Well defended servers drained of life

"So what do we do with all this?" I say jerking my chin at all the bodies on the floor. I mean there are some of them that aren't corpses yet do we just leave them here? Do we kill them so that our presence here doesn't get out?

"Take a few then continue" Replies Marianne while picking up one of the unconscious ones from the floor and carrying them over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Seeing her answer I attempt to bend down and do the same but a sharp pain radiates from the side of my abdomen where the man had been striking me with his elbow.

"Etchsss" I groan out something between a grunt and the hissing sound of a snake as I feel the pain coming from my side.

"Yeah… Not so sure I could carry someone with the state I'm in right now." I mutter utterly defeated by bodily limitations. I may not have been brought on for my talents in combat but the fact that I'm incapable of performing simple combat tasks without getting myself injured seriously bugs me. I've been a merc since I could work and I've been training for even longer yet…

Seeing my state Marianne just shakes her head at me with that motherly smile again. "I'll do it." She says in her usual baritone before picking up another unconscious man but this time she put him on the other shoulder. Then she continued to pick up another two men piling them on top of the others in a position similar to a fireman's carry.

It looked extremely hard to balance them on her shoulders and would be even heavier to lift. Yet Marianne was doing so. There was certainly strain on her face but she was managing it and she wasn't heaving which was a feat in and of itself. Even as a bear beast-kin they're not superhuman they still have their strength limits and I'm fairly sure Marianne is seriously pushing those boundaries.

"Wheew" I whistle at the show of strength in front of me. The woman was carrying four grown men at once. Their physiques were designed to be light and efficient but they were still fully grown adults trained in combat and full of muscles. Yet she was lifting four of them with only a slight strain.

"Come then" she said as she started walking towards the door that the guards were standing in front of and I follow behind. Surprisingly her voice didn't have any strain in it despite the note in her expression.

"First though." I said and turned back behind us before calling out quietly.

"Tommy you can show yourself." The moment these words resounded through the room a black mass with a distorted face appeared out of seemingly thin air. Then the black mass started to wriggle and condense itself until Tommy's face was revealed from behind the stealth suit.

"Hurry up and open the door for us would you?" I ask him now that he'd finally showed up after the fighting was already finished. Don't get me wrong I'm glad he wasn't around when the fighting started. If I couldn't make it out unscathed there's no way Tommy would but it's still annoying to see him perfectly fine when I had to go through all this effort.

"Sure." He replied with a smile no hint of irritation at how I was treating him despite only doing his job. He knows me well enough to realize I'm only a little miffed and taking it out on him and he's probably happy enough to be the butt of the jokes anyway if it means everyone's mentally stable.

Walking up to the panel next to the door he places the USB into the panel and after a few seconds of seemingly contemplation but realistically was a bunch of hacking mumbo jumbo I don't understand the panel turned green and the door in front of us make a light clicking noise.

Tommy stepped up to the door and opened it up revealing the room inside. The place was filled to the brim with black boxes and was lit up like a Christmas tree. Several rows I can't be bothered to count of servers lined the room from approximately a few yards in front of us to the back of the seemingly 50m or so room.

The room's lighting was dim and the moment we stepped in we felt the cold air against our skin. Tommy started rubbing his shoulders in an attempt to warm himself up. Looking up to where the cold air was coming from I spotted a number of pipes lining the ceiling seemingly random but also organised patterns.

The pipes would sometimes cross over each other or line up underneath one another like they were just piled under each other from the ceiling downwards but looking back at the servers you could tell the pipes were more concentrated on the areas the servers were lined up.

Looking through the convoluted mess of pipes allowed me to spy what I believe to be the edges of a fan spinning at high speed. The fan would blow air downwards that was presumably warm and then it would touch the pipes which likely have some kind of coolant and that would blow the cold air towards the servers and stop them from overheating.

Looking around the room the walls didn't have so many pipes on them but they were certainly covered in fans. They had metal grates in front of the fans rather than the pipes on the ceiling and those metal grates appeared to be covered in some sort of gelatinous substance. Likely another coolant.

Because of all the cooling the servers needed however we were now forced to endure this freezing cold air and I shivered slightly "Couldn't they make it a little cooler in here." I mumbled annoyed by the temperature around us.

"Of course not. These are servers you know? You could cook an egg on these things without the intervention of a coolant system. Then you and the egg would likely explode alongside the servers for good measure." Explained Tommy seeming exasperated.

"I know. I was just complaining." I mumbled before turning my eyes to the rest of the room looking for our target. While the servers were lined up line supermarket shelves and fans were placed around the walls at roughly waist height and head height every few yards the rest of the room was somewhat barren. The floor was black with a number of lines running throughout it in a manner similar to veins shining an iridescent bright blue. The walls didn't have any of these veins however and were just a pure black colour.

It actually looked like the material that the whole building appeared to be made out of with the exception of a few rooms we'd been to. "Do you think they use this material for the building just so it can cool the servers better?" I asked curious as I looked at the black stone-like material a little closer.

"I don't actually know what that material is so I guess that's possible. Though if that was all it was for I think it would've been far easier to attack the servers." Replied Tommy with a shake of the head.

I had to agree but I had just finished scanning the room and found my target so I stopped myself short of saying so. The thing I was looking for was a small ordinary white desk. Underneath the desk was what I was looking for. Another server but this one appeared to be the home server and one that they all had to run through so it would be easier to get the files from here.

"Found it." I exclaimed pointing to the server and walking over towards it. Marianne and Tommy following behind me and examining the server in turn. It was a small black box no taller than the height of my knees and no wider than the length of one of my arms. In fact it might've been a little shorter than that.

Yet this was the most powerful server of the bunch. The box was separated into something akin to floors similar to a beehive. Each 'floor' had a number of ports, drive slots and lights along it's length. The lights along the server would occasionally flash various different colours. From a deep red to a bright blue and even white.

Some of the lights were on constantly while others would flash on for a few seconds before flash off. Others still would simply flash in seemingly random patterns before turning off and appearing again in another seemingly random pattern.

I didn't have the technical knowledge to understand what was going on under the hood but to me it felt almost like each of those lights was a fairy from legends. Busily moving around their server hive and collecting data to put in another spot. Each flashing light would be a fairy quickly moving the data around and busily doing it's job.

Thinking about it from that perspective made this machine seem amazing even though my somewhat meagre knowledge didn't help me understand how it worked at all. I also noticed a button on the top of the server that seemed to indicate a hologram.

The symbol was a round circle with an isosceles triangle projecting out from it's centre. It was all 2d of course but it seemed as though the triangle was fanning out from the centre of the circle. This was the universal symbol for hologram and a way for us to see the servers inner workings.

"I'll let you do the honours I guess." I said turning towards Tommy who already had a different USB out of his pocket. This one had a design similar to the floor underneath us just without the bright colours. The USB itself was black and there were a number of grey veins running across it's length occasionally crossing each other and making a strange pattern across the USB.

This was the one we were given by Emily or supposedly Emily was given this by Mainframe. Tommy walked up to the server and pressed the hologram button I mentioned on the top of it's case. Immediately there was a display with a number of technical stuff on the table that I didn't understand.

It looked somewhat similar to a computer BIOS in that it was separated into sections that all had readouts such as RAM, CPU speed or GPU speed. Except this was even more detailed than any computer BIOS I'd ever seen. Admittedly I wasn't very good with computers and only saw the BIOS once on startup when Sophie was doing my PC but this was still even more advanced than the one I saw before.

Sophie taught me about terms like clock speed, number of cores etc… They were on this display as well and that much I could understand. The problem was the rest of it. There were a number of displayed names that I thought was written in a foreign language on first glance.

D1zA4T0-server-1007 was an example of one such name. IT wasn't the only one. They were all listed across the screen with numbers next to them indicating something. I recognized number of packets as something to do with the internet and it was clearly moving at a blistering pace but other than that this whole screen was gibberish to me.

Even worse the readings for CPU and whatnot were tiny and in the corner and there was a bunch of other readings I couldn't decipher taking up the majority of the screen. I couldn't understand a word of it and I looked to Tommy for help.

He however just ignored me and placed the USB Mainframe gave us into one of the server ports that had the weird family tree looking sign that meant USB. Pouting a little at him ignoring me in favour of this USB I watched as it seemingly came to life.

The moment it was inserted into the server it almost appeared to start beating like a heart. The veins that were once grey turned a bright blue and it looked awfully similar to the floor we were standing on. The difference being that the floor was a static light while this…

The USB's 'veins' would pulsate in a rhythm similar to that of a real heart. Some parts would light up more than others and it honestly looked like it was a leech draining the server of it's life. The server itself appeared to agree as all the lights on the server started to panic and flash like a warning sign or like someone fighting to survive.

It's resistance however was pitifully futile as the USB continued to drain the server of something and server would only flash helplessly at us as though begging us for aid. Looking away from the server I turned to Tommy and asked "Do you think we could get comms with Mainframe up and running now?"

He looked surprised for a moment then thought on it before replying. "Yeah sure I'll give it a try. One moment." Then he started fiddling around with the display on the server and he would click on some of the gibberish names before granting them access to something and poking around with the other gibberish names.

While Tommy was restoring communications I turned to Marianne and asked "So aren't we supposed to be defending this location from a bunch of security soon or something?" to which Marianne only smiled and started to walk towards the door clearly indicating for me to follow her.

I turned over my shoulder and shouted to Tommy "I'll get ready to welcome our guests so let me know through comms once you're done!" then I followed Marianne out of the server room. We came back out to the area we took on the guards and found the place empty.

I was a little confused why we bothered to come out here but Marianne went over to the reception boxes the peacock and slovenly guy were working at. Once she got there she took out her laser for the first time since she entered the Flux branch and fired it at the bottom of the reception counter.

"That will do." She said shortly before moving on and shooting the other one. When I looked at the area she shot however I saw that nothing had changed in that area. I was confused a little by the sturdiness of the reception but chocked it up and asked.

"What exactly are you trying to do?" Making sure to keep the confusion in my voice minimal. Marianne looked over at me and pointed behind the counter. Realizing she wanted me to move behind the counter I did so and I'm fairly certain I saw her doing the same on the other side before I hopped over the counter.

Then I heard Marianne's voice even from all the way across the room. "Put your personal shield over the reception window instead of over yourself." Starting to understand what she was getting at I followed the instruction and saw a number of translucent blue hexagons appear across the window.

"Now it's just an FPS I believe you call it. You've been hunting before right?" She asks with an excited tone to her voice and I finally understand what she meant. We're going to be holding the reception area as a sort of choke point and using our personal shields as barriers. Since we can shoot through them but they can't shoot at us we have an overwhelming advantage.

Especially since the shield is in a condensed space meaning it has to spend less energy on defending and is stronger for it. Not only will the battery be drained slower but we'll also be able to take more damage at once before it cracks.

"Oooh this is going to be fun." I say with a grin already experiencing the euphoria of being part of a live shoot 'em up. Just as we'd readied ourselves we heard some sort of crackling noise coming from our comms. Assuming that meant Tommy had succeeded in getting the comms back online I was impressed for a moment before I heard what was said over the line.

"Someone important has arrived at the branch. Likely Penelope 'Viper' Flux. Be prepared for a more difficult job" Came Mainframe's robotic warning. Oh how absolutely wonderful. Things can never be this easy huh?