Seeing Lily in action left no doubt. No human could move that fast. Nothing else could have evaded such an intense onslaught for even a second, much less for the duration that Lily had already survived. But there was no time to lose. Lily was now driven into a corner, and the one who meant her harm was slowing her approach, making sure not to overextend herself and allow Lily to escape. This lovely creature only had a second or two left to live.
Brian charged and leaped at the product like a lion ambushing an unsuspecting gazelle. However, when he landed he set his feet and bent his knees to absorb the impact so that he could stop dead in his tracks. His ploy had worked. The product had heard him, as he knew she would. As he landed, she turned and swung her long baton back at him, the tip of the weapon whistling just millimeters away from his chest. She had expected him to be a little closer, but he had anticipated the swing. It was a trick that hypersensitive products liked to play on humans-act as though they don’t know you are coming, lull you into thinking you have the element of surprise, and then bam! hit you like they have eyes in the back of their head. It was a move that Brian was all too familiar with.
Having swung her baton with the confidence that she would deliver a decisive blow but then missing, Treva was now open. Brian knew his opportunity would last only for the briefest of moments, which is why he was already swinging good ol’ Tiffany. Only a moment ago he had been swinging at empty space, but now-right on cue-the baton was there in the path of his swing. Brian’s preference would have been the product’s arm or, better yet, its torso, but the savvy guard settled with slamming the heavy, bulbous tip of his mace into the stun baton with a mighty crack.
Treva, not expecting the blow, lost her grip on the rod, which smacked against the hard stage and clattered off into the roaring crowd. She was enraged. She had been watching this new meat puppet in her periphery, the one with the club. Relative to a being like herself, the human guard seemed to attack slowly and recklessly. She had expected to neutralize him with a single strike with her baton, but the seeker had underestimated this one. Now she had lost her weapon. Normally, she would have enjoyed the challenge of a worthy opponent, but now all she desperately wanted was her prey. And this guard was interfering!
Treva turned toward the man as he aimed another blow at her head, but this time she was watching and dodged it easily, and as the club sailed past her, she launched herself on him.
Love_Monkey, the watcher of the lounge, gazed down at the stage from her throne high above. This will not do, she thought. Due to the nature of their work, seekers were never a welcome sight, but Love_Monkey had never witnessed one unleashing itself in public. Sanctioned by the Divine Authority or not, Love_Monkey would not abide such violence on her watch. Without hesitation she leaped off of her balcony into empty space, eighty meters above the groksta floor. She fell rapidly at first, but the nanothreads gradually slowed her descent. It was at times like these that Love_Monkey was grateful for the groksta’s safety matrix, the web of threads so thin that they were invisible to the human eye.
Groksters were not allowed to use the safety matrix for fun (although they were often tempted); rather, it was there to avoid the stiff point penalties imposed for wrongful death. However, Love_Monkey was not just a grokster, she was the watcher, and as such she would do what she pleased. This was a true emergency. Falling toward the groksta floor, billions of nanothreads crisscrossed across her small body, stretched, and then, unable to withstand her weight, snapped. Although the threads broke, each one absorbed a tiny amount of her kinetic energy, the collective influence causing her to decelerate as she neared the floor. The damage to the safety matrix was of no concern to the hostess, who knew the threads would self-assemble again.
During her fall, Love_Monkey had withdrawn an emitter from a QuickPocket™ in her dress. Her familiar had called up the blood profile of the seeker, but Love_Monkey was too far from her target for the emitter to work properly. As the floor zoomed in, she readied the kill switch.
The human male was adept with his weapon, and so Treva endured some solid blows, one of which nearly broke her arm. But seekers were built to take a beating and Treva had no time to play, so she took her licks and then proceeded to rip into Brian. She tore at his flesh indiscriminately with her sharp fangs and steely nails, and his body quickly became slick with blood. Astoundingly, the girl-the one Treva had hunted all this way-jumped on the seeker’s back, grappling with Treva and screaming. Treva felt the dull sting of a blade as Lily stabbed into her shoulder and neck. Lucky for the seeker, her prey was less adept at attack than it was at evasion, and Treva estimated her wounds to be nonthreatening.
Treva bit down into the throat of the troublesome man and then snapped her head backward, effectively severing Brian’s carotid artery. He crumpled to the floor in a dead heap, blood spurting from his neck. With the nuisance now disposed of, Treva turned her attention to the little girl on her back, the one Treva had been imprinted with. The scent of her prey pressed up against her was overpowering. Soon she would feed. And when she had satisfied the worst of her hunger, she would then feed on the other one, the man limping toward her with his pathetic little knife.
The bloodthirsty seeker snatched a handful of Lily’s hair, and just as her brain was sending the signal to her muscles to pull the prey off her back, Treva felt the most wonderful feeling of her life. She threw back her head, moaning in ecstasy. She then fell to the ground. Her back bowed and she started to pant. Lily was still on Treva’s back, cutting into her wildly, but the hunter did not feel the knife; rather, the seeker writhed on the ground sensuously. The quiet from the audience was deafening. Then, all at once, Treva’s body convulsed in an explosion of haphazard movements and then went limp. The whites of her eyes turned pink as the blood vessels ruptured under pressure. Lily was still on top of the seeker, hacking away like there was no tomorrow. Blood spatter now covered Lily’s body, but no one could see it behind the illusion of her skinsuit. Treva’s limbs started twitching violently.
D_Light, dragging his injured leg and clutching his knife, then fell on top of the seeker and joined Lily in the grisly task of butchering the downed hunter.
Love_Monkey bent her knees slightly to absorb the shock as she landed on the stage. She looked down at the emitter’s clearly lit readout display. It was targeting the D-bots in Treva that carried the pharma MaxiDrive™. This drug was often used as a well-being pharma, but it was also a very effective pep. No doubt the seeker carried MaxiDrive™ in her bloodstream for those times when she needed an extra kick of adrenaline. Love_Monkey had set the emitter to an infinite loop, which meant that it sent the release signal over and over very rapidly. This emptied all of the MaxiDrive™ available into the seeker’s bloodstream over a fraction of a second. Her pulmonary and circulatory systems were overloaded, or at least that was what it was supposed to do. Love_Monkey was unsure if her emitter had killed the seeker, or if it had merely incapacitated her while the other two stabbed her to death. Either way, her objective had been met.