Torad Kash
By the time his ears had stopped ringing and the optic implants had fully rebooted, Leng could hear the footsteps of incoming forces. It was all he could do to climb fully out of the duct and stand upright before he was surrounded. C-Sec armoured units, rifles and shotguns raised, piled into the utility room, spreading out around him.
System diagnostics flashed across his heads-up-display, tallying damages and disruptions, and he felt a pricking in his arm as automated medical injectors kicked into gear.
"Drop your weapon and place your hand on your head," the C-Sec goon in front of him intoned, gesturing downwards with his rifle.
Kai Leng glared at the turian, face impassive. It was troublesome that they'd obviously known he was coming - but at least they hadn't come in force. Leng spared a moment to glance around at the rest of the C-Sec forces. Four turians, three humans, and a salarian. No asari, so probably no biotics. At this range, in an enclosed space? It wasn't even close to a fair fight.
"Drop your weapon! Now!" The C-Sec officer yelled again, repeating the gesture.
Leng smirked, but pretended to comply, raising his hands above his head. Unknown to the C-Sec forces, the kinetic blaster embedded in his hand was building charge, the eezo core in his ribcage whining.
Seeing him surrender, several of the officers lowered their guard, just a bit, and in that moment of weakness, Leng struck.
Dropping to his knees, he slammed his fist against the ground and fired the kinetic blaster. The shockwave immediately shattered the tile floor at his feet, a blue nova of energy erupting forth from the point of impact. Leng, braced, merely rocked back as the blast shoved against him, but the officers weren't so lucky. Unprepared, they'd been thrown back, slammed against the walls, left dazed and disoriented.
Leng was still pretty dazed and disoriented himself, in all honesty - though his augmentations had already recovered from the point-blank blast of the flashbang, the brain was as always frustratingly slow to catch up, leaving him wracked with phantom pain. But he was used to that.
He sprung up to his feet, drawing his sword with his left hand and raising his right, pointing him palm directly at the seeming leader of the squad.
The kinetic blaster fired again, slamming the officer's head into the wall with a delightfully meaty crunch, as his sword flashed, relieving the turian closest to him of his weapon - and his right hand.
And then Kai Leng took off, shoving his blade into the stomach of the salarian by the door as he ran past. There were more C-Sec officers in the hallway, who seemed surprised by his sudden emergence. That surprise was the last thing they ever felt, as a wide sweeping slash slit the throat of the human and carried the blade deep into the side of the turian's plated skull.
Tearing the blade free in a shower of blood and gore, Kai Leng turned to find his target and found himself facing down seven more C-Sec troopers, rifles raised and too far away to easily disrupt with his augmentations.
How the hell had those idiots in the Phantom Cell slipped up so badly? The Executor shouldn't have known he was coming at all, let alone with enough advanced warning to arrange for him to be ambushed on arrival.
Leng wasn't a fan of abandoning missions, but he wasn't so proud or so stubborn as to refuse to admit when a situation had gone beyond salvaging. In a fraction of a second he ran through his listed escape routes, determined which one was least likely to get him shot, and made his decision.
Torad Kash winced as he watched Kai Leng cut down two more C-Sec officers.
He had warned the Executor not to underestimate Leng. Apparently that warning had gone unheeded, or more likely, some hotshot C-Sec agent trying to follow in Vakarian's footsteps had gotten overconfident about his own skills.
In their defence, though, it seemed he had underestimated Leng himself - though he hardly moved with the grace expected of an elite assassin, he was still up and moving, despite his recent proximity to a flashbang grenade designed to hinder krogan.
Torad regretted not insisting an EMP mine be planted as well, the damage it would have done to the Executor's utilities be damned. Clearly, Leng's cybernetics were more advanced than Torad had anticipated, but few portable electronics could resist an Abec Munitions Type-21 Directional EMP Charge at close range.
Despite his surprising abilities, it was clear Leng wasn't entirely up to fighting his way out. Several pings flashed across Torad's HUD, listing the various contingency codes and emergency measures Leng was authorising even as he blaster a hole through one of Executor Pallin's windows.
Normally, a seven-story drop would be something to hesitate about, but Leng took the leap without a hint of fear, shields flaring in some way as he dove through the window - not from gunfire, though.
An integrated soft-fall device, drawn off the eezo core powering his kinetic shield? The salarians had meddled with that, Alit Ves were always meddling with things like that, but last Torad had heard they'd been far from successful. The kind of control needed to safely cushion one's own fall was generally limited to the most skilled and powerful of asari biotics, and replicating the effect with technology had never ended well for the user.
It implied interesting things about Cerberus engineering prowess, if nothing else.
Torad spent another moment tracking the assassin's fall and landing, waiting to see which way he turned to run, before setting off himself.
The combination of newly enhanced Icarus augmentations and the surprisingly soft foliage below made for what Kai Leng would have considered one of his most pleasant unplanned landings - the fact he was even beginning to compile a list was a disappointment he choked down bitterly.
His HUD flashed, several potential escape routes highlighted for him as he looked around.
Getting back up to the ventilation shaft on the higher levels would be difficult, if not impossible. No doubt the grounds would be swarming with C-Sec any minute, and they would have shuttles keeping an eye out for any rooftop parkour. He'd be shot to pieces if he attempted to climb back up there.
Spinward towards the business district was a poor option as well. It was the most direct route to the safehouse, but it had also been plotted as the primary escape route under the assumption that he'd be able to kill Pallin quietly - if there was even one set of eyes on him now, he'd be leading C-Sec right to the Phantom Cell, and that wouldn't be productive. Though it would have been sweet revenge for them getting him into this mess in the first place.
That only left the alternate backstage route, through the Keeper Tunnels that ran underneath the station's lowest accessible layers.
Most people considered the Keeper Tunnels too dangerous to explore - it was illegal according to C-Sec, and urban explorers shared horror stories about shifting walls, atmospheric venting, unmarked thermal vents, and all manner of other unpredictable deathtraps. But Cerberus weren't so cowardly - one of The Illusive Man's other cells had found navigational records that charted safe routes through the tunnels, areas where dangers were predictable or nonexistent, and those routes had quickly become Cerberus' gateway to every part of the station.
Even ignoring the environmental dangers, there was some slight risk he'd run into some duct rats or random Keepers, certainly, but neither would stop to put up a fight and neither would speak to C-Sec, so if he could make it down there, he'd be essentially home free. No one at C-Sec would dare follow him below.
Mind made up, he tagged the tunnel access hatch as his next waypoint and set off through the gardens. It wasn't a long trek, in straight line distance, but the density of the trees made it difficult to navigate through at speed. Leng took advantage of the obstruction, though, ducking and weaving through the foliage and flickering his tactical cloak on and off, to throw off anyone tracking him.
As he shoved through the bushes he was surprised to see a figure standing at the riverbank, a volus in a silver pressure suit leaning against the railing right on top of the access hatch that led to Leng's escape route.
No matter. Volus weren't exactly hard targets.
Contrary to popular extranet memes, volus didn't pop if you punctured their suit - it was, in fact, quite a difficult task, as even civilian suits had to be heavily reinforced to both contain the pressure within and prevent ruptures from everyday accidents, and even if you managed it, emergency seals within the suit would kick in, preventing the whole thing from depressurizing all at once.
Leng understood it was often painful for the volus in question, though, more than sufficient to immobilise them - and his blade was more than sharp enough to cut through. With a grunt of effort, he threw himself at the volus, blade drawn.
Kai Leng's arrival was not as stealthy as Torad Kash expected from Cerberus' master assassin. Although Torad had to admit, he wasn't sure he'd be of particularly sound mind two minutes after taking a flashbang grenade to the face unprotected, so it was really more impressive the assassin had made it this far at all.
The leaping attack was a staple of the turian Havoc Trooper's close-combat routine, and Kai Leng's wasn't all that different, once considerations were made for the differences between Leng's sword and the Havoc's omniblades. It had many advantages - the Havoc's jet boosters, like Leng's cybernetic legs, allowed extremely fast traversal of short distances, and few in the modern era anticipated non-krogan trying something as daring as a close-range charge against a target with a gun.
Unfortunately, it also had one crippling disadvantage, in that it made for some very predictable trajectories.
Torad sprung to the side, rolling, drawing his pistol, and snapping it up in Leng's direction all in one smooth motion. The first two shots were, unsurprisingly, deflected by the assassin's barrier, and that was all he had time for before Leng landed, twisted, and launched a second attack, a flurry of slashes.
A more graceful warrior would have ducked and weaved, dodging or deflecting each blow as it came in a stunning display of speed, elegance, and expertise, retaliating with carefully timed martial art strikes, or pistol shots, or with bladework of their own.
Torad Kash was not a graceful warrior. Across his left wrist, a series of interlocked energy projectors engaged, clicking and whirring, and a projected shield bloomed from his wrist, a large hexagonal barrier almost as large as he was. The designers marketed it as the omni-shield, based on the similarity of its display to things like omni-blades, but in truth, the geth-derived technology was based on entirely different principles. Not that that made it any less effective.
Simultaneously, the omnitool on his right wrist engaged a little used protocol to synchronise with his kinetic barriers, re-tuning them into a potent bludgeon around his fist, and the device he clutched tightly within it.
Thus prepared, he widened his stance, and braced himself.
The energy shield hissed and howled as Leng's blade dug into it again and again, but it did not give. Leng tried to leap over Torad's head, to strike from above or behind, but Torad ducked low and spun on his heels, fist swinging to catch Leng as he landed.
The assassin grunted and staggered back as the eezo-boosted punch slammed into his guts, then snarled as his quick retaliatory strike was deflected by Torad's shield.
"Who the hell are you?" Leng growled, taking a step back, blade raised.
An indicator flashed on Torad's HUD. He skimmed and dismissed the message, keeping his focus on Leng.
"If you don't already know, you're-" gshk "-not worth telling, Kai Leng."
Behind his visor, Leng frowned, just for a moment. "No matter," he spat. "You'll be dead in a minute."
Leng's other hand snapped up, light blooming from the kinetic blaster in his palm.
Torad raised a hand of his own, initiating an Overload protocol. A smattering of low-energy laser beams painted Kai Leng's form, creating a path of minimum resistance for the significantly higher-energy blast of electricity that followed.
Of course, most of Kai Leng's augmentations would be hardened - omnitool-based EMPs were simply too prevalent a threat for any high-end combat equipment engineers to ignore. But Leng's kinetic blaster, a lightweight model that traded a lot of reliability to achieve its small form factor, and which was already channelling power at close to unsafe levels, lacked sufficient hardening to contend with its own power draw and an EMP effect.
The gravitic warp that had been building explosively dispersed, throwing Leng's hand back. Snarling again, the Cerberus assassin raised his sword once more. "You're smarter than you look. We'll see how smart you look without your head!"
Torad didn't fight a lot, and he certainly hadn't fought many humans, but he couldn't recall any who'd tried to use terrible banter as a weapon before. At least, he assumed that's what the assassin was doing. He couldn't think of any other reasons for him to say something so staggeringly immature.
The assassin pressed the attack, combining slashes of the blade with punches and kicks and a lot of unnecessary backflipping. Torad made a few return strikes of his own, but simple physics was against him in this - he was shorter, and had much stubbier arms, which made it easy for the more manoeuvrable human to keep out of his reach.
Torad grunted and drew his pistol, taking a few quick potshots to just as little effect as his punches had had. Another notification popped up in the corner of Torad's HUD, kindly informing him that C-Sec had been alerted to a public disturbance in his area and were advising residents to stay indoors.
A few seconds later, that message was made redundant by the roaring of engines, as four C-Sec shuttles emerged from behind buildings, doors open and armed officers lining up their shots.
Leng spared a moment of his focus to glance around, taking in the shuttles, their contents, and his rapidly deteriorating tactical situation, before returning his attention to Torad.
"I'll find out who you are, volus," Leng proclaimed. "And then we'll meet again. And that meeting will end... with your death."
Leng's body blurred and faded away as his tactical cloak clicked in. Torad heard the thud of something heavy dropping a short distance into the Keeper Tunnels, and then the echoing of sprinting footsteps that quickly faded to nothing.
One of the C-Sec shuttles dropped low, an asari officer stepping down to join him on the riverside walkway. "Spectre Kash."
"Commander Tie'el."
"Can't help but notice the assassin got away." She noted, gesturing to the still-open access hatch.
Torad dismissed his energy shield, reopening his omni-tool's holographic display. "I'm not as much a fighter as my esteemed colleagues, Commander." gshk "I was doing my best to merely stay alive."
The asari looked down at him with one eyebrow raised, but said nothing.
"Not to worry," Torad added after a moment, finishing his reading and closing his omnitool. "He'll be departing the Citadel soon." gshk "There's no need to pursue."
"Pursue? Through the Keeper Tunnels? We've already lost five men today, Spectre. Even if you ordered us, we wouldn't go down into that death maze."
"How fortunate, then," gshk "that that won't be necessary."
Between the residual damage from the flashbang and a point blank shot from a high-spec Overload module, Leng would inevitably require at the very least a thorough diagnostic checkup, and likely several part replacements to reduce the risk of residual damage. It would be incredibly risky for him to get into any other fights without ensuring his cybernetics were fully functional.
And that wasn't the kind of thing that could be done just anywhere. That would require the dedicated expertise of Cerberus bio-technicians and the equipment of a fully functional medical centre. Admittedly, Cerberus likely possessed several, but the ones Torad Kash knew of were abandoned, like those on Binthu, or destroyed, like the one on Pragia.
Which meant that wherever Kai Leng fled to, he would be taking with him one of the galaxy's most sophisticated cyberwarfare packages, and delivering to the Spectres valuable new intelligence about Cerberus' operations.
Torad looked up at Commander Tie'el. "Though it was unfortunate that C-Sec-" gshk "-suffered lossed, this was still a victory." gshk "The assassin runs, but he cannot hide. And his target still lives-" gshk "-so his mission failed. Now, if you'll excuse me," gshk "I have other Spectre business to attend to. I trust you can-" gshk "-clean things up here."
Tie'el shook her head gently. "Yeah, yeah. Hey, it's just our guys who died, right? You didn't leave any extra corpses lying around for us?"
"Not today, Commander," Torad confirmed. "But ask me again tomorrow."
