“You say dataDyne had this in a panic room?” Potts said as he held a metallic, blue rifle in his hands.

It was strangely shaped – Incredibly thin, terrible to hold with a trigger group that looked as though it wasn’t designed for human hands. It was tall, with a scope that hung onto the top by a hinge. Near the front was the distinctive logo of the Carrington Institute, a CI with a diamond in the center. The room they were in had old weapons behind glass all down a corridor that wrapped around behind the re-enforced range. The firing range itself had bulletproof glass windows for observation off to the left.

Foster, Potts’s assistant, stood behind him with his arms crossed and a worried expression on his face. As the head armorer gave him a nod, Foster walked with purpose around the corner and out of view – towards the armory’s weapon storage area.

“Our records haven’t flagged any inconsistencies, but you know how tech can be,” Potts said with a smirk, handing the rifle back to Joanna who took it back in hand.

“Uncomfortable,” Joanna jested as she stepped through the sliding glass door and into the firing range proper, “However, what it lacks in creature comforts – it makes up for in efficiency and reliability.”

Jo stepped up to a stomach-height barricade between her and the range’s targets and looked to the computer in the center. They didn’t have many actual agents that needed to train, so the entire range was designed for individuals to come and perfect their use of firearms. She brought the weapon up, pushing the thin metal into her shoulder as she held it tight.

“Nine-millimeter parabellum, 1000 rounds per minute, state of the art friend or foe tracking. Shares a magazine with dataDyne’s CMP-150 loaded from the underside, but its electronics are far superior. Smarter than that machine you recovered in some ways.”

“Carrington Institute’s finest I suppose. Speaking of ‘that machine’, we get any good intel from it?”

“You’re asking me? Grimshaw hasn’t stopped talking about Caroll or whatever the AI goes by since you retrieved it. Daniel’s got it at the villa though so we’ll get something soon, I hope. Either way, not my area of expertise… This, however, is – I’d like you to test the weapon. Would hate to see dataDyne toying with our tech too much.”

“One was missing,” Foster said as he returned from around the corner of the room, "We take their equipment, not the other way around. Thanks for bringing us the K7 Avenger, by the way... I've been reverse engineering it for part of my own project!"

Potts shook his head, stepping out of the live fire area and back over to Foster’s computer safe behind the bulletproof glass. Joanna watched as the door slid shit with a hiss. The two armorers spoke for a moment, out of earshot as Joanna peered down the angled scope to the back of the range. After a moment, Potts stepped back up to the window and Foster had a seat back at his computer desk.

“Alright, Jo. First, I’m going to drop some targets at various ranges. We’ll blow through a few magazines… Just a quick test of the targeting systems and accuracy. Then, we’ll test its deployed status and tracking to see if it properly fires at targets with opposing signatures to its operator. Besides, what better way to start the day than range time?”

The lights went down, and the session at the range began…

Meanwhile

The smell of gunpowder was fresh in the air as Mathew looked around, walking slowly through a field of spent lead and floors scuffed by ricochets. The walls had bullet holes, there were burnt areas off in the distance where explosives had been used, along with broken pieces of targets scattered throughout…

Then, a fresh target fell from above. It clicked down into place, followed by another. Gunfire echoed overhead as nine-millimeter chunks of lead thumped into the dead center one after another. A few bounced down to the floor near him like meteors, the impacts so close his hair fluttered as he started to run forward for cover with his hands over his ears. The shots sounded strange, almost electronic in a way. The target shattered overhead and more pieces of debris rained down around him. It felt like he was dodging falling sections of a building as shards crashed near his diminutive form.

“Good,” He heard a voice say off in the distance, “Perfect marks as always, just as I’d expect from an agent with your moniker.”

“I’d have blamed the gun had I missed,” Joanna said with a chuckle, setting her spent magazine on the barrier in front of her before grabbing another and sliding it into the strange firearm’s underside, “Deployed mode next?”

“You got it. We’ll keep the targets close for this one, it’s not an accuracy test after all. Ready?”

“Ready…”

Mathew’s heart pounded as he looked around for cover. The walls to the side were black, likely to hide bullet holes. However, at his size, there was almost nothing he could do for a place to really find true cover. The lights went dim again. He could see Joanna holding the rifle at ease just a moment before the area was flooded with light once more. Targets fell, and with a single button and a toss, the rifle started to transform mid-air. A multi-barreled, rotary turret with a weighted base. Almost as though it sensed the surface, Mat saw it fall properly into place and stick tight to the floor. Joanna dropped below the barrier for protection as the barrels began to spin.

And track directly towards Mathew.

“You’ve GOT to be kidding m-”

Bullets started to fly as Mat ran towards the nearest piece of cover. He could hear ricochet, whizzing like artillery fired from a machine gun as it tracked his every movement. The machine was designed to hit human-sized targets and take out groups, not track smaller creatures like him. A round landed right in his path, knocking him back as the parabellum rounds stopped firing.

“Amazing,” Foster said from his computer. Joanna peeked over the secure barrier while Potts shook his head, “Not a single bullet hit the targets.”

“Right… Jo, go retrieve the firearm if you would,” Potts replied with a sigh. He turned his back to Jo and the range, “Foster. Can you connect to the Laptop Gun’s programming and see what’s changed?”

“I already did before the test,” Foster replied, “It all seemed fine.”

Heart racing, Mathew pushed himself up from the floor amid a series of bullet craters and scars. The multiple barrels were still spinning; they had finally locked onto him directly and were moving with his every movement. Nervous, Mat walked towards the safety of the barrier, and the barrels followed. Surely at a range the safest place would be near the firearm operators. He turned to look back to Joanna, who was walking a wide path around it to keep from being targeted directly. Mat watched her footsteps, the spent rounds disappearing beneath each, a chunk of lead that got stuck in the tread.

“Strange…” Jo said as she crouched next to the machine.

The barrels were pointed directly towards the line, still spinning. Joanna pressed a button on the side of the emplaced gun and it transformed back into a rifle, laying on the floor as though nothing had happened. As she picked it up, she took a few cautious steps towards where it was aimed… Her eyes locked onto Mathew’s bright blue hair.

Joanna’s shadow engulfed Mathew as she crouched over him. Bare skin from her left hand’s fingers pressed onto his chest and back, carefully pinching him up from the floor. He gasped and squirmed, pushing against her grip as she stood up and let him slide into her palm. With a brow raised, Jo stood back to her full height. Without saying another word, she started to roll him in her hand. The smell of gunpowder was intense to the little one. He was aroused, trembling, and breathing heavily. Joanna started walking towards the safe area of the firing range and hopped the barrier, setting the rifle down near the computer. She pressed a button on its surface and it transformed once more, into an average laptop.

“Alright Jo,” Potts said as he stepped back to the window, “Ready for another test? It looks like the gun’s programming was altered a little, but I still don’t know how that effected its accuracy so much… They just disabled its civilian targeting safety protocols.”

Joanna’s fingers wrapped around Mathew’s body, concealing him as she stepped through the glass door and out into the armory’s main office area. Joanna shrugged, flippantly waving her right hand in his direction.

“I think I found the bug in its programming…” Joanna said as she walked around the corner towards the exit, “You two have fun.”

Foster looked to Potts, who just tilted his head and shrugged his shoulders. He walked into the main firing range himself to retrieve the firearm and start cleaning the range of spent ammunition cases and bullet fragments…

Later, in Joanna’s office.

“I’ve heard of genetic cloning before,” Joanna said with her arms folded as she sat in front of the computer at her desk, “But this? A miniaturized human? Did someone design you to be so indecent, or is this purely of your own making?”

Joanna’s office was incredibly minimalistic. A single glass table with a computer, a couch off to the side. It was open, without even a chair for her to sit in – She didn’t really need one for her line of work, most of her time was spent preparing and training. The sun had just come up, peering through the glass overhead. Joanna hadn’t been at the office for very long before hitting the range and getting ready.

“I’m sorry,” Mathew replied, trying to cover the erection between his legs, “I don’t mean to be offensive.”

“Well, I’m not offended. Quite frankly I’m surprised you can speak, at your size I’d imagine a human brain to be less… Capable.”

“To answer your question though, I don’t know? Not really. I just know I come back to life after I’m killed, and-”

“And you’ve no shame of telling strangers your desires?”

“I like to put them to use, to help people. Not myself… Relax, or to be a good luck charm, or to let me be used to enhance your focus.”

“You’re talking about what you produce, correct? The glowing blue liquid.”

“Something like that…”

“I’m not going to report you to Dr. Cordell, or anyone else at the institute. If what you’ve told me is the truth it sounds like you aren’t long for this world.”

“So, you’ll keep me?”

“Honestly? I’ve no reason to think you aren’t some sort of dataDyne trick or spy, so letting you simply leave isn’t exactly an option either.”

“Then use me… I can be helpful.”

“You mentioned being worn inside of footwear. Is that what you’re asking?”

“If that’s alright?”

“That’s one way to figure out if you’re being truthful, I suppose… It’s about time I absconded to the combat simulator and brushed up on some tactics. If you come along, I doubt you’ll survive.”

“Alright,” Mat said with a smile, “I’ll try to feel as good as I can for-”

Knocking echoed through the room from the door to Joanna’s office. She moved her laptop to obscure Mathew’s line of sight. The door slid open. Mat peeked around the corner as the agent opened the door to see a woman standing with a folded red shirt in her arms held tight.

“Emily?” Joanna said, leaning against the door frame, “What going on? You look-”

“They have Carrington,” Emily said quickly, “They took Daniel, Jo. They-”

“Breathe,” Joanna said, pushing herself from the frame to a firm standing posture, “What happened?”

“Last night we got a call from Cassandra… Around midnight, I’ve been in and out of situation rooms ever since. We lost communications with the villa. She contacted me personally with her demands.”

“Daniel was at the villa with the AI; he must have found a place to stash it otherwise they wouldn’t be bothering us about their toy…”

“Yes… She refused to negotiate remotely; we need to send someone in person.”

“I’ll go,” Joanna firmly said.

“Thought you’d volunteer… I’ve brought an outfit for you. I told Cassandra we’d be sending a negotiator. Rodgers is already prepping the jumpship, he’ll be piloting it personally. How long before you can be ready?”

“I’ll be at the motor pool in ten.”

“Right, see you then…”

Mathew watched as Joanna took the clothes and shut the door. Her demeanor had changed entirely. Not focused on Mathew at all, Joanna started to strip her clothing to prepare for the mission. He politely stood behind the computer as she did so, offering her enough privacy to get dressed. Jo moved with an almost inhuman level of speed, preparing herself as she pulled a pair of sandals from beneath the couch in her minimalist office. She walked back to the computer.

“You said you want to ride along? Now’s the time, bug,” Joanna said, setting her hand on the glass table next to Mathew. “I won’t be focused on your safety if you do come.”

Without hesitating, Mathew climbed up onto her palm. She lowered him to her sandal. There wasn’t really an intense smell to the surface, just a bit of a funk from years of use and dried sweat. Mathew crawled up underneath where the toe indents were, positioning himself so he’d be safe as he looked up to Joanna who towered over him. While she was intensely quick about everything, this was something she hesitated to do. Mathew watched as she lifted her right foot over him. The sole of her foot looked nice, soft even as she carefully set it down and lifted her toes so he would slide underneath her. Warm skin, the smell from her boots still lingered in the air as he felt her flex over him. With a gasp of pleasure his erection slipped between her toes. She didn’t notice. Instead, she started walking – with purpose, back downstairs. Mathew kept himself as still as possible, her toes didn’t lift enough from the surface for him to be sent tumbling to the floor outside. Gasping in pleasure, he did his best to focus as Joanna pushed her way back into the armory.

“Hey Jo,” Foster said as he watched her storm back in, “Have a date or something? I don’t ever see you dress up.”

“You could say that,” Joanna replied, “How’s the Laptop Gun?”

“Working flawlessly,” Potts said as he stepped out form the range, taking off his hearing protection. He still had the rifle in hand as Joanna turned to him, “What did you do to fix it? Said it had a b-”

“I’m going to need it.”

“What for?”

“I’m going on mission. No time.”

“Already checked it out for you,” Foster said.

Potts handed her the rifle. She flipped a switch inside the mechanism and the gun began to transform back into its original state. A laptop. With a nod, Joanna tucked it underneath her arm and briskly made her way back out to the main area of the institute. A large statue of the institute’s logo stood proudly in the center of an open space. She jogged past it, heading towards a ramp that led to the motor pool. Then, a bust of energy washed over her. It felt like time had slowed. Her pace was the same, and there was a slightly more intense dampness between her toes. Mathew tried his best to keep himself from climaxing, but the constant, torturous pleasure of her toes was too much. Joanna didn’t stop; she made her way to the motor pool to begin her mission…

Later…

The floor of the villa’s basement level was flooded with glass shards and spilt wine. Joanna stood with her back pressed against one of the wine rack’s edges, the last few rounds of ammunition in her laptop gun itself, and a hail of gunfire flying back in her direction. She’d cleared the entire villa up to this point. The fight was excruciatingly long, but she got constant bursts of energy throughout from her good luck charm.

Throughout the mission, the idea that Mathew was a human disappeared entirely. He was a tool, something giving her the energy she needed to fight at peak efficiency…

dataDyne hit-squad soldiers blended into the environment. Glass bottles looked like heads. Instead of picking out who was real and who was fake, she simply shot every bottle she could see – and that was tough on her ammunition supply. With a long, suffering sigh, she loaded the last magazine into the laptop gun, pressed a button on the side, and threw it down the corridor.

“What the-” She heard one dataDyne soldier say…

Then, gunfire. Even on the wine-soaked floor it managed to create enough suction to keep in place as it used every bullet in the magazine, she had given it to fire at the dataDyne grunts. Then, there was silence…

For Mathew, he’d been in a torture of his own creation. Her toes were slick and gritty from fighting through the villa floor by floor. Every bit of his body was hypersensitive; her sweat was so intense that the glowing liquid Mat produced simply disappeared within a few moments each time she brought him to climax just by moving. He could feel his erection rubbed raw between her toes, almost crushed by the idle exertion. Joanna started to cautiously creep through the last hallway, keeping close to the shelter of another wine rack devoid of wine as her shoes crunched through broken glass. The laptop gun’s deployed sentry wasn’t moving now; the barrels weren’t rotating – it didn’t sense any living things aside from its master that it could eliminate. Not that it had the ammunition to continue the fight at any rate. As she moved, her slick, gritty skin made keeping in place an almost impossible task for Mathew. He’d barely held on, and at this point he was far too gone with pleasure to put up any resistance. He felt his body slip further under her foot…

Crunch…

She didn’t register the difference between Mathew’s body flattening against her skin and the crunch of glass bottles underfoot. Luckily none of the shards seemed to get into her footwear as she moved. The sniper rifle on her back was completely dry of ammunition, she found a devastator in a crate that she used to great effect, and now the last bullet was spent of her laptop gun.

A dataDyne soldier lay slumped against the wall. Instead of taking her laptop gun back, she just picked up his CMP-150 and checked it for any unspent rounds. It only had a few shots remaining. Moving through the area, she wrapped around the last two wine racks to a pair of thugs that were laying on their backs now. One was dead, the other barely hanging on. There was only one bottle left on the rack they were behind…

“You… Bitch…” He groaned, coughing up blood that mixed with the wine he lay in.

Joanna didn’t respond. She crouched next to him as the life left his eyes, then began to pat him down until she found a security card in his pocket for the door next to her. She stood back up, then opened the door to the last room of the Carrington Villa’s basement. Before she entered though, she turned around, leveled the CMP-150 to the remaining bottle, and pulled the trigger. All her weight was on Mathew now, almost focused as she inadvertently crushed him deep into the skin of her gritty sole.

Crash…

The bottle shattered, ripped apart by a nine-millimeter projectile.

“Act your age, Joanna,” she heard as she entered…

Later…

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to drink that?” Joanna asked, leaning back in the couch that had been torn to shreds, “Glass isn’t good for your health.”

It was starting to get dark, and she needed to be on her way to Chicago shortly. In the meantime, she relaxed the best she could. The Laptop Gun rested against Carrington’s couch in his kitchen area as he stood behind her pouring wine into a glass. Carrington didn’t look up; Joanna simply rested with her feet kicked up on his table as she awaited her jumpship’s arrival. The others were transporting Carrington Institute personnel to the villa to clean, repair, and start with body disposal. Two of which were behind them, moving a knocked-out prisoner together.

“I’ll be damned if I let what you left of my wine go to waste,” Carrington said, “Did you have to break every bottle?”

“Do you think I did that on purpose?”

“I watched you execute the last one,” He said with a laugh, taking a sip from the edge of his drink as he set the bottle down on the ground, “The jumpship will be here shortly. I’ve instructed Rogers to hover near the dock.”

“He probably would have regardless,” Joanna said, bobbing her foot, “So. Why do you have a washing machine directly beneath your oven in the kitchen?”

“Never mind that,” Carrington said, gesturing to the window nearby, “We’ve more important things to deal with at the moment.”

Mathew’s body was flattened on her sole, and she hardly remembered he existed. Barely alive, twitching, he was far beyond what would have killed a normal person. There wasn’t much but pain for him now. Without thinking anything of it, Joanna reached over and grabbed her sandals. She stood up, leaving the laptop gun behind as she watched a jumpship fly over the villa towards the water.

“Off you go,” Carrington said as he walked over towards the door. It led outside to a stairwell that wrapped around to the lower level where the dock was, “Be careful Jo. I’ll be heading back to the institute after this drink with what’s left. By the time I get there, you should be nearing the G5 Building.”

“Right,” Joanna said, bringing both of her shoes up to her shoulder to let them dangle towards her back. Daniel spotted a red smudge on her right sandal’s insole, but paid it no mind.

Joanna descended the stairwell outside just as she watched the jumpship come to hover at the end of the pier. The side door opened, lowering a ramp to barely touch the edge. Emily Partridge hopped out onto the wooden boards. Joanna made her way over, stepping up to her side getting a polite nod from Carrington’s assistant.

“You’re amazing,” She said as Joanna, barefoot, simply stepped up onto the moving platform barefoot, “There were so many.”

“Sorry, can’t stay to chat,” Joanna said, “We’ll catch up at the institute.”

“Right,” Emily nodded, watching as the door closed and the dropship took off.

Left behind… Mathew was barely conscious still, splattered and broken on the wooden boards of Carrington’s dock. He watched the dropship disappear, looking up to Emily as she stood over him. She didn’t even look down, as she turned to look to the villa’s bullet-hole riddled windows, her foot slid over Mathew and settled into place.

Crunch.

She felt something give beneath her…

“Wh-” She gasped, lifting her foot to see Mathew’s twitching corpse on the floor.

Curiously, Emily crouched down. It was a human shaped… Something. The twitching stopped. Its blood was red; there was a tuft of blue hair. However, in her mind, she didn’t think of it as anything more than a strange bug. Standing back to her full height, Emily stepped onto it again, twisting it out.

“Sorry,” she said, apologizing to it before walking off, "Strange bugs on the coast..."

Mathew’s remains were left twisted into an unrecognizable mess to be washed away by an institute cleaning crew like all the other blood left behind...