We’d finally found a place a spot with a view.

  I had thought when we started, that it would be easy. It was never a high priority, since I had suspected that it wouldn’t do us any good, but I still wanted a chance to see the city. Looking down on all the lights was a staple of the cyberpunk genre after all, and this place had a surplus of tall buildings and power-mad CEOs.

  I had reckoned without thinking about the claustrophobic nature of this floor. Most of the buildings were tall enough to extend into the cloud cover. In most places, that would mean a hell of a view across the cloud tops. Here, though, the clouds were more of a permanent fog, meant to conceal the rock ceiling. It extended all the way to the roof, and so did the skyscrapers. They weren’t buildings so much as pillars. The exclusive penthouse executive suite was generally entombed in rock.

  Which, in fairness, made for great security. If the view had to be faked with screens, none of the occupants seemed to mind.

  So for a while now, I’d been keeping an eye out for a building that was high enough to see over the majority of view-blocking buildings, while not being so high that it reached the clouds. You might think that all I had to do was look out a window halfway up a taller building… but you would be wrong. If picture windows were good enough for the CEO, then they were good enough for the lower floors, it seemed. There were more… energetic ways to look outside, of course, but a firefight with security wasn’t conducive to taking in the view.

  I’d all but given up, and yet here we were. On top of a building that was just the right height, placed well enough to take in much of the city. A depressing expanse of drug dens, chop shops and corporate law firms.

  “I see one,” Felicia said.

  “I do too… and there’s a third,” I replied.

  We were looking at the local mana flow. Dungeons tended to have very smooth flows compared to the outside, but that just made it easier to pick out the flows that they did have.

  “What does that mean? Why have multiple exits?” Borys asked.

  “You’ve got to have an exit,” I explained, “And the mana is going to tell us where it is.”

  I left unsaid the possibility of using illusions to conceal the mana. I didn’t want to give Axel any ideas if he hadn’t already thought of it.

  “So if you want to keep the adventurers from rushing the exit before they finish your little game, you make multiple exits,” I continued.

  “How does that help?” Borys asked.

  “Normally, it would just mean more exits to defend. Here, though, we’ve seen that Axel can make changes to the floor we’re on, which dungeons can’t normally do. So any time we get near an exit, he just closes it up.”

  “Which he can do since he still has an open exit,” Kyle finished for me. “What if we started closing the exits for him?”

  “That might work,” I admitted, “But I think it will be easier to just play his game. Plus he might not answer those questions if he can claim we cheated.”

  “I want those answers,” Borys stated. “We’re almost done with this game, and the new tools we’ve acquired should only make things go faster. There’s no need to change plans at this stage.”

  “Fair enough,” Kyle said. He hefted his new weapon. “So are we ready to go?”

  I looked around at everyone. “I don’t see why not,” I said. Moving to the other side of the building, I looked down at our target.

  “Twelve floors up, five windows down,” I recited. The location had been chosen from some plans we’d liberated in a previous mission. I lit it up to make things easier for Kyle. “Is that right?”

  Felicia double-checked for me. “It’s right,” she said quietly. She readied her own weapon.

  My friends had taken to the magical guns like they were secret Americans. Felicia’s small and light machine pistol dealt more damage than Kyles's sword, turning her from a pure healer to a damage dealer.

  The real delight was the autofire, though. Each pull of the trigger counted as five shots for training [Weapon Mastery: Triggered Weapons]. I’d been neglecting that skill, but I was going to come off this floor as quite the crossbow master.

  Kyle didn’t have to feel left out though.

  I wasn’t sure if it could be properly called a rocket launcher when it magically propelled a dart enchanted to trigger a magical fireball… but it was close enough. Kyle aimed at the window I’d highlighted. The window was fake, of course, but that didn’t matter to the Blitz.

  Glass shattered all across the side of the building, leaving a scar of concrete behind. At the centre of that scar sat a massive hole, flames licking fitfully at its edges. We gave it a moment for something unexpected to happen, and then Borys stepped up with his own shoulder-mounted ‘weapon’.

  Most of the weight and bulk of the Tenshi was in its steel-cored cable, 200 metres coiled up tightly behind the grapple. 1000 damage was a bit misleading, as it was designed to punch through soft targets and embed itself in hard ones. If you were hit by it, you might only take a thousand damage, but you’d be strung out on a line and anchored to the wall behind you. Or the hook wouldn’t lodge and you’d be drawn in when the recall function started.

  Borys aimed and fired. This was our first time using that particular weapon, but it didn’t matter to the skill. His aim was spot on, the harpoon flying straight through the hole. When he started pulling back on it, it seemed that it had lodged somewhere solid.

  “Looks good,” he said and secured it at our end. The back end of the line detached and could be looped around a solid structure or hooked onto something. We’d done the first one. All Borys had to do was push a button and the line started tensioning.

  A beep and a green light indicated that the line was ready. Borys didn’t have to ask who was first. Cloridan stepped up. Dodging would be important for the first one in.

  It wouldn’t be his only defence though.

  [Greater Invisibilty]

  Cloridan gave me a lazy wave, as I was the only one who could see him, and hooked his strap over the line. In the next moment, he was halfway between the buildings, sliding down into the hole.

  “And… in,” I said, letting the others get an idea of how long it took. I was going to have to be next.

  With Cloridan invisible, we couldn’t see how the fight was going. The spikes made some sound when they hit a target, but the distance and the other sounds drowned that out.

  I cast [Greater Invisibility] so the others wouldn’t see how nervous I was.

  This is just another use of the [Climbing] skill, I told myself. Nothing to worry about.

  To my great relief, the skill did trigger as I reached for the line. I swung myself over the edge of the building as if I’d done it a hundred times before, and launched myself down to our entry point. The room was filled with the scattered black-clad bodies of what had been ShinseiDrachen’s security team.

  Cloridan had cleared out most of the security from the floor, so I flashed a [Static Image] to my crew to let them know to come down. I gave Cloridan a bit of supporting fire, staying carefully out of his way. He didn’t really need the help. The mooks were just firing wildly, with no idea of where his attacks were coming from.

  Giving an invisible rogue an assault carbine was just cheating in my opinion, and I thoroughly approved.

  Cloridan had finished up by the time Kyle came down, so I cancelled our invisibilities.

  “It’s a shame these things can’t be reloaded,” Cloridan said. He threw away his second empty gun and started looting weapons from the mooks he’d killed. They should have plenty of ammo left: they hadn’t had anything to fire at, and most of them carried a spare.

  It was a shame. The guns could be reloaded, but only by weapon shops. They wouldn’t do it for you. Ask for a reload and they’d just insult your mother. But if you sold them the gun for half price, and then came and bought it the next day, it would be freshly cleaned and reloaded… and twice the price.

  “Probably for the best,” I said. “It means that we won’t be taking them with us.” The cell phones would only work down here, but I saw no reason why the guns wouldn’t work anywhere— until they ran out of ammo, anyway.

  Felicia was next down the line, and Borys finished up in the rear.

  “No problems,” he reported.

  “Great,” I said. “Now let’s see how much of the infrastructure we left intact.”

  While the boys kept the lift covered, I hunted around for a suitable connection point. This level had been the security centre and had some special terminals.

  I found what I was looking for. Pulling a black, featureless device out of my storage, I pulled a cable from the terminal and plugged it into the device. A second later my phone rang.

  “Geez, lady, you sure made a mess of this place!”

  “It needed to be done,” I said, shrugging. Glitch had said that the last time too, and we hadn’t been anywhere near as messy then. “Can you bypass the security now?”

  “Already done!” the hacker said gleefully. “I’ve got my routines running roughhouse over them. You can stop worrying about the elevators, they’re under control.”

  “Good,” I said. Like any computer game corporation that didn’t have to worry about health and safety, this building only had elevators. No stairs. In a further offence to the gods of Fire Safety, the ground floor elevators only ran up to level eight. To get to the higher floors, you had to run a gauntlet of receptionists, security and deadly traps for four levels.

  Or you could bypass that insanity by blowing your way into level twelve and having your hacker take over the system. Glitch had assured us that once he was plugged in, the only way to get him out would be to physically unplug him. Since he controlled the elevators, they’d have to cut through the doors and climb up the shafts.

  Since he’d mentioned it as something the security staff could do, I had to assume it was part of their programming. It would take time, though.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said. The doors for the elevator to the upper floors slid open.

  “Next stop, the penthouse,” Glitch cackled from my phone. “It’s a straight elevator run, all the way to the top.”

  “This is it guys,” I said. “If we can get ShinseiDrachen’s secret formula for cyberorganic fusion, Kobayashi-Krüger Konzern will give us their token. We take ShinseiDrachen’s token from out of their CEO’s cold, dead hand and we’re done here. Floor finished.”

  There were muted cheers all around. Everyone couldn’t wait to be done with this. We got in the elevator and watched the numbers climb. 13…14… it stopped on 19, one short of the top floor. The doors dinged open, revealing the massed gunmen waiting for us.

  “Sorry babe,” Glitch’s voice came from my phone. “Kobayashi pays pretty well, but ShinseiDrachen pays better. It’s been fun.”

  “Ah, Glitch,” I said sadly. “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.”