The Academy Read Free Page B

disappointed.

Three
     
     
     
     
     
    Twenty bullets . Two minutes, five seconds. At least six Weir currently visible, and more movement in the brush at the park’s edge. One trembling teenager, trying not to cry, standing right behind her.
    These numbers defined the current parameters of Mitsuru’s world.
    The firearm protocol she’d downloaded was still active, running an auto-targeting subroutine that saved her the trouble of aiming. Her vision was layered with rose-tinted boxes and text, ballistics data and distances, potential threats, angles of attack. With it activated, she knew with a steely confidence that she could fire all twenty remaining rounds, and expect to hit every time.
    Mitsuru didn’t need a protocol to know that the situation was hopeless. She had enough bullets to stop the first two Weir as they came at her, probably. She could handle one more in close combat, possibly. She had been reckless to engage the Weir alone, and she had badly underestimated their numbers. Two minutes had become an impossible number.
    If they ran, the Weir would overtake them in the mud before they even made it to the path, never mind getting out of the park. She didn’t have the firepower to kill all of them, and fighting Weir hand-to-hand was just short of suicide. They were vastly stronger than humans and inhumanly resistant to injury. She had another two or three protocols she could activate in her current state, but their combat value was negligible.
    Mitsuru’s mind had been reengineered as a logic processing engine, a web of equations and calculated assumptions, permeated with Etheric tools and machinery, capable of rapid analysis and projection based on probability measurement. She was, in many ways, an Etheric computer – not an Analyst, obviously, but rather a field strategist. She was a node on an wide-ranging and invisible Etheric network; a precision device, capable of thinking or killing her way out of almost any situation, sifting through the probability fields for the most desirable outcome, adapting to her surroundings with rapidly evolving mathematics and an overriding drive for survival.
    The only favorable outcome she could foresee to this situation was her backup arriving early, almost immediately. She gave them no more than a minute, optimistically, and in most of the scenarios she ran, less than thirty seconds.
    Mitsuru let all of it go with one long, slow exhale, and then leveled her guns at the closest Weir. She fired off a couple of rounds to slow it down, as a warning, shattering its front forepaw and sending it tumbling into the mud. The Weir didn’t know she was running out of ammunition, and while they wouldn’t be afraid even if she were wearing a half-dozen bandoliers, it might slow them down a bit while they jockeyed for the best attack position. Getting shot hurts, after all, even for a werewolf.
    Older Operators said that silver Weir were particularly cunning and long-lived. Certainly, the one who flanked them fit the description. It was powerful enough to conceal its Etheric signature until it was almost on top of them, and smart enough to use the lake as cover, bursting out of the waters and charging up the short at them. She spun to face him, and then grimly readjusted her projections negatively, diving for the boy and firing with her free hand.
    She was too late, and she knew it already.
    The silver beast was a huge, vile thing, teeth protruding from a long, blunt snout, ears shredded to nubs, and a matted and patchy coat. He was close enough that Mitsuru could smell him, the musk and embedded odors of blood and decay. He was old and fast, moving in the halfway form that some Weir could assume, a bipedal wolf-thing, knuckles dragging like an ape, fingers tipped with cruel talons. He came up out of the stinking water of the lake at a run, making no noise other than the heavy slap of his back paws against the muddy banks.
    The boy heard him and he flinched, barely enough to keep