The Tutorial's a Bit Brutal (3)
The instant that heavy steel fist came flying, Seven knew.
Too late to dodge!
He crossed both arms on instinct, five pairs of claws locking together with his forearms. The math was simple. Take the hit, bleed off as much of the impact as he could, and then counter—
He was wrong.
KRA-KOOM!
The pile bunker gauntlet roared. A piston with the force of an industrial press tore the air apart, and stacked atop the thrust of the punching arm, it drove the steel fist home. Arrogance had a price, and it was steep.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
"Ghhk—!"
Seven regretted everything.
Block and counter, my ass!
The impact crashed through him. Both arms crumpled where they were, and the force didn't stop—it sheared across muscle, shattered bone, and sent his torso flying like a sandbag while vivid pain lashed his brain.
Fuck, that hurts like a motherfucker...!
He found himself thrown backward like the victim of a car crash. A breakfall? Balance in midair?
Not a chance in hell!
CRASH!
Seven tumbled across the ground again and planted himself face-first in a heap of trash.
"Khh... kuh!"
As he tried to rise, another fist came in.
Instinct drove his right-hand claws up to meet it. Fist and claws collided head-on. It was a bad bet.
With a wet crunch, all five fingers shattered. Machine output pulped organic tissue. Even through the pain, Seven tried to counter again. His left claws drew an arc.
Tried to.
"You little shit?"
WHOOSH!
A harsh blast of compressed air hissed past his ear. A massive hand closed in, and Seven's left was caught. The Scavenger Boss's cyberware hand clamped down and squeezed.
CRUNCH!
"Ngh—!"
The steel hand seized his as if wringing out a rag and hauled him up. The red optical eye set in the center of the Scavenger Boss's forehead zoomed its lens, mocking. A low mechanical whine rose, and a heavy synthesized voice declared through the speaker.
Seven's body was swung into the ground, again and again.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Victory was a breath away. Hideous smiles—killing intent tangled up with glee—spread across the faces of the scavengers holding their guns on him.
"That's the boss!"
"Kill him!"
CRUNCH.
As his whole body was crushed, Seven thought desperately.
Yeah. A straight strength contest was never gonna work.
Machine strength was absolute. Before raw destructive force, flesh was nothing.
Seven accepted that cold gap. Physics is honest. There was no opposing the grip of cyberware grinding his whole body down, no resisting torque bent on pulping meat. And yet there remained a domain no machine, trapped inside specs and tolerances, could ever reach—the flexibility that belonged only to an organism able to change its shape like water, no matter the situation.
Hadn't someone said it? Life always finds a way.
Only one way to do this.
Seven moved as instinct told him. Time to prove the old saying.
Crack.
His whole body folded, joint after joint. Like a crocodile clamping its prey and spinning a death roll, he twisted, popped the joints of his arm, and wrenched.
Snap!
The twisted left arm tore halfway through and slipped the grip.
"...Wh-what the—?!"
The boss's optical sensors flickered wildly, as if they'd hit a bug. The jaws of the scavengers still aiming their guns dropped open.
Splat!
He hit the ground. Seven's left arm regenerated once more, and white claws had already surged back out of his right hand.
He didn't charge in.
The body that had been pounded into the dirt was hanging in tatters. His ribs were cracked, and regenerating an arm twice in a row had his stamina crawling along the floor.
Chug a potion first.
Seven opened distance from the boss and threw himself into the dark behind him.
Thud!
A pile of corpses caught his foot as he rolled into the landing—one of the scavengers he'd torn apart earlier.
Without a moment's delay he snatched a corpse by the scruff and dragged it behind the husk of a junked car. He drove his arm in. Flesh and vessels burst from the red grip.
Shunk!
He sank deep into the corpse's chest and Devoured, ravenous. Like a dry sponge drinking water, he drew it in with a wet slurp, and organic matter poured into his body. Amid a strange rapture, Seven's energy surged. Blood and organic matter from the corpse flooded his cells the way water soaks a dry sponge.
The night-vision implant buried in the Scavenger Boss's forehead relayed that horrifying sight to its owner without a filter. As the corpse shriveled and a red heat signature swelled in the same instant, the sensor in his forehead flared a furious crimson.
"Th-that crazy monster bastard... he's sucking down my brother's corpse?!"
The synthetic speaker howled as if it might tear itself apart.
The boss snatched the massive large-caliber heavy machine gun slung over his shoulder, right hand clamping down hard. His left rattled with a loud metallic clack.
"You son of a bitch! I'll rip you to pieces!"
THUD! THUD!
The cyberware giant charged between the hills of trash. Pistons and mechanical joints spun like mad, and another fist came flying. Seven's thought was simple: he could not take that twice. He planted a foot on a junked hood and shot upward.
He twisted lightly aside from the heavy straight charge.
KRA-KOOM!
The metal fist, having lost its mark, kicked up a cloud of dirt. Seven's body shot through the gap in the roar and rushed straight for the side of the truck.
"You little shit!"
The boss's heavy machine gun opened up at once.
BRRRT-BOOM!
Large-caliber rounds swept the area. Seven's eyes tracked through the sonic cracks whipping past him by a hair.
Soft targets first.
The marks were four scavenger grunts. Greenhorns who had been blankly aiming their guns beside the truck did nothing but blink, and Seven's body slipped into the encirclement like a snake.
"Eek?! He's coming this way!"
"Shoot, shoot!"
The grunts panicked and swung their rifles up. Belated gunfire split the air.
Tat-tat-tat!
Seven dodged the bullets as instinct led him. What wasn't lethal, he let hit. Weapons like theirs, he could endure to a point. The boss, by contrast, flailed. The heavy machine gun in his right hand lost its line and spun on nothing.
The moment he sprayed, his own men would be the first ones turned to sieves. The tracer fire cutting across the dark hesitated.
"B-boss! Don't shoot! You'll hit us!"
Ashen with terror, the grunts screamed and hit the dirt.
The machine gun was tied up.
Seven smiled.
"Should've kept shooting."
Shunk!
His right-hand claws punched through the collarbone of the grunt standing right beside him.
Bloody flesh surged from his left palm again. The greedy test subject's body wanted fresh blood.
This time, a live one. Still breathing.
Shunk!
Sluuuurp—!
"G-ghhhaaagh...!"
In a short death rattle the man's eyes rolled back as he gagged. Sucked out—organs, blood, muscle. The once-sturdy body went gaunt in an instant. The neck snapped.
Watching his man get drained right in front of him, the boss's reason snapped clean off.
"You son of a biiiiitch! Everybody get down!"
BRRRRRT!
The boss thrashed. The brute grip of his steel hand crushed the machine gun's murderous recoil, and a finger loaded with rage mashed the trigger. Streaks of light came flying in.
Seven flung the corpse aside and slipped sideways, immediately snatching another grunt and hauling him up.
"S-stop!"
Thud-thud-thud!
Bone and flesh sprayed through the air.
"Aaaagh!"
Seven sneered. Scavengers, in the end. Poke a back-alley thug a few times and he loses it on the spot. The cyberware giant charged like an enraged boar.
Hydraulic pistons hissed and drove forward. The left hand came smashing in.
He snatched the third grunt by the scruff, lightning-fast, and put him straight into the fist's path.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
"Guhhk!"
The brutal impact crushed the third man's spine and rib cage. At the same time Seven's claws sank into his back. Like squeezing a juice pack, he thought.
Organic matter poured out of the meat in a waterfall. From that excess of Devour, every wound on his body had already healed.
Power to spare.
Seven pressed the fight as he was.
"Uooooh!"
Instinct led. Like a kindly guide. Seven simply followed.
He ducked his torso tight beneath the machine gun swung like a club. The left hand dropped as if to pin him, and he twisted his waist and let it slide past. A heavy kick came rushing in. He cleared it with a backflip, landed, sprang his legs like a coil, and leapt to the flank, slipping the rain of steel-fist combos by a hair.
Whoosh!
After a flurry of empty swings, a gap finally opened. Both of the giant's wildly swung hands struck nothing but air.
Cut his mobility!
Seven kicked off the ground and slid in low between the man's legs.
The legs were typical third-rate cyberware, obsessed with output alone. In exchange for nothing but power and speed, protection had been thrown out, and the weak points at the joints lay bare.
Shink!
"You little rat!"
The boss caught his balance and looked down. Nothing. Where? A presence at his back turned him around.
Claws on all ten fingers of both hands flashed.
The target was the back of the boss's knee joints.
Shink!
Exposed wiring and hydraulic hoses, calf and knee.
"Ah—ahhh!!"
Ten bone claws drew diagonals across the weak point. Oil geysered. Sparks flew, and the cables snapped. Strength drained from the lower body. The giant staggered, and Seven's leg kicked hard into the inside of the knee.
"M-my leg...!"
The heavy steel knee slammed into the dirt, and he dropped to his knees.
THUD!
The heavy machine gun in his right hand clattered into the mud. The giant folded as if collapsing. Seven's eyes gleamed like a beast's. His claws gouged the shoulder. The collarbone shattered.
"Gyaaaaaagh!"
Both arms locked up.
The boss's upper body swayed in agony. The claws went straight for the nape—the scale-patterned cyberware neural mesh running down from the back of the skull. Seven stabbed and twisted.
CRACKLE!
Sparks burst like fireworks.
The neural trunk linking the cyberware throughout his body severed in a single stroke.
"K-khhh... ghk...!"
Bloody foam spilled from the boss's mouth, and his head dropped limp.
Without hesitation, Seven ripped the buried claws sideways and tore.
Slice!
The headless giant pitched forward. The ocular implant in the head rolling across the ground flickered twice and went dark for good.
Only after he jammed his claws into the skull once more—just in case a breath remained—did Seven stop his hand.
"Hah... got him."
The very instant the tension tried to break—
"H-hiiik...! It's a monster, run!"
"Save meee!"
He turned his head and saw two scavengers, faces drained of color, bolting with their tails between their legs.
Seven's eyes narrowed.
He was a living test subject of Alden. And those men had just seen him. This was an aberrant power on a completely different level from the ordinary bioware strewn all over Nowak City. Having already broken from the original story's tutorial track, he couldn't afford to create any more variables.
BOOM!
Seven's legs stomped the mud with explosive force. Maybe from Devouring one after another, they were full of strength.
"Aaaah! Mom! Mom! Save me!"
Power he couldn't restrain drove his body. He flew, leaving an afterimage, and came down in a straight line.
His claws roughly snatched the nape of the scavenger trying to climb the barbed-wire fence.
"Where do you think you're going?"
"Ah! Aaaaaagh!"
He slammed the man to the ground in one motion and drove his claws into the back of the skull again.
Then he caught the ankle of the one trying to crawl into the mouth of a drainage pipe.
"Aaaaaah! Spare me! Please!"
He dragged him out and leveled his claws.
The last scavenger trembled and wailed.
"I-I'll give you everything I've got! I won't tell anyone! Please—"
Slice.
Seven severed the man's neck without hesitation.
Silence settled over the clearing. There were no survivors.
"Hoo..."
Seven let out a long breath and shook the blood from his hands.
"Ha, fuck... what did I just do?"
A sudden sense of the absurd. He'd simply run wherever he felt like and swung his claws, and somehow the enemies were dead.
People, even...
Something popped into Seven's head.
No. I didn't eat them, did I? This is absorption.
Calling it eating was a stretch. You don't call hooking up an IV and taking a drip a meal.
Besides, they were the ones who shoved the gun barrels in his face first.
They'd paid him in lead, and he'd simply returned payment in flesh. As a transaction, it was perfectly fair.
"Good's good. Whatever."
Seven shook his hands lightly and drew the claws back in.
The red muscle fiber that had covered his hands so ominously rippled and sank beneath the skin. The blades that had torn up through his fingertips slid smoothly back under his nails and vanished.
Seven rifled through the scavengers' corpses.
"Let's see... anything worth cash?"
Rummaging turned up a heavy master e-key from inside the boss's clothes.
He pressed it on a whim, and a beep answered from the direction of the truck.
What came next was a handful of electronic terminals and two encrypted credit chips the size of his palm.
Spending money. Nice.
Seven stuffed the chips into the pocket of his patient gown and looked over the floor of the clearing.
"Grab the heavy machine gun first..."
He gathered every gun that still looked intact and tossed them into the pickup's passenger seat.
Then he climbed into the rattling driver's seat and shut the door.
Thunk.
The moment he took the wheel, he saw his own face in the rearview.
A typical young East Asian man. One of the male appearances you could pick for Seven on the default settings.
"It really is Seven."
Seven leaned back in the driver's seat for a moment and closed his eyes.
I can't use implants.
Most people in this era lived with a neurolink—a neurochip, as everyone called it—jammed into their heads. A life without a neurochip was the same as being told to live through the twenty-first century without a smartphone.
Can't even pay for anything. Take these credit chips away, and it's almost all electronic currency.
No proper account, no identity. He couldn't so much as buy a one-credit taco from a vending machine. Landing a contract from a major fixer was beyond dreaming.
A safehouse to hole up in was urgent, but the most urgent thing was something else. A capable fixer who could turn the looted gear into cash and swim the net in his place.
He rapidly flipped through the original story's knowledge still sitting in his head.
Current location: the O'Neill Barrens landfill. The nearest place from here?
District 8. The Laderas slum.
Then an NPC he could get his hands on there—one he could trust, by the original's standards—
Ah. There was someone who fit perfectly.
A thin, cold laugh slipped through Seven's lips.
"Easy to handle. Even better to put to work."
And not bad as something to look at, either.
VROOOOM!
He hit the accelerator, and the old pickup tore free of the trash heaps.
Right on cue, cold rain hammered the windows. Beyond the view the wipers carved open, a dense tangle of shanties came into sight, and power lines strung like spiderwebs. Cheap neon, red and blue, bled through the damp dark.
Nowak City, District 8. La Frontera.
The lawless slum. Laderas.
Seven turned the wheel and murmured, low.
"Jackie. I'm coming."