Beta Fluid

“Khhrk — hhgh! Haaaaah…!”

One arm — the one wearing the prosthetic implant — had quite literally exploded, and the enormous backlash that followed must have torn straight through his nervous system and into his brain. This idiot, who so enjoyed being held up as some kind of Wolf, glared at me with blood pouring from his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and his ears.

And what exactly do you think glaring is going to do?

The guy was just a fresh newbie strutting around on a gear-carry. He’d gotten a somewhat more systematic implant job than Flesh, who’d stuffed his body with way too much artificial muscle — but that was about it. That kind of slapdash implant work was a build players used back in the earliest days after EFD officially launched, when nobody knew any better.

A ten-year veteran like me, and this guy shows up with a dumpster-fire build going come at me, bro?

Makes me want to crack his skull in three seconds flat.

But I wasn’t actually going to smash a newbie’s skull. Because newbies are cute. I’d been taught that cute things should be treated as precious. And through living in society, I’d also learned that nobody had ever treated me that way.

“Suddenly my rage meter is filling up. Yeah — I’m cracking your skull after all.”

“The fuck are you even saying, you son of a…!”

“Normally when I see a newbie I pick them right up and only put them down after, oh, five hundred thirty-four million five hundred thirty-five thousand six hundred twenty-three times. But I don’t even want to pick you up. You just piss me off.”

This was absolutely not because nobody had ever treated me as cute and precious.

“I’ll give you credit for getting lucky and blowing off one of my arms — but this isn’t over…! I can still wreck you plenty from here!”

“Then go ahead and try.”

With that, I charged the guy who still hadn’t fully shaken off the stun. One of the fatal drawbacks of implant users was the catastrophic damage that followed when a specific implant took severe structural failure — and one of the signature symptoms was stun, a higher-tier debuff sitting above confusion. He was blustering, trying to buy himself as much recovery time as he could, but there was no reason to give any more time to someone already driven to the edge of groggy.

“Whole body’s tingling, huh? Limbs won’t listen, that chip they jammed in your brain feels like it’s about to pop, and the coolant’s leaking everywhere.”

“……!”

“You know people used to agonize over a single dental implant to replace a permanent tooth? That’s how carefully you’re supposed to treat anything artificial you put inside a human body.”

Jamming implants in like a barbarian the way you did is not, in fact, a winning strategy.

The legs first.

I’d already wrecked one arm, so the next target was obvious. Implants usually came as matched pairs, and when one half of a paired set broke, the other half went temporarily dead as well. I exploited exactly ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that — drove a shard of shattered alloy plating into the knee joint of his prosthetic-leg implant and twisted with everything I had.

Crrrk-crack!

“GAAAAAAAH!”

“That’s a lot of screaming. The joints being the weak point on prosthetic-arm and prosthetic-leg implants is just common sense, isn’t it? Or did you not even know that when you had all four of your limbs chopped off?”

“You son of a biiiiiitch…!”

“Corporate-grade implants actually patch weaknesses like this pretty well, but looking at you, you got the cheap mass-market kit, so what can you do. You should’ve paid Ted Chan a little more.”

Ted Chan was a gifted implant surgeon, and he was equally famous for collecting every last bit of what his labor was worth. The fact that a man like that had fitted implants of this quality meant this was exactly as much as the guy had paid — enough to slap on a flashy exterior and some hollow, rushed combat power, and not a coin more.

“You swapped out all four limbs for implants, so you either replaced the spine too, or at the very least you had a supplementary artificial skeleton installed, right?”

“W-wait!”

The second I stepped around behind him, he seemed to realize what I was about to do. His whole attitude flipped on a dime.

“Too late.”

Skrrrk-k-k-k!

Using the surgical scarring along his lower back as a guide, I slashed the alloy-plate shard across in one hard stroke. The improvised horizontal blade tore through the spinal artificial neural net that linked into his limb implants.

“Ghk!”

This time he couldn’t even manage a proper scream — just the sound of the air leaving him. A severed artificial neural net meant every sensation coming in through the implants had been cut off. Put another way, the shock of that severance transferred straight into the brain, undiluted.

Thud.

In the end he toppled slowly forward, every implant he’d had installed comprehensively wrecked. The bloody foam leaking from the corner of his mouth and his rolled-back eyes were all anyone needed to guess what kind of shape he was in.

That single muttered line, spoken in the dead-quiet center of an arena that had gone still as a grave, slipped through the microphone of a broadcast drone that had crept in without a sound and poured out of the house speakers.

“Holy fucking shit.”

“So that’s the majesty of a genuine Orange?”

“Are all Orange bastards like that?”

“They did say none of the Oranges still breathing are right in the head.”

“Who the hell is that guy? Oh — the Super Rookie? Yeah, that tracks.”

“Tell the boss, now. A big shot just showed up.”

At the murmur rising around me, I tossed the shard still in my hand and headed for where the announcer was sitting. Whether the mood in here had gone to hell was not my problem. I had won five straight, fair and square, and I was collecting what I was owed.

“Hand it over.”

“…Here you are.”

“Time sure flies.”

The moment I met an otherwise ordinary morning in the prison, I took delivery of a priority shipment from the prison management AI. Some time back, Lucy and I had gone through hell in the Dark Zone to recover the contents of a security case, and I’d handed those contents off to Technica’s chief what’s-his-face. Today, that cargo had finally shown its face to the world.

Sure enough, Crazy Clock — which reacted like a bloodhound the instant anything Dark Zone-related was involved — was the first to speak up.

“If this is here, that means the security cargo’s seal was lifted without a hitch. So you owe me what you promised, right?”

At this point, I could already guess what kind of reward this thing was going to hand me. Not because I’d known Crazy Clock long enough to read it like a book — it was just the kind of inference that came naturally after years in the game. It would have quietly priced in, as the reward, a Level-3 security technology related to whatever data was sitting inside this priority shipment, and that technology was very likely something I needed right now. Love it or hate it, this thing had the most accurate read on my current condition of anyone — and I was only a temporary contractor.

And what I need right this second isn’t an implant, and it isn’t some earth-shattering piece of intel.

Weapons and armor I’d already pulled from Vladimir. If I needed more, I could buy them with money, so none of that was urgent.

Which left…

Called it.

I’d already unlocked Alpha Fluid and fabricated it myself. The most urgent thing now was finishing the Fluid set. Which meant whatever was in this box was either a material item related to Beta Fluid, or classified data ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠on the same.

Click.

I cleared the priority shipment’s security with a fingerprint and opened the case, and the cold rolling out of the interior pulled a smile onto my face all by itself. What sat inside was a single small ampule of green-glowing drug. The ampule had been put through a very particular kind of security processing; you couldn’t just draw the contents out. Technica’s chief what’s-his-face had probably cracked the security case’s seal only to walk straight into another layer of security, and I imagined he’d been more than a little thrown.

And the fact that he still sent this to me without a word of complaint means he figured I’d have to come back to him to get the ampule unlocked.

Funny thing about that. I already had security access to the ampule.

“And that would be the Level-3 security technology bundled into the reward you promised, right?”

In other words, the only reason that unnecessary detour had been partly skipped was that I’d gotten lucky and picked up the prototype nanobots while I was in Cell Block H-099 on other business. From the start, the prototype nanobots had been a required piece either way.

“Originally I was going to track down Doctor Hwang — one of the VIP patrons of Cell Block H-099 — and squeeze him for information on the Fluid set. Ending up here instead is a win, honestly.”

“Not wrong, I’ll give you that.”

I’d used Alpha Fluid to enhance my Sixth Sense and watched my luck stat climb, so it wasn’t as if the idea had no legs at all.

“Enough small talk. Shall we make some Beta Fluid?”

Strike while the iron is hot — and with the next Dark Zone incursion sitting right on the doorstep, I was in a hurry.

“Start by running the data upload on these Prototype Liquid Nanobots.”

“I don’t hate a unit that stays this far ahead of me.”

No. Not like that. That was just a Korean being polite — the equivalent of we should grab a meal sometime. Still, simple machines were easier to handle, so I didn’t bother correcting it.

Beta Fluid came first anyway.

I used my security access to unlock the ampule, then drew every last drop of the contents into a disposable syringe and, without hesitating, drove it into my right shoulder.

“Hsssss — would’ve been better to just drink it.”

“I know that, damn it.”

In the game, the only annoying parts had been the bloated craft timers and gathering the materials. Using the finished product was a single click. Now that I was the one actually using it, I was getting a fresh appreciation for the downsides of 2040s cutting-edge science. A world where people casually jammed weird shit into their own bodies. No wonder only the deranged veterans survived.

Next, the nanobots.

I took out the liquid nanobots I’d been storing carefully in the locker without ever using them, drew them up into another disposable syringe, and this time drove it into my left shoulder.

“This feels. Really. Fucking. Weird!”

Cutie’s going to cry if she hears that, you bastard.

That aside, the sensation of the nanobots and the Beta Fluid concentrate binding together inside my body was… genuinely, profoundly strange. Like every last cell in my body switching on at once. In that moment I felt like I could track the flow of my own blood, even the electrical signals traveling through me. Of course, that too lasted only a fraction of a second.

“Hoo.”

Unlike Alpha Fluid, I’d injected the Beta Fluid into my forearm from the start, so the physical ability it would enhance had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠already been decided.

Crrrk-k-k.

I’d been getting by with nothing but a hastily thrown-together exo-suit and not a single implant to my name. At last, I had enhanced muscular strength.

“The effect’s the real deal.”

The cheetah — scratch that. The veteran is smiling now.