Alex can’t focus.
Which does absolute wonders for her swordsmanship, but for everything else? Yeah, not ideal. But can you blame her? She was told by some sort of greater being that things were about to get messy. Like, real messy. Scars are things of accumulated accolades, a single war might forge a few, but those are for particularly bad wars.
And apparently what’s coming could grant a fifteen-year old nobody their dreams of grandeur.
So yeah, focus has been a bit of a challenge. For an entire week she’s been waiting for something to happen, anything, but it’s been business as usual. Well except for the fact that they haven’t heard from Ellie but she’s a bit flighty, so that’s not a concern.
She’s starting to wonder if the flesh amalgam’s just trolling her.
-
“You know,” Aki starts, “how close is ‘soon’ to a thing like what you’ve described”
Alex tilts her head, “I never thought of that”
“Like it could mean years for all we know.”
“So you’re saying I should just be ready for something ambiguous for the rest of my life?”
“Or maybe it’s already happened!” Sasha adds dramatically “like, whatevers supposed to cause the change, not the change itself.”
“True” Alex muses “think it might have something to do with the war?”
They both shrug.
-
Alex is fiddling with the soft metal of her bracelet, she never wears it, preferring to keep it safe in her room where at least the cameras can catch any would-be thief. Criminality is encouraged, but not against one of your own. She doesn’t like looking at the little snake bracelet, it reminds her of Vicktor, and how he’s probably dead.
The war’s officially entered its second month, and The House is losing badly.
The gangs are things of millions, and full blown war involves everyone. Even the kids have to do their part. Viktor’s probably got protection duty for supply transports.
Tantalising targets for sabotage.
The longest war between gangs was, funnily enough, between the Kingdom and the Bastion. It lasted three years, and kicked off the last Arthien war once the corporations saw weakness. They lost, but the aftermath saw mountains formed of corpses. Now gang wars don’t go beyond a few weeks.
But this ones different, and she doesn’t know why.
That’s not what frustrates her though. What frustrates her is the fact that she can’t do anything to help. Vicktor’s a friend, sure, but he is not an ally, and in Arthas the latter matters more than the former.
She just hopes he’s ok.
-
Alex was having a perfectly normal day, she went to Fadi’s stall, had some good food with good company and was on her way back home.
Everything was going great.
Until she got shot in the head.
The bullet didn’t pierce her skull, searing into her temple where it settled and stopped.
She turnes to the shooter.
“What the fuck?”
He shoots again and her head snaps back.
She’s not that bothered by a random shooting, that’s just Arethas, she’s more concerned about the fact she got no warning. Someone was aiming at her head, yet there were no magic tingles.
She draws her katana, not really wanting to waste a hundred creds on some street fodder.
She goes to cut him.
He blocks with a baton.
The fuck?
It’s a few more exchanges, all of which he blocked, until he shot her in the ribs. Which also did nothing, and also came with no warning.
She goes for a jab to his abdomen, but he blocks with precision and skill. She keeps trying different targets and he keeps blocking.
This is going nowhere.
She draws her Tengu and shoots him in the dick.
His scream is loud, and the surrounding audience lets out sympathetic ‘oohs’.
He clutches at his lost manhood as she cuts off his head.
“This was so stupid”
On the plus side he had a few thousand creds.
-
Alex’s debated getting a new gun, something that punctures better than the Tengu and doesn’t break her arm to use. This idea came from the fact that she literally took two bullets to the skull and came out fine.
Only problem is the price. Her Tengu was around five hundred creds, pretty cheap considering its usefulness so far. But gun prices don’t scale linearly with utility.
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An upgrade that’s worthwhile would cost her four thousand creds minimum. Then there’s the ammunition, that kind of firepower can range from two to five hundred a pop.
She’s not making the kind of money where that’s a feasible primary. But she can use it in special scenarios. Like, say, if the Tengu doesn’t pierce.
Which leads us here, in the same gun store as last time.
She’s been eyeing a matte black Reison. It’s a beautiful pistol, it looks heavy but she knows from a few videos that the recoil is much less extreme than her Tengu. It’ll pierce through mid-grade cybernetics like regular flesh, she’s just trying to justify the price.
Seven thousand creds and six hundred per bullet.
She only has enough to buy the gun and one bullet.
But it’s such a good gun for the price, and it’ll punch through most people without a problem.
She won’t need to upgrade for a while either if she gets it.
“Not thinking of going for something heavier?” A voice behind her asks. She turns to find the shopkeeper standing behind her. His single chrome arm crossed with his ‘ganic one.
He nods his head over to the rifles section.
“I still want to use my katana in fights” She says, tapping on her trusty blade.
The man snorts “you’d need high-grade cyberwear to survive all the bullets that’ll come your way while trying to be fancy”
She shrugged, “I’ll make it work”
-
“Why in all that’s good and holy would you buy a railgun?” Aki questions exasperated.
Alex runs her hands along the barrel of her latest acquisition, ignoring Aki.
“How does it even work anyway” Sasha asks.
Alex glances over and rattles her brain “magnets maybe?”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Sasha replies.
“What am I, a scientist? It shoots real fast and hits real hard, what else does a girl need?”
“Common sense?” Aki says
Alex continues to ignore him
-
Alex’s finances are screaming at her right now. Not literally, that would be weird. She’s hoping for a job from Ellie soon, and like a sign from the heavens…she gets jack shit. She had to spend two weeks being poor as a door, only surviving thanks to the vegetable curry of lost hope. It’s meh.
But something truly sacrilegious has happened, Alex has lost weight. Two pounds of muscle, gone. She literally weeped the loss before bed when she found out. Clarice seemed happy, the devil. She went harder on her workouts because of that, getting to the verge of tearing muscle before stopping.
And then she lost more muscle.
Fuck!
She needs money to fund her babies. Look at them, all weak and flimsy. This cannot stand.
“When does Ellie get us our next job” Alex interrogated Aki, who put up his hands in a calming gesture and tried to back away from the very intense girl getting all up in his personal space.
“I don’t know, we’ll get them when we get them alright? It’ll probably be soon” He tries to placate, it does not work.
“Ask her” Alex says.
“You want me to rush one of the Dragons Fingers?” He asks, now officially worried for Alex’s sanity.
“If you don’t want to then give me her number so that I can”
“Alex! That’s even worse!”
-
No jobs, no money, no muscles.
It’s a simple equation, one her fool self didn’t consider when buying the Very Nice Gun. No, all that was going through her mind was how she might need it to clown a cunt with too much protection, she didn’t consider the consequences.
She traded her guns for a gun.
She was a fool, an eager fool who forgot the pains of being poor. She wants her muscles back. Five pounds! She’s lost so much in so little time, it's in this melancholy that she hears a knock on her door.
Who dares to interrupt her moping!?!
If it’s Sasha she’s punching her in the face, hell she’d even punch Aki right now.
She opens the door, and she is greeted by a mountain.
The man waiting at her door is slouching because otherwise his head would punch through the ceiling. He’s wearing grey, and doesn’t look to be affiliated with any gangs. All the kids in the common area seem to be ignoring him. Alex scowls at his ridiculous muscles.
“Who are you, and why are you so buff?”
He blinks, stares at her, then blinks again.
“Lots of exercise and lots of beef” he says in a voice that is deep, like multiple octaves below what should be possible kind of deep. Is there a neanderthal in front of her room? That would be interesting, aren’t there only a few hundred in Arthas?
“Ooook, I'm assuming that means you won’t tell me who you are?”
He nods
“Cool” She shuts the door.
There is a knock.
She ignores it.
There is a knock.
She ignores it.
There is a series of knocks playing to the melody of a song, a song she recognizes.
She opens the door.
“The fuck do you want?” she asks
“To talk”
“What on God's green earth would a giant want to talk about with me?”
“Funny, we’re actually going to talk about gods, specifically the one that left its mark on you”
Oh, oh this might be very bad, she just realized. What did the Flesh monster say about those who could see it’s mark? Something about violence, and her guns are in her cabinets. This is not good.
“Ok” she says slowly
“Can I come inside?” he asks
“No”
He shrugs and sits cross-legged in front of her door. No one seems to care about the giant amongst them, going through their day as though he weren’t there.
“What are you doing?” She asks.
He stares at her, and then he is gone, and nothing is there. Was there something there? Weird, she could have sworn she was talking to someone-
A giant-
Oh
Oh fuck that’s cool
“Slipping between realities” he says “expensive, but useful”
She looks at him in wonder “so can you like, break someone’s neck without them knowing?”
He shakes his head, “I cannot interact with someone who isn’t on the same plane as me, now, a question for a question. What did you find to give you that” He points at her forehead
She’s…hesitant, whoever this is seems advanced in the arcane, if that’s an applicable word to what she just witnessed.
She decides that she can’t come up with a convincing lie on the spot. She should have thought of this beforehand.
“I was in a desert of purple sand” She said “smelled like lemons and tasted like mango-” he raises an eyebrow “-and in the sky was a kind of window, or a break into another place. Somewhere where a planet made of flesh created monsters to fight and eat each other. It talked to me.”
He stares at her “ask your question.”
She nods excitedly “How are you talking to me if you're on a different plane?”
A small smile spreads across his features “There is a shared reality, that is the one we all participate in. But each person has their own personal reality that can be accessed”
She nods and waits.
“What did it tell you?”
She hesitates, “I don’t really remember the first conversation, mostly it was happy I wasn’t freaking out and amused I was being cheeky”
He gives her a sharp look “the first conversation?”
She nods slowly “Yeah, I’ve been back there occasionally but most of the time it doesn’t talk. A few weeks ago it told me that something serious was coming”
He stares hard at her.
She chooses to ask her question “who are you?”
He keeps staring, “Banzan.”