TRICK OR TREAT 2
This expedition was different from the last in many ways.
The objective, from the very start, had been a single Nexus Port — and the field would be contested by countless pathfinder groups after the same prize.
Trivial relics and data shards were of no concern whatsoever. Every ounce of their focus went into speed, into driving straight through the ruins without pause.
Reach the Nexus Port before any of Halloween's other idol teams. Chanting that single thought like a mantra, Ash and the rest tore through the ruins without a moment's rest.
Ta-ta-tang...
In the distance, gunshots echoed down a corridor that chilled the blood — an auditory reminder that they were not alone in these ruins.
Perhaps the sound lit a fire under the anxiety already smoldering in her chest, because Ifrit shouted:
"Faster! Move it faster!"
Everyone picked up the pace.
And with every step, Akina's ragged breathing grew louder.
"Lady Akina, are you well? If the pace is too much for you—"
"Don't worry about me, mister!"
Soaked in sweat and gasping for breath, Akina still flashed a bright, show-off smile.
"I'm fine!"
The girl knew.
Knew that in this entire group, she alone possessed a fragile human body. Knew that the team's marching speed rested entirely on her own two legs.
And so she ran herself ragged, legs pumping desperately.
She was fighting to keep her spirits up, to force a cheerfulness she didn't feel — struggling not to become a burden to anyone.
Faced with that young but unbending resolve, Ash found nothing to say. He'd been ready to carry her on his back the moment she faltered — and the girl had refused his kindness with a clear, ringing laugh.
Now is not the time for childishness. Run on your own strength, Akina!
Simply clinging to an Assault's back because running was hard? What would she do if a sudden firefight broke out? Fragile-bodied Technomancer or not, a pathfinder who gave up on even walking with her own legs had already failed the job.
I am not a burden!
She refused to be one.
I chose to throw myself into this hell, so I'll endure it to the end on these two legs of mine. That was what Akina believed.
Ash watched her face for a moment, then turned his gaze away — a silent promise to respect her wishes. And with that, he resolved to give his own duty everything he had.
The role of an Assault was to shield the Technomancer from the threats of the ruins. That was a far heavier responsibility than a gentle kindness.
Flaring his ki-sense wide open, Ash swept the dust-choked ruins once more.
The gunfire had not ceased even now.
And so the gloomy air of the ruins hung thick with greed and killing intent, drifting like dust motes themselves. At any moment, a bullet might come screaming out of one of those black corridors.
Then, suddenly, Ash realized something.
These ruins resembled Gamma-7, the first site he had ever explored — and yet somewhere beneath the resemblance, they were profoundly, alienly different.
Gamma-7 had been nothing but machinery and steel structures from floor to ceiling, obsessed with practicality and function alone. This place felt fundamentally unlike it at its very core.
How best to describe this place?
For lack of a better word — it felt like a kind of temple.
Stone pillars marching in perfect intervals, wall carvings that somehow retained an air of dignity despite being shattered and destroyed, corridors far too vast, ceilings stretching straight into darkness above.
It was as if he had stepped into an entirely different civilization.
The others didn't seem to pay it any mind — Akina no less than the rest. To them, this place was nothing more and nothing less than a ruin hiding artifacts worth money.
But Ash was different.
Judging by the experience of his past life, it took him no time at all to see that this space was no ordinary ruin.
His brief contemplation ended abruptly when they arrived at a fork splitting three ways.
"Tch."
Clicking her tongue at the crossroads, Ifrit jerked her chin toward Dullahan.
"Run a scan."
Dullahan stepped forward.
Across the smooth front of his helmet, dozens of hair-thin panels that had never been visible before slid open like a honeycomb, each one drinking in a faint glow.
It was then that Jack O'Lantern, who had been holding up the rear, spoke up.
"Akina."
"Yes?"
When she turned, Jack O'Lantern made an exaggerated show of plugging his ears.
"Huh? You want me to cover my ears?"
Akina, baffled, raised both hands to her ears — and at that exact moment, a monstrous resonance erupted from inside Dullahan's helmet.
KEEEEEEEEE!
"WAAH!"
It was a shriek like a blade boring straight into her skull.
The inexplicable high-pitched tone went on and on.
"Ugh! What IS that?!"
Akina's face twisted as she cried out and looked around — only to find that not a single person besides herself seemed to be in any pain.
She understood quickly enough.
She was the only human here with raw, unfiltered hearing and no noise-canceling cyberware.
A moment later, the noise vanished as if it had never been.
"How's it look?"
Ifrit's question.
Above Dullahan's visor, torrents of data streamed past like a storm.
A real-time 3D wireframe rendered from the echoes of sound waves. Littered along the route, minor obstacles glowed red while structurally compromised sections blinked yellow.
ROA.
They were a group built for a special purpose, equipped with cyberware tuned not for simple combat but for transport and extraction. Even the uncanny sonic resonance device just now was clearly search-and-rescue hardware.
Having finished his furious computations, Dullahan pushed a message across his visor.
"Okay. Let's move, then?"
The five pathfinders set off down the left passage, and the darkness flooding the corridor swallowed their silhouettes whole.
When Dullahan said "faster," it did not mean that the route was safe. It meant, quite literally, that it was simply faster.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Ifrit's Dragon's Breath roared flame, melting the armor plating of a Sentinel that had burst from the wall.
Jack O'Lantern seized the opening without hesitation, detonating his compact bombs in a single synchronized blast.
The chain of explosions and the conflagration made the whole ruin shudder. Amid the tremors, the Sentinel that had disguised itself as mere decoration collapsed into scrap, half its frame destroyed.
A beautiful piece of combined-arms work.
Ifrit and the two idols of ROA had clearly spent long hours drilling their coordination.
"Okay! One down! Next up—"
Jack O'Lantern whipped his head around and never finished the sentence. There, standing tall amid the wreckage of the auto-turrets he'd sheared apart, was Ash.
He shook the machine lubricant from his blade with an almost casual flick of the wrist.
No trace of an explosion. Not a single scorch mark.
There hadn't even been a sound.
Only the severed scrap, sliced apart by a single razor edge, lay abandoned on the floor.
"...Wha — you cleared them all already?"
Ash gave a noncommittal nod at Jack O'Lantern's stammered question, then turned toward where Akina was.
Jack O'Lantern looked back and forth between the smoldering wreckage of his own bombs and the eerily silent cuts Ash had left behind. Then he let out a baffled, breathless laugh.
"Boss lady, where in the world did you dig up this monster?"
Ifrit, reloading Dragon's Breath, answered absently.
"He was hiding behind a rock."
"...Huh?"
"Eating a strawberry energy stick."
"What kind of bullshit is that?"
She ignored Jack O'Lantern's confusion and took charge of the situation.
"Small talk later, back in Sanctum. We move now. The Nexus Port's practically on our doorstep!"
At her shout, everyone brushed aside their scattered thoughts and set their feet in motion again.
But the mood was subtly different from before.
Jack O'Lantern kept sneaking sidelong glances at Ash walking up front, and Dullahan, too, would occasionally glance back with the message [ROA IS SHORT ON COMBATANTS······] glowing on his visor.
Every time he did, Akina would seize one of Ash's arms and glare with all her might, and the sheer ferocity of it would send Dullahan's gaze snapping back to the front.
Somehow, the air had gone all electric.
And the one who dropped a bucket of cold water over it all was none other than Ash himself.
"Hold. Stop a moment."
At his low, metallic voice, Ifrit made a puzzled face.
"Hm? What is it?"
Ash said nothing for a while, staring down the far end of the wide corridor.
After a moment had passed, he spoke.
"There's someone up ahead... I believe."
At his words, the whole party strained their ears toward the depths of the ruins.
Even Akina, the only one without sensory-amplifying cyberware, held her breath and tried her hardest to catch any sound through the darkness.
But nothing came.
Only the occasional drip of water falling from the ceiling, and a wind that carried a thick, cloying smell back and forth.
Soon Dullahan, the party's designated scout, raised a message on his visor.
"No. Don't."
Just as Dullahan's sonic resonance system was about to spin up, Ifrit thrust her hand out to stop him.
"If someone really is out there, they might hear it too. All we'd do is give away our position."
Frankly, Ash's claim sounded absurd.
He was saying he'd sensed something even Dullahan — a specialist in reconnaissance — had failed to pick up. By any normal measure, it was the kind of talk you'd write off as nonsense.
But this was Ash.
As long as the man who'd spoken those words was Ash, there existed a real probability that someone truly was waiting up ahead.
Hadn't it been Ash, after all, who first sensed Redman's ambush in the past?
"You're sure about this?"
At Ifrit's question, Ash concentrated his mind once more and unfurled his ki-sense. But this time he didn't stop there.
He ran his neural cultivation technique in parallel, specializing the sense to spread wider and finer than before.
Microwaves born of his will rippled outward in every direction.
Electric ki-sense.
It was a sense only Ash could use.
The technique he had mastered in his past life — the art of stilling the mind to read the killing intent of all creation — had adapted to his machine body and restructured itself into something entirely new.
His will to know the world, amplified by the neural cultivation technique, transformed into the form of minute electromagnetic fields and fanned out in all directions.
The faint echoes of microwaves rebounding from every corner of the ruins.
This was no vague "feeling" anymore.
It was, if anything, a high-resolution radar — far more precise and far more covert than even Dullahan's acoustic detection.
And on that electric ki-sense, something was unmistakably registering.
In the short silence, Ash withdrew the sense.
"They're there. For certain."
That one sentence froze the air around them.
Ifrit swallowed dryly and whispered.
"Can you give me more detail?"
"Three, beyond doubt. I can feel faint currents moving around them, but I cannot tell what those are."
His calm report continued.
"They are not Sentinels. Their movement is far more chaotic and dynamic. If I had to guess—"
"Idols. Right?"
Ash nodded at Ifrit's words.
"Correct."
"Good. Everyone, huddle up for a sec."
At her word, the single-file column broke apart and gathered in a tight circle.
"Ash. Three confirmed?"
"That's right."
"Dullahan. If we give up this route, how far do we have to backtrack?"
At her question, system messages for the calculation cascaded across his visor dozens of times over.
After a moment:
"Fucking hell."
Cursing under her breath, Ifrit fell silent for a while.
A flicker of anguish passed over her face — but the emotion was swiftly, cleanly erased beneath something called a decision.
"We don't have options. We punch through. If our routes overlap, you break through them. Simple as that, right?"
No one voiced an objection.
"Alright then — let's go find out who we're dealing with."
The party pressed forward, guarding their surroundings with a wariness beyond anything they'd shown before.
At last, they arrived.
And there, spread out before them, was a vision of hell.
"..."
It was a cavern.
The vast, hollow expanse was filled with nothing other than blood and corpses.
The dismembered bodies were beyond counting.
Every one of them had been cut apart, making an exact tally impossible — but there seemed to be well over ten.
Most wore crude gear and cheap cyberware, suggesting a pack of no-name idol teams who had banded together in hopes of striking it rich.
And every one of them had been slaughtered without even a cry of protest.
One could have called it an "ordinary" ruin massacre, perhaps — but there was one unmistakable difference.
Three women, seated gracefully atop the field of the dead.
Beneath the lights of broadcast drones drifting on all sides, each took her rest in her own fashion — with the air of someone utterly unconnected to this horrific butchery.
One perched on a corpse, filing her nails. Another shook the blood from her clothes.
But the most chilling of the three was the woman standing at the very center of the carnage, drenched in more blood than anyone.
Cradling her blood-soaked blade like a lover, she hummed a song with an expression of pure rapture.
It was a clear, lilting, achingly beautiful voice.
And that very beauty made the horror before them all the more grotesque, all the more bone-deeply wrong.
Her name.
It was a scene that could not have suited the moniker Siren — the one said to lead all who heard her into ruin — any better if it had been tailor-made.