The Tutorial's Kinda Brutal (2)
Beneath the steep slope of Waste Canyon, I dropped flat and wedged myself under the frame of a wrecked car.
Headlights turned the open lot at my back into a white glare, and around that glare the scavengers' shouts and curses went off like a string of charges.
"Fuck! Somebody jam a knife up under his chin? Which piece of shit was it?"
"Goddamn it, look at this. His chest is shredded!!"
The mess I'd left them had apparently made an impression.
Ten scavengers had spilled out of the vehicles in all, submachine guns, battered assault rifles, and a machine gun leveled in their hands. The cyberware they wore was as crude as scavengers ever managed, but when it came to weapons, they had everything that mattered. Implant eyes and flashlight beams raked the junkyard in a savage sweep, following the blood.
"Footprints keep going that way! Follow me!"
"We catch him, we skin him alive! You son of a bitch! Come out!"
Flat on my belly under the wreck, I clutched my lower gut. Ngh... The regeneration had clearly finished, but something deep in my abdomen still burned, as if phantom pain had decided to linger. One thing, though, was certain.
Guard the head, and I've got a shot at this.
The gunfire a moment ago had driven that home. In a game you just ate hits and kept swinging, so I'd never really understood it—but a test subject's abilities were well past anything I'd imagined.
Long as I don't get caught in a crossfire, I can work with this.
So long as they didn't pulp my limbs, I could afford to take a few ordinary rounds. Grow a little more and the day would come when even a bullet to the head wouldn't drop me.
The problem's energy... wait.
A scene surfaced in my head without warning, and I swallowed. Surely I wasn't supposed to pull that stunt from the game.
The thought didn't last. Footsteps were already closing in.
Just one.
All I had in hand was the Mastiff shotgun I'd taken moments ago. A slug was already in the chamber. All that was left was the trigger.
Light reached in between the piles of wrecks and slid under the chassis. The man coming on was barely fifteen feet out. Even the crude neural jack sunk into the nape of his neck stood out clear.
Take him first. I'd already put a man down with my bare hands, and the finger on the trigger didn't hesitate.
I rose out of the wreck's shadow.
"Huh...?"
The instant he turned his head my way, I shoved the shotgun's muzzle forward. Past the front sight, the view and the chest he was trying to bring his gun around on crossed dead center.
I pulled the trigger.
The report tore at my eardrums. A sheet of flame lit the canyon.
Large-caliber slug. His body might as well have been paper.
The round punched clean through the ribcage and blew a gaping hole in his upper torso. Bone and scraps of organ rattled down across the scrap pile behind him.
Landed it in one!
But everything has a price. My right arm kicked back with it.
Something cracked.
"Ah— shit...!"
Firing a handheld cannon, the kind of thing you were meant to brace with a cyberware arm, had a brutal cost when you did it barehanded. My right hand dangled loose. The stupid recoil had bent my wrist ninety degrees.
The grip failed, and the shotgun clattered to the ground.
Fuck... did it shatter?
Maybe the bone had gone to pieces. Heat flared inside the wrist, and then the feeling went dead.
"There! Shoot!"
The scavengers who'd heard the blast poured fire in all at once.
Rounds hammered the wreck's steel plate without mercy and threw sparks. A fragment ripped across my cheek. Pain like a knife-cut flicked through my thigh and my left shoulder.
No time to reload. I have to move!
I threw myself clear.
My foot slammed a container's steel skin and I shot up the wall in a single burst. Swallowing the throb in my shoulder, I snagged the overhead piping with my good left hand, scrambled up the mountain of trash, and dropped flat out of sight.
Sprawled on the container's roof, Seven hauled in a rough breath.
"Haah..."
Down in the open lot, the scavengers were tearing through the trash piles at random.
"Where'd he bounce? He packing a jetpack or something?"
"There's blood on the ground! He didn't get far!"
"Pair up and comb every inch! Take his head!"
Seven looked down at the right hand dangling from his wrist. The hyper-regeneration that had been knitting the blown-open hole in his gut only moments ago was working at a crawl. Inside the joint, a broken knob of bone stabbed outward and poured pain through him.
Why's it doing this?
Thrown by the anomaly, he hurriedly retraced what he knew.
The core of the test-subject route is P-Cells.
The Proteus cells developed by Arden carried a power that bordered on omnipotence. Fatal wounds closed in seconds, and they handed a bioware user a vicious spread of talents. The problem was that the power came with a price that could not be waived. On top of being unable to wear cyberware, turning the ability on required fuel.
Someone else's blood and flesh.
That was the part that made Seven hesitate.
Can I actually do it?
That was when it happened.
A scavenger lagging at the tail of the search line walked out behind a rusted drum.
"Ugh... gotta take a leak first..."
He planted himself in a corner out of his crew's sight, dragged his zipper down, and started spraying.
Prey had walked in on its own.
An instinct he had no words for climbed Seven's spine and flooded his skull.
Now.
Seven threw himself off the container's edge.
He landed on the ground without a sound and immediately shot his good left arm out, clamping the man's mouth shut.
"Mmph...?!"
The scream that tried to burst free jammed back down his throat. Seven hooked the scavenger's neck hard with his left arm and kicked the back of his knee out.
He dragged the man down into a gap in the trash and, in the same motion, tore bone claws from the tips of his left hand.
The claws buried themselves in the man's back at once. The scavenger couldn't even scream. His limbs just shuddered.
From between the claws, crimson vessels and ropes of muscle poured out like a waterfall. Flesh and tissue drove into the wound in his back without hesitation.
What followed was ugly enough that Seven himself, claws still sunk in, let his mouth fall open.
Claws and living tissue began to drink the scavenger's body with a wet, greedy suck. Biofuel flooded in along the vessels. A violent thrill shot up Seven's spine.
As the nutrition rushed through him, the broken right wrist bent again. The displaced fragments of bone found their seats and locked. Seven shook the hand, startled by how fast it had happened.
"Unreal."
The moment he pulled the claws free, the half-shriveled corpse rolled across the ground. Blood, muscle, and organs had been drawn out of it in bulk, leaving a gaunt ruin, and Seven could only blink.
Shit. I actually just Devoured him...
There was no time to be horrified. An impact like a club to the skull slammed straight into Seven's brain.
"Ghk—!"
Filthy memories still clinging to the dead scavenger's nerves surged back up the connection.
His skull split with a stabbing headache and voices that weren't there. Seven ground a palm into his temple and swallowed on a dry throat.
"Goddamn it... this bastard's head is nothing but garbage."
Absorbing a person was something he couldn't have helped. Telling himself that, Seven got to his feet.
"Yeah. I think I know how this fight goes."
Was it the brainwashing Arden had worked into the test subjects? Nobody had taught him, and still the sensation circling his head felt familiar. It turned his stomach, but he slipped into the shadows with a practiced ease all the same.
Not even a few minutes later, a scavenger hunting for the straggler came to a stop.
"Hey! Carlson? Where are you? This asshole wandered off again..."
A heartbeat later, two glittering optic implants found the corpse on the ground.
"Hii—hiiik?!"
He had seen what was left of his crewmate, gaunt and emptied out, and the scream tore loose.
"C-Carlson's down! Fuck! What the hell is th—!"
Seven threw himself from the top of the wrecks. Bone claws at the tips of all ten fingers stretched long through the air.
The last thing the startled scavenger saw was a black shadow. The right-hand claws flew in and punched through the crown of his head, nail-blades piercing the skull and churning what was inside.
The scavengers who came running at the scream gaped at the shape of Seven ripping the claws free and leaping clear.
"Crazy mutant bastard! Waste him!"
Panic-stricken, they yanked triggers at random into the dark. Seven showed himself on purpose and slipped away again, drawing the scavengers in after him.
Then the ambush started.
The head of the scavenger spraying rounds from the very rear simply vanished.
"B-behind us!"
The man beside him jerked in surprise and tried to swing his muzzle around. Too late. Seven's claws were faster. A wet crack, and the wrist holding the gun came away. Seven jammed his right hand into the howling mouth, and the man gagged, eyes rolling white.
"Die!"
A barrel whipped around in pure rage and lined up on Seven's head. He caught it anyway. Flesh hissed and seared against the hot metal. He didn't care. He twisted the muzzle until it pointed at the third man's face.
The burst at point-blank range blew that face clean off. In the same instant, the claws of Seven's left hand drew a horizontal line across the gun owner's nape.
A fountain of blood went up, and four bodies dropped in a row.
"You crazy son of a—!"
Past the canyon's narrow cut, two more came charging with assault rifles shouldered. Seven didn't hesitate. His foot snapped out.
The heavy steel drum his kick launched rolled at them in a furious tumble.
"Move!"
Their sight pictures broke. Muzzles spat fire into empty air, and the crosshairs of junk implants jittered wildly across their vision. The shape bouncing like a rubber ball was impossible to lead.
A thought flickered through the scavengers, brief and ugly. Two legs, then all fours—was that thing even human? Wasn't it an animal?
Seven ran on instinct. Hips and muscle twisted at angles the human body was never meant to hold, and he sprang off the ground with a grotesque, elastic snap.
"Hit him! Just hit him!"
He spun a hundred and eighty degrees and slid in along the dirt. Rounds sheared past overhead; one kissed his cheek. The red line scored into the skin filled itself back in an instant.
He knifed in under their knees. The claws of both hands crossed like scissors.
Five rough gashes opened across one scavenger's thigh and lower belly. Guts spilled. Blood spilled. The other man's legs sheared apart, and the torso, suddenly without its supports, rolled off the knees.
Three left.
"M-monster... run!"
Two of the scavengers who had watched the slaughter threw their guns down, turned, and ran.
"Run? Where the hell are you running?"
Seven snatched up a rusted iron pipe lying on the ground. He drew his arm back like a javelin thrower, as far as it would go. The shoulder joint popped—and stretched, long enough that even Seven was startled.
The elongated arm snapped forward like a released bowstring.
The pipe split the air and punched through the center of a fleeing scavenger's back.
"Gaaahk!"
Run through, he slammed into the ground like a driven nail and coughed blood. Seven sprang like a coil and caught the last runner by the scruff of the neck.
He drove the man's face into the hood of a wrecked car with no mercy in it.
"S-spare—"
Again and again, the way a child throws a tantrum—two blows, then a third. The head burst like a watermelon.
By his own sense of it, only a few minutes. Silence drifted over the ground where the scavengers had fallen.
Seven blinked at the sticky red sheen coating both hands.
Ha. Fuck. What did I just do?
He'd simply moved however he felt like moving, and the scavengers had been shredded for it. Feeling a clean, bright rush off a fight that made no sense left him with a wrongness sitting in his gut.
"Ugh... hhk!"
In the quiet, a rough breath stirred. He turned his head, and there was a scavenger still alive. The crotch of the man's pants was already soaked.
Seven flicked the blood off his hand the way you'd shoo a fly and walked up to the last survivor. The filthy patient gown, gone a dark crimson, flapped around him like a ghost, and red drops fell steady from the bone claws on both hands. It was nothing short of a nightmare.
"Hiiik... d-don't come any closer!"
The scavenger mashed at the implant on the back of his neck with a shaking hand, clawing it like he meant to tear it out, and wailed.
"Boss! Boss! Please, save me! There's a demon—there's a crazy murdering bastard here!"
Seven, already close enough to touch him, lifted the claws of his right hand.
"Off you go."
That was the moment.
Savage gunfire ripped the junkyard's dark wide open.
Large-caliber rounds hammered Seven's chest and left shoulder without mercy.
"Ghk—!"
Under the pouring fire he staggered, then went down backward across a pile of wreckage.
Crushed debris sprayed in every direction. Right on its heels, a modified pickup with a steel bumper plowed in over the trash.
Light flared. The searchlights mounted on the truck's roof blazed on all at once.
Four armed scavengers poured out of the doors and the bed.
"Surround him! Cut off his escape!"
The driver's door swung open. One enormous combat boot hit the dirt, and out of the cab stepped a hulking cyborg, hydraulic cylinders plating him from shoulders to chest to both legs.
A majestic proclamation, as if some hero of justice had deigned to descend. Tears welled in the eyes of the scavenger who, a moment ago, had been rigid with terror.
"B-Boss...! You actually came! You came to save me...!"
Seven could hardly believe the sight. Snot and tears, blubbering gratitude, the whole pathetic show.
"That the bastard?"
At the Scavenger Boss's words, the scavenger shouted.
"Yes! That's him! That bastard! Our brothers—!"
With a thin mechanical whine, the red camera set into the center of the boss's forehead locked onto Seven.
Seven saw it and clicked his tongue.
Goddamn it. That's an implant with night vision.
The modulated voice peculiar to a cyborg pressed low across the lot.
"You the one who touched our brothers? Don't know what hole you crawled out of! You came at us with that cheap little scrap of bioware? Forget about living nice and easy!"
Watching the enemy strut like he'd just become a hero, Seven spat a mouthful of blood and stared.
...Give me a break. These thugs show up to shoot a hero movie?
The pose was committed enough that a laugh nearly got away from him.
The boss opened and closed his enormous mechanical fist. Metal ground on metal, pistons contracted, and the knuckles locked together. A sharp scrape of steel stabbed into Seven's ears.
Inside his head, the gamer brain spun up fast.
Pile bunker gauntlet? Pricey hardware for a back-alley field boss.
Nasty implant for a tutorial enemy. Taking that cyberware head-on was going to hurt. But it was far too late to dodge.
The Scavenger Boss's legs detonated into motion and drove his bulk forward.
"Die!"
Seven threw both arms up.
In an instant, the steel fist filled his vision.