“What. What the fuck. I thought he was dead.”
Devin was breathing hard, he could have sworn he was dead, that was before the dead man had started spasming and grasping around with his weirdly large finger.
The guy’s chest wasn’t moving. Devin definitely wasn’t going to feel for a pulse. He paused with internal debate then unloaded his light pistol into Jack’s chest.
That had scared the shit out of him. He shouldn’t have still been alive, crumpled, prone, and a lifetime’s worth of metal sticking out of him.
No, no, he shouldn’t have been alive, not with that much blood beneath him. But he wasn’t, he was dead. He was probably already dead before, that was just a delayed reaction.
He stood up straight and took a deep breath. Well, he definitely wasn’t moving anymore.
Devin still didn't trust him. He shot him through the head to make sure and after the thin bar of white light bored directly through the center of Jack’s forehead, he chanced a look. Sparkling electricity moved around the edges of his lifeless body.
He cautiously peered closer at the hole in his head, he saw the white bar just sitting inside, right the middle. He wondered why the shots hadn't exploded but then he caught the smell of cooking grey matter.
Did Mikey still have those white bars stuck in his body?
He looked the at ‘light-gun,’ it was a strange pistol.
He kept it ready, just in case. He cautiously looked around. Thankfully, Jack had already taken down the big crab. Jack’s body had been launched into an alcove formed from scrap, out of view of everybody else.
He approached and grabbed his limp arm.
“Ow, fuck!” The current traveling lazily on top of Jack's skin jumped into his finger. Devin dropped the arm and grabbed it with his gauntlet and willed it to block the electricity. The small charge attempted to make a slithering leap over the pink film but a thin strand of dark pink shot out and caught it. The Gauntlet, as much as he loved it, was really weird.
He took out his knife and started cutting through the lifeless wrist.
Shit. He looked around, it was taking too long. The flesh beneath his skin looked strange, it had odd bands that dove into and overlapped muscle, bone, and ligature. Cutting these bands released bursts of electricity his Gauntlet wasn't able to fully contain.
He debated, knife in hand, and settled on degloving the hand. Slowly, ever so slowly, he stomached the unsettled feeling in his gut and started to flay the skin from the wrist down.
----------------------------------------
Jack had felt the repeated punches of condensed energy enter his body. His Constitution or his Affinity wouldn’t allow the condensed energy to disperse. It was like giving a man in the desert a Turkey dinner and nothing to drink.
He could sense the concentrations of electricity sitting inside him. They burned hot, their energies struggling between discharging forcefully and his Nano’s natural resistance and control over electricity.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he teased the electricity out of one of the bars. There were more, many more stuck inside him, but for now, one at a time. Then a blinding flash, one that didn’t hurt, hit him in the middle of his forehead.
He could tell it hit there because as the round made contact with the skin of his forehead his entire head came online. Immediately following that the round entered his brain and his perception shut-down as his awareness dimmed to a distant point. It was bright here. His dim point of perception was pulled into three sides, him in the middle.
----------------------------------------
Devin finished the gruesome work and paused. He thought he did a pretty good job. He struggled and carved through the skin and gauze and Medjel shell that surrounded the Shield Attachment. His Shield Attachment now. He placed the pink round disk into the palm of his Gauntlet.
Pink rubber-like ropes lashed out and stripped back the pink material that covered the Attachment. Inside was an intensely and intricately complex series of circuits and other things he had no way of describing.
Different micro-devices and combinations of them sank into the Gauntlet’s palm one after another. It was a slow process, he debated leaving. He looked back, the body still wasn’t moving. He released a breath he didn’t know he had been holding.
Once the process was done he checked the inside of the gauntlet. Then he gripped his fist and felt the GreatShield deploy. Wow, it was an energy pig. He felt it drawing life-force to maintain itself. Maybe it was a good thing he let Jack block all those shots before.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Nice. It’s perfect.
He walked out of the alcove. There were still hybrids wandering around. He brought up his arm to deploy the Gauntlet’s built-in Shield. There was just a stump. Blood dripped from his sheared elbow.
He stared blankly at it. He looked down and saw the tip of the blade claw that had cut through his arm, now buried in his gut.
Brushing the back of his ear, “I don’t believe that belongs to you.”
The harsh bark of laughter was quickly replaced by cooing, “Oh no, no no no!” The pain started to register. His light pistol was stripped from his left hand. No, his hand was taken, it wasn’t there anymore.
“Look at you poor boy, you’ve taken something that doesn’t belong to you without leaving me anything for payment. In fact, you took flesh from me.” He felt a hand rubbing something soft and gel-like over the stump of his left hand. Something else repeated the action over his right elbow.
Devin felt- it was behind him now, it didn’t feel like Jack. Jack’s energy felt alive, aggravating, and everywhere around him. It made your hair stick up.
Whoever or whatever was behind him, 'it' was different. He was a mouse surrounded by starving Natives. His Senses picked up nothing. They couldn't tell him if anyone was there at all.
The oppressive feeling lied in the fact that, there was, in fact, an oppressive weight there and he was completely unable to tell where it was coming from at all.
A monster was staring at him from a space between spaces that had expanded out to appear as the size of a person. It wasn’t what he could track with his Senses, it was that he could only perceive the space around their presence. That made it worse. Much worse.
“Oh yesssss.” This was followed by a sharp intake through the creature’s nose. “Oh pardon me, you smell terrified. ‘Oh no, you’re scared!’ Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you, I do have moments of kindness. How about a payment plan hmm? Just until you pay back what you owe me. That’s fair isn’t it? A pound of flesh now, then later, well, we’ll see how you do."
Devin fell to the ground with a cry as he lost contact with his foot. The pain from his arms blossomed as they hit the ground in an instinctive attempt to catch his fall.
----------------------------------------
A scream cut through the general noise. It stuck out through the background din. As she closed the distance it became easier. She followed the sobbing, pleading, mewling noises.
She was close now, the harsh jagged laughter brought her right on top of the scene.
Not again. She wondered who started it. With a quickly forming pit in her stomach she already knew the ending.
Jack had dragged Devin back into the piles of broken scrap. Jack was bleeding from a slew of jagged streaks punched across and through his entire body. Surprisingly the round holes in his chest were not bleeding at all.
Devin was laying there, severed hands and feet. Jack was slowly peeling his skin off. She saw one continuous length of skin and had to clamp down tight on her stomach.
Devin tried to strike him with his elbow but all he earned for that was a shortened limb as Jack starting cutting the limb shorter above the Medjel cast.
Devin screamed and she could hear Jack, the infinitely cold voice travelled and echoed unnaturally, “I told you not to scream so loudly, didn’t I? I thought I was clear. Perhaps I wasn’t.” Jack punctuated his point by scooping out one of Devin’s eyes with his enlarged middle finger. He held it in his other hand for a moment and placed it in front of his own eye.
He ate it. He ATE it. Yuma gagged and vomited bile. She needed some space and a plan to approach this.
“Missss Yuuuumaaataaaaaa,” the creepy sing-song voice again, she shivered as she wiped her mouth, “is that you I hear?”
She didn’t move. Shit, this was bad, she needed the Zappa. She could always zapp him herself but what if it didn’t work? He had some pretty extensive damage on him already. If she tried and it didn’t work she’d be unconscious and that would be be the only thing worse than her present situation.
“Where are you…..”
That was close, entirely and absolutely too close for comfort. Her heart pulsed current through her with uncomfortable potency. She was quickly approaching her stored capacity.
She kept her head down. She tried the thing that Jack was doing earlier, sensing the electricity or something. She sensed her body, her heart was out of control. She could only sense her body, she wasn’t picking up anything else. She didn’t even know how he did that.
Metal shifted behind her and to the left. She rolled to the right and met the Smile face to face, again. She shrieked and he jumped towards her, his sharp, dead eyes filled with manic lust for violence. Her heart went into double-overdrive and she let rip a short range zapp that crackled the air around them. She didn’t notice the sound as she slumped to the ground.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Jonah turned another corner and negotiated his way up and then down a small pile of scrap. He was panting heavily. He had been burning Endurance Allocation on the Run and now it was finally becoming a problem. He gasped and wheezed. He looked at a relatively comfortable-looking piece of metal and debated whether or not to take a few minutes break for entirely too long. He dragged his eyes away and rounded the corner.
He saw Jack shocking Yuma awake with a concerned look in his eyes with a warm smile. Jack closed his eyes and placed a hand over her heart. He put the Zappa to her other side and pressed it hard and hot into her.
“Can I help?”
Jack looked up at the words, ready for something, whatever look he had had faded as the current flowed between the two of them.
“Oh hey Jonah, yeah Yuma wasn’t doing so hot, I think she pushed herself too hard.”
Oh thank heavens. He was worried that he had been lost, then he would turn a corner and find both of them dead. Then he would have had to… he excised a few minuscule particles of the free Nano-Trace in his brain to forcibly extract himself from that chain of thought.
“I’m just glad you’re both alright. Was that you with the crab?”
Jack smiled at him, “Yeah that was me, it was a close one.”
“Well, you seem alright now,” Jonah was lying, Jack looked terrible. On his right hand, from the wrist down to the beginning of his fingers the skin was entirely missing. It looked like it had been flayed completely off, Jonah paused for a moment as he watched the muscles and bones shift and move.
His shirt was barely that, tattered, it would probably be torn off if he happened to brush against something. His pants were doing somewhat better, ending mid-calf and above the knee respectively.
His uniform, if it could even be called that anymore were no better than caveman rags. The belt-loop seemed to be the only thing that was somehow, miraculously, undamaged.