Chapter 5 // Robot Dogs

Omega police—corrupt scum—arrived on scene with two cybertrucks. A squad of 8 men exited one of the armored vehicles. They had electronic visors with a red line replacing their eyes. A troop went to the other truck and activated two robot dogs that stood 3 feet tall. They burst inside the mall like blood-starved beasts, famished and hungry for sustenance. Another entrance welcomed a group of amateur mercs, male and female, ready to make a quick credit.

Mocha and Tatsuki hid in the courtyard, center of the mall. Tatsuki had been here plenty of times in the past, but it was eerily quiet, minus the holograms. Mocha pointed to a security office and ordered Tatsuki to hide and for Yoshi to protect him at all costs. The door to the security room was locked but Yoshi took care of it. Tatsuki locked the door and approached the command center. Hundreds of computer screens, buttons and knobs… Tatsuki cracked his fingers and sat in the chair to see what he could do. He found Mocha on one of the camera feeds. Unfortunately, he did not have a microphone to warn her of the approaching enemies from both sides. This did not look good, not at all. Dogs?! Ah man, we’re screwed…

A guy with a toothpick stared at a blue female hologram. “Sheeesh, look at those thighs!” He ran his fingers across the hologram and his hand floated through her legs. He pulled his arm back and ducked alongside his mercenary friends when they heard the robot dogs enter the mall.

“Pigs!” a girl with blonde dreadlocks said. “What we finna do, boss?”

The shirtless leader with ugly tattoos across his body sparked a 1000 credit cigar. “Let the pigs do the hard part. Kill them after. We’ll collect the reward.”

“Boss! You’re a genius!”

“Yeeeee!” A crackhead rubbed his hands together and excessively licked his lips.

Yoshi hacked the security mainframe. Tatsuki took control of the mall. He activated the metal doors, covering the main entrances to stall further reinforcements. He kept one exit open for a future escape route. Tatsuki decided to leave the holograms running to provide Mocha a bit more cover. The holograms continued reciting sales pitches while the police searched for the terrorists and the mercs hid far away. Tatsuki wished he could do more, but this was the extent of his power…

The police moved in four groups of two-man squads. They swept the mall, keeping each other updated with every move they made. They carried pulse rifles with rapid-fire but needed to cool down after so many shots. When this happened, they had pulse pistols to switch to.

A few minutes passed. A robot dog approached a clothing store with mannequins behind the glass walls. The dog opened the door with a claw. It looked like it was sniffing a trail as it entered the store.

Mocha dropped from the ceiling and lunged her katana through its head. To her surprise, the dog was still not dead. The pulse cannon on the dog’s back fired at Mocha as she dove over the checkout counter. The blast missed her, making a hole in the wall. The police swarmed toward the noise. The closest squad was 10 seconds away.

The dog fired another pulse round at the counter, destroying half of it. Debris dispersed all over. Mocha dove out from the counter and landed sideways while aiming the semi-auto rifle. 4 shells hit the ground and the robot shut down.

Mocha ditched the gun and detached the pulse cannon from the dog. She ran to the back of the store. The cannon was much more heavy than she expected; she had to hold it two-handed like a gatling gun. Her bloody arms had a massive pump as they became vascular under her sweat. All the stores were interconnected and had doors leading to each other. She moved from one store to the next, staying low and silent.

A two man squad approached the clothing store with pulse rifles drawn. One guy propped the door open with his back while the other checked on the dead dog. He inspected its damaged circuitry, then noticed the semi-automatic rifle on the ground, then the missing pulse cannon. He spoke into his radio.

“This is Darquisha, Spot-157 is down, transmitting my coordinates time-now—Frank!!!”

The guy propping the door open got shot by a blast that tore through his biotic shield. He crashed through the glass door and oozed blood from the trench in his chest and back. Daquisha ran to check on his comrade. A faulty mistake. Mocha shot another round, this time severing Darquisha’s right leg from the knee down.
“AIEEEE!!”

Mocha turned the pulse cannon toward the 2nd robot dog that zoomed in her direction, but the cannon was too heavy—the dog tackled Mocha with its metal frame and skewered her near the collarbone with a blade. The cannon fell from her arms as she fell backward into a store, the dog on top of her. The weight of the dog smashed her sternum. All the air in her lungs forced out of her mouth. She tasted her own blood. The dog tried to straighten its back to atomize Mocha’s face with its pulse cannon but couldn’t get the right angle. The dog instead bashed its face toward Mocha’s. She nudged her head left and right and dodged it. The weight of the dog was crushing her body, cracking the pavement underneath her.

She managed to slip her thighs around the dog’s body, but she needed to get the blade out of her collarbone. There was no other way—she pulled herself toward the dog's rear, tearing the blade through her flesh in an upward drag. She screamed as she did it, but once she was free, she muscled her way around to the dog’s back. She gripped her thighs around the pulse cannon, unsheathed her katana and stabbed it in the head.

The dog bucked like a horse and threw Mocha off. It ran forward and tried to stab her with its blade covered in her blood. She deflected with her beast gauntlet, side-stepped and stabbed through the bottom of its jaw. The dog darted around in a circle too quickly for Mocha to remove her blade. It charged its pulse cannon. Mocha slid underneath the dog as it fired a round at the wall and made a tunnel into the next store. She removed her blade as she slid through its legs. She stood up behind the dog, jumped toward its head while spinning in the air like a ribbon dancer and stabbed its face. The dog finally shut down.

She was close to using her powers… That thought infuriated her. Against a robot dog?! She had no time for self-pity or rest—all the other policemen had arrived and filled the store with lasers. She dove onto her back and crawled on her shoulders with katana in hand. Droplets of blood leaked from her wound. She opened a door connecting to the next store.

One of the policemen threw a biotic grenade inside of the store. The blue explosion shook the whole building and warped the atoms within the blast. Mocha jumped into a ceiling vent and repositioned while the police looked for her scattered limbs. They saw the doors Mocha had been using to move from store to store. They spread out in individual units to cover as much ground as possible. They shot inside the stores at random and through the ventilation shafts.

“Damn, Yoshi, this is bad! She needs our help!” Tatsuki got up and approached the door, but Yoshi blocked it and tilted side to side.

“We have to help her! I… Damn!” Tatsuki recognized the bot was right. Tatsuki had given his gun to Mocha and his martial arts experience was limited. There was nothing he could do… No… What sort of weakness is that? There’s always something. He ran back to the control center and activated the overhead sprinkler system to distract the police. He laughed cynically, assuming what he did was pointless, but Mocha found motivation from the new battlefield. She was accustomed to fighting in the elements. Policemen were spoiled; they rarely trained and only in perfect conditions.

The mercenaries were pissed off and tried to find an exit to avoid getting drenched even further; they had been hiding at the far end of the mall but the explosions made them nervous. They started to realize why the reward was an abundant 50k of credits. Stick with the plan…

Tatsuki searched the camera feeds and found Darquisha and Frank's body.

“Yoshi, look… their weapons, see? I’m going to sneak over and grab them.” Tatsuki stood up and Yoshi blocked the door once again.

“You’re going to have to stun me or something, bro. I have to help her. She… she saved me. And… I want to help her… So do what you have to do, but I’m going!”

Tatsuki reached for the door handle but Yoshi blocked him again. Tatsuki grit his teeth and almost yelled, but Yoshi opened the handle with a claw and peeked its eyes around the corner. It looked at Tatsuki and an unspoken agreement was made. Tatsuki followed behind the drone toward the battle.

Yoshi and Tatsuki were getting soaked by the overhead sprinklers. He felt like he was in a movie. It was times like this he wished he had a film crew to follow them. Imagine the content! The views! The—Tatsuki remembered what Mocha said. Sometimes you have to stop talking and actually step foot into the trenches… How pretty she looked, how wise and beyond her years… How old was she anyway? He saw himself from a third-person perspective and felt disassociated from his actions. All he knew was a primal urge to go, go, go… Save the girl… There is no final revolution… Every day we resist is a revolution. Every step I take toward my dreams…

The police were thirsty for revenge and annoyed by the water and that Mocha kept evaporating. She was like a ghost; every time they saw a washed out trail of bloody footprints, the trail stopped, like she grew wings and flew away. They continued searching but stayed in close proximity to each other, at least in line-of-sight. Mocha dropped from the second floor with her katana pointed down. It pierced a policeman's biotic shield, into his trapezius, down the length of his spine and through all his internal organs.

“Dakika!!! NOOO!!!”

Lasers sprayed toward Mocha. She grabbed Dakika by the vest and used him as a shield. The dead body twitched and melted from each shot. She pulled out the blade, took the pulse pistol from his holster and flipped sideways in an aerial while bullets skimmed around her thighs. As she landed, a pulse grenade bounced near her feet. She sprinted and slid her thigh against the wet floor like a baseball player, but the explosion made her go flying, her body twisting in the air. She landed hard and felt a burning sensation on her shoulder blades. The ends of her kimono were scorched.

The policemen thought she was surely done for. The warping effect in the air began to clear; the sight of the woman running was mind boggling! How the hell is she still alive?! They fired rounds at her as she stepped off a trash can and launched up to the second floor. Their visors were blurred by the water droplets; despite that, her left hamstring was grazed by a laser.

The five remaining men followed Mocha and climbed to the second floor, but they were much slower, some of them taking a few attempts to get up. One of them slipped from the wet floors. Mocha was nowhere to be seen. They rushed forward, their weapons pointing all around the mall.

“The stores, light them up!”

They fired belligerently at every room. Glass shattered everywhere. Inside one of them, Mocha rested behind a counter. She leaned sideways; her shoulder blades burned… As lasers flew all around her, she brushed her palm against her ruined kimono. How unfortunate…