Strike One - Fractal Goes Hunting

Posted on Thu Sep 28th, 2023 @ 4:59pm by First Lieutenant Bethany Harrison

Mission: HYDRA: Another Head Rises
Location: Small Cult Compound, Southern Idaho
Timeline: Present Day

Contrary to what people seemed to believe about her, Fractal wasn’t out running off, half-cocked, seeking her own destruction. Sure, the soul-churning pain that Rook’s absence had caused, even pierced through to her present, coldly-tactical state of mind. It was muted, distant, but the only pain that the young brawler had ever experienced while in that state. Still, she knew her death meant his actual death, and she wasn’t rushing off, seeking to see him again in the afterlife, especially since she knew that he would be really pissed if she managed to off herself stupidly.

Still, she had a job to do. One that she was quite suited to.

To see it from that vantage point, nothing seemed overly amiss. A small grouping of houses, some crops, some animals. There were no towers with armed guards, though there were those that patrolled, those that controlled the small compound. It really did take a great deal of effort not to interfere with what she witnessed as she studied her prey, recorded their movements, their weaknesses. But keeping hidden had been a tactical necessity.

While she had been at the academy, she had visited the science department and had Julius upgraded to defend against HYDRA’s nanite rounds. There had also been a few minor repairs, various materials added. There was also an excitable young programmer that went on about a new program that he was developing that would allow the nano to shape itself into another outfit, or something like that.

Luckily it wasn’t ready for implementation, or she may have been forced to keep listening to his impromptu marketing pitch. While Fractal didn’t like the hero worship that the recognition of the armor brought, when it came to instilling fear into an enemy, there wasn’t anything quite like them seeing just who it was that was coming for them.

A sudden cry of, “Mutant bitch!” rang out in the darkness, causing Fractal to pause in her approach. Did they have someone that could see past her cloak? Her gaze moved across the compound as it came to life, people rushing out from their houses, children being dragged along. Then, she saw the red-headed girl that was being dragged by her thick, curly hair towards the center of the compound.

“The light-bearer comes! The light-bearer comes!” she screamed as she tried to fight off her attacker, scratching at his large, muscular arm, bloodying him, desperately attempting to get away. When he slung her down in the center of the still gathering men, she dragged herself up to her knees. “You will see! You are blind now, but the light-bearer comes! You will see!”

“Looks like we need a new attack plan,” Fractal muttered to Julius, the AI that managed her symbiotic armor, knowing what was about to happen, having seen it so many times in her life. So much easier to do it that way, than to have to explain why someone suddenly went missing, with the added bonus of fear reinforced to the masses. She couldn’t protect them then, but it was her job to save them now.

Understood. Recalculating. Julius’ smooth British baritone responded, directly accessing her auditory system.

Before the gathered crowd could even process the fact that she was standing there, she appeared between the screaming, kneeling girl, and the tall, muscular man. His arm was drawn back, angled towards the child on the ground, and he gasped as Fractal seemed to step out of nowhere, halting his swing and causing him to stumble back a bit in surprise.

The girl looked up at the woman that was suddenly standing where nothing but empty space had been mere milliseconds before, tears streaking from white, blind eyes, and over her thin, pale face. “I told you,” she whimpered, then grabbed the back of her head and curled up into a little ball, nearly burying her face in the dirt, as if she were a turtle trying to pull into its shell.

“How about picking on someone your own size,” the slender young woman in the sleek black armor, complete with a customized tactical rig, said in a bored tone. Fractal fixed the tall, muscular man with a cold gaze over the mask that covered the lower half of her face. The so-called light-bearer’s irises swirled furiously with multicolored light, her hair aflame with dangerous reds, oranges, yellows. “Or, you could just surrender now and save a lot of bloodshed.”

For a moment, the man blinked in disbelief at this woman that had come between him and the focus of his rage. Then his eyes widened as he seemed to gather a bit more control over his senses. “I could break you in half,” he spat at her incredulously, giving a patronizing chuckle.

“Better men have tried,” Fractal said, giving an unconcerned shrug. Julius informed her that some of the other men were creeping towards her, though a couple had fallen back, looking unsure of themselves rather suddenly. “Yet here I am,” she said, her hands moving to her sides, palms upturned, empty.

“Looks like the flock gets double the lesson tonight,” he sneered at her. “The light-bearer, huh? Another minion of Lucifer that gets to know the power of God tonight!”

“The only lesson for tonight is...that you have no power,” Fractal said, her previously bored tone edged with venom.

When the man lunged at her, a small, unseen grin formed on her lips behind her mask. She had decided that she wasn’t going to toy with the brute...too much. Before he could start his swing properly Fractal was standing directly in his path, her knee connecting with his groin, while her right fist connected sharply with his throat, causing him to gag and cough, almost simultaneously.

“How dare you invoke the name of my God,” she said with an eerie calm, and watched passively as he dropped to his back, his eyes wide with confusion, gasping for air through his damaged throat.

The man’s hands were clawed, hovering over himself, as if he couldn’t quite figure out which injury to cover. That was when three others began their attack from behind, a fourth attempting to get to the girl on the ground.

“Why do they always wake up and choose violence?” She muttered, turning to the new attackers, electrified batons snapping into place as she pulled them from her rig and slung them to full extension. Her eyes landed first on the one going after the girl, only to find that a young man was pulling her into his arms, shielding her protectively. His threat priority was instantly downgraded to secondary, and her attention turned to the other three.

There was a dull thunk as one of them managed to catch her in the middle of the back with what seemed to be a baseball bat. Fractal’s AI-assisted armor took the brunt of the blow, but it still caused her to have to take an uncontrolled skip-step forward. The young brawler spun aside just in time to avoid a closed fist, and brought the batons around with the built up momentum, adding some of her own speed and agility into the mix. Then the young brawler bounced each of the dangerously arcing implements off of the back of his head in rapid succession.

The other two had backed off slightly as she spun back around to face them, another of their leaders dropping behind her, the acrid stench of burning hair briefly tainting the air. “Are you really that devoted to the cause, boys?” she asked, pacing protectively around the two cowering children on the ground at her feet.

None of the roughly twenty or so men seemed to want to get up close to the baton-wielding psychopath that they had suddenly found themselves facing. That was until their great leader managed to haul himself back up to his feet, though a bit shakily. “Cowards,” he croaked, holding his throat. “Kill them.”

The cascade of chaos that happened next, taxed Fractal’s ability to rapidly calculate tactical situations. The shoot, don’t shoot scenario at mind-shattering speeds. Were it not for her ever-expanding control over light, there was no way that her human mind could keep up with the advanced calculations required in order to properly utilize the accelerated movement that comes with being able to move at the speed of light. With her nano-suit’s symbiotic AI’s assistance, her movement speed and acuity were further enhanced.

A tired, pale woman suddenly ran out of the crowd and up to the staggered leader. “Please! Not my children!” she begged, grasping at his bloodied arm, tears rolling down her face as she pleaded for their lives.

Fractal saw it coming before it ever happened, her mind trying to drag her back to that awful night, not so many years ago.

No, mama! Don’t die! You can’t die!

Time seemed to slow as he shook the woman off violently, then shoved her to the ground. “Guess I’ll just start with this one,” he growled, each word, each movement slowing further and further as he reached for the gun at his side.

The loud roar of a large caliber pistol tore through the night. A very large hole simply ripped through his face, spraying the followers behind him with his brains, blood, and bits of bone. His last impulsive movement yanked his gun free of its holster, where it promptly dropped from his suddenly limp grasp.

Absolute terror and panic erupted as the heavy man dropped to the ground with a thud, as well as a disturbing squishing sound. The women and children started screaming, each of the mothers grasping onto their newly traumatized offspring and running for the fallout shelter at the back of the property. There was a brief, surreal moment where Fractal turned her furious gaze, and smoking .45, to a man standing in front of her, blocking the path between her and the woman on the ground behind them.

“Move,” she ordered the few men in the way, then she crouched down next to the kids on the ground. “Go to your mother. Take his gun and go north into the hills. You know the place,” she said to the young man that she’d seen snooping around the remnants of her primitive site earlier in the day. “Protect them.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice, ma’am,” the boy managed to choke out hoarsely, then hurriedly picked up his sister and rushed past the men that had stepped aside. None of them actually seemed to want to wind up meeting their maker quite as quickly as their cursed leader just had.

Once the children passed unmolested and the family had gathered together and moved away, Fractal chuckled, a dark, foreboding sound. Five of the twenty men had decided that they weren’t up for the fight, and disappeared into the chaos. She would hunt them down later, as the weak-minded were the ones that tended to run, and they normally didn’t last long on their own.

The young light-bearer turned her attention to the insanely fanatical men left surrounding her. “Ah, the smooth-brains emerge,” she said, nodding slightly as she holstered her weapon. HYDRA agents posing as cultists hadn’t exactly come as a surprise to the woman that had been watching the compound for just such inconsistencies. Though, it was a strangely high number for such a small compound.

As the gunfire sprang to life from all sides, a wave of red light stormed across Fractal’s body, throwing up a heat shield around her, hot enough to incinerate the lead before it could get to her. It gave the men an instant sunburn, and forced all of them to back away from the searing heat that had even set wisps of hair and strands of fabric smoking. When the hail of bullets slowed, then died, she pulled the light back, even taking in the ambient light around her, creating an eerie, unnatural darkness where she stood.

“Who did you piss off to get this job?” Fractal asked, not really seeking an answer to her sarcastic question. But she was honestly curious as to why so many of them were sent here, with no metas to back them up. “I see. Expendable reinforcements. Oh well,” she finished with a shrug, having no shred of sympathy for the men that had chosen their own fates when they sold their souls to HYDRA.

A pulse of searing light rapidly moved away from her in all directions, engulfing, then incinerating the men within, the warped, twisted metal remnants of their weapons dropping to the ground. It was over in an instant, just a blip in time, but when the light pulled back and dissipated across her form, she paled and staggered a few paces over the newly devastated and desolate courtyard. She had used more power than she had anticipated in her relatively few attacks. Pinpoint accuracy, blinding speeds, and incinerating light all came at high cost.

Fractal righted herself quickly, coldly, her movements nearly mechanical as she scanned the compound in front of her. Most of the heat signatures had dissipated, which told her that a majority of the people were hidden. Three remained near the back of the property, crouched near the shelter where the women and children had run to.

Her body shimmered, then vanished as she made her way towards the shelter.

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She watched from above, perched on a hill, invisible to normal eyes. While she didn’t want to be there when Dyami arrived, she also couldn’t leave the place until she knew that the shaman had answered her summons to the small compound. Fractal had done enough of an investigation into the few workings that were kept on the leader’s hidden computer to verify that it was only a few years old, technically still a startup, and that the extra HYDRA soldiers had been sent to them when the larger compound had been raided.

There hadn’t even been any kind of underground facility, which told her that there was some kind of facility within a day of it, where the mutants, and anyone that didn’t conform, would be taken and sold off to the highest bidder. If they had even survived the trip. Her chest was burning with fury, even as she sat passively atop a rocky outcropping.

Are you certain that you wish to continue this? Julius asked, his voice gentle, though genuinely curious, concerned for her mental wellbeing. You could take command of that team...

“I’m sure. And no,” Fractal responded to her AI companion, who bore the voice that made her heart ache. “I don’t want command. You know that better than anyone.”

There was a sigh from Julius and he said, I do know that you struggle with the idea of ordering people off to their deaths, or even wanting other people to, well, not to put too fine a point on it, be like you.

Fractal stood and shrugged. Dyami’s portal had opened up and he was quickly in control of the situation. “If I wanted to be lectured about the kind of monster I am, I’d have stayed at the ranch,” she said shortly.

You’re the only one that sees you as a monster, love. He reminded her gently.

“Says the monster-bonded AI. Talon knows. Rook knew,” Fractal said sadly. That had always been the most heartbreaking thing about their relationship. Jon had always been afraid of her, of the extent of her powers, even if he had loved her. And right now, she was doing everything she could to avoid living up to that idea in his head. He had been the one person that she would burn the world to ash over, and she was struggling against doing just that now that he was trapped in an alien box, an eternal dream. “At least he had the guts to be honest about it.”

After having Julius check the maps that they had downloaded from the original compound’s data servers, then cross-referencing it with their newest data, Fractal made a few quick calculations and disappeared, unseen, into the night.

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FIN
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Bethany Harrison
Fractal
Mutant Underground