Kiko cancelled the call from her in-built phone for the fourth time before simply switching off her communications line altogether.
Her master was probably going to kill her for ignoring his calls, but she couldn’t afford any distractions now. If all goes according to plan, the success of this mission would be a huge step forward in her plan.
There was no room for failure.
Silent as a spider, the villain crept up the stairs, firing electronic scramblers at every security camera she spotted. Irritation was already beginning to gnaw at her. It wasn’t easy sneaking past all the infrared lasers earlier, and now there were enough cameras around to sponsor a press conference. Miles Cooper certainly did not stinge on the security in his building.
Strangely enough, the doors to his private laboratory were guarded by a simple, old-fashioned deadbolt lock. It seemed the CEO of Cooper Incorporated was still rather wary of digital attacks despite his technopathic quirk.
Kusanagi pulled a pick set from her overcoat and worked the lock. Her heart maintained a steady, alert beat as she jiggled the pins swiftly. Compared to the amount of sneaking around she just did, this part of the infiltration was a cakewalk.
The pins gave in to her touch after a few more seconds, and she returned her tools to her pocket. With a twist of a round door knob, the lock clicked, and the door opened a crack. Kiko slunk into the dark room, pulling out a torch.
The beam of light swept around, occasionally illuminating some sort of reflective metal swirling around in glass containers like flies around a lamp. Kiko ignored them. There was only one Cooper Industries product she was interested in.
She was vaguely aware of what happened in the outside world, and that included Miles Cooper’s new quirk amplification device, which was already selling like hotcakes in the hero market. Normally, she wouldn’t be interested in geeky technology like that, but Hiro’s enhanced strength during their encounter had finally brought her attention to it.
Her master’s intel was rarely wrong, which meant that Hiro’s technology was supplied by Cooper. If it really could do what that businessman advertised and more, this device was the key item to her plan.
Instead of pondering how to engineer her quirk into a quirk deletion wave, she could be the source of its power instead. Coupled with this new amplification technology, there would be no need to waste time on further research. Her plan would be vastly simplified.
After a few minutes, Kiko’s torch came to rest on a filing cabinet labelled ‘Amplus’. She glanced at a sleek-looking computer before turning her attention back to the cabinet.
Amplus was a commercial product as far as she knew, which meant that any information about it should have been stored on the company server. Why was there a need to store hardcopies in an inconspicuous drawer?
Kiko pulled open the drawers and flipped through the beige files one by one. Her eyes widened with anticipation with every page she read.
Bingo.
This cabinet had everything she needed, from complex details about the Amplus’ manufacturing process to the conceptual explanations behind the working principles of the device. She grinned victoriously behind her mask. Cooper’s wariness against cyber attacks only betrayed how he kept what really mattered to him.
After all, the best thing about a simple filing cabinet was that nobody could hack into it.
She snatched the blueprints and tucked them into her coat immediately. With this new valuable information, all she had to do was command those scientists in her quarters to study them and create what she needed.
Kiko closed the cabinet quickly, heading for the exit. There would be plenty of time to take a proper look at the files later. She wasn’t in the mood to hang around here all night.
Something else caught her eye— a platform in the middle of the room where a translucent helmet was hanging over.
Kiko stared at it curiously. The helmet was hooked onto the ceiling via a transparent tube filled with wires. What intrigued her, though, was that the wires converged to a single point into a small rectangular panel.
She reached for the helmet and gingerly put it on her head. Could this be—
The woman squeezed her eyes shut as a throbbing headache struck her. But when she opened them again, everything was coated in a dark red tinge. Kiko gasped with the incredible surge of power bursting out of her eyes. It felt as though her quirk could reach the ends of the universe.
“Guh!” Kiko dragged the device off her head as she collapsed to the ground, panting heavily. The red tinge in her irises faded away.
Holy crap, was that the power of Amplus? It felt so much stronger than it looked on TV—
“Unauthorised personnel detected!”
Kiko scrambled back to her feet as her surroundings flashed an angry red. She somersaulted away just in time for metal bars to rise from the ground and turn the platform into a cage. A security camera jutted out from a hidden access panel as a red spotlight locked onto her immediately.
Kusanagi hissed, pulling out a pistol as the swirling ‘products’ on display transformed into armed drones and burst out of their containments. She didn’t come prepared to engage in combat here, but she had no choice now.
The assassin sprang into action.
~ ~ ~
Miles Cooper paced the laminated marble floors restlessly, ignoring the well-dressed people mingling all around him. The half-full Martini had been sitting untouched in his hand for the past fifteen minutes. He had just won the ‘Most Conscientious Entrepreneur Award’ for the third year in a row, but he had yet to give an acceptance speech in front of all the other businessmen in the room.
Still, he wasn’t thrilled to be here. There were other things to worry about, like Hiro’s non-responsive phone.
The man leaned against a cooling window and looked out at the night city. Whoever designed this hotel clearly had something against corners, because practically every single edge of the building was filleted with a series of curved glass windows. It probably looked good on whatever 3D software the architect had used. But in reality, the hotel just turned out looking like a giant concrete snail.
Miles sighed to himself. He hated reminding himself of this, but it was his fault that Hiro had walked out on him. There were just too many damn secrets in his life, and covering things up had long become second nature to him.
He wanted to speak to the kid. Rather, he needed to apologise to the kid. But Hiro had disappeared off the grid, and there was no way to contact him. Though considering how the HPSC had just declared his vigilantism a crime and ordered a manhunt for Hiro, it was probably a good thing that he was a ghost at the moment.
Something beeped in his hat, and Miles turned on his powers.
“Intruder detected…?” the man murmured to himself, his eyes flickering green.
He focused his powers through the Amplus embedded in his maroon fedora and peeked into the security camera feed in his office. If the intruder was Hiro, he needed to deactivate his automated defence system before it hurt the kid.
But it wasn’t.
Miles squinted into space, watching a black figure dance around his drones like a deadly ballerina. Whoever this person was, he was kicking the security system’s mechanical ass. At this rate, Miles needed to take manual control of the drones before the scarily skilled intruder trashed all of them.
Hold on, is that… Kusanagi?! Why is she in my—
“Mister Cooper, there you are!”
“Huh?!” Miles yelped, and a couple of guests turned their heads to him. “Oh, terribly sorry about that. What is it?”
“Congratulations on being the Most Conscientious Entrepreneur of the Year once again.” An elegantly dressed woman flashed a pretty smile, gesturing him to the podium in the front of the ballroom. “Please come up to the stage to accept your award.”
Miles mumbled an inaudible thanks as he staggered onto the stage, barely able to follow the woman. His surroundings blurred as he mentally controlled his drones, using the only security camera in his office to guide him.
“Thank you… Thank you for this award,” the man muttered absentmindedly. “Uh, I am grateful for this… Uh, opportunity to…”
Kusanagi was flipping around the room, throwing out bolts of scramblers with deadly accuracy. The drone above her feinted right, before another drone shot out a capturing net from her left. Kusanagi stepped to the side as the net hit another drone instead.
“To— SHIT!”
The crowd went silent, staring at Miles in confusion. He grinned sheepishly at them.
“Sorry. To be a part of this Gala,” he stuttered, fighting down nausea. The strain from Amplus was starting to get to him. “I claim this not for myself but for every inventor in the world. I would especially like to thank the host of this event. You really are a—”
Dozens of Taser bolts burst towards the assassin, only to strike the walls as she ran in a wide circle. Sparks fizzled as one of them hit the main computer in the room.
“—Son of a bitch!” Miles yelled again. Shocked murmurs went through the crowd, and some of them began to frown at him.
“Treasure! Ahem… treasure— To all of us.” The man faked a cough, watching helplessly as Kusanagi tossed a grenade at his reinforced window. “My apologies once again. I’m feeling a little under the weather.”
C’mon, c’mon…
Miles gritted his teeth, desperately shooting as many nets as he could at the frustratingly quick woman. She dodged them smoothly, occasionally firing her pistol to take the closer drones down. The grenade beside the window continued blinking.
“All in all, uhm… What was I saying again?”
Kusanagi writhed on the floor as a Taser bolt finally struck her squarely in the back. The drones took the chance to move in, aiming a capturing net at the woman.
“Uh, thank you for coming!” Miles shouted hastily, firing a drone—
He yelled as a ground-shattering explosion shook his laboratory. The security camera fell off the ceiling just in time to capture a net flying back from the shockwave. Kusanagi ripped the wires off her body and rolled out of the broken window. She landed on a small floating motorcycle that had apparently been waiting outside all this time.
“Dammit…” Miles clenched his jaw in both frustration and discomfort as the motorcycle flew into the distance. He cut his technopathic connection with his office.
Multiple hands found their way to his body, and he realised he had collapsed onstage as well. His legs kicked weakly as the people tried to lift his body back to its feet.
“Someone call the ambulance!” a random voice shouted as more people gathered around the man. Someone pulled the hat off his head, fanning him vigorously with it—
Acid shot up his throat, and Miles vomited uncontrollably onto the floor.
Fluorescent lights flickered from above. The radio playing classical music distorted as though it was being run through some heavy influence. Miles wheezed as the green tint continued to cover his blurred vision. His technopathy was spiralling out of control, reeling from the aftereffects of Amplus.
After a few more minutes of projectile vomiting, stillness returned to the nearby electronics as the technopath finally managed to bring his quirk back under his command.
By then, the crowd had mostly cleared out to give him some space. Or perhaps they just didn’t want to get their fancy clothes dirtied by puke. Either way, he was grateful for the breathing room.
Ambulance sirens wailed in the distance, but Miles staggered to his feet and trudged out of the ballroom on his own, heading towards the lifts.
He had to find out what the intruder wanted with his lab.207Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzTLCSnvvay
and then Add to home screen.