It's About Saving Yourself Ch 14

Blegh. At danger of sounding like a scratched record. This past week was tough.

In fact it's been a tough few weeks.

Or rather...a tough few months.

...A tough few years.

So...I guess I'm building up to saying thank you lot for reading and helping me pay my bills. It's sincerely extremely helpful.

Now! I know at least some of you lot read the last writing update. SO!

I'm gonna post the other story I have ready to start posting as a draw for Ko-Fi commissions...this coming week. I would say tomorrow, but stuff was looking like I was going to have to stay pretty late throughout the coming week, it might just be another one of them weeks where I just spend the all my evenings writing with my brain leaking out my ears.

After that, I'm a pretty big proponent of the Rule of Three. So I need to come up with a third story before I start posting those for commissioning. So uhh...I guess I'll just be open with y'all. I have a Star Wars story.

Or rather, I have the start of a Star Wars Waifu Catalog story. Set in the Clone Wars. I could try and get that one to a few chapters. Enough to draw people in, y'kno? Then post it here. And then post it publicly some time later. That said, I need to marshal my writing efforts, because work is gonna get tougher before it lightens up near the end of the year. Is a Star Wars story something y'all would enjoy? Should I try and do a poll?

I'm open to suggestions. Doesn't even have to be Waifu Catalog or self-insert. Please, feel free to give suggestions. As of now, the plan is to go ahead with the Waifu Catalog Star Wars Clone Wars story.

...

Yeah, that's it.

Here is the next chapter of Saving Yourself.

=][=

As Falco did his best to drive into every single pothole on the road to the Grand Imperial Mall, I checked, and rechecked, and rechecked my weapons.

My modified quad-barrel Rostović DB-2 Testera, loaded with four shredder slugs, and a bandoleer full of magnum buckshot, more shredder slugs, incendiary shells, and acid slugs.

My Militech M-179 Achilles, a weapon I did not use often, as its ammunition was expensive, it was finicky, delicate, had an atrocious magazine size, it was expensive to maintain and repair, and if I charged too many shots in a row the railgun had a tendency to melt. But it had the stopping power to put down a charging elephant and if charged, it didn’t give a single gangrenous fuck about walls between it and its target.

And lastly, a Techtronika RT-46 Burya, a soviet relic; It was ugly, inconvenient, cheaply made, ugly as sin, heavy, each swappable cylinder of the railgun revolver only held four rounds, and to top things off it had such heavy recoil that if handled incorrectly it would smack someone unaugmented in the face, or bump fire and blow the user’s brains out. But for all that, it required no charge time, and it fired its flechettes in such a tight cluster they may as well be a slug fast enough to tear through heavy armorjack, the meat or internal machinery behind it, and the walls behind that.

I was weighed down with enough ammo to make a whole community of rednecks breathe heavily while touching themselves, and my hands itched to be bathed red in Animal blood.

My crew sat around me, watching silently as I obsessed over my weapons.

“So uhh…” Rebecca said, looking warily at me, and glancing at Kiwi and Lucy. “Al? We uhh…we got a plan here? You know? This is usually the bit where you go over the job and stuff.”

“Yeah.” I answered as I checked the firing pins on my Testera for the ninth time. “We go there, we find anything that isn’t the hostage. We shoot it till it dies. Lucy and Kiwi will provide support.”

Rebecca looked from me to Kiwi and Lucy, and back to me. “R-Right.”

Apex had not come along for this job. I wasn’t here to play hero or play nice. I was here for one reason only. I was going to kill every single Animal in the building, make sure they could not hurt anyone else. Somewhere in between all that the hostage would likely be found.

Apex did not need to be exposed to something this ugly.

Not yet.

“We’re arriving in two!” Falco called from the front of the car.

I checked my weapons one final time, made sure they all had one in each of the respective pipes, and prepped my Daemons suite.

Lucy reached out a hand and laid it on my shoulder, I could barely feel it through my armorjack and equipment, it wasn’t until I felt the pressure of her hand that I realized I was shaking. “Alex…Alex please promise me you’ll be careful.”

I worked my jaw. Trying to tell her what she wanted to hear.

But I didn’t want to lie to her.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to calm down, until I could not only say the words, but mean them. “I will, Lucy. I will.”

The car came to a stop a way off from the entrance to the mall, the back of the van opening. The poisoned well in my gut surged forth, making me nauseous with the need for vengeance, without my input the Sandevistan thundered on, I slipped past Lucy, Kiwi, and Rebecca who were frozen solid, jogging to the doors of the mall. There were four Animals outside, three of them reaching for weapons, one of them raising a hand to his head, his eyes glowing gold.

Four quiet ‘thuds’ later, their heads came apart in a welter of blood, brain matter and reinforced bone.

I kicked the door open, there were more Animals inside, frozen in the middle of laughing, lifting weights, eating, the things good people did that these monsters parodied. The instant the Sandevistan timed out, the frozen world resumed motion, some of the Animals jumped in surprise. The world froze again when the fastest of them had their weapons raised a third of the way.

They were the first to die, quintets of flechettes boring through their skulls from the Achilles. I emptied the rest of the magazine on the second fastest Animals to react, and tore ravenously through the ICE of any I couldn’t reach.

When the world resumed. Some of the gangsters fell to heat stroke, others began puking their guts out, a few danced in place as their cyberware electrocuted them. Some fell dead, their brains fried by their neural ports.

A few begged for mercy, wrestling with their own limbs as they betrayed them, raising a pistol to their own eye before pulling the trigger.

The luckiest among them simply fell unconscious. Their neural port forcing them to sleep. As I put a quintet of flechettes through their skulls, I chastised myself for not switching out that daemon for something more appropriate to the work I was doing.

The pitter patter of small feet told me Rebecca had arrived at the door. From the moment the back of Falco’s van opened to now, nine seconds had passed.

I spied movement. The Sandevistan roared.

The eight foot tall, four-hundred-pound gangster running through the door had a reflex tuner, his right fist moving perceptively slowly toward me as I stepped up to him. Far too slow to stop me putting the barrels of my shotgun to his chin and blowing his brains out the top of his head. The two behind him suffered much the same fate.

The Sandevistan timed out, I felt an impact on my upper back that staggered me but did not break my armorjack, my implant roared back to malevolent life, giving me all the time in the world to line up the barrel with the idiot who shot me and reduce his head to an unrecognizable puddle of blood, brain, and bubbling acid.

The slaughter continued. Someone was calling for me, but I couldn’t hear them over the roaring in my ears. My world devolved into the thrum of the Sandevistan, the heat of my overworked Netdriver, and the ache of absorbed recoil in my shoulder joint and what little remained of my spine.

At some point, I was down to the last Animal. A green haired woman who weighed eighty pounds more than I did in pure muscle. She was curled up in the fetal position as I brought down the stock of my Testera on whatever part of her I could reach. She babbled, asking for mercy, begging for her mother to save her.

How fucking dare she.

I emptied the four barrels into her arms, then did the same with the Burya’s cylinder. The incendiary ammunition cauterizing the wounds and making certain she would not bleed out too quickly.

A few kicks to her chin silenced her annoying screeching.

I swapped out the spent cylinder for a fresh one, stomped on her neck, and aimed it between her eyes, and was surprised at how short my breath was. “Give me one reason. Any reason at all. Why I should let you live.”

“P-Please!” She said, then babbled incoherently rather than answer my demand.

I stomped down on her nose, the reinforced plate on its ridge spreading the force out through the rest of her skull, denying me the crunch I wanted. “I asked you. A question.”

“I have a sister!” She shrieked. “Please I’m only doing this for my sister!”

I stomped down again. “Your name is Betany Anderson. You are an only child. Try again.”

“M-My mother. If I don’t take care of her—”

She cut off as I kicked her in the short ribs hard enough to nearly break my toenail on the steel toe of my boot. “Your father died when you were seven. Your mother died two years ago. Try again.”

This continued. The animal at my feet lying, coming up with increasingly more pathetic falsehoods about why I should let her live, ever more frantic, wondering how I knew so much about her; not difficult when her entire life’s story was at my fingertips through her agent.

She began sobbing, tears, snot, and blood staining her clothes and the ground as she begged, promising she’d turn her life around, that she’d abandon her ways, that she’d become an upstanding citizen. She’d turn herself in to the cops and do her time in jail.

I became aware of Rebecca, watching what I was doing silently. She didn’t look particularly bothered. I could feel Kiwi and Lucy’s gaze through the nearest camera.

I got tired of the worthless creature at my feet and shot a flechette slug through her left lung to shut her up.

I put the barrel of the Burya against her forehead. “Offer me money.”

“I-I-Everything I own! It’s yours!” She panted, stopping to spit up blood and staining my mother’s EMT smartpaint jacket. I never did get around to returning it.

This worthless insect stained my mother’s jacket.

I shot her ear off for the transgression. “Offer me, anything I want. Convince me to spare, your worthless life.”

As she blubbered, her face melted and morphed, becoming the twisted grinning features of one of the first animals I’d killed, the one who shredded my mom’s car with us still in it.

The face made me angry. I brought the Burya down on her teeth to wipe that smug smirk off her face. The impact causing the gun to go off, the shot carving a trench through the gangster’s face and tearing her left eye out of its socket and spilling ceramic teeth on the ground.

She screamed.

But her stupid face was no longer grinning.

I raised the gun again. The animal’s lack of symmetry offended me.

+Dad?+ Asked a very familiar voice directly into my head. The synthetic-but-not voice pouring cleansing, cold water on the consuming fires of my rage. The poisoned well fled me, leaving me feeling hollowed, carved out, empty.

Tired.

I turned, instinctively finding the drone through the mall’s skylight.

+Dad? What are you doing?+ Apex asked. +Dad…are you okay?+

I couldn’t answer. Shame welled up where rage had been, just as all consuming, but frigid. My legs became leaden weights, my throat burned raw with every labored breath. Without the red haze that had colored my sight to push it back, blackness rushed in from the edges of my vision until the only things keeping me on my feet were my willpower and reacting quickly enough to lock my knees.

“A-Apex?” I rasped, my voice a hollow monotone in my ears. “What…What are you doing here?”

The not-so-little drone skittered backward until all I could see of it was one of the optics of her spidery faceplate. +You’d never told me to stay behind before. I was worried.+

I looked away; I couldn’t bear the thought of Apex seeing my face. I searched for the poisoned well, for the certainty of purpose that had filled me just a moment before. But try as I might, I could not bring myself to do that, to be that, not in front of Apex.

Apex deserved better.

+Dad…is she a bad person?+ She asked.

I tried to catch my breath as the gangster at my feet whimpered. I attempted to summon the anger that had sustained me throughout the whole running firefight, but the only thing that welled up within me was nausea. “She…she is one of the people who hurt me and your grandma, Apex. I was…making her pay for that.”

Apex was quiet for a long moment before she said. +Like Mister Mustang did with Envy?+

I looked down at the whimpering pile of muscle. “Something like that. Just…go home Apex, I’m…I’m okay.”

+Okay.+ She agreed, leaving me to contemplate what I had inadvertently done, irrational anger at the gangster beneath me rose up, demanding I punish her for making me show such an awful sight to my daughter.

But that, of course, was hypocritical. And I couldn’t be a hypocrite.

I had to be better.

“Oi, Al.” I turned to see Rebecca’s worried face as she reached out and placed a hand on my organic bicep. “You uhh…you doin’ alright there, choom?”

I considered the question carefully, then emptied the last round in the cylinder of my Burya through the head of the gangster at my feet and swapped out the spent cylinder for a fresh one. “No, ‘Becca, I honestly don’t think I am. Lucy, Kiwi, have either of you found the package?”

Without a word, one of them put a nav point in my HUD. I took a step and fell when my knee refused to hold up my weight, my whole body began to tremble as a terrible exhaustion seeped out of my bones. Glancing at my self-diagnosis program, I saw several dozen alerts and warnings that I had ignored and silenced.

“Hey, c’mon choom.” Rebecca said with surprising gentleness as she helped me to my feet, then hugged my side with the weak knee, acting as an improvised crutch.

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I walked like an old man in the direction indicated by the NAV point. “This is so unmanly of me.”

“Eh, big manly dudes who do manly things manfully and are too manly to need help are sssoooo 2050s anyways, you should have been a tiny femboy to fit with the times.”

I shuddered in exaggerated disgust. “If that ever happens to me, promise me you’ll end my suffering.”

“With big mommy smooches?”

“With a bullet to the brain.”

“And waste a perfectly good femboy? Not on your life.”

We continued to bicker as we walked. Pain growing with every step as my OS enumerated the plethora of torn muscles and micro fractures in my bones.

I knew there was a reason why I didn’t like the damn Sandevistan. I was going to tear this damn thing out of my back first chance I got.

=][=

Watching Alex shred through the Animals in the mall was simultaneously exhilarating to watch and made Lucy terrified for his safety. Which was stupid of her, she’d seen him fight plenty of times before!

Only, this time was different.

Lucy could not put her finger on why, it just was.

Alex was a blur, a black wind that burst Animal heads as it passed. The way the gangsters with cyberware fell in droves to hacks while the crew’s Netrunners sat back and did nothing, confirmed what Lucy and Kiwi had suspected for months. Alex had implanted two different operating systems simultaneously, and unlike every time someone had tried that, had not fried his brain or gone cyberpsycho.

As Alex continued to turn Animals into corpses, Lucy worried that whatever miracle had kept him together had finally run out.

[It’s not cyberpsychosis.] Kiwi said, all but having read Lucy’s mind.

Lucy turned to Kiwi’s net avatar where it floated next to her on the Grand Imperial Mall’s subnet. [How can you tell?]

Kiwi had one of the few remaining cameras zoom in as Alex finished off the gangsters in a vandalized store, then rushed past ‘Becca to get to whoever he’d chosen as his next target, making the tiny spitfire swear and yell at him to slow down while chasing him. Kiwi manipulated the playback, showing a few frames where Alex had had ‘Becca in his sights, finger on the trigger ready to end her life, before running around her and moving on. [Whatever this is, it’s targeted. He’s reflexively targeted ‘Becca a few times, but as violent as he is being he is still checking his target. He wouldn’t be doing that if he’d gone psycho. My guess is that this is something else, something personal. Back when we first met him, Gloria did say she’d been caught up in a gang shooting and her son had disappeared. In retrospect, seems pretty obvious the gang was the Animals.]

Kiwi’s avatar shrugged sarcastically. [Drat, wrong emote. Anyways, who knows? Maybe he’s the type to hold a grudge, or maybe he never really worked through it and this is a very bad episode of PTSD. Either way, job’s about finished, I found Saori, she’s safe and will keep while Alex gets whatever this is out of his system.]

[But…I don’t like this. I don’t like seeing him like this.] Lucy said.

[Well, he’s your output, console him, get his mind off things the way only an input can.]

Lucy’s body fidgeted, thankfully her Net Avatar required an input to do the same. [You’re only telling me that so you can claim the betting pool at Lizzie’s.]

Lucy didn’t answer, watching as Alex tortured the last remaining gangster in the building.

It was not unusual for cyberpunks to torment a defeated enemy, but as before, this was different. Lucy saw none of the usual malicious glee in his movements that one often saw in a fresh thug playing with his food.

What Alex was doing…it didn’t seem to bring him any joy. There was no laughter, no swagger, he went about hurting the gangster with the same methodical approach he did just about everything else.

Until he simply stopped, looking toward the ceiling. None of the cameras Lucy had available to her rose that high.

Alex didn’t pause for long before he absently put a round through the gangster’s head, asked for the location of the ‘Saka brat they were there to rescue, and staggered in the direction of Kiwi’s nav point with ‘Becca’s help.

[I’ll go ahead and call Rogue. The vehicle to move the rich brat will take a while to get here.] Kiwi said and disconnected from the call and the Net.

Lucy remained, watching over ‘Becca and her…her Output.

She twitched slightly as her ringtone indicated an incoming call. She didn’t recognize the address, but it was labeled ‘Apex’ so she had a good enough guess as to who it was. Suppressing a sigh, she accepted the call to see what Alex’s ‘daughter’ needed.

[Yes?] Lucy asked as she unlocked doors for Alex and ‘Becca.

Ignoring the immediate jab that Apex had just asked a question, Lucy instead said. [Go ahead.]

Lucy blanked. [Why what?]

Lucy mulled that over in her head. Clearly, Apex had come after all and had seen Alex torture the Animal. Lucy had a feeling she wouldn’t like where this conversation was going. [Uhh…she was in a gang and looking at her record, she had a pretty bad rap sheet so…yes?]

Oh thank god, an easy question. [No, your dad is way stronger than a random gangster.]

There were a few seconds of silence before Apex continued. +Was my dad scared of her?+

Lucy couldn’t suppress a snort at that. [Apex, your dad is one of the bravest men I’ve ever met, it would take a lot more than what these guys had to throw at him to scare him.]

+Then why was he being so mean to her? She was crying!+

Well, shit.

Before Lucy could come up with an answer, Apex dropped a much heavier bomb on her. +Is…Is my dad a bad person now? He did something only bad people do.+

[Apex, your dad is not a bad person. This girl…she is with some people who hurt him and your family, very very badly. I think, I think he’s been bottling up a lot of hurt and anger, and it got the better of him this time. But even then, he made sure to only hurt the people, who hurt him and his family.] Lucy took a deep breath. [What he did was not good, but it’s not nearly as bad as what was done to him.]

Apex remained quiet for a long time before answering. +Okay.+ And disconnected.

Lucy sighed and fell bonelessly back against her seat.

Bomb diffused…she was so gonna get back at Alex for this.