Witch of the Web

Chapter 20

Felicia

“Do you think she’ll be ok?” Summer asks as we hide behind a hillock and observe the LOG weapon stockpile. Even from here, I can see the lances stacked up carefully as well as some other equipment I can’t quite make out from our position. 

“She’ll be fine. She’s got Willow with her after all,” I assure her with a confident smile. “Those two are scarily powerful, and together I doubt anything truly threatens them.” 

She nods and gestures at a lone guard off to the side of the main outpost. “Okay, then we should focus on our job and think about thinning them out, right?” It’s more of a question than a statement.

I shake my head and nod back the way we came. “Remember, we need to wait for them to receive word that Rose is attacking their squad. With any luck some of them will run off. It’ll make it more credible.” 

Summer frowns and looks back at the high stone walls before us. “How will we know she’s begun her attack?” she asks. I grin and tap my ear. 

“I still have access to the LOG communication protocols. The infosec guys are super lazy and likely won’t change the access codes until the regularly scheduled update.” Summer’s grin grows devious as I tell her this. “What do you have in mind?”

“Think you could disguise your voice enough that they might not realize who you are?” she asks, instantly cluing me in on her scheme. 

“You know what? I can do you one better!” I pull up an old logger app I used to avoid at all costs. It’s a voice changer program that is frequently used to implicate suspects with incriminating recordings…

How did it take me so long to realize how fucking corrupt LOG is? 

Why did I keep looking the other way?

“Are you alright?” Summer asks, drawing me out from what promised to be a dangerous spiral.

“Yeah… just… feeling really guilty all of a sudden,” I admit. She gives me a knowing look and pulls me close enough to give me a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks. I’m gonna spoof that distress call and then turn over all the legally ambiguous apps that I still have to the resistance. Maybe they can find a way to counteract them.”

“Probably a good idea,” Summer agrees.

I launch the voice changer app and transmit a call on the local channel, ensuring that the message’s location beacon directs them to Rose’s ambush site. “Code-30! Officers in need of assistance! Under assault by priority one target. Requesting backup!” The voice that comes out of my mouth is gruff and masculine and I have to bite back the instinctive discomfort that comes with such a thing. It’s no wonder trans folks like Rose and Summer suffer so much from their dysphoria. 

There’s no need to listen for the reply as I can already see several guards from the outpost grabbing weapons from the stockpile and running along the path towards Rose.

Nodding to Summer, the pair of us make our way down the other side of the hillock, quickly reaching the stone walls. 

I decide to make use of a new ability that I put together and stab my spear in between the bricks. With but a thought, my spear acts as a shaped charge and blasts several tonnes of masonry into the outpost. A quick check shows that I managed to hit two of the remaining guards with the shrapnel. 

We don’t give the LOG agents any time to react as I rush in to grab their attention. I’d hoped that the knights would’ve responded to the distress call, but two of them are still here. 

“Leave them to me,” I warn Summer as I charge straight for the massive, armored soldiers. The lances have great reach, but they aren’t very effective if their target is up close and personal. I take full advantage of this and find the sweet spot where I can fully thrust my spear, but they can’t get a good angle with their lances. It takes some work, but with my tanking and crowd control quester abilities, it’s doable.

While I tango with the titanic metal meatheads, I can hear Summer raining holy fire upon the rank and file grunts. I wince a bit as one of them screams in pain. I used to be one of those grunts. In other circumstances, that might’ve been me having my digital flesh seared from my bone. 

I need to focus though, too much time thinking about the past has left me open and I nearly have a lance impaled in my side. The only thing that stops it is a glowing golden barrier provided by Summer. If it weren’t for her, I’d be as dead as the physical movie market. 

Careful footwork brings me back into range of the two knights, but they seem to have figured out that Summer is my healer and one of them falls back to engage with my blonde girlfriend. 

Heh. That happened fast. Didn’t it?

I barely manage to block another lance thrust before I hop back and try to grab my wayward opponent’s attention again. They seem pretty dead set on skewering Summer though, so I have to take a more direct approach.

Slamming my shield into the ground, I kick up a wall of dirt and stone that blocks one of the knights while I dash for the one after my girlfriend. He nearly gets her before I intercept with my shield. “No. None of that!” I taunt him as I shove back on the lance tip, forcing him off balance.

“Thanks Felicia,” Summer manages to get out between heavy breaths. She looks exhausted. I check the time and realize that we’ve been fighting for a while now. But what has me more concerned is an urgent communication from Lonnie. “Hey, you seeing this message?” Summer asks, having clearly just seen it as well. 

Worried about what Lonnie needs to tell us, I throw up a domed barrier around us to buy us some time to read. “Read quick!”

I go to open the message, but am interrupted by the knight pressing the attack again and just shattering his way through my shield dome. He knocks me off balance and is joined by his buddy, who has busted through the dirt wall and is barreling towards Summer with his weapon raised. 

“Look out!” I shout, but it’s too late. 

Clearly distracted by whatever she’s just read, and with a look of horror on her face, Summer doesn’t see the attack coming. 

Pixelated blood sprays everywhere as the knight lifts her up on his lance. A storm of conflicting emotions rages in my heart. Each feeling competes against each other to dominate my soul. There’s the obvious ones like the gut wrenching sadness that Summer is dead. What’s possibly more terrifying is the sheer unbridled fear at what Rose will do when she finds out. 

I’m not going to delude myself by thinking that I mean enough to the insanely powerful woman to make up for the loss of her closest friend and lover. It hurts, but I know where I stand as a former LOG operative. 

There’s a very real debate in my mind whether to just let the knights finish me off too. It’s interrupted by another message coming in from… Summer?

How? That’s not possible!

Was it the code that Rose wrote before we split up?

It has to be!

There’s no time to worry about that though. Not in my wildest dreams could I take on two knights on my own while worrying about their goons at the same time. I need to escape and fast.

Catching two more strikes on my shield, I quickly look for a way out. I’m relieved beyond belief when I spot a stack of boxes that form a convenient set of stairs up to a nearby wall. 

I trigger a shockwave ability that temporarily stuns the agents and book it for the crates. Quick and light steps bring me up and over the wall, allowing me to slide down the hill side and cover a great amount of distance in a short time. It costs me some bruises and bumps, but my proxy body will heal quickly while I’m logged out.

Once I’m far enough from the outpost and certain I’m not being pursued, I teleport somewhere more secure and cut the connection, pulling me back to my meat body.

Standing right in front of me is a despondent looking Summer. I reach out and brush the tears from her eyes as she does the same for me. 

Wait? I’m crying?

Well, it makes sense. She should be dead. 

“How?” I whisper. 

“Rose’s code,” Summer confirms my suspicions. “Just before I got hit, I got hard yanked out of Lanadel. I have a massive migraine as a result of how rough it was, but I’m still alive at least…”

“Then what’s wrong?” I ask, still holding her cheek. 

“Rose has been captured.” Her words chill my veins and force me out of my seat as I wheel about looking for Rose. 

Not seeing my ravenette girlfriend, I turn back to Summer. “How? Why? What happened?” I demand. She should be here. And it doesn’t look like there was a fight in meatspace.

“The others said that she went to a LOG precinct in person and started causing mayhem both in Lanadel and out of it.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know why she’d do that. It sounds so… so… reckless!” 

I pull her in close, holding her tight as she starts to break down into tears again. “We’ll get her back,” I assure her. “Trust me. They’re not going to kill her until they can extract Willow from her, and that’ll be no easy feat.”

“But what if they torture her?” she sobs into my shoulder. “They’re going to do such awful things to her!” 

Summer’s clearly inconsolable, so I gently lead her out of the auditorium and back to our room. We can find out how the relocation mission went afterwards when we coordinate with Lonnie about getting Rose back.

We hold each other for an indeterminate amount of time. All the minutes or hours just merge together as I devolve into worried tears as well. 

After a while, there’s a gentle knocking on the door. I carefully extricate myself from a sleeping Summer, giving her a soft kiss on the cheek. She'd passed out from the stress, so I want to let her rest. With quiet steps, I go to the door to see who it is.

Lonnie steps into our room and offers me a tender smile. “I’m sorry about Rose. If it’s any consolation, y’all bought us enough time to clear out our outpost.” I just level her with a steady gaze. “Fair enough,” she sighs. “We’re still trying to piece together exactly what happened during what seemed to be a two pronged assault by Rose,” she explains. “Our best guess is that she got caught off guard and was taken down in meatspace.”

“What’s the plan to get her back?” I demand. “We can’t let them keep her! Willow is too dangerous to be in their hands and they’ll have to kill her to get Willow out!” I’m practically shouting and Lonnie winces and steps back a bit. Reining in my anger, I glance back at Summer to see if she's still asleep. She's awake and gearing up to make her own retort.

“Yeah! Rose wouldn’t stop at anything to get us back! Hell, she already proved that when Felicia kidnapped me!” I bite back on my discomfort as Summer reminds me of my recent shortcomings. “Oh, sorry Felicia,” she apologizes. She must’ve been able to sense my uneasiness.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got some ideas. Most of which revolve around you,” she says to me, a brow raised in response to Summer’s outburst. “Our liaisons were monitoring your operation and we’re pretty sure that we can borrow that radio trick along with some other weaknesses in LOGs infosec team to get into the precinct before they can transfer her.” 

“I’ll do it,” I announce simply. “I still have my LOG uniform, and with a little tweaking to my appearance, I could probably pass for a random agent.” 

“I’m coming too,” Summer announces with determination.

“Sorry,” I wince. “You’ll stand out too much, and you don’t have ANY physical combat training. It’s best if I go alone.”

"Then bring me in as a prisoner!" she counters. I shake my head and lay my hands gently on her shoulder.

"Summer, that'd just get you a record, and make me have to identify myself to file paperwork," I explain. "You can be on comms to keep tabs on me, alright?" She deflates in the face of my cold logic and sighs.

"Fine..." she relents.

Lonnie nods her agreement and makes a few calls to other resistance members. “Alright, we need to move quickly. Get changed and meet me outside in twenty minutes. We’re going to raid a LOG precinct.”  

End Chapter 20