Chapter 108: The Surface
Soul Killer’s Research Notes on Diana Ulrich [Deleted and sent to another lab.]
Diana Ulrich, what a curious phenomenon she is. The Sin never raised the topic of her to me, but she was no doubt always intended to come into my hands… it’s just a shame it had to be that version of me to first meet her. Oh, if things hadn’t been different due to Juliet’s intervention and Jacob’s death, we would have molded her perfectly into our soldier.
I’m sure of it, her Deviant Mutation, Mutagenic Drain, originates from a Fragment of the Source-Shard of The Infinite. I recall it well, awakening and inheriting the memories of those who saw it’s reign of destruction and ruin over The Floridian Free City. How futile Zero’s attempts at defeating it were.
It must be fate, for the monster that awakened me to be delivered at my doorstep. She’s unparalleled in her Tier for the sheer volume of Mutagenic resources she can absorb, a creature capable of harnessing energy and converting between states through the unique genetic restructuring she’s gone through. Oh, now she’s got me curious about her counterpart.
I wonder if I can somehow emulate the processes I went through with Heart Seeker to inherit Hexblood’s revival. They had only been at an 85% compatibility, but my previous experience with twins in Topaz and Quartz surely benefited the success of that project. I remain unsure in what qualities could be transferred between her and Dreadwire… nor the method to do so. A 99% compatibility… it’s so close to true Hybridism.
That very purpose for which I’d been created, and now… I fear I may not be able to witness it firsthand. Zero… you’ve led the R0N1N towards Yuzhou’s invention of that MAL I forged from you, but I have no doubt that Amaterasu has departed it into another. In time, we will know what will come of their union, I have no doubt that The Sin will one day state upon us the words I have longed for.
The day I can finally kill Skeleton and The Dogwhistler.
The day that there only needs to be one Adapter of The Infinite.
Diana
The bullets rattled away as I kept my gaze down, and soon… Dryder walked out. His face was etched in blankness, a sense of duty and resolve I knew came from repeated experiences like this. “It’s done.”
“All… of them?”
“No.” Dryder crouched, looking over Olivia as he gently checked her eyes. “Not all of them. You… you really cured her?”
“I think so.” It felt like a lie when I said it. “I… I just… tried to do what felt… natural. I have no idea if I actually…”
“I know a place to take her. Kids like her… aren’t an uncommon sight.” He sighed, clenching his fist. “You did good here, Diana.”
He gently picked her up, motioning with his head for me to follow.
Olivia was safe and, for what we assumed, healthy as we found a quiet couch to place her on within the deeper layers of the MAL Bunker. The walls echoed as far as we walked, through each and every empty door to leave no stone unturn.
I saw their research notes, complicated words spread across spreadsheets and documentation. Dryder compiled them into a Warpcube, his voice coming out slowly. “I know a lady who can help… a geneticist who runs an orphanage.”
“Does she know about… Soul Killer?” I frowned as I stopped at one article… SynTec was mentioned several times as being… a method through which Soul Killer extracted funding. Had they infected even a corporation… or…?
I feared to think it, none of this made sense as we broke our way into one of the more secured labs. What we found had shattered my streak of silence. “Is that… Are those Kaisels?”
The room was full of large vats each containing growing masses of flesh, some of them were just bulging organs while a few of them had the unmistakable face of Kaisel growing within them. Clones? But I thought they…
“You should see what the corporations do…” Dryder began, before pausing awkwardly. “I mean I haven’t either, but there are rumors…”
“Like what?” It was anything to get my mind of… what had just happened.
“Well, like SynTec apparently grows entire families in vats! Or Yuzhou building their army out of clones who all have three testicles!”
“What?”
“Just a rumor. They want extra testosterone or something.” Dryder shrugged as he rummaged through the lab’s faculties, plucking out wires and various DataCubes or vials and storing them wherever he found space. “But whoever Kaisel was… she’s long dead.”
“So… what comes after this?” I mindlessly scrolled through some computer files, it was all too much technical genetic mumbo for me to decipher. There were grotesque details and pictures of so many humans losing their way and becoming MALs… if I was right, it seemed like even the Fangtooths all originated once from a human being.
“Well… you’re gonna have to lay low, until we figure out what the police is going to say about this place. Gonna have to scrub your Frame squeaky clean, install a rigged Bioshard up your nose since they took out your old one and… well, oh yeah, I gave you that shapeshifting Mutagen. Did it come out right?”
“I think it helped me get a mutation called Limited Morphology Manipulation.” I droned out, before sighing into my hands, nothing was entering my brain.
Dryder tapped my shoulder, his gaze heavy but also uplifting in a strange way. “Come on, there’s nothing else for us here.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“What about the Kaisels?” I stared at the shrunken face of one clone, I wondered who the original body must have been… if she was even still alive.
“Their life support was turned off before we even got here, so was most of anything important. SK knew how this would end up the second I arrived.” Dryder couldn’t help sounding annoyed, but I understood where he was coming from.
I wanted nothing more than Soul Killer’s head on a pike. The real Soul Killer. “So what, how many of these bases do they even have? Do we take out all of them and only then they’re dead?”
“There are other bases, yes.” Dryder began walking away from the demented scene of the room, and I followed. He groaned, the tiredness in it harmonizing with my own feelings. “I don’t know how many there are… but don’t expect them all to be like this one.”
“What do you mean?”
“This place was easy to take down relatively, the nexus here was… weak. You saw it right, how they only controlled three MALformed at a time? That’s not my experience with the other places, some could control tens of them at once… but what was unique here was the difference in how they changed.”
“You mean…” I remembered something, when Anthony was being threatened he consumed a gas that was supposed to raise the Development of the Soul-Death Mutation. Everyone else, however, could spontaneously lose themselves at a moment’s notice. “How fast they had… turned into Parasytes.”
“Aye. It appears that Soul Killer used this facility as a means of experimenting methods to rapidly induce that demented Mutation. A new strand capable of spontaneous Mutagenesis… this place wasn’t to build an army. It was only ever an experiment.”
“If that’s the case then…” My voice faltered.
“Soul Killer could have hundreds of people scattered through the District, and in a moment, we could have hundreds of MAL hunting within our walls.”
“Just when you think it stops!” I kicked into the wall nearest to me, my foot hurt, but it distracted me. “I- I fucking-!”
“Calm down Diana, this type of rage is exactly what they want. If you strike blindly then you’ll gladly end up in their jaws.” Dryder put an affirming hand on my shoulder.
“I know… I know… I just thought that… getting out of here would have been more-“
“Fulfilling?” Dryder’s glance shared too much of my emotion. “You know what a Hydra is? It was a fabled beast of old, take down one head and another would come up to replace it… a never ending cycle that whittles you down to your bone.”
“Then when does this end?”
“When we strike the heart and not the heads.” Dryder entered over to the main hall, where Olivia was still stirring in her sleep. “…but for now, focus on her. Focus on Anthony, you saved lives. There’s not a lot here in Westbrook who would have done what you did even with the same power.”
I brought my attention over to Olivia, she was cured, and that was all thanks to me but… no, no buts. I’d managed more progress against Soul Killer in the time I spent here than the police had managed in a whole half-century. Picking her up, we continued back to where Anthony was sitting in the room.
It pained me to know that we left him here, but it ended up being for the better once we tried to leave this place. The doors were sealed tight, practically unbreakable due to the purpose designed over them. So then Dryder sat there for a few minutes as he plugged his head into the internal systems, leaving me to my thoughts.
But even my thoughts wanted to leave me alone, my eyes were so heavy after all of this. I’d just reached Tier II only to fight harsh battles afterwards, everything in me needed a break. So my eyes closed, and stayed that way until Dryder tapped me awake to the open doors.
I’d forgotten what the sun felt like on your skin, that natural warmth whispering the echoes of the coming day. The harshness in that light to those who lived in the shadows, and most importantly, that you didn’t realize how much you missed something until it was gone.
I’m pretty sure I cried as I helped load Anthony into a truck, apparently it was Dryder’s, one that he modded to be identical to the trucks loading supplies in and out of the cargo bay we were in. The barnyard smell whipped a sense of life into me, a longing for those times back in the forest with my hunting gun and my…
I didn’t let the thought finish, instead as I sat in the passenger seat, I decided to ask Dryder the question that had been bugging me the longest. “What’s today’s date?”
“Right, you aren’t exactly caught up in recent news. Today’s date is-“
September 6th
4:57 PM
“Oh.” In ways, the time that had passed was both longer and shorter than I’d imagined. “I heard that… something happened on the outside. What exactly was it?”
“Westbrook’s a big city, there’s always something happening… what was it, celeb gossip? A corporate scandal or… nah, I know what you’re talking about. It’s to do with that friend of yours, the one who shares that Golden Energy in you, isn’t it?”
I chewed my cheek, of course Dryder knew, he had been watching me for a long time. “What exactly happened?”
“Well, you know the R0N1N?” Dryder turned his head to me.
“Pretty sure you know the answer to that, he was there, at the hotel.”
“Well, turns out it was all some big scheme to raid Yuzhou Facilities.”
“Facilities? As in multiple?”
“Correct, three of them. Death count is high, Yuzhou won’t say exactly, but what makes this one so remarkable is that there wasn’t one, but two Gold Grade Mercenaries acting within the attack. This new kid in particular is stirring up all the papers for the stunts he pulled of.”
“So he’s got a reputation now… doesn’t he.” I stared off into the passing cars, wondering what exactly would happen between us now. I’d told Anthony to go find Ripley if things went wrong but… it was obvious to say that the help didn’t come.
“Yeah, Ripley goes by the name Dreadwire now.” Dryder casually said, to which I shifted nervously.
“How’d you know his name?”
“You’re the one who said it, back when that drone entered your apartment…”
I didn’t like this, knowing that he’d been watching me. “How long have you been-”
“Since you first got entangled with Anthony.” He admitted. “Kid is… he means something that I had to….”
He took a sip of a bottle even as he drove, he waved off my caution before I could berate him. “Look, they call me Drunk Ryder for a reason! Where was I? Yeah… uh… started looking into you the second you attacked Metal Heavens in LR. Been in the business for a long time and cops like you, stupid but with a heart of gold, don’t last long.”
He continued. “A little further in, figured you were Brian Ulrich’s daughter… wasn’t going to bug you immediately, not until the bug in Anthony’s house told me his dad gave you that cube. Knowing what I know… I… it was stupid of you to open it up on your home network.”
“Ripley told me that much.”
“And he was right. You do this. You have to be smarter, more cautious, trust no one.”
“Been doing that for a long time… Derrick.” I guessed that was his real name, Soul Killer mentioned it and Anthony had also said that Derrick was the name of his mother’s partner before she left the police force.
“It’s Dryder. I respect you enough to call you Diana Jones.” He said, to which I nodded. “You went AWOL for a bit, didn’t take too long to realize from Anthony that you got taken and… well… things got complicated. Can’t charge in blindly and…”
He was avoiding the reasoning of why he didn’t come in sooner. I could tell. “Cut the bullshit, and-”
“By the way, Dreadwire’s someone who we… might want to know. Saw his skills in the newsfeed and… well, his bounty speaks for himself.” An image passed into my lens from Dryder, and I poked it open mentally. My eyes went wide at the sight.
Bounty Issuance for Gold-Grade Mercenary: Dreadwire
Total Bounty: 150 Million
Bounty Issuers: 130 Million from Yuzhou [Dead; Arachne Shardware, Implant and body passed over]; 20 Million from Metal Heavens [Alive]
Description: An unknown Gold Mercenary who played responsibility in August 30th’s attack on Yuzhou. Uses a unique Arachne-based Endoskeleton capable of causing severe damage to Shardware, he has links to R0N1N and The Iron Devil.