing red arrows along the flooded ground led her to an abandoned convenience store.

The store itself wasn’t too far away from the hotel. Where it was located, it stood right on the edge of the perimeter of jammers. Colleen walked up to the front entrance, which had been boarded up and locked. She casually slid her fingers into the narrow gap in the door frame, and with one single gesture, ripped the door from its hinges along with all the boards and metal sheets hammered and screwed into the door.

A flash of lighting lit up the entire street behind her for a brief moment before she stepped into the store. The red arrows on the floor continued forward, possibly leading her up to the second floor of this building. Her stride was brisk. The sonner she could confirm what was happening, the sooner she could put herself at ease. If the container was in any danger and Kodak failed to deliver it back, she couldn’t look herself in the mirror.

The red arrows led her to a door that was locked shut. Colleen simple punched a whole through the glass window of the door and twisted the knob on the other side by force, easily bypassing the old school lock system. Opening the door, she briefly looked up at the flight of stairs.

A normal person would have to walk up each step and it would take an eternity for anyone to make it up. Anyone who was inferior to an agent, that was. Colleen bent her knees slightly, calculating the sufficient force she would put into the jump without shoving her head through the ceiling.

Her legs sprung into actions and she causally made the jump up while keeping her head tucked. She perfected the landing and skipped the flight of stairs. Now she turned and noticed a peculiar set of locks in front of her. Not only that, the door was different as well. Instead of the flimsy crap at the entrance and the door to the stairs, this was a heavy duty metal door. What such a door was doing in an abandoned convenient store such as this was an interesting question Colleen knew the answer to.

Someone was in there and didn’t want to be interrupted. By anyone.

A single glance at the door was all Colleen needed to assume its strength. She could tell that even with her level of strength, she might break a sweat trying to crumple this slab of metal. She glanced to the side and saw the hinges were specialized reinforced hinges that were designed to fit this particular door. Otherwise, Colleen would have just ripped this door off because of its weak hinges.

Beside the door, a keypad on the wall demanded that she enter a password to gain entry. This appeared to be a recently installed keypad as well. Colleen smirked. Whoever was squatting in this abandoned store was about to get a surprise visitor.

Colleen shut her eyes so that she could power up. While she knew this was overkill, it had also been a while since she had used this ability. And she wanted to have some fun.

The surging energies blasted out of her body, Even through her shut eyelids, she could see the ripples of orange from the red bioelectricity her body produced. Muscles throughout her entire bulged and her entire circulatory worked over time to supply the necessary fluids to power this state. The elevated heartrate and the pounding in her head reminded her of that.

Berserk activated. Tear apart the flesh of your enemies, agent.

Colleen slowly opened her eyes and dug her fingers through the tiny gap in the door frame. Even with a metal door, her fingers still deformed and forced themselves through the edges of the metal slab. With just a bit of force, she pulled and ripped the entire door apart with as much ease as she did at the front entrance.

She exhaled and immediately powered down. Whoever was on the other side, she doubted the matter would require her full power. Slowly stepping into the room, all she saw was a man sitting cross legged on the wooden floor at the end near the window. The man was only visible through the ambient lighting of the screens in front of him.

From the little amount of light shining and illuminating this man, Colleen was pleasantly surprised to see the familiar long coat of an Alpha agent. The man’s complexion appeared tanned along with slicked back hair. He stared back at her with wide eyes, the horrible truth finally setting in.

“Shocked? I would be,” Colleen said. “You must not get much visitors to your little setup over here.”

The Alpha agent still didn’t respond. His attention was entirely on her. The wide-eyed gaze eventually evolved into shaking hands and twitching facial muscles.

“I know, I’m sure it’s not everyday you have a beautiful woman such as myself literally beat down your doors,” Colleen said with a giggle. “Alright then, now that we have that out of the way, let’s begin with the formalities. Why don’t you introduce yourself?”

The Alpha agent’s shoulder rose up slightly, and the frightened and shocked gaze in the agent’s eyes slowly evolved into determination. Colleen was even more intrigued. Was the agent about to make his move? She stepped closer and closer toward the agent. His life was heres to end any time she wished.

“I admire your bravery. You’re about to die anyway so I’ll be generous. We can skip telling each other’s names and you can simply tell me what you’re up to. Can I reasonably assume you are the one piggybacking on our comms and listening to every word from us? Is this entertainment for you, or are you doing something else under our noses?”

The agent still didn’t say a word. Colleen glanced down and notice something in his hand. His thumb was on a button and she immediately knew what he was up to. Even at such a short distance, she couldn’t cross the distance on time to prevent her enemy from pressing the detonator.

Colleen was throw back out the room and straight through a wall from the explosion. The bastard blew himself up. Colleen’s energy shields activated the moment her armor detected the violent forces and rise in temperature. Her world rolled and tumbled until she found herself awkwardly on her head with her legs hanging down from the air. She rolled herself from her upside down position from a van. She slowly got herself back up and cracked her neck. The human-sized dent on the side of the van brought a chuckle out of her. She checked her HUD and saw her energy shields completed depleted after taking the full blast of that explosion.

He had robbed Colleen the chance, not just to kill him herself, but from gathering any intel on what his purpose was. But his mere presence told her everything she needed to know. The Alpha Corp had sent a force of agents to the hotel to steal back the container. The only agent who had the balls to spearhead such a risky operation would be none other than Michael Cynosa. He had come to steal it back and potentially settle the score with her.

Colleen received a rudimentary message from an unknown source. Because the jammers were active, she knew she couldn’t receive or initiate calls with other agents. The message was a brief update from Kate.

The container is gone. We have intruders in the hotel.

“Wonderful,” Colleen said. She wiped blood from her mouth and sprinted back to the Revelation at full speed.