“What are the odds those doors are going to hold?” Trace asked as the platform settled into place on the main floor. Unlike Monroe, who was carrying an absolutely massive gun as his primary weapon, all Trace had was his regular assault rifle. It was a good gun, but it wasn’t some vehicle destroyer.

“Pretty good, I’d say, but they can still get in through the holes in the roof.”

The warehouse doors shuddered and squealed. The metal wheels holding them on the tracks at the bottom and the top were straining as the reinforced metal of the massive loading doors otherwise shrugged off the impacts. They were so over-built that Trace hadn’t even needed to look at them, unlike the roof or the regular door.

“Do you want to handle the roof? I’ll take the second entrance and finish what’s going on down in the basement. Leave a couple injured but alive and unable to leave if possible. I want answers.”

Monroe checked his rifle and nodded. “You got it. Be careful down there.”

“You too,” Trace told him as he took in the sight of the gun and the magazine that had just been slipped into place. The cartridges weren’t quite as large as the ones used in their revolvers, but they weren’t much smaller either. “What kind of rifle is that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like it before.”

Monroe racked the slide and ran a hand along the length of the rifle’s short barrel. “I’d be surprised if you had. It’s a heavy rifle made as a joint effort between Colter and Koltech. It’s the ‘Techter .650’. and it’s almost as mean as our revolvers.”

“Do they come in normal person size?”

The large man laughed and shook his head, already jogging toward the ladder that would take him to the roof.

“I wasn’t joking,” Trace muttered as he headed for the apartment. “I want one of those things.”

Inside, he rushed past Deckard and into the closest, where he opened the door for the basement stairs. There was a second door at the bottom of the stairs that he had never been able to open due to the water pressure. Over the years, some water had seeped in around the edges, creating a puddle, but overall, the door had maintained a remarkably good seal against the encroaching moisture.

Now he was about to ruin that.

Trace twisted the handle and threw all of his weight against the door, feeling it barely budge. A little more water came in through a few places, but that was it. He tried again, achieving the same result, a few more leaks, but nothing else to show for his efforts.

The pressure from the water on the other side was simply too great. Until there was enough water on this side to equalize the pressure, the door wasn’t going to open.

Grumbling to himself for wasting time, Trace raced back up the stairs and back out into the warehouse and onto the elevator platform. Firing from above like before was how it would have to be. He just wouldn’t be able to use the assault rifle still, and hopefully, his wrist could withstand the abuse. His second perk might be called ‘Steady Hands 1’, but the ability to reduce recoil was really making a difference at the moment.

He lowered the platform to around the same height as before and slid to a different edge from before.

The area below had fallen quiet.

Trace trained his flashlight down below and used the scope on his K-10 to look around. The water level had fallen significantly to the point where it was no longer creating a vortex around the opening the bear had created. Now that the waterline was naturally well below the top of that opening, it was simply gushing out instead. There was still plenty of pressure behind all the water, but the force had been lessened some.

He could see a couple of corpo agents peeking around the edges of the opening, content to stay in the sewer for the moment. Looking around the water-filled basement, he was soon able to see why.

The corporation created aberration bear had been injured. Oddly enough, it was leaning against the wall, near where the door leading up to the apartment was. The sight made him doubly glad that he had been unable to get the door open.

For the first time, he was able to get a clear look at the thing, and he found himself filled with equal parts awe and revulsion. Whichever corporation had done this to the poor beast had gone above and beyond in what they did to it. The legs were natural, but there were extra veins and arteries being run outside of its body to enhance its muscles. Both of its arms -if that was even the right term when it came to something like a bear- had been replaced with cyberware versions and synth skin.

Then there was its neck and head. The neck had received a similar treatment to its legs, though the tubes here had been covered in synth skin that had mostly been torn off. The head thankfully remained mostly organic, with only the jaw and upper mouth being switched out for something more cybernetic and metallic in nature.

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It truly was an aberration, just not the kind typically found from the irradiated zones. Those ones weren’t quite so cybernetically modified in nature.

Trace flicked the scope to the opening to check on the corpo agents and then zoomed back in on the bear. It was definitely injured. There were streams of blood running from multiple holes in its body. Yet, the bear didn’t seem to care all that much. If anything, it looked as though it was simply taking the chance to rest, and nothing more.

Its skin hung loose on its frame as though they had been starving it.

Looking between the two groups, Trace wasn’t sure which one he wanted to win. He had no idea why the bear was even in his basement! It seemed like a little too much of a coincidence to him that he would be the one hired to track it, and that it would also then show up at his home. The job part he could understand, Revlock’s reasoning for hiring him, had, and still did make sense. The bear just happening to show up at his place though was a little too far.

Something else was going on, and he needed to know what it was.

Not that he was likely to receive any answers from a bear that couldn’t talk, or a bunch or a corpo hit squad. He might have better luck just searching their bodies for clues, unless Monroe had better luck on the roof, of course. One could always hope.

Trace turned his attention away from the bear for the moment and focused on the agents hiding in the sewer entrance. There were two options that he could pursue at the moment. Taking careful aim and open fire on them. Using that method, he might hit one of them before the rest hid again. After all, they had time. The other was using some of the remaining grenades he still had clipped to his bag.

They didn’t explode right away, so he might get lucky. He hadn’t used them until recently, so he didn’t really know how long their timers were and didn’t dare cook off the timer after pulling the pin either.

All he could do was combine the two and hope for the best.

He pulled the pin on the first one and dropped it over the edge and into the water. It was carried toward the opening and after only a couple of seconds; it was gone.

Trace counted in his head, and after five seconds, the grenade finally went off. By then, it had entered the sewer pipe and was nowhere near the agents. It had only stayed in the basement for maybe two or three seconds. The force created by the water leaving through the opening had pulled it out too quickly.

At least now he had an idea of how long he could hold it for.

There were three grenades left on his bag. Trace unclipped the next one and pulled the pin, holding it for a two-count before dropping it. He decided to play it a little safe, just in case he was off in some way.

The K-10 snapped into the position as the ribbed-for-their-pleasure, metal pineapple went through the opening. A second later, it exploded right behind them. The force of the explosion, mixed with their already shaky foot-placements ensured they needed to step into view as they fought to regain their balance.

Trace shot the first one in the head, and then quickly shifted to body shots as he didn’t have the time to precisely aim. He wasn’t good enough yet to be sure of his aim whenever he needed to hurry.

He blasted through the entire magazine of the K-10, grateful for its extended barrel and the accuracy that came with it. His aim might not be quite up to par, but at least it hadn’t suffered because of the distance and his choice of guns.

He spotted six corpo agents on the ground in the sewer pipe. Only the one he had hit in the head was dead, while all the rest were alive, but injured. The 10mm ammo had a punch to it that they were all feeling at the moment.

Two uninjured agents were in the process of pulling the six out of his area of visibility. That meant there were eight down there in total at the moment, and one had been eliminated. Monroe and the bear had taken out a few as well before.

Just how many people had this corporation sent to take down this bear originally?

Speaking of, Trace turned his scope and flashlight on the aberration and felt his brows pinch together as he frowned.

The way its skin hung off its body was noticeably looser than it had been a few minutes earlier. Along with that, he also noticed that the wounds it had received were completely gone.

The bear pushed off the wall it had been using to support itself, and after a couple of shaky steps, charged the hole.

There was so much going on here that Trace didn’t like, and the way the bear had healed itself at the expense of its body was definitely near the top. The corporations didn’t have access to technology that was capable of something like that.

Or at least, he hadn’t thought they did. It was becoming increasingly obvious to him that what he knew was exactly what the corporations wanted him to know and nothing more. They had access to and had developed tech far beyond what was commercially available. If he wanted to compete with them, he was going to need to play scavenger on the agents’ bodies and hope something good turned up.

Down below, he watched the bear tear into what remained of the unsuspecting corpo hit-squad. With one dead, and five still on the ground groaning in pain, it was easy for the bear to tear into them. The cyberware arms it had been given included plasma-edged claws that tore through the bodies of anything unfortunate enough to stand in its way.

The aberration had managed to activate the claws in its rage-induced rush. As soon as it took a second to search for a new target with a slightly calmer head, the plasma function flickered and died. It was too much to hope that a beast driven largely by instincts would be able to activate them at will.

Not that it made much of a difference to the bear. It had lived all its natural life with regular claws. What did it care whether they glowed or not?

The guns of the two remaining uninjured agents spat out a constant staccato as they were flicked into full-auto mode and let loose at close range.

From his position above and inside the basement, Trace was only able to catch a portion of what was happening inside the sewer pipe. None of it looked good though for either side.

The bear was bleeding heavily. Its newly reduced mass was much less effective at stopping bullets than before. The agents on the ground were simply getting stepped on and smashed into paste, while it tried to take down the remaining mobile corpo agent.

Trace inched closer to the ledge and used both hands to steady the pistol as he zoomed in as much as possible. He had swapped in a fresh magazine and was good to go, now all he needed was the chance.