Folly's Daughter

Marching onto the catwalk leading to your mech, your Handler recites to you:

"The wolf hunts-" Alone. "-alone."

"The wolf hunts alone."

Dagger rises on its elevator, the pace urgent for an emergency deployment.

"Let not the teeth-" Let not the teeth forget the claws. "-forget the claws."

"Let not the teeth forget the claws."

Your mech's lithe, angular form burns in the light of the hangar, the blades at the end of its arms glistening from the water that cleansed the oil and blood of its prey mere minutes ago.

"It will-" It will sense no warning. It will scream without sound.

You speak in time with her. "-sense no warning. It will scream without sound." Cool ice chills your voice, under a thrum of excitement.

Two deployments in a single day. Three targets first. An advance deployment. A scouting party that found obliteration, a radio signal that found no home.

"Eight."

You turn on your heel as the gangway extends the final stretch to your weapon. Her weapon.

Missing its blood.

Missing its teeth.

Missing its wolf.

Your hands tuck behind your back as you stand at crisp attention. Four fingers extend on each hand, thumbs tucked against your palms.

You do not repeat the count.

You will hear it again when you earn it.

Your Handler regards you for two moments. The first, looking for weakness. The second, looking for failure.

She finds neither.

Her hand reaches for your throat, and the chip in her palm signals to the electronic brace around your throat. The back of her fingers run against your skin when she grasps the center of the collar and pulls it away. The sensation of her skin is a brilliant light for a fraction of a second, then the diodes on the rear of the chunky brace disconnect from your neural link, and the sounds of the hangar disappear.

Her tactics linger. The shape of the syllables, but not the sounds. One sound lingers.

Eight.

Dagger sprints among the buildings of a financial district, jamming all signals in a twenty block radius as it rushes toward the first enemy signature. The balls of your feet feel only taps, as the experimental stealth hydraulics of your legs dampen the sound of your rush to no more than the callous slamming door of one of the cars you nimbly dodge as you near your prey.

You leap over a pedestrian bridge, the sounds of frightened civilians below silent to your perception as you slide to a stop in a T junction and dig a blade into the building ahead of you in to halt your forward motion. The elegant length of the weapon jutting from your elbow slides out smoothly, and you turn to face your prey under the burning noon sunlight.

Easy kill. Your teeth lock together, and you take off toward the muscular silhouette towering a story taller than your nimble machine. The radar chaff scattered by your jammer paints targets in a flickering ballet a half mile ahead, and the defense mech's arm scans side to side, the barrels of its massive 120mm rotary cannon spinning and ready.

Ready for an attack that it will never see coming.

The sound of Dagger's feet fail to penetrate its cockpit before you brace and launch yourself upward behind it, the forward momentum of your sprint redirected into a single clean slash with the thin upper forearm of one blade. The point enters at a precise spot in the spine, piercing through the foolishly well documented blueprint and into the cockpit of the machine, pinning the pilot against the reinforced glass of the view port for a microsecond before a gaping hole is thrust through their chest.

"One."

A brilliant star blinks in your eyes as you hear her voice cut through the air of your cockpit while you complete the motion, Dagger's feet landing atop the corpse of your first target. It stands under you, the balance of its thick legs uncompromised by your precision, and you survey the placidity of what only a novice would call a battlefield.

A predator would call it a hunting ground.

The second is bisected by a horizontal slash from both your blades, each shearing off a half of its shorter carapace in each direction as its pilot's torso and legs fling out of the decapitated corpse of their weapon of war.

"Two."

A chord of pride thrums under a yoke of obedience. Self-gratification is a reward for success, and success is not measured in parts.

The third is penetrated from above, the same arm that killed its heavyset match a mile behind it. It topples to the ground under your nimble weight as "Three." glimmers in your ears.

Steel slides over your arms as you yank rhythmically yank each one out of the back of a Mastodon class mech to slam into a higher point, each thrust climbing you up its back. You have but seconds before it can send out a warning cry, as its heavy plates conceal a powerful subspace radio module that could scream its demise to the rest of its pack.

Your jammer is not enough to hide your presence from the comms, but the pilot's frantic call is interrupted two words into their panic by the tip of your pointed finger piercing the back of their head.

"Four."

The word burns, the recording playing quieter in your ears than the memory of a phrase striking your ears at the same time as her rubber bullet impacted the back of your skull when you missed a lethal cut in a training exercise. 'Do better.'

The pounding of inadequacy in your head is more painful than the armor-piercing rounds that tear into your abdomen as you streak toward another mech the same size as your own, an old model with paper-thin armor. If you had a shoulder cannon of your own, you could tear this prey to shreds from a distance, your bullets spraying its pilot into a visceral paste right out the back of their seat.

You need no teeth.

You slide under the wide legs of the weapon, raising a blade to slice through its pelvis as you pass. Critical power lines spark in a cacophony of electricity while you drag your other blade through the asphalt to force you to a stop. Both the sharpened points of your claws stab into your enemy's backside, one through the heart of the pilot, the other into its reactor core.

"Five."

The core blows as you race away from the scene of the kill, the noise and collateral damage a lure for the last three.

Adrenaline and resentment at missing the chance to revel in her approval both scald your veins as her voice barely registers under the din of battle. "Six."

Bullets riddle the body of the sixth as you hold it in a limp vertical posture in front of you. Another pilot might panic, being stranded behind an enemy's mech as its companion continues to drill rounds into a body that friendly fire turned into a corpse moments ago.

You glance to the side, and see your only way out. Muscles in your body bunch up, preparing to struggle through the controls and neural feedback against the strain, and then you brace and haul the heavy mech still skewered by Dagger's blades toward a nearby building. Your body burns under the stress, but you manage to get close enough to yank your arms free and dive behind cover.

A more fearful pilot might disengage, circle, try to flank their foe.

Fear is predictable.

You scramble to your feet and burst back around the corner to streak toward the gunner. They're caught by surprise, needing to take a moment to realign their barrels from their left flank and back toward you again. Your victory is clear, Dagger's sprint far too quick for the clumsy blue machine you face.

Your mind recalculates as you step on a car whose suicidal occupant tried to drive their way to an escape in the middle of a battlefield. Your leg slides under you, forcing you to spin backwards and slash blindly toward your enemy's torso.

The twirling motion is halted as your forearm hitches on the rigid steel, and you're caught in an awkward diagonal, feet barely managing to keep any friction against the ground. Another massive strain, and you roughly flex your abs to push yourself away, yank your blade free, then use your weight to slash into the shallow wound again.

You hit something vital the second time, and the bulky automatic cannon falls to point at the floor, firing on overdrive and burning rounds into the hot asphalt. You may have nicked the pilot, their hand clenched on the firing control as they bleed out in the cockpit, but your Handler has yet to confirm the kill.

You twist away from your blade, pulling it free as Dagger collapses to the ground on its back. Another exertion, and you pull your legs up over your torso and kick out to use the weight of your legs as a counterbalance to flex your upper body and yank it into the air like a gymnast, as your feet move to contact the ground.

Something tears in your stomach, but you can't tell if it's mechanical feedback through the neural link or the muscles of your body protesting your commitment to the mission. Pain and ignored tears burn in your eyes as you turn and thrust a blade into the broad slash in your enemy's carapace. Your Handler does not reward half measures, so you rotate your elbow and shoulder to carve a sideways eight through the entire chassis, an infinity symbol bringing the sudden end to the life of a pilot foolish enough to resist you.

Certain of their demise, you pull your blade free, extending it to point behind you as the destroyed mech collapses first to its knees, and then backwards onto the street.

"Seven."

A fierce battle. You've shown your commitment to the hunt. One left.

The last is a puzzle. Its thin form stands atop a tall building, hastily turning in random directions as its targeting reticle chases your phantom signals, failing to see you through the hole you poked into an office building to let you watch it. Its rail cannon is a fearsome weapon, its power draw demanding so much from the machine equipping it that its pilot has to sacrifice armor plating to allow it to keep its weapon and movement systems powered at the same time.

Your teeth grit, knowing that any ranged weapon in the arsenal of your FOB would make this a trivial fight. Your hands flex in the cuffs of your controls, and your left blade idly carves a gash into a semi truck beside you. Your eyes drop to see the source of the friction, and…

The last mech twists its rail cannon toward the sky and snaps off a magnetically accelerated shot into the heavy vehicle careening toward it through the air, but the projectile penetrates cleanly through the rough slash carved into the metal as you skewered it to throw over your cover.

You can already hear that glorious number in your heart as you race around the edge of the building and sprint ahead while your projectile glances off your enemy's weapon, causing a malfunction as it attempts to reload. The pilot is still frantically clenching the trigger at you as you reach the peak of your powerful leap and slam your feet into their chassis. The metal screams of catastrophic failure when it reaches the concrete on the other side of the building, and you plunge your blade directly through the transparent forward panels of the mech's cockpit. You revel in the terror frozen on the pilot's dead face when their organs explode under the tip of your brilliant weapon, and you hear that beautiful word:

"Eight."

You pause with your blade buried in your final target, letting bliss course through every inch of your obedient form. Your body aches from exertion, something tore in your muscles, and exhaustion clings its dark hands around your eyes, but all your cortisol burns away in an inexorable fire as validation baptizes you all over again.

The words are invisible to you, but their notion still gives you direction:

Back to base. Back to your Handler. Time for Dagger to be rinsed off, repaired. Time for you to shower, for the pain of recovery serum being injected directly into your torn bldy.

Time for her to give you back your thoughts. Time to be given the chance to learn again. To be honed. To etch the tactics of combat so deeply into your psyche that they cannot be forgotten, even when your conscious presence is exchanged for the predator's clarity.

You run back toward your extraction point, the muted bang of your feet the only sound in a city that evacuated into underground bunkers as its wardens were skewered and scythed and pierced and ruined. You glance down at your radar to check your heading again, and-

Dagger's arm lifts laterally, scraping through a building as you change your running step into a powerful thrust forward. You only catch a glimpse of a bulbous form in your peripheral vision as you pass, pink paint already being ruined by your arm. Your foot lands, and without hesitation you spin 270 degrees with your other arm lowered, then you whip it up at the end of your turn, shearing the tentacley arm of the enemy off at the shoulder.

You needn't have bothered - as your eyes take in a kill you didn't even consciously register, you can see the mech's cockpit, its entire frame torn out and impacted into the wall opposite the slashed building on the other side of the intersection. Biological effluvia can be seen leaking from the pod as you hear "Nine." breathing ecstasy into your ears.

Not a recording this time, a real radio feed. Surprise in her tone. And… pleasure.

You pleased her, beyond her expectations.

Something rushes through your skull and swirls down into your stomach, a sick excitement that at once makes you feel nauseous and desperate for its next swallow.

You stare, hungry, at another blip on your radar. It burns a luminous red, the same as the targeting lasers of the dud missiles you learned to dodge both on foot and in Dagger. But this time, you're the missile, a knife pointed with pinpoint precision at another evasive mech, closing on your position.

You'll hear the next number.

And it'll be the last thing your prey ever hears.

"Ten." makes you moan, and by "Eleven." you can barely see your auxiliary control panels through the mania. Another four targets are closing in on you, a crowd of Prowlers come to exact revenge for the extinction of their fraternal packmates.

You focus on the closest target and leap onto the nearest building, ready to pounce, when your Handler's voice breathes into your ear. "Evac. Now."

You bite down on a protest, desperate to earn another number, but you would never question her. She continues "They're doing an orbital drop in four minutes and forty-five seconds. You've done well."

It gives you shivers to hear her praise, and she at least explained why she's pulling you out, even with more fur within reach, ready to split under your claws. Even without words to put to the notion, you know you don't want to be around for an orbital drop, no matter how cunning your tactics.

You turn around and leap to another building, your shadow passing directly over another Prowler, blissfully unaware of how close it came to death.

Manic energy thrums in every inch of your body while Dagger is towed through the sky back to base, and when you leap out of the cockpit your overexerted legs try to buckle under you, but you stay strong. Your hands clasp behind your back, ten fingers closed and fists pressed together to symbolize eleven.

Your Handler strides toward you, an uncommon smile on her face. Try as you might to remain stoic, you can't help the stupid grin that stretches your features as she approaches. It seems she forgives the insolence of your expression, because she cocks a hip and crosses her arms in front of her, using one hand to click the ends of your brace together twice. "Good-wolf."

You'd boast, revel in the glory of the kill, laugh yourself hoarse at the vindication of her praise, but you don't have the words.

She reaches up with the brace, and you can feel structure creeping around and stitching itself into your spine as the two ends of the metal circle near each other at the back of your neck. Your Handler's face burns bright in your vision, incandescent and pure, for one brilliant moment as she leans close, and then-

Click.

"Thank you ma'am. Any idea why the Prowlers didn't show up on the scans?"

Her hands pull back, and she tucks them behind each arm when she crosses them again. "Seems to have been a new model. Didn't show up on the long-range. You did good, they almost snuck up on you."

"Almost isn't enough. Shame about the drop, I'd have loved to stay and show them that the new model bleeds just as well as the old."

She nods with a smirk. "We find where they're manufactured, and I'll let you out to hunt again."

Another grin finds your features, and it lingers while your Handler pulls a syringe out of her jacket and poises it over the torn muscle in your stomach. "Be good."

"Always." The pain, now stark in your cognizant processing, nearly makes you whimper.