Fanaticism dating back decades......plus the finest enhancements the Master and the Manei Domini could install, versus the unleashed rage and insanity of a violated child-combined with the nastiest modifications the Cameron Dynasty could install in a killer covert-operative and the combined residues of those operatives that had borne the previous generation of the Desmond type implant.
it shouldn't even be a contest. Ananiel's technology was superior, stronger, better armored, and complete, with no known flaws and no failures in implantation.
Amanda Roberts was a damaged meat-suit with damaged tech, able to drive past rational limitations due to the simple expedient of not knowing, or remembering, what those limits might be, and being unable to
care what those limits are.
She was a broken thing, but in that brokenness, she was better
integrated, the skillwires didn't need to be activated, they were already going, the adrenal boosts didn't need conscious choice, they simple
were. The processor enhancement didn't need to apply to her conscous memory-it had, over the last four years in 'the wild' integrated and copied through the plasticity of youth and developing brain-matter,
become her reflexes.
The human brain stops growing around 25 terran years, when the skull's plates finally finish fusing together. This is why child-soldiers tend to be more messed up after their war, than adults-they have a harder time reintegrating back to civilian status, to peacetime. the Trauma becomes 'normal'.
The Manei Domini officer she is facing, has the brain of an old man, who was an adult and a young man, but still an adult, when he was converted.
Despite the physical differences, then, the fight was horrifyingly even...and he was beginning to feel a visceral sensation he had not felt since the battle of Tukayyid.
He was feeling visceral
fear. The sensation that he was not the one in control of the fight, not the one certain of victory, not ordained to save humanity from itself.
This insane child was the result, and she was here to bring the sins of the Manei Domini to them in the flesh-and-steel.
In a mix of terror and desperation, He threw a punch with all his enhancement...
***
he lashed out and she felt the breastplate of her suit shatter, and a pressure in her chest, mixed with lancing pains that sent her spinning into the bulkhead, he remained anchored, and lashed at air with his other fist, as she struggled to reorient, pulling her cutlass from a bulkhead.
she coughed blood, but it hurt less than the surgeries.
"He's still using his cybernetic eyes to track you, I can't spoof them for much longer""Keel-Haul..." she coughed, "Make him walk the plank..." She kicked with both feet, and used the velocity and her unbalanced spin, the swipe brought the edge of the cutlass against where a human's windpipe would be.
He gurgled, suddenly clawing as she drew her knees up agianst his massive back, roughly shoving the vibroblade through his reinforcements of myomer, endosteel, and artificial bone. sparks flew.
his flailing actually made it cut
deeper and she grabbed the top of his head, wrestling the powered blade through a neck that could take shots from a 12.7mm machine-gun.
the head came free in a spray of pink mist, coating the chamber in not-quite-enough-blood for a body that size.
the machine was all that was left, lashing out independent of the severed head in her hand.
she drove her blade down, into the opened torso.
stirring like a butter-churn, until he stopped moving.
"I...want...my...answers, Erin." she hacked up more blood with each word.
"You will have them....could you perhaps do me a favor, and convince your Snow Raven allies not to kill me, Please?"
