Quantum Cultivation by Jace Kang (simple e reader TXT) 📕

The image revealed the origin of the particle gun shots: blurry shapes, moving fast.

“Ai, repeat, at one-tenth speed.”

The scene repeated. This time the shapes came into focus, and her real body would’ve shivered.

Ministry of Defense assassins.

While her own internal electronics were limited to her EtherCloud jack and the interface into her brain, MoD assassins were wired through and through. The integrated circuitry included cybernetic eyes and allowed teams to work in coordination with each other. AI-controlled nanobots assisted every movement, giving them superhuman reflexes, and prosthetic glands released hormones that blocked out pain.

They were barely human, and research suggested they’d lost all emotional sense of humanity. The technologies were made for starfighter pilots from three centuries before, and had later been banned—except in covert MoD programs. Thankfully, the expense of creating just one of these supersoldiers compared to shocktroopers in power armor ensured their numbers remained small.

In the playback, their wiry forms bounced from building to building, flipping midair while shooting. She’d mistaken Ryusuke for one of them when she’d first watched footage of him fighting the Peacekeepers and shocktroopers.  She had to warn him.

She jacked out and looked.

Ryusuke had already leaped to the temple’s rooftop, then sprang to another building as stun beams crackled through the air, striking the old wooden structures in the neighborhood. The dark shapes leaped after him.

“Ministry of Defense assassins!” Aya yelled. Whether he heard her or not, it was impossible to tell. “They’re enhanced with speed!”

The master disappeared from her line of sight, and Aya looked to Kentaro.

Blood had stopped leaking from the gash, and she could’ve sworn the wound looked a fraction smaller. She jacked back into her EtherSpace.

“Ai, compare Kentaro’s wound from two minutes ago with now.”

Computing angle. Showing.

The two images of the injury appeared side-by-side, then came together so that the more recent one overlaid the earlier one. Indeed, the wound had already started to close by half a millimeter. Thin, barely visible fibers threaded through the skin.

“Ai, zoom in on the fibers and identify.”

The image enlarged, and a rainbow graph was displayed beside it.

Spectral analysis indicates several different iron alloys.

Several different iron alloys…just like… “Ai, compare this to the data on Ryusuke’s skin.”

The fox spirit displayed two rainbow graphs side by side, then overlaid them. There were slight variations in some of the metal content, but they were about ninety percent the same.

Could it be? Kentaro was already gaining iron deposits in his skin?

The rattling of her body jolted her out of the EtherSpace.

She blinked her eyes several times to find a Peacekeeper next to her.

“Are you all right, miss?”

She looked around. Thirty-two Peacekeepers swarmed the area, with some examining the Yin-Yang symbol. Another checked on Siena, while two medics knelt down beside Kentaro. They’d brought a levitating biobed with motion dampeners. Others were scouring the area, and two were examining the Kappa’s broken walking stick.

“What are these needles in the Elestrae woman?” one asked.

“Check out this wood and the gemstones inside,” said another.

Their expressions showed just how baffled they were.

“Miss Johnson?” the Peacekeeper asked.

Johnson? She shook her head and met his gaze. Of course, the Trojan horse she’d planted in the Peacekeeper EtherSpace identity database would recognize her as someone else. In this case, the woman Ryusuke had saved from the Nue.

She jacked in for a split second to command Ai to keep her identity as Hiromi Johnson.

“Yes?” she asked when she jacked back out.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. I think so.” She looked around. There was no sign of Teppin.

“I’m Officer Perez.” The Peacekeeper waved his hand around, then paused on the Nue’s remains. “What happened here? And what is that?”

What to say? Certainly they knew about Ryusuke, if the MoD Assassins were after him. She burst into tears as she ran over and knelt by Kentaro. “My boyfriend!”

Ken’s breathing remained stable, even if the wound still looked horrific.

“A Purebred?” the medic asked.

“He doesn’t have a chip,” said another Peacekeeper with a chip scanner. “I thought he was another one of those mysterious visitors.”

Through her manufactured sobs, she pointed at the Nue. “We were strolling to the temple, when that…that thing…attacked us.”

“It’s amazing he’s still alive,” the medic said. “I can’t figure out why he’s not bleeding anymore, even though he has a pulse. Or what this needle is doing under his nose.”

“What about the Elestrae?” Officer Perez pointed at Siena.

“I don’t know,” Aya said. “She must’ve heard our screams and come to help. The cameras must’ve caught what happened.” Of course they wouldn’t have, since these creatures from the World of Rivers and Lakes always interfered with the surveillance devices. Though after it died, maybe they caught something.

Officer Perez then gestured to the diagram of blood on the ground. “And what’s this?”

Feigning shock, she stared at the circle. She shook her head. “I…I don’t know.”

“We’re going to have to take you to headquarters to take a statement.” The lead Peacekeeper said. He gestured to a hover transport levitating close by.

This wasn’t good, especially if her sister Keiko happened to be on duty. On the bright side, she would now be on the inside of Peacekeeper Headquarters, where she might be able to jack into their EtherSpace without having to slip past Sentinels.  If only there was some way to let Ryusuke know.

With a nod, she climbed into the second-row seating of a hover transport, behind the shielded cockpit.  The Peacekeepers lifted Kentaro and Siena onto biobeds and loaded them into the back of the vehicle.

The trip to Peacekeeper Headquarters on a priority route would take a minute. Aya gave herself a second to hack into her home’s EtherSpace. There, she stole her father’s ID and sent a message for Keiko to come