It was not hard to identify the owner of that voice, even before I turned around. A quick check at my buffer showed it was still at nearly 80%. Not an especially good situation, but one I had to face to survive this night.

While I slowly turned around, I briefly considered summoning a Balrog to assist me, but I rejected that idea almost immediately. The bandwidth the corpies had appropriated was slowly crumbling, and I would have to either cripple myself or the Balrog.

Instead, I chose to fight at my best.

Then I stood face to face with THE JUSTICAR. The other Abyss-dweller choosing the avatar of an angel.

He appeared as a tall, muscular man in a blinding white robe, with shoulder-length, wavy hair flowing in a virtual wind. A halo made out of pure light hovered above his head, and his single pair of pure, white wings towered above his shoulders with the hilt and grip of his signature flaming sword sticking up between them.

One would assume that we had a similar mind, but unfortunately, the asshole was a religious zealot, a believer in the cause of St. Bryce, or as he was known in the rest of the world Sanderson the Idiot.

To make it short, he was of the firm and vocal opinion that all Pures needed to be purged, preferably burnt at the stake and then drowned for good measure.

Not that he was particularly fond of me before he knew I was a Pure.

In his humble opinion, the avatar of an angel was reserved for the just and holy. Also known as the religious nutjobs of the Alliance.

Additionally, as he explained to everybody not running away fast enough, women had no place in our business. An all-out nice fella obviously.

At #24 in the rankings, he was considerably higher placed than I was, and it showed his aptitude that he, as a citizen of the Alliance reached the top 30. He was essentially the only one there not from the EU, the CSA, Japan,  or the NWC.

While the basic computer technology was somewhat comparable, after all, my new processors were the first really new technology in almost a century, the implementation was, in one word, crude.

 They lacked the education to use the technology to its utmost. Their programs were subpar, their matrix was unstable, and all in all, they had it much harder to even get to the Abyss.

That did not stop this asshole from trying to make my life a living hell. Spectre had quickly put an end to that. Rumor was that Spectre ripped him a new one, and left him half dead, his board in a smoldering ruin.

After that, he took verbal potshots at me but otherwise kept his distance.

I spun up my combat utilities but left them unspawned. Every second I could delay the, as I feared inevitable fight meant one second longer for my buffer to regenerate.

I was pretty sure that under normal circumstances with both of us starting fresh, I could beat him. With my buffer damaged to that extent, it would be dicey.

I still had a few aces in my sleeve, but it was getting uncomfortably empty in there. If this night would not end soon I would be all out of tricks.

I spread my wings, tilted my head, and then addressed him.

„Justicar. I should have known that you are the one responsible for this farce. Your people have lost. Don’t compound your failure by getting into a scrape with me as well.“

He balled his fists, and his stupidly expressive face showed pure rage.

„YOU SHOULD HAVE JUST ACCEPTED YOUR PREORDAINED FATE! YOU ABOMINATIONS HAVE NO RIGHT TO LIVE! IT WAS A MISTAKE TO LET YOU DEMONS EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE. A MISTAKE WE WILL CORRECT IN TIME. AND FOR YOU, I WILL CORRECT IT NOW.“

Not what I wanted to hear, but sadly expected. His booming voice got on my nerves, and I slowly changed the environment here to make him sound like a chipmunk. I would treasure his expression when he found out.

Unfortunately, I could not be sure to win this fight. I had to prepare contingencies should I lose. In the best case, I would be thrown out of the matrix and wake up in a few days with a headache from hell.

In the worst case, I would get my brain fried. In the first case, if the Cyberzombies were not killed, I was dead anyway. In the second case, I would not let them enjoy their victory.

Thus I readied two utilities that were essentially my doomsday weapons.

Enola Gay was for all purposes my third most destructive utility. It would take every single measure it could to destroy any systems it could reach, with one lone exception. And the measures I had given it were… extensive. It slagged any electronics it could get into contact with. It had a high probability to take out the power armor and the Cyberzombies.

And it would go off if I was kicked out of the matrix or died.

Then I instructed the cluster to arm The Lamb. In case my life signs ceased it would inflict it on the world. Whoever was behind it would not be happy with the outcome.

Then I loaded Aegis.

“You should go. I have the same weapons Spectre used against you. And more. My board is better than what he had then. You could not beat him then, and you will not be able to beat me now.“

In turn, he gripped his sword and drew it.

“I will enjoy… what have you done to my voice! You heretic! Blasphemer! I will make your end so much more painful just for that.“

His wings and halo burst into flames, while a shield made of light materialized in his left hand. Then he stormed towards me.

Meanwhile, I had reloaded the MH-7, freshly loaded with the 20-round magazine.

Unfortunately, The Justicar‘s shield was made of much sterner stuff than the corpy’s, and while the shield showed visible fluctuations, it withstood. Still, he stopped for a moment, clearly perplexed about the damage I had done.

Conventional wisdom was that mele weapons offered the best penetration. Apparently, no single Jack had ever consulted a weapon specialist to get an armor-piercing gun. Add in that we are all mostly nerds, and you get why medieval weapons were seen as the non-plus-ultra among the elite Jacks.

The effect of the subconscious was stronger than anybody had ever believed.

Still, I had to draw this part of the fight out as long as I could, to get more buffer back.

To that extent, I spawned a Gremlin to hamper him. It would do nothing more than annoy him, but at the same time, I activated my stealth. Let him hunt for me.

Periodically I spawned a decoy while I kept my distance, playing for time. After he dispatched the third decoy while steadily spewing forth insults and taunts, still with a chipmunk voice, he turned around and moved towards the kill switch.

I seriously did not like where this was going. Before he reached it, I fired at him again, but he was fast. Not as fast as me, but fast enough to bring his shield up in time. He laughed, I think he meant it sinister, but with the chipmunk voice, it just sounded ridiculous.

“Damn you. But you are done. You can’t stop me now. And I will see you burn in hell.“

I fired a couple more shots, with negligible effects. But there was essentially nothing I could do.

My buffer had reached 24% reinitialized. With the outer buffer from the cluster, I was at nearly 40%. Not enough to go against somebody like THE JUSTICAR.

I had to somehow gain more time. Sadly, he was so inconsiderate to not be stupid about this battle. He knew what I was interested in, and why. And the way he acted I had to believe that he was the one actually in charge here, so he probably had the authority to move the kill switch somewhere else.

Yes, I would find it again, in time. Time I likely did not have. It was imperative for me to prevent him from moving it. And he knew that. I quickly spun up some Erinyes. They were the little sisters of the Balrog. Neither as smart, nor as tough and by far not as strong. But for harassment, they would do.

I had not used them previously because, in a fight of this weight class, they were mostly useless. I would pit a Balrog against THE JUSTICAR, and not expect it to do much damage. The Erinyes were mostly something I had just lying around.

They were actually an early iteration of the same project that in the end yielded the Balrog. I tested the basic principles with them before I scaled the different parts up. I sometimes thought that I could sell them as a mid-level black ICE. But in the end, they shared too much code with the Balrog for me to be comfortable doing that.

But they had one extremely important advantage over the Balrog. The Erinyes used barely any bandwidth. Yes, they would not be able to do real damage to my opponent, but with a bit of luck, they would be able to keep him distracted so I could defend the kill switch.

My hope failed me though. For a moment, yes the Erinyes managed to harass him, but then he placed his sword floating in the air beside him and materialized something that looked like a hand grenade.

And a couple of seconds later, a pulse scrambled all the bots in the vicinity. I had, honestly, not expected something like that. An AoE-combat utility, who would have thought that. Yes, it was tricky to manage it in a way that one self was not hit as well, but it was, obviously doable.

A brilliant idea, but not one I wanted to see now. Yes, of course, I fired another couple of shots, but to no avail. He grabbed his sword and slowly backed towards the kill switch.

And there was nothing I could do. Even the cluster needed a few moments to reinitialize the scrambled bots. And I had taxed its combat capabilities hard this day. Eight Banshees, two Balrog, four Sybils, a Gremlin, and four Erinyes, all within a couple of minutes in real-time. I had never expected a fight like this.

The worst part was that if this shit had gone down a few days later, I would have had Glory ready. With Glory, there would have been no contest at all. I had designed her to be capable of running all the bots I used so far without even getting warm, and she would clear the memory in fractions of a second. With her, I would fight a JUSTICAR in slow motion, literally run rings around him.

But I was stuck with Precious. Yes, I loved Precious, but she was the old generation. She was at the top of the old generation, and I was a few precious percent faster than THE JUSTICAR, but sadly not enough. Glory had three times the buffer, and it would have cleared up by now.

Three, maybe four days. Was that too much to ask? But no, they had to attack that day.

And then it happened. He reached the kill switch. And it vanished. Inwardly I groaned, but I had already started my plan to counteract his move.

I had the cluster spin up a couple of tracer bots, and they started to search for his real IP. It would take a few seconds, in real life, and these few seconds would be painful, especially as I could not risk doing any real damage to him.

But if I managed to find him, I had one final ace up my sleeve. And this ace was a whopper.

For now, though I had to withstand him. And unlike me, he had no reason to pull his punches.

He knew that too, of course.

“Oh, did you need that? My bad. Why don’t you give up, and die like the Abomination you are? You have lost. There is no way you can stop me now without destroying the link to the kill switch. You can’t hurt me anymore, you can’t stop the operatives now, and when we have found your cybutcher, we will take him away, and kill the rest of you. I will make sure that you will suffer.”

Damn, I simply could not stand this asshole. He was always so smug, so sure of himself. I was by no means the only one, but he still was… wait a minute.

“You want our implant surgeon? Really? That is what this is about?“

“Yes. He stumbled into something that by all rights belongs in the hands of the righteous. And we will take it and use it to cleanse the world from Abominations like you.”

I had to grin at that, not that my avatar showed any expression, unlike his smug smirk. Time to pop his bubble.

“You just placed us on the same footing again, asshole. You can’t kill me anymore than I can kill you. You see, I am the implant surgeon you search for. You want the CRS-free cyberware? I am the only one who knows how to make it.“

That stumped him, and I was again astonished that he chose such an expressive skin for his avatar. I could see several emotions cycle over his face in rapid succession.

Smug triumph was followed by dumbfounded, followed by disbelieve before it changed to rage, and finally stubbornness.

“Then I will start with your reeducation. You will serve us before we can cleanse the world from you.”

Nice going here. There was just one problem. I had virtually no utility that could damage him, but leave his board and connection intact.

That is not quite true. I had a few utilities, but they were not enough to get through his defenses. Not without potentially doing more damage than I could allow.

But he did not know that. I lacked the reserves on the cluster to spawn another swarm of bots for now, and I had better uses for Precious resources than to use them for bots, but somehow I had to keep him busy, while simultaneously keeping him from knocking me out.

Yes, Enola Gay would most likely kill him, if he was still in the system when it did go off, but that was not what I wanted.

And unlike me, he had the time on his side. I had to stop the Cyberzombies and the power armor before they killed my friends and knocked me out, he could play for time. I had to hope that my tracer bots found him before my time ran out.

The changed situation had one good side though. My buffer had largely become irrelevant.

I just had to keep playing for time until my tracers found him. He did not know it, but when they did, he was toast.

And so, our tango began.

He morphed his sword into a whip, still burning, and lashed out at me. Somehow I was unwilling to get hit by that thing, so I evaded his strike. In retaliation, I did… well nothing really.

I started another round of harassment, changing the variables of the viron, making him run into invisible walls and such things, but in the end, I had nothing I could use against him for now.

Unfortunately, he was not quite content with our game so far and after some time he dismissed his shield and used his left hand to throw some sort of grenade after me. It manifested in a mass of sticky goo.

I felt myself slowing down immediately and cursed inwardly. He had used a massively distributed attack against me.

These things were annoying, but usually nothing serious. They were an offshoot of the old DDoS attacks from the prehistoric matrix. The attacker used a botnet to spam malware, exploits, or whatever at the target.

In theory, a very good way to overwhelm the defenses. In reality, these types of attacks were obsolete more than 200 years ago. It was relatively easy to identify the surge of incoming packets as an MDA and spin up a filter to remove them from the pipeline.

That filter had a disadvantage though, which was the reason why nearly every hacker still had MDAs in their arsenal. It slowed the target down for a few seconds.

Usually, that was no problem for me, as I was in the habit of building at least three connections for my operation, and switched seamlessly from one bridge to the next.

But naturally, in the emergency situation I found myself in I had forgone my usual pre-intrusion preparations.

I tried to bring up Aegis in time for the next attack that had to follow, but I was a tiny bit too late, and the whip connected with my avatar.

Pain lanced through my whole body, and I couldn’t prevent a scream, while further backing away.

THE JUSTICAR was of course delighted at my pain and another smirk graced his face.

“See what is in your future? You can despair now. And you will give us your secrets just to be allowed to die. I would tell you to make it easier for yourself, but I am enjoying it way too much.”

Urgh, what is it with all these sadists? I seriously don’t understand how somebody can enjoy inflicting pain that much. As revenge, yes, I can see the appeal, but towards a stranger?

Well, the pain was bad, but nothing I had not endured before. Compared to Frankel, this asshole was an amateur. I had worse torments when the gamma curse hit me.

Still, it was nothing I would willingly take, so I had to change my strategy.

I summoned a couple of barriers between us. Essentially static walls that would blunt his attacks for a bit, before crumbling.

“What’s the matter, freak? Do you feel you can’t win? Guess what, you can’t.”

His taunting was getting on my nerves. Add to it that my time was running out, and I slowly became desperate. It would serve nothing to use more tracer bots. The problem was that the asshole simply was too good for fast results. And he knew that as well.

I could have used an MDA of my own to slow him down, but that would be at best temporary, and at worst make my endgame much much harder.

And so we continued our cat-and-mouse game. I can tell you, I did not enjoy the role of the mouse.

Then I got the message I so desperately needed.

My tracer bots had found him. Not his bridge, not his spoof, not his redirects, no, him. And it was time for me to go medieval on him.

While I continued to evade him I had the cluster prepare the MDSA. It was my own little variant of the MDA.

You see, the problem of the MDA, the thing that made it an annoyance instead of a deadly weapon in our arsenal was the fact that the filters everybody had, reacted in a few hundred microseconds.

In a world where the latency was measured in milliseconds, that was way too fast. It was possible for an MDA to be timed so well that the filters would be overwhelmed, at least theoretically. In reality, it was much more likely to be hit by lightning three times in a single day than to get that sort of timing right.

And so, nobody paid much attention to them for a very long time.

And then I developed the Q-link. That changed everything. I now had the ability to launch a massively distributed simultaneous attack. Instead of slowly ramping up the attacks over a couple of milliseconds, my attacks would land in the same 100 microseconds. Faster than the filters could react.

I had then to choose the payload. Usually, it would be something in the vein of Enola Gay, as I had just one shot at this. But I could not risk his board getting damaged, or even him being killed with his board being shut down.

My other option was of course Babel for that. It would serve to take him out of the equation long enough. But honestly, I had it with this asshole, and I would rid the world of him.

With that in mind, I choose Gom Jabbar as the payload.

It was in a way similar to Babel. Both were based on a design flaw I found in the basic datajack design used for nearly 200 years by now.

Well, to be honest, I found the reference in the documentation of the higher level jacks when I designed my skull ware. The flaw was discovered during the great war, but it was deemed obscure enough that the continued production of jacks was more important than fixing it.

And after the war, the few who knew about it had other things to do. And jacks had become unimportant thanks to the UNAN and their bioweapon. So it was forgotten.

The flaw made it possible to directly stimulate the nerves the jack connects to in certain manners. It was, of course, a different way to simply fry the brain of the Jack. I rejected that option, I had enough other options that would not make use of my hidden trump.

Then there was Babel. The nerves in question here were essentially the prefrontal cortex and the other parts where the personality sits. Babel overstimulated them so that they were forced into a temporary shutdown. Resulting in the Jack being unconscious for a few hours and waking up with a headache from hell. Trust me, I tried it myself. Only the curse is worse.

Gom Jabbar on the other hand was what I created to really make my displeasure known. It was my mind-killer. The name came from one of those ancient science fiction novels. There the Gom Jabbar was actually a poison needle, but the most important use of it was where the main character was tested with it as a punishment for failure. And he used the term mind-killer there. Concerning fear, but I thought it was close enough for hand grenades.

And thus my Gom Jabbar was named. It used the same nerves as Babel and the temporal cortex, where long-term memories were stored. And then it burnt them out.

The body would live on, but there would be no person any longer inhabiting it. I had developed it with the vague notion that someday I might need it, but never thought I would.

It was one of those better to have it and not need it things. And boy was I happy I had it when I needed it.

So I spun up a last set of barriers. They served only to annoy him further, but that had just become irrelevant.

Then I finally taunted him back.

“You fucked up royally. Now your ass is toast. See you in hell.“

And I launched the MDSA. He froze, pain evident on his face, and he screamed as if his soul really burned in hell, and then stopped.

He stopped moving, stopped doing anything. The connection was still there, and the avatar was still standing, but THE JUSTICAR was dead.

I took a few moments to take some deep breaths and calm down for a bit before I followed the connection to his board.

There I let go of a swarm of Sybils again and began searching for where he placed the kill switch. Fortunately, he had no notion that I would be able to seize his board and had done nothing to hide it.

I quickly surveyed the connection to unveil any potential trap but found it clean. And so I threw the switch.

I then set the cluster to scrape this board for every little bit of information, and finally looked at the situation in the fortress again.

It had only been 20 or 30 seconds since I looked last, but in combat that could be an eternity.