V – 00002.0 – Child Or Monster.

Holding Sargent Fields by his throat, I shook him, using his large frame as a shield between me and the younger soldiers. I grabbed the strap of his rifle with my off hand and pulled it, tearing his gun free and throwing it behind me, as the other soldiers began barking orders at me.

“Put him down!” they both yelled at me in unison as they started spreading out around me, trying to move into a position where they could get a clean shot at me.

Shouting as I gripped him tighter, my claws starting to part his soft skin, he audibly began gagging and choking as I took a step back. “Stay where you are; I will fucking murder him if you keep moving.”

They froze but kept their guns trained on me, and then the young woman spoke with her gun still trained on me. “Just put him down, kid; there’s no scenario where you walk out of this alive unless you surrender.”

The younger male soldier cut in next. "Yeah, just put him down, Gintarou; no one has to die; we can just...”

I cut him off as my rage mingled with my trepidation about what to do next. “Shut the fuck up; you aren’t taking me back to that plague-infested fucking city. Why couldn’t you people just leave me the fuck alone?”

“WE STAYED AWAY FROM YOU... You, YOU CAUSED THIS, NOT US.”

I shouted loudly feeling the rage i had been repressing, mixing with my disgust towards these... Invaders

Suddenly everything happened at once, our standoff becoming a display of brutal violence as I heard a quiet click coming from the young man’s gun, his safety switching off. I flexed the muscles around my adrenal vault and squeezed the muscles in my forearm flexed violently, rippling like the wires of a suspension bridge during a storm as I crushed Field’s throat and exploded forward charging.

I held him up as a shield as I sprinted Field’s struggled pathetically, his arms scratching me in slow motion as his windpipe was crushed flat and my claws dug into his neck, finding purchase between his vertebrae.

I crossed the distance between us just as I heard a second click and an explosion. The young man's gun fired a single round, the bullet hitting Field’s shoulder and punching through into my own before the next bullet could leave his gun.

I slammed Field’s into him hard and kept running, the earth being torn up under my feet as I slammed almost four hundred pounds of human meat into a tree, crushing them against it and finally halting my bull rush.

My ear twitched as I heard another click, and I leapt backwards, letting go of the Sargent and flipping back through the air into a handspring, my inhumanly dense musculature and strength easily receiving my weight and throwing me back into the air with a display of supernatural agility.

Flipping and springing off the ground into a dive, I dodged into the trees to take cover from the spray of bullets, and I could feel the world starting to speed up again, prompting me to squeeze my adrenal vault harder, flooding my body with epinephrine.

Reality went from moving sluggishly to crawling by as more fire like adrenaline soaked into my blood. Leaping out of cover, I locked my eyes onto the woman who was still firing at the tree I’d just left behind. My body seemed to be falling through honey instead of air as I threw out my flint knife; the blade whizzed through the air like a speeding bullet before hitting her body armor. Making her take a step back with the impact as my blade exploded into rocky shrapnel.

She was moving slowly compared to me, and like a snail in my altered perception of reality, if I was falling and sprinting through honey, she looked like she was wading through tar as she turned, trying to track my movements with her gun.

I jumped a few feet into the air and angled my body towards her, coiling my legs up like springs as I ascended and kicking out again. I bounced off a nearby tree, flying towards her like an angel of death with a rocket shoved up his ass.

My arms out, fingers flexed claws poised to strike. I tackled her in my descent, knocking her arms to the side as I fell upon her, slamming her down to the ground. I pinned her underneath my body weight before arching back and palm striking her head as I clawed her; her body tensed up under the strike as my fingers left long, ugly bleeding lines down the side of her face.

Raising my arms high and interlocking my fingers ready to turn her head into a fine mist, I stopped myself thinking better of it as a voice in my head demanded my attention.

Stop, we won. She’s unconscious, and I’m pretty sure the other guy is too, or he’s dead, but either way, she’s worth more alive than dead, at least for now.

Grudgingly, I was forced to see the logic of my usually antagonistic head voice. I raised myself up and disarmed her, taking the knife, rifle, and sidearm she had along with her pack and all contained within her. I began walking towards my hut before heaving for a moment as my adrenaline rush faded.

I grabbed some of my twine rope and walked back to her before wrapping her ankles, knees, wrists, and forearms together tightly and checking the other two.

Sargent Fields was dead as a doornail, but the young man was surprisingly still alive; he looked like he’d been hit by a bus, and all his bones would probably never heal right without intense surgery, but I tied him up too as a precaution before I dragged them both to my prized floor.

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My eyes lingered on the dirty boot print and cracked bark from where Sargent Field’s had stepped on the frosted log, and I felt a flicker of rage hit me again, and I was forced to bury my fury at the dead man as well as the disgust I felt that these filth had come here and they’d polluted my home with their existence.

I stripped the other soldier of anything even vaguely useful—his weapons pack and boots going in the same corner of my floor as the women's—before I repeated the action on Field’s and began eating him. Digging into his flesh greedily seemed to sate some of my anger as my stocks ticked up and the bullet in my shoulder was pushed out by the regeneration process.

A shrill scream distracted me from my macabre dinner as the women I’d beaten awoke to see her captor eating her commanding officer. I tore some fabric from his stripped uniform and used it to wipe my mouth and clean my hands of the blood and viscera that was hiding under my claws.

Turning to face her, I threw a baleful glare her way, seeing her trying to wriggle away from me like a caterpillar in her bindings.

“Shut up!” I shouted, getting irritated by her screaming, and to my extreme displeasure, she stopped screaming and instead started shouting.

“Stay the fuck away from me, you fucking cannibal!”

My eye twitched as I raised my voice again. “I SAID SHUT UP BEFORE I EAT YOU.” This seemed to do the trick, as whatever she planned to say next was cut off by her mouth shutting.

“I’ll deal with you after I’m finished.”

I said before returning to my meal. It took me a little while to get through the rest of Fields, but he went down easily, and I quite enjoyed the fermented taste of his flesh. Frankly, it would be a lie to say eating him didn’t put me in a better mood.

Finally I walked away to the lake and washed myself up, getting the blood off me and rinsing my mouth with water to clean the fleshy scraps out from between my teeth. Then I walked back to the hut to deal with my... Guests? Prisoners? Emergency food? I wasn’t totally sure what I should classify them as just yet, but I’d get there, I thought.

Locking eyes with the women, it was clear she was afraid, yet she didn’t seem nearly as terrified of me as I would expect considering she just watched me drop her and her small team as if they were light work before eating one of them.

“What is your name?” I ask, sitting down no longer attempting to keep the disgust I felt out of my voice.

“Sasha. My name is Sasha." she said shakily, before finding the strength to firm her voice upon repeating her name.

"Alright, Sasha, here’s how this is going to work; you’re going to answer some questions for me, and depending on how useful and forthcoming you are, I may let you go, or I may just eat you instead; and you will be alive for that process, so it’s really in your best interest to dig up every piece of information rattling around that tiny head of yours.”

She nodded, confirming she understood my statement, but didn’t respond to my taunt.

Good

“First question, what were the levels of everyone in your squad?”

“Fields and I were at level one; Liam is the only member of our squad who was at level two,” she said, seeming much calmer than when she awoke, seeming almost mechanical, which spoke to a level of strength I didn’t credit her with; well, that or she was in shock.

“By any chance did Liam put his points into Vitality?” I asked

She grimaced before replying, her tone coming across as annoyed, or at least i believed it to be annoyance; truthfully my weak grasp on other peoples emotions was only getting worse as of late. "Yeah, he put all five into Vitality; some bullshit about wanting to be bulletproof.”

“Right, to be fair, I guess it worked; as hard as I hit him, he should be a pink fleshy pancake."

She cast a glance over to Liam’s prone body and shuddered slightly seeing how broken he was, although as I followed her glance, it still amazed me how un-pancaked he was. Either his vitality is really high, or his body armor played a large part in distributing the force.

Pulling out my tools I returned to a small project I had been working on the last few days and began carving a few pieces of wood, which was significantly easier now that I had a few steel knives.

“So tell me what things are like in the world; spare no detail, oh, but if you lie, I’m going to bite your fingers off.”

She swallowed hard, and I could see in my peripheral vision that her eyes were locked onto my mouth.

“Um, I don’t know a lot about the world; we haven’t really managed to get much communication from the other countries; even establishing contact with our own settlements has been extremely tasking; we’re spread very thin and working with practically no resources; anything that wasn’t deep underground in a fortified bunker made to withstand an electromagnetic pulse is pretty much useless; guns still work, but anything with a chip or electricity has been fucked up beyond all repair.

"Hmm, so about what I expected, although it’s nice to have confirmation that this was an EMP blast and not somehow the system eviscerating humanities technology... alright continue.”

“The US got it pretty bad; as far as we can tell, the quakes have rocked a lot of our major settlements, and Hawaii is gone.”

“What exactly do you mean by gone?” I asked.

“I mean, it’s gone, fucking erased from existence; it’s a crater; we think one of the things that hit the earth hit Hawaii dead on and destroyed it, sunk whatever was left into the ocean, as far as we could tell there weren’t any survivors.”

She sounded incredulous as she spoke, as if she couldn't quite bring herself to believe the ridiculous shit she was having to say out loud.

“I see. Tell me about the plague in Anchorage.”

She went silent for a few minutes before responding, "I don’t know what you’re talking about; there isn’t any plague in the city.”

My eye twitched subtly as she lied to me, and I stood from my woodworking project and took a step towards her. “I told you what would happen if you tried to lie to me, Sasha,” I said, spitting her name as venom and malice filled my voice.

"Seriously, I don’t know what the fuck you're talking about.”

I cut her off, reaching down and grabbing her ponytail, yanking her up by the hair, and opening my mouth wide in preparation to tear off her fingers like an alligator.

She winced and closed her eyes tight, unwilling to look at me the fear she had clearly been suppressing, overriding her bravado and will; she began talking so fast it was practically gibberish as she tried to say anything that would change my mind.

“Please don't; I mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about; no one is sick in the city except for the normal stuff.”

My jaws snapped closed over her middle finger and stopped just barely breaking the skin as she said something that finally caught my interest.

“The only weird illnesses could only come from the pharmaceutical lab, but those disease samples are harmless; everyone’s been vaccinated against them for decades.”

I opened my jaw, releasing her finger as I stared at her swallowing the small droplets of blood that coated my tongue.

“Tell me more.”

She sighed heavily as she started talking again. “There’s a...uh lab in the center of the city near where we’ve set up our barracks; we checked it out as soon as we got here as a priority target; we confirmed that the backup generators were dead and that the containment protocols had been breached, but the only disease samples they had were things people have been immune to for almost a century. You know Scarlet fever, polio stuff like that.”

She kept babbling and rattling off all kinds of random shit, like who owned the lab and why it was considered a priority to secure it until I stopped her.

“Did your system interface ever warn you about coming in contact with a pathogen?”

Her eyes opened as she stared at me. “N… No, it pretty much hasn’t done anything for most people I’ve met except for making us pick an archetype and telling us to assign a level; did it tell you there was a plague in the city?”

I dropped her before replying. “Yep, pretty much as soon as I got deeper than the outskirts of the city, my interface forced itself open to warn me, and it started telling me my body was failing due to the pathogen in the city, and I started losing my abilities.”

“Is that why you attacked us? You thought if we took you back that you’d die from whatever illness was in the city,” she asked with a shocking amount of sympathy, as if she were seeing me as some scared kid all of a sudden and not a cannibalistic monster.