Trace ‘Tune’ Delevey was not happy with how this latest job was going. All the information was supposed to have been included in the data prism he had been given by the job broker. It should have been a simple matter of sneaking in past two drugged-up Virtual-Connect addicts and grabbing the goods.

Except that wasn’t the case at all. It wasn’t just two mostly mind-toasted addicts. Or at least it wasn’t now. In the beginning, it had been. Now, there were twelve of them, and they were in the process of carving someone apart for the cybernetic pieces as he watched.

They were all drek scavs, the lowest of the low. They were scavengers who kidnapped people right off the street and then harvested them for parts. It didn’t matter if the person was even dead yet, they would go to work on them and let them bleed out on the table. Some of them even enjoyed the pain they inflicted on the people.

Everything was up for grabs to the scavs.

They specialized in everything related to cyberware, but they were just as willing to scavenge fleshware parts if they already had a buyer lined up.

The job had looked too good to be true for the credits it was offering. He needed the money though, and so he had ignored that little voice that had told him there was something wrong with the job and taken it anyway.

Now where had his desperation gotten him?

In the middle of a scav den, with no backup and a bladder on the verge of failing him. His equipment, by which he meant his guns and armor, not the aforementioned pre-leaky bits, was subpar homemade scat. It had fallen off the back of a poor person’s truck and then been dragged through the sewer before finding its way to him.

Even the two augments he had were the cheapest that could be found on the market.

Frankly, the drek in front of him had better augs than he did, and more of them to boot. It only went to show you that crime really did pay, especially in this day and age. At least until some Reaper came along and took them out. Reapers paid even somewhat decently for solid information on scav dens.

If he managed to make it out of this situation alive, he would need to contact them later and see if they would pay him for the location of this one. A few extra credits were never a bad thing.

Again, that was assuming he managed to survive and make it out.

A fight was the absolute worst thing that could happen to him with his current equipment. However, he also didn’t think his chances of sneaking back out were all that high. The only reason he hadn’t been discovered yet was because they hadn’t bothered looking in the direction of the mounds of trash since they had returned.

He had dived into the middle of the pile of trash bags and loose filth as soon as he heard them coming back. It had been a close thing, but he had made it. He wasn’t sure how long he would be able to remain in that spot though. The smell was cloying, as they apparently filled the bags with pieces of the dead, and he could feel needles poking his armor.

The last thing he wanted was to get stabbed by some used needle in a scav den. The mere thought made him shake and want to vomit.

As it was, he could only watch in stupefied horror as they butchered their latest victim. The muffled screams that slowly became blood-gurgling whimpers taking on a life of their own inside his mind.

His body refused to move as he became an unwitting witness to their latest crime. This was the first time he had ever seen something so terrible in the first person, and he wasn’t prepared for it.

Sure, life in New Denver and the surrounding territories that made up the Mountain Collective was harsh. It was like that everywhere, or so he had been told. This though, what he had just seen was another level altogether. It terrified him. It wasn’t about simply struggling for food or shelter; it was just being brutal for the sake of being brutal.

It drove home something that people had always told him, but he had never quite gotten it until that moment. Scavs are sadists. They enjoyed the work they did. The creds and extra cyberware they get are just a bonus for them.

If they found him, there was no hope for him. It didn’t matter that he only had two bargain bin pieces of cyberware, they would still rip him apart. What was worse, they would do it while he was still conscious, while his mind was still active, while his eyes were still open.

Just like they had done to that poor soul in front of him.

The poor nameless bastard that he had done nothing to help. He hadn’t tried. The gun on his hip was practically decoration by this point, not something that he had ever seriously used.

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Everyone carried a weapon these days. If you didn’t at least have a show of force minimum, then you were asking to get mugged. He could count on both hands the number of times he had been forced to draw it and on one hand, the number of times he had fired it. Two times and both were misses.

There was a reason he preferred sneaking into places instead of going in, guns blazing. Well, there were a few reasons, actually. Ammo was expensive. Healing was expensive. His life, at least in his opinion, was expensive.

When you snuck into a place, there was a lot less of a chance of being caught and then getting shot. At least that had been the case up till today.

Now he had to make a choice, and he had no idea what to do.

Did he make a stand here and hope for the best, or did he keep cowering among the filth and discarded remains of their past victims?

Was there even a fraction of a hope that he could survive going up against twelve armed and much better-augmented scavs? What was his bottom line? He had already watched them tear into that person and done nothing. Was that really who he wanted to be? Did he want to stay afraid of everything and everyone for the rest of his life, or did he want to try and make a difference just this once and take out a scav den?

He would never say he had aspired to be a reaper, but a Wraith… that was a dream that had certainly appealed to him. Wraiths were different from reapers in that they didn’t focus on simply killing. They were more broad in purpose; it was right there in the name. They were wraiths, shadows, the unseen. Assassins and thieves, people who worked in the shadows.

They were what he had always aspired to be, but had always lacked the courage and credits to truly become. To do that sort of work, you needed a certain level of cyberware that he had never been able to afford. You also needed to be willing to put yourself in situations that were more dangerous than he had ever been willing to attempt.

Closing his eyes, Trace ground his teeth. He barely held back his gag reflex as something cold and slimy from the bag above his head chose that moment to drip onto his lip. His hand inched slowly towards the gun in his hip holster, as he tried to desperately remember when the last time he had cleaned it was.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember. Which meant it had been a long time ago. He just hoped it still functioned and wouldn’t blow up in his hand. If he made it through this, then he promised himself he would start spending what little money he had to go to the shooting range more often. He would even take better care of his crappy gun.

Everything that he should have already been doing but had been putting off. If he made it out, he would start doing it all. He silently promised to the steel goddess Meredith above.

His single augmented eye didn’t even have the functionality to link with the aiming reticle on guns. Not that his crappy gun had one of those anyway. Which meant he had to aim the old-fashioned way, using iron sights that may or may not be accurate.

He was buried in a trash pile fifteen feet away from them. Hopefully, even he couldn’t miss from that short of a distance. There was only one way to find out though, and despite himself, Trace still found his body hesitating, refusing to obey his commands. It was all he could do to pull it out and quietly rack the slide against his thigh.

It was likely that he would have remained frozen in that state for the rest of the day if it hadn’t been for the scavs finishing up. Most of the intestines went into a trash bag, similar to the ones strewn about him. It was then promptly tossed onto the pile with a nasty squelching noise.

He was unable to hold back the gagging noise he made as it all pressed down on his head. It was a loud enough sound that they all heard it, and it was more than enough to make them turn toward the pile of trash. The gig was up. He either needed to act right then or become another nameless victim lost to time like so many others.

Still, he hesitated, right up until one of them grabbed the bags from above his head. Then, he finally found the courage to open fire on them.

The gun jerked in his hand as the smell of burning gunk and plastic wafted into the air.

The scav released the trash bags as a look of shock came over his stupid-looking face. All the sounds in the room stopped as the other scavs turned to the fellow he had just shot. A bead of red bloomed out from his chest as he slowly toppled over backward. Blood continued to drip out and onto the floor as the man silently died.

It was the first person that Trace had ever killed, and it wouldn’t be the last. Not if he wanted to get out of the situation alive.

The scavs finally reacted after several seconds of shock. None of them had expected to find someone in their operating room and then for one of their own to suddenly die. Regardless, they quickly shook off the shock and pulled out their various weapons.

With his free hand, Trace began rearranging the trash bags on top of himself, burying his body deeper into the pile. The hand holding the gun he simply waved around and pulled the trigger. There was no way he could properly aim it from where he was, so he didn’t even try.

There had been four scavs in the room initially. One just leaning against the doorframe smoking something that put out toxic blue clouds. Two had been working on the body, and then there was the fellow who had been on trash duty.

Well, that last one was already dead, but that still meant there were three more in the room he had to deal with. Once he made it through them, there were still another eight before he reached the door. That was assuming that he had seen all of them when they brought the body in earlier. If he hadn’t and there were more…

No, it didn’t matter either way, because the chances of him surviving the next ten seconds, let alone that long, were infinitely slim.

His bullets flew through the air, ricocheting randomly whenever they hit the edge of the table or the sloping corner of a light. There was a slight grunt of pain from one of the unqualified surgeons as he took a bounced round to the back of his butt. Every other shot missed, and within a few seconds, the dreaded sound of his magazine running dry rang out.

The scav with a freshly offset butthole laughed and raised his automatic pistol to the trash pile. The other two were only a second behind him.

Without even waiting for a signal to begin, all three of them opened fire at the same time.