Chapter Sixty-Nine - Fairness Unevenly Applied

You want to see a spectacular fight? Talking balls-to-the-walls, close quarters, face-smashing combat that will have you on the edge of your seat? Then find two core-users who are about at the same level and let them loose at each other.

Each core represents a single power. Most, if not all, are small and rather useless, but they can be strange, which makes using them in combat a game of exploiting small advantages and weird quirks.

These fights were, of course, monetized as best they could be, because there was some broken part of the human brain that just loved seeing two people break each other in high definition.

Ivil had never taken part in that sort of cage match. She'd seen a little, but was never truly impressed.

Those kinds of fights always tried to do the one thing that a real fight never had; they tried to be fair.

Pitting D-classers against each other, or two C-classers with an equal number of cores made for an even, more or less technical battle.

Ivil didn't like fair fights. She had never participated in one if she could avoid it because she liked winning far too much. So far, that had worked out for her pretty well.

It was working out rather terribly for the Slob.

The man clearly had at least one core that could help him survive in a vacuum. Those were rather common, and only good sense for anyone with many cores who expected to fight onboard a ship or in a station where the vacuum was one puncture away.

Still, his face turned an interesting shade of purple as she gripped him in an invisible vice and kept him still.

He fought back. His cybernetic limbs put a lot of pressure against her hold. One arm twisted, opening up into a large chainsaw-like blade that spun in the void and tried to cut at the nothing holding him. His other arm unfolded and six-inch long metal spikes shot out into space.

Ivil watched him squirm the way an unhinged child might watch a fly whose wings they'd plucked.

Eventually, she suspected he came to realise that he was at her mercy. She snapped her fingers and the atmosphere exploded around them, creating a bubble of air from nothing that held them both in a large sphere.

The Slob winced at the burst of pressure, his fat rolls wobbling with the motion and his skin bruising at the change. He gasped in a huge breath, then screamed. "You bitch!"

"No," she said before robbing him of his air. She kept the rest around him, so that he could hear her while he choked. "I find your lack of respect... disturbing. Can you not see that this isn't the kind of situation where you should run your mouth?"

She let him breathe again and he sucked in a gasp of air, then shifted, pointing his gun arm at her in a flash. A metal rod fired out, and now that they were no longer in a vacuum, the gun's bark sounded like a cannon going off.

She plucked the rod out of the air then examined it. It looked like a piece of rebar, almost. No, not almost, this was definitely a piece of cheap rebar. Was he too stingy to buy good ammunition?

The Slob stared at her, then glared. "A-classer," he spat. "I should have guessed. Too many powers in too pretty a shell. You think you're better than me?"

"I rather know it," she said before flicking the bar away. "Tell me about Mister Aida. He must be well off to be able to hire an up-jumped C-classer like you as a bodyguard."

"I'm not a C-classer," he rumbled. Ivil was starting to suspect that he had never really invested in the kinds of cores that would improve his intellect. "I'm one of the strongest free mercs in the Jovian system! I don't come cheap."

"Oh? And how much do you cost?"

The Slob licked his lips. "Let me have a taste of your meat and I might let you know," he said.

She grimaced. "Well, you've certainly earned your title, Slob. Is that how he's paying you, in human flesh?"

"Not flesh, women," he said with a disgusting grin. "You think you and your little friends taste any good?"

"Are you asking for me to kill you?" she asked.

"You wouldn't. You might be some fancy A-classer that that Martian bitch hired, but Phobos doesn't want to start shit with Callisto, not when Callisto's gaining such a foothold around the Jovian system. You kill me and there will be consequences."

Stolen story; please report.

"What about unimaginable torture? Are there consequences for that?" she asked idly.

"Fuck off, I'm not scared of--"

She ripped off his limbs. They were core-made, so quite tough as far as that kind of thing went. When a core gave a person a new organ or a new limb it was generally quite a bit better than any organic version. The alloys and metals that cores grew were usually centuries ahead of human material sciences.

The Slob's crumpled like too-dry cardboard. He gasped, likely feeling quite a bit of feedback at the moment.

"Consequences, yes?" she asked. "How about this, as a consequence? You know, I could tear every last core out of your massive body and there would be no consequences for me. You, however, you would be a pitiful mass of flesh in deep space, choking on nothing in your final moments."

"The Emperor of Jupiter!" he shouted, and she paused to listen. "The Emperor says that there's to be no user-on-user violence in the Jovian system."

"Did he say that?" she asked. "I never got the memo."

"He'll know. He finds out, and then he'll add your cores to his. Those are the consequences! And you'll see them! You've hurt me already, you stupid bitch!" He grinned, the kind of rictus that came from someone who thought they'd won one over.

"So?" she asked.

"So? He's an Emperor!"

"So," she replied coolly. "We have an agreement, you know. The three of us."

Now the Slob was shaking.

It really frustrated her how people didn't treat others--mostly herself--with respect and deference until they realized that she could erase them from existence one atom at a time without any repercussions. Having a good reputation... or at least a reputation of some calibre, was useful, but she sometimes wished for respect without having to prove that she could kill people.

"You can't be," he said.

"Sure I can," she replied. "Do I need to take out some photo ID to prove that I am who I say I am? Was teleporting you out into empty space while time is frozen, creating a bubble of atmosphere and ripping off your limbs not enough proof? I can continue ripping pieces off of you until you believe me, if that's what you want."

The Slob looked past her, only now noticing that the distant ships and lights from faraway stations weren't moving. "I'm sorry?"

"Was that a question?"

"I'm sorry!" he shouted.

"Better, but I'm afraid I don't believe you. Tell me about Mister Aida."

"He hired me! Put out a contract for the strongest merc he could find. He's a real piece of shit, but he pays well. No morals and all smiles. You know the sort."

"And his intentions with this meeting?"

The Slob shook his head. "I don't know! I think it's just to wrestle for more power. There's something everyone is after, but they're all being quiet about it. Aida's the same."

"Hmm, so he's at least discreet. And the attack on our ship? We were intercepted by a group of snub-fighters on the way here. Was that him?"

A shake of the head. "No. I don't think so? I was with him most of the time. He isn't that sort. He wants me to threaten people, scare them, put them in their place, but I'm not supposed to kill anyone."

"Hmm, well, I suppose that's acceptable. I... have decided that for the sake of avoiding any drama, I'll be returning you alive." She glanced at the limbs floating away, then shrugged and crushed them further. Some had entire cores stuck into them which had come loose. She pocketed those for later. Most of the limbs had come from cores still in his torso, so they'd slowly grow back. "You, of course, won't speak a word about me being who I am."

"I won't?"

"Not unless you want me to make an example out of you," she said. "I've been advised not to kill people, so I'm trying very hard not to. But it's... so much easier, you understand?"

She didn't give him time to reply.

They reappeared in the same spots they'd been in before, and time snapped back into motion.

There was a thump as the Slob crashed to the ground. He was crying.

"Evelyn!" Aurora gasped.

"We had a discussion," she replied. "It was very civil."

***