(LIMITLESS) CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: THE CALM…

The city was quieter tonight, or maybe Taylor was just too angry to hear the usual chaos. Or maybe—more likely, it only seemed quiet because most people were too afraid to leave their homes.

Bakuda had seen to that.

In the last seventy-two hours alone, she’d bombed a courthouse, a city bus terminal, and a PRT-sponsored community outreach center. The death toll was still in the low tens, for now, but the message was deafening: nowhere was safe, not anymore. The ABB had declared war not just on rival gangs or Protectorate capes, but on the very idea of public safety. They had only been targeting places people went to feel safe, places people needed to believe were safe.

So now, the streets of Brockton Bay were empty. Shops closed early, transit routes rerouted, people cancelled their plans, and even the gangs had pulled back, giving Bakuda space, either out of fear or respect or both.

Taylor stood alone on a rooftop, high above a shuttered strip mall, the wind tugging at the hem of her hoodie. She looked out over the city she was supposed to protect and found no comfort in the silence, only the slow, cold burn of intent settling behind her eyes.

From the intel the PRT gathered—chatter from frightened ABB members, files decrypted by both Armsmaster and Dragon, and murmurs pulled from the corners of the internet by analysts—she was beginning to form a picture of the type of person Bakuda was:

An egomaniac, self-proclaimed artist, and now, a terrorist with a grad-level physics brain and the morals of a damp rag soaked in kerosene. Her bombs weren’t just weapons, but statements. And lately, that statement had been Taylor’s name written in blood and fire.

Taylor didn’t mind being targeted. She minded the casualties.

She exhaled slowly. The cold air bit at her cheeks, but it didn’t help her anger.

Bakuda was admittedly clever, even brilliant. The bomb she’d designed, the one that killed Taylor’s dad and the civilians in Fugly Bob’s, had bypassed her forcefield while it was fully active and she wasn't disoriented. No one had done that before. 

But for all her brilliance, for all the fear she inspired, Bakuda was still human.

She didn’t have Brute ratings. Her reaction speed, her stamina, her ability to recover, and to move fast enough to matter were baseline human. If you could get past her toys, she was nothing. Taylor had beaten Brutes, Changers, and Breakers, and she knew the limits of flesh and blood. But Bakuda? 

Bakuda’s real power was distance and spectacle. Which meant the moment she lost her distance, she was vulnerable. Any armour she wore might as well be paper. 

Could she trigger her bombs remotely? Maybe. Tinkers always had some trick up their sleeves, so a neural interface wasn’t out of the question. But Taylor doubted it was full-on thought-to-detonation, and even Armsmaster and Dragon thought Bakuda still needed some level of physical input or line-of-sight for targeting. Which meant: delay.

There would be a lag in Bakuda’s response patterns, a slight delay in activation and the time it took for explosions to sync, that anyone fast enough could take advantage of. 

Taylor could work with that. After all, she wasn’t a baseline human anymore.

She could still see even with her eyes closed, her thoughts moved faster than they used to, and most importantly, her instincts were honed in ways no baseline person could match. And Blue, when she used it, made her even faster.

Because speed was the key.

But it was risky. 

Accelerating her movement even a fraction past her normal maximum would make her possibly outrun an explosion, if she saw it coming, but it wasn't without cost. At such high speeds, even with her faster thoughts, every twitch of a finger or shift in her center of gravity risked overcorrection, and her recovery time between bursts stretched by fractions of a second that mattered.

She couldn’t do it for long—at least, not without more training—and worse, there was no way to know if she would still be fast enough to dodge everything thrown her way. Or what she was dodging in the first place.

Bakuda’s bombs weren’t just concussive or incendiary; they were also unpredictable monstrosities that didn’t follow the normal rules of physics. Some had delayed exotic effects, others responded only to certain stimuli, most just didn't make sense at all, and none of them came with a clearly marked yield radius.

So yeah, very risky.

But if she had to? If it meant closing the distance before Bakuda could trigger another suicide bomb?

She would take that hit, endure the pain, and trust her healing factor to fix her up. After all, according to Miss Militia, Panacea had only been called to check if Taylor had healed right. She hadn't needed to do anything.  

So as long as her brain didn’t go flying, she’d be back up eventually. She would survive. But she wasn’t sure she could survive losing anyone else.

Bakuda was out there, convinced of her own brilliance, and lording over terrified ABB soldiers who didn’t dare talk back. Which meant it was time to stop waiting.

Tonight, Taylor wasn’t going to sit back and wait for another attack. She wasn’t going to watch another building crumble or another name appear in the casualty report.

Tonight, she was going hunting.

And Bakuda was going to learn what fear really looked like.