Chapter 23

Chis smirked as he placed his elbows on the table and leaned even closer to my fully charged Bulldog. He reached up and tipped down his visor to look at me eye to eye. “Bad move, kid. What happens next is Nash hacks your gun.”

I felt pressure coming from their netrunner, and, in a moment of panic, I didn’t try to stop whatever he was doing, I didn’t try to lean on whatever program he was using to disable my gun, I shoved back as hard as my IA could. I immediately felt the heat from my IA burning my ears. Chis’ netrunner had a much harsher reaction. Nash’s head jerked to the left and stayed there, bent to the side as his eyes went blank. With a small popping noise a small cylinder, perhaps half an inch in diameter and two inches long, shot out of his IA, accompanied by a continual stream of greasy black smoke.

I”d definitely pushed my IA further than I should have. My vision was narrowing, like I was looking at the merc in front of me down a long dark tunnel. But my nanites obviously had a handle on it, and my vision rapidly began to come back to normal, although they seemed to be focusing on my brain since the audibly sizzling flesh around my IA hurt like a motherfucker.

“Actually, Chis,” I said with an even wider grin, ignoring the searing pain in my head, “What happens next is that Lizzy hacks Stumpy’s gun.” I barely had time to get the words out of my mouth before the high tech rifle pointed at my eye was encompassed by a series of blue arcs of electricity. The targeting laser pointed at my eye went out. Stumpy looked down at his deactivated rifle, looked back at me, and he dropped the rifle to hang by its shoulder strap as he took a quick hop backwards and put his hands up in a nonthreatening manner.

Chris was no longer smirking as he glanced at his fried netrunner and his one footed rifleman who seemed to be surrendering. Chris pushed his visor back up over his eyes before glaring at me. “Too bad we couldn’t come to a simple arrangement, I guess we’ll just have to-”

A bang rang out as musclebound tank top guy shot me. I barely felt the bullet bounce off my forehead. Chris’ forearms suddenly seemed to split in half as his purple sleeves parted to show some sort of large bored cannons hiding within.

So I let go of the trigger.

THOOM! Chis’ left eye disappeared, and I was now looking at a golf ball sized hole in his face that clearly showed me a view of the food court behind him.

+1000XP

The roar of Sara’s automatic shotgun from right behind me was nearly deafening as she turned the large slab of muscle in a tank top behind Chris’ corpse into bloody chunks. I guess that guy couldn’t afford subdermal armor…or maybe it just wasn’t very good subdermal? Either way, the man no longer resembled a human being so much as a pile of bloody rags wrapped around, or just generally protruding out of, a pile of chum.

The moment the first shot rang out, the samurai and the twin to my left engaged in a flurry of vicious sword strokes. Less than a second later the samurai found himself being overwhelmed when he suddenly found himself facing two ninjas whose blades had begun to glow bright orange. The fight from that point on was decidedly one sided, and the girls seemed to be toying with him as they methodically cut off both of his arms and legs in short order. The samurai found himself reduced to a head connected to a limbless torso, lying on his back. He seemed to be cursing them in Japanese, but I couldn’t really make out what he was saying through his mask. The girls finally crossed their katanas around his neck, almost like an oversized glowing pair of scissors, at which point they unceremoniously snipped off his head.

WIth the immediate cessation of his muffled curses the food court became oddly quiet after the sudden burst of violence that had somehow not even lasted a bare minute. “For what it’s worth, I had no interest in trying to fight you guys once I found out you were mercs,” said Stumpy, breaking the silence. He hadn’t moved and was still balancing on one foot with his hands up.

I tapped my Bulldog on the metal table a few times as I thought about him. “Your call, Sara,” I said after a bit of consideration. “You worked with him before, right?”

“Logan?” asked Sara from behind me. “Sure, we worked a couple gigs together. He even picked off a guy that was about to shoot me in the back on our last run…I’d say let him walk, if he agrees this was all on Chris, and that he’s not going to do something stupid like try to get revenge or something.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“All Chis’ fault!” Logan agreed wholeheartedly. “Probably did me a favor really, getting me out of working for a moron like that. I only tagged along because Nash got some intel that said the kids down here caught some kinda plague and were dropping like flies. This was supposed to be easy money. As it stands, I had to use most of my ammo fighting a small army of the little shits. I was barely going to break even, even if we collected the full pay day.” Logan still hadn’t moved and was looking at me with hope in his eyes.

“Well, alright then. Looks like you’re off the hook, Logan. But you owe Sara your life, I trust you’ll remember that going forward,” Logan was nodding so hard I was a little worried he’d hurt himself. “There’s just the small matter of my tailor’s bill then.” I stood up and held open my coat, displaying the grotesque splatter of blood and excrement coating its pink interior. “I”d imagine selling that fine rifle of yours should cover the cost of its repair and cleaning.”

“My rifle?” Logan looked down at the extremely expensive looking high tech weapon hanging across his chest and rather obviously had to stop himself from grabbing it as despair bloomed on his face.

“Ooo,” said Sara with obvious amusement. “Logan loooves that rifle, Mal. That’s just mean.”

“Well I looove my coat. So it seems fair to me,” I responded over my shoulder before returning my attention to Logan. “Tell you what, Logan, I’ll just be holding onto that rifle for a bit. I’ll get it appraised by my favorite gun dealer. You can pay me whatever he’d give me for it, and I’ll return it. Sound fair to you?”

Logan took longer to come to a decision than he did when he’d decided to sell out his dead friends. But eventually he reached up and slowly pulled the rifle’s strap over his head and carefully lowered it to rest on the floor in front of him. “Just take care of her, please. She’s very sensitive.” I received his contact information through my IA. “Just call me as soon as you get her appraised. I’ll meet you anywhere anytime. Just don’t sell her to anyone else, please.” The desperation in his voice was readily apparent.

“Deal,” I agreed with a firm nod. “I’ll make sure nothing happens to her in the meantime. We’ll just let this be a reminder to not shoot me again in the future. No harm no foul.” I gestured to the hallway he’d entered from. “Hop along, Logan, you’re free to go. I’ll call you later after I get the appraisal done.”

With a final glance at his rifle he did just that and awkwardly hopped his way out of the food court. I walked over and picked up the rifle, strapping it over my back. “Alrighty then, where were we? Ah yes, looting everything of value we can find in here. I’m pretty sure we’re just about done with the majority of the cleanup. There may be some holdouts hiding here and there, but I can probably handle that myself while you girls start selling off the goodies.”

I looked over at Lizzy who was cheekily poking a finger against Nash’s forehead, he was still standing there with smoke wafting up from the small cylinder poking out of the side of his IA. Blood was starting to drip down in trails from his eyes, nose, and ears. He looked on the verge of death, and when an XP notice popped up, letting me know I”d just earned another 500XP, I knew he’d just literally died on his feet. “You should totally scav these guys, Malcolm. I doubt this runner has much of any worth, considering that old school firewall fuse IA, but their boss’ arms? Those arms should be worth some serious cred. They might even be worth as much as this whole gig, depending on the brand.”

==

It had been a long day. While the girls had filled up bag after bag of rather shitty guns from the kids we’d killed on the way to the center of the level, I’d gone around and had jogged through every single hallway of sub basement 10. I had indeed found a half dozen apartments with kids hiding out. Having gotten some practice using my IA on those mines, I’d made short work of hacking the doors to get inside, and had even gotten a few Net XP notices. A quick flashbang, followed by a few quick shots from my CrowdController, and each apartment was cleared.

Still, given how damn many apartments there were on this level, and how many hallways I’d had to traverse, it’d taken me hours. The girls had been making trips up to the surface to sell off the guns, as well as some gear they’d found in a room near the food court. It appeared that the kids had been trying to scav various people they’d killed, and some of the chrome was salvageable. Lizzy had taken charge of that project as she’d dug through literal piles of bloody cyberware. Most of it had been ruined, either by the kids when they killed its previous owners or when they stripped it out of the corpses, but she’d found enough that she expected to make us some decent money.

I’d scavved out the mercs myself, by putting them into my inventory, while the girls were off selling some of the guns. The street samurai had had some sort of reflex package that I wouldn’t have minded trying to sell, but it was listed in my inventory as ‘damaged,’ probably due to being cut into six pieces, so I’d left him alone. Nash had similarly only had damaged cyberware.

But Chris, on the other hand, had those sweet sweet cyberarms. The arms were listed in my inventory as: ‘MilSec CyberArms mk 17. They may not be the finest cyberarms on the market, but, when they possess the capacity to blow a heavily borged out badass into little chunks, the phrase ‘good enough’ is brought to mind.’ Thinking of the way he’d had them pointed at me brought a shiver to my spine when I considered how close to death I’d probably come.

I”d hacked up Chris’ corpse a bit around the shoulders where his arms were now missing and left him behind the trash throne. Bagging the arms up in a ratty duffel I’d found in a pile of children’s bookbags, I’d headed up to meet the girls in The Drunk KItten. I just needed to give the bartender the full final vid of our gig to collect our pay. Then we’d sell off the cyberarms and divvy up the creds from all the loot the girls had been selling while I’d finished up the extermination.

And then? And then we party.