Snippet #2761261

"Oi, oi, oi"

Dolce sweatdropped while looking at the battlefield from her location above. The AI didn't seem to have detected her again, as she had still been setting up her rifle, after releasing her intangibility. Ghost.exe was still running though, which made it harder to find her either way.

Back to the matter at hand though. She was about to give up on her sniper rifle, deciding to use barrier.exe to lessen the damage the armoured Datadiver was doing---

(She remembered reading about him once in the Organization's Files, but couldn't remember his name for the life of her)

---When Miss Rhorer decided to switch programs.

Dolce found it an ill thought out move of her. Especially since she was only taking out flight control, leaving the bulk of the programming intact. She wasn't even running software to interrupt the enemy programs on her attacks.

The result was a large number of ships about to crash into the serverscape. Likely to do a lot of damage.

Dolce had only been notified of this happening by the first one crashing into the floor, and was too late to stop the second one's descent. Starting from the third one though, she enveloped using Barrier.exe, and crushed it with no time to waste.

Still, she almost didn't catch the fourth ship due to rate Rhorer was going through them. She pinged Iris, and told the AI to ready the connection to her personal AB server.

10 seconds later the connection went through, which was just in time too, for it allowed her to use AbsoluteBarrier.exe to catch the next ships simultaneously. She left the last ship attacked to Rhorer, who seemed to be coming out of her program-induced battle high at this point, a minute having passed.

This decision was further cemented by the fact that her actions had drawn the attention of the AI in charge of the army, several dozens of missiles coming her way. Luckily, she still had AbsoluteBarrier.exe running. There's no evading an attack at the speed the barrier was enveloping them completely after all, which was significantly faster than the normal Barrier.exe.

Then came the seeming next stage of the virus' attack. Several humongous data chains burst out from the ground, where some of the shots of the tanks had landed, and started attacking the buildings.

Dolce just stared for a short moment.

"Oh, HELL NO", escaped her mouth. She had enough presence of mind not to vocalize the string of curses going through her mind while Yuyan was within hearing range. Advanced though the boy might be, he was still an eleven year old. She was aware age was just a number in some cases, Yuyan's probably included, but Dolce's aunt, may her soul burn in hell forever, had hammered manners around kids into her thick skull, and it was one of the few things Dolce could agree with her with.

But still...

Why did it have to be tentacles?

Well, she had been about to teasingly call Yuyan a Scaredy Cat, and was planning to ask if he minded playing messenger to Rhorer for a bit, to ask if a Deep Dive would be possible...

Yeah...

Seemingly...

This was karma wasn't it?

Either way, aside from her freezing up at a second at the sight of the tentacles, she didn't allow it to stop her for long. She was still Quality after all. Besides she'd been through worse. Far worse.

That was what she was trying to convince herself of at least. It was true she didn't completely freeze up, but her attacks had clearly dulled since the tentacles appeared.