The listing that drew Nicolai’s eye was called a skin suit.
Skin Suit - 40,000p
This suit provides various functions. It has hypersteel plating over vital points and reinforcement throughout, providing good defence against lower-calibre guns and melee attacks, and is resistant to tearing, cutting, and crushing.
However, its intended use is environmental protection. The skin suit forms a perfect seal around the body, regulating the user’s temperature, collecting and recycling sweat and other bodily fluids. It is even capable of injecting various drugs, such as combat-enhancers, adrenaline shots, wakefulness enhancers, emotion regulators, and more.
The skin suit is layered with artificial muscles which are designed to tightly mesh with the users musculature, enhancing their strength and speed.
These suits were developed for clean-up in hazardous areas, but have gained popularity in combat for the physical enhancements and protection they provide.
Also listed in apparel was a skin suit compatible helmet for 10,000 points, which would be preferable to the skin suit’s built in hood. Nicolai saw immediate use for the skin suit and found himself more inclined towards it than anything he’d seen so far.
The reason for this was because he needed something to help him move through the jungle. When he’d told the others that he worried the castle would not remain safe, he hadn’t exactly been lying. The shaking, the hidden war between demons and undead. All pointed to the castle becoming increasingly inhospitable. He was also convinced the Lizard would not be found in the castle. The visions the Controller had shown him were burned into his mind. First it had shown a great and ancient city. Then a dark tower. Then two yellow eyes, shining in the dark. His assumption was that the Lizard was in the tower, and the tower was in the city, and the city was not here. He’d have to head through the jungle.
The skin suit was perfect for such an environment. It would protect him from parasites. It would prevent him from leaving the stink of his body by acting as an air-tight shell around him. It even had systems to collect and filter water built into it. Through the helmet he would be able to filter the air he breathed, avoiding toxins, and the helmet also had built-in thermal vision alongside other features.
He checked on permits next.
> Permits
1,000,000 - Market Tier Upgrade (E>D)
700,000p - Low-Tier GunShip Call-In
500,000p - Low-Tier Killbot Call-In
300,000p - Low-Tier Kill-Team Call-In
100,000p - Defensive Emplacement Call-In
Nicolai’s eyes rounded. The prices were ridiculous but if these Permits did what they said, it’d be well worth it. A Gunship? A Killbot? You could lay waste to whatever you wanted. He struggled to understand how it could be possible. A kill-team should be a group of well-trained, heavily augmented soldiers, armed with powerful weaponry. A group from Earth.
Was Heaven going to pick from those remaining there, and bring them here? Would any of them, the gunship, the killbot, the kill-team, actually do what he wanted, once called? Astonishing as it was, he could only assume so. Until the day he saw a piece of Examine text fail to deliver, he would view them as truth.
Finally, he checked out the augments, which held a few more interesting and desirable items, numerous of which he would be interested in picking up. One in particular caught his eye.
Spinal Tap - 10,000
A controversial and frequently banned implant which still sees significant use, this implant is never installed willingly. When placed on an an individuals upper-spine, it allows for an attacker to seize control of an individuals body from the neck down. The Spinal Tap does so by tapping into the spinal cord, where it blocks off the commands of the brain while sending its own.
Controversial indeed. They were very, very illegal; which meant of course that the rich used them freely, so long as they didn’t get caught. He was surprised the Trade Link offered them.
Closing everything, Nicolai ran through the lists he’d built in his mind, of the items he desired. He’d thought himself to have a great horde of points at twenty three thousand, but after looking through the Market he realised that was not the case. Everything cost significantly more than in the F tier Market. He considered what he could afford, then made his purchases.
When he pulled open the cabinet that formed on the Trade Link, metal cases filled with weapons winked at him from within.
He pulled the most prized of them, which contained AA-12 automatic magazine-fed shotgun, out from the space. This box was significantly larger and longer than the others. After placing it on the ground he pulled the clasps and flicked it open.
Unusually, the AA-12 was not disassembled, as was typical for guns purchased from the Trade Link, this being the reason the box was unusually long. Nicolai knew why it wasn’t disassembled, and in fact it was obvious from looking at the gun.
The AA-12 was an unusual looking weapon, shelled in what appeared to be one seamless piece of high-impact polymer plastic, with a large hand-guard that went from the bottom of its grip forward then up to rejoin the weapon in front of the trigger-guard, this part also forming a backrest for the magazines to attach to.
Unlike the other weapons he’d purchased for selling, the AA-12 could not be neatly split up into receiver, barrel, buttstock and so on. Nicolai tugged it free from the foam, then rotated a clip at the butt, pulled two retaining pins in the middle of it to the rear, pulled up a spring-tension just below the rear-sight, then slipped another spring-tension on the handguard forwards. As he did all this the polymer shell was coming loose with clicks and clacks and once done, he pulled the rightmost half away.
The internal body of the AA-12 was laid bare. A large piece of stainless, welded steel, forming the barrel, receiver, guards, and sights, with part of it sticking out towards the butt. There was one long spring that ran the entire length of the weapon, from butt all the way to the end of the upper-barrel. This was the primary innovation of the weapon, at the time considered quite clever. Nicolai knew that this was not all one piece, in truth it was more like two. First the outer metal body as one part, then the barrels, receiver, and spring as the second part.
When fired, this entire part would move back and forward within the gun. The recoil of each shot would be applied to that long spring as the barrel-and-receiver assembly rocked backwards. The spring, going practically the whole length of the gun, managed to significantly reduce the recoil. It would then bring the assembly back into place for the next shot. This system was very effective and made the gun extremely easy to fire, as the user would experience minimal recoil. Even a child could fire the gun and hold it steady. An adult could fire it in full-auto one-handed.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Despite its appearance, the AA-12 was a relatively simple weapon, which Nicolai approved of. The more complicated something was, the more likely it would malfunction. It didn’t even come with a selector to choose between single-fire and full-auto, as full-auto was the only setting, and the finger was the selector. That said, it fired relatively slowly for an automatic weapon, meaning it was quite easy to control fire-rate via trigger control.
He’d chosen it in large part because of the oddities in how the Trade Link functioned, and due to the situation he was currently in. Back when these guns had been used, the 32-round drum magazines they could be equipped with were almost impossible to find, due to heavy regulation. The Trade Link did not care about that, and since it still only offered a limited selection of weaponry from a certain time period, he’d settled on the AA-12 as a good option at the 10,000-points mark.
When he’d been operating on earth back in the 21st century, he never would have used it on the job. The AA-12 had never been heavily produced, and back then had been a collector’s item; it was even moreso in the modern day. In that regard the 10,000 points cost was a steal, though in truth it wasn’t so great a weapon. It had a relatively slow fire rate compared to other auto shotguns from a similar period that could empty their mags in a quarter the time. However, none of those were listed, and so it was superior to the other auto shotguns available.
Furthermore, most of his encounters in this place were quite close ranged, due to the nature of the castle, and so an auto-shotgun was a better pick than it would’ve normally been.
Ultimately he would get himself an assault rifle, which would be better over range, but even then the AA-12 would still have use. As a close-ranged assault weapon, a fully automatic, low-recoil shotgun capable of holding 32 rounds was, in his experience, more than up to the task.
Nicolai checked everything was working to his satisfaction, removing the full-length spring, investigating the receiver’s mechanism, and performing a few tests, before clicking everything back together. Every weapon he’d so far purchased from the Trade Link had been in perfect working condition, but unless he had no choice Nicolai would never take a gun into combat without first performing his checks. He enjoyed looking it over, having never personally handled one of these weapons in his life. He only knew how to operate and take it apart due to book learning.
That done, he retrieved one of the three 32-round drum-magazines alongside the boxes of ammo. Two of the boxes were standard 12-gauge, while the other box contained armour-piercing rifled sabot-slugs. He slotted 12-gauge into the 32-round drum-magazines, one by one until all three were full, enjoying the process, and then retrieved the fourth and fifth magazines—both ten-round box-mags—into which he put the sabot-slugs.
The AA-12’s lack of rifling and requirement for fairly low pressure when firing meant that normal full-metal-jacket AP rounds, such as a rifle would fire, were not possible. These slugs were the next best thing. Their main issue was that they would be extremely inaccurate over any real distance. They came with their own rifling to make up for the fact that the AA-12 was smoothbore, but a rifled bullet was no comparison to a rifled gunbarrel. If the enemy was more than say, two-to-three hundred metres away, he might as well not bother.
But in the event he did find himself close up with someone heavily armoured, or, as he thought more likely, made of metal, then they would do the job, penetrating better than 12-gauge would.
Nicolai clicked one of the 32-round drum-magazines into place in the AA-12, tucking the other two into the front his vest, the box-mags in a side pouch, then he hung the weapon over his back on its strap, and reached for his other purchases.
In one slender, silvery-metal box he found a stick nestled on a tiny bed of silk. The Yin-Yang Minor rotation incense stick. He wanted to try it out and see just how effective it was, before he committed to buying more.
The next item wasn’t a box but two small bottles with sealed screw-caps. Slow Water.
Nicolai took one and looked it over, seeing the water within had a faint greyish sheen, slightly opaque. He now possessed an Infused Crystal and Slow Water, meaning he just needed the Lotus Blossom Symbiote and then to combine everything and start feeding Souls to the result, and he’d be ready to claim the sword—according to Paxolnaz, at any rate. He had a clear route to getting that Lotus Blossom, because its recipe was in his new Market.
The issue was the cost. The recipe for the Lotus Blossom cost sixty thousand points, and it was only a recipe. Once he had the recipe he would need to purchase or find more ingredients in order to make the Symbiote. What would the final cost come to? As he’d never used a recipe before, he couldn’t guess. Maybe he would just need to buy a few more things for a few thousand points from the Market, and be done. Maybe he would have to spend as much or more than the cost of the recipe itself. Maybe the Market would not have what he needed, forcing him to go searching.
Ultimately, he decided that he would focus on improving his current position by buying all the most useful cheaper options such as weapons, more augments from his personal buy-back list, the skin suit, and more incense sticks, before he went for the recipe. He wasn’t in any great rush, as afterall Kleos had said that he would need to complete his head Major Node and at least one hand Major Node to have any chance of using the Blade Artifact.
The next two items comprised a small box containing a basic Cyberwarfare implant, and a Cherubic Surgeon Permit. Cyberwarfare was exceedingly happy to have convinced him to get the implant, and, of course, it wanted him to install it immediately. He assured it he’d do so soon.
The rest of the items he pulled out were mainly submachine-guns and pump-action shotguns, alongside ammo. Goods to sell. He also bought a few more medikits and some more clothing, as these had been equally popular amongst those he traded with.
Finally, there was a cordless disc cutter, which he found in the utility section of his F tier Market. It came with a charger which could be plugged into the solar powered system they’d set up. When breaking into places and stealing things, as he soon intended to do, he felt it should come in handy.
After those primary items for himself were items for the others.
He was left with only a few hundred points. The vast majority had been spent on the AA-12 and the Yin-Yang Rotation incense stick, which had claimed 17,000 points.
After packing everything into the sports bag he’d brought with him, Nicolai made his way out and over the bridge. He paused there, putting everything aside. The Cyberwarfare Implant would go in the back of his head so there was no need to disrobe, and it would be a comparatively minor brain-surgery that would only necessitate a few minutes of unconsciousness.
After using the Permit, a Cherubic Surgeon burst into existence before him. Nicolai indicated the item he wished to be installed and closed his eyes.
It was over quickly, the Surgeon giving him a jaunty wave then vanishing when he awoke. He felt the new Implant within his mind, already fused with his BSI and Network Link. Nicolai had wondered whether this increase in hardware might see the return of another Module, but if any had wanted to rise out of his subconscious, they should’ve acted faster as Cyberwarfare dove hungrily into the new Implant, fizzing with synthetic joy as it settled in. It also retained its control over the Network Link, guarding them like a hen over its brood. Nicolai didn’t raise any protest; Cyberwarfare was the best suited for both implants.
With a true Cyberwarfare unit the Module would gain a host of benefits; it’d be capable of launching true Cyberwarfare attacks and much better at defending him from such, plus it would significantly better able to track others via their digital signatures while noting if others were doing the same to him.
You need to expand to it, I am not able to fuse properly, said Cyberwarfare, poking at him.
Nicolai quickly saw the issue, which was an interesting one. Cyberwarfare’s digital awareness had expanded without issue into the new hardware, but its tiny Soul was not able to enter so easily. As before, this new hardware was not considered a true part of his body by his Soul.
He settled down, took out some Oma crystals, and focused. Cyberwarfare eagerly joined him as he spread his Soul into the new area, claiming it over the course of an hour, and then Cyberwarfare settled properly into the unit.
After climbing the ladder, a task that wasn’t made easy by the two hefty sports-bags full of weapons he carried, Nicolai hauled himself out of the hole and the humid heat of the small jungle pressed into him, along with the sounds of birds, animals, and the swaying of branches above. He paused, dropping the bags, a little breathless. He’d used the Imbued chain whip to attach one of the bags to his back as he climbed, while the other hung below him, but even so carrying such a weight hadn’t been easy.
While he regained his breath, Nicolai activated his drones. This was another area where he’d used the chain whips, as he found the numerous hooks quite useful for simple storage purposes, in this case using them to attach the drones. The drones hummed into the air to search around him.
He made his way back quickly, always wary of being caught out while carrying so much and without any backup. He encountered no problems on the way, but as he drew close to the safe place, Cyberwarfare alerted him.
Someone’s scanning the Local, searching, said the Module. I recognise them. It’s the same individual who hacked drone three. Cyberwarfare paused, and peering into its internal processes Nicolai saw that it labelled this portion of its dialogue as: Significant Pause. It is far easier to detect them now I have proper hardware, continued the Module in a tone that, without in any way actually blaming Nicolai for not buying that hardware earlier, managed to express considerable blame. It appears they have been keeping tabs on us for some time. They are nearby and, for now, unaware I have detected them. Significant Pause. If I’d had such hardware earlier I would have spotted them long ago.
Nicolai snorted. I get the idea, he told the Module. His eyes narrowed. So, the hacker was back, nosing around, sniff-sniffing to see what might be found. Cyberwarfare was right, he should’ve gotten it the unit earlier.
But at least he had it, now, and it was already paying off. This mysterious hacker had messed up, and now Nicolai was going to chop their nosy snout off.