Yuma opened her eyes briefly and he relaxed. Her eyes moving was less important than what his Affinity was telling him. She needed a full reset of her heart. He was glad he didn’t have to go in there. Well, he didn't have to go in there, yet.
She was okay as best as he could guess. He had woke up next to her, who had been passed out. It must have been her that was somehow putting those lightning bars in him. He was getting impressed with her level of power. So she must have put all she had into that shock to his head. Good thing he woke up, otherwise they’d both be out on the ground.
The electricity cycled through her at a good pace but her Electro-Zappa Heart™ had taken some damage. He dived back into his Affinity to check the damage. He didn't think what he saw would immediately become a problem but it definitely needed to get solved at some point.
At least she was alive. He looked the rest of her over. She had taken some other bad hits, he looked back from where she came, she had left a trail of blood behind her. He looked her over again and applied Medjel where he could.
As he lifted her up he noticed that he didn’t have his Shield attachment on his hand anymore. Someone flayed it off of him? The open area started to hurt now that he was aware of it.
Brutal. He followed the trail of, what he presumed to be, his blood back through the piles of scrap and metal.
“What the fuck is Devin doing here? And like that?” Jack asked mouth completely agape.
Jonah threw up. Apparently, he had been snacking.
Devin was a soggy mess, crawling on his four severed limbs away from where it had presumably happened, weak cries coming from him. Trailing him was a long, two-finger thick, singular strip of flesh that coiled wetly in his wake.
“Why? Who? Who would do this?” Jonah looked pleadingly to Jack. He didn’t have an answer for him.
He looked for somewhere, if not soft, at least not actively sharp to put Yuma down. He stepped away from her then came back and pawed at her chest pockets. Jonah’s sputter next to him made him realize his faux-pas, he gently opened her chest pocket and withdrew the AI disk.
Slipping it into his own pocket he walked over to Devin. This was messed up. Really messed up. Did a crab do this to him? He already hated them but their evil counter just jumped a few levels.
Jack scooped him up and saw the pleading tears in his eyes, well, specifically, ‘eye’. There was fear too.
“No, no no, no more please, I’m sorry no more please. Pleaseee.” The drawn out pleading was tough to hear. Really it was just hard to look at him at all. He wasn’t the type of person to plead to, he didn’t bother to correct Devin’s words.
Jack looked over his shoulder at Jonah, he had walked himself back from the edge of panic and was fretting over Yuma.
He looked back to Devin, a soft look in his eyes, “Relax man I got you now, you’re safe.”
He walked him over to the nearest Cryo-Tube that didn’t look like a complete wreck and inserted the AI disk into a slot next to the screen.
Devin looked petrified, a Smile reflecting in his eyes. Like he didn’t know what was going to happen next. Poor boy.
“Hurry up and heal quickly so we can have more fun, my sweet Devin.”
His screams abruptly cut off as the lid closed. A subconscious habit pulled out the Zappa from Jack's pocket and started to apply it to wounds on his chest. His cells started to charge, fill, and replicate, closing his wounds.
He shook his head and inserted the AI disk.
“Uh, Terminal can you hear me?”
The familiar “…” trailed across the screen.
“Can you heal him back up?”
Analyzing…
Full Regeneration Success Rate… Acceptable.
Regeneration Risk-Profile... Within Acceptable Limits.
Insert Magno-Tubes to Start Rejuvenation Process.
[https://i.postimg.cc/vm6FcbD3/Screen-Shot-2022-10-14-at-1-50-02-PM.png]
Jack reached to his belt and looked. Sure he had a lot of them but these were his and this kid was kind of a prick no matter how messed up he was, didn’t change that. It wasn’t really surprising that somebody worked him over this bad.
He sighed and took out a Magno-Tube, opened it, and plugged it into a slot next to the screen. It drained and he withdrew it.
Insert Magno-Tubes to continue process Estimated: 1/18 Required.
[https://i.postimg.cc/fWv43HTn/Screen-Shot-2022-10-14-at-1-50-48-PM.png]
Nope. Forget that. “Do what you can.”
Scavenging Mode Enabled.
[https://i.postimg.cc/MHqhPB5F/Screen-Shot-2022-10-14-at-1-51-05-PM.png]
Jack waited a few seconds then forcefully yanked the chip from Terminal and walked back to his companions.
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Earlier, on the way to the Run:
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Crab tastes like shit.”
Yuma immediately became defensive, “What? No it doesn’t!” Her teeth having to gnaw several times to get through the slightly overcooked wad of crab flesh.
“Is there anything else to eat?”
“Sometimes people can get things from Terminals but that’s rare, most things are scavenged, or killed.” She attacked a new portion of the crab. It was more than a little horrifying watching her liplessly chew her food. Good thing they were sort of friends already. She looked up at him, “Not everyone gets a hundred lifetime’s worth of Medjel thrown at them.”
“Hey, I paid for them."Jack threw his clump away.
“Hey! Don’t waste food.”
The roll of Jack’s eyes turned to amusement as Yuma scrambled for it.
“How are there people surviving here?”
“Every once in a while an old Cryo-Bay will fill with Pods. Sometimes Humans get there first, sometimes crabs.”
It seemed like each question opened up another, “That just happens? Where do they come from?”
She shrugged, “Beats me, they just appear. Nobody I know has seen it happen but it obviously does, Pods aren’t there and then they are. More rare nowadays.” She had moved on to Jack’s clump and tore off a new chunk of crab and started to jaw it.
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He picked up the Gauntlet. It was pink, of course it was. The fingers looked like they were covered with some sort of rubbery material. The Gauntlet itself was relatively innocuous, besides the color. Across the outer arm… it registered to Jack that there was still arm inside it.
Bleh. He tried to pull it out to no avail. Thinking for a moment, Jack sifted through the mini-duffels hanging on his belt. Before digging in too far he found what he was looking for, the Magno-Tube he had just emptied. He twisted it open then jammed it into the meat of the cleanly sliced arm. It pulled out a decent amount of Nano and it automatically closed as he withdrew it. Jack opened it back up again and put it back in the duffel.
The bone turned soft and slopped out with the rest of the viscera. It splashed onto his feet.
“Oh gross.”
He saw the 5 finger spaces and looked to put it on his left arm, but the fingers holes were reversed. Brute forcing it wouldn’t work. Well, actually there was a bigger problem than that.
It was weird, there was no hole in the middle of it, just a solid pink mass with finger indents. He didn’t remember when the middle section filled but it had. He switched it to his right arm and as his finger, oversized as it was, passed through the outer shell into the liquid or moldable solid of the gauntlet. He continued to push his hand through.
It formed around his hand, he had his fingers back. Well, his middle finger was still occupying the space of the middle two fingers but at least he had his thumb back. He was excited and tried to move his digits. Nothing. He touched a finger and felt nothing. He pinched hard, then much harder and a faint sensation came through.
His middle finger moved fine and his new ring finger fit poorly against his middle. It hung off the side of the larger digit, like a tumor. He tried to pull his hardest to rip it off but got nothing but a tearing pain that shot up his arm. It flopped back as he released it.
Trying to revive his remaining enthusiasm he looked over the rest of it. It had a solid, elongated oval shape on the outside of it. The inside of the gauntlet was thin, it had a strip of something, a screen? He looked closer, it wasn’t saying anything.
He gripped his hand flowed electricity towards the Gauntlet. The current ran down his bicep and elbow then stopped. He pushed it forwards, through the Gauntlet. It pushed inwards then back out, returning into the rest of his body. No electricity? He thought of deploying his Shield. Nothing. He looked at the back of the gauntlet and saw that the outside of the bracer had deployed a round buckler, he had seen that one before. It wasn’t near as large as his big energy shield and it looked completely solid. The entire thing was still pink. So it probably operated under similar principles. He couldn't know.
That didn’t make any sense. He touched it, it felt like matter but who knew what weird shit this was. He got the feeling that it could probably handle a degeneration beam as well as his big Shield did.
The buckler seemed to be the same size as when Devin was using it but he had no way of confirming this, the only person who knew anything about it was flipping a coin for their life in a Cryo-Pod.
The pink buckler looked stable, solid. He didn’t feel any strain deploying it either which was nice.
He gripped his hand and tried to switch to his bigger energy Shield now that the buckler was out. Nothing.
He thought how it would be Great to have his Shield back. It deployed but he had already released his grip in surprise. He gripped again and thought of deploying his Shield again.
What was he doing wrong? What was he doing different? He mentally walked himself back through his actions and thoughts.
After a small bit of struggle he figured it out. ‘GreatShield’ was the activation phrase he needed to think of when he closed his grip. Shield deployed the smaller buckler.
He deployed the GreatShield again, he guessed he could probably could hold it for around a minute straight at this point, depending on the level of attack that it was blocking. He felt it draw from his body’s stored electricity.
It flickered out. That wasn’t good. He still had plenty of energy to give it.
He looked over the Gauntlet again and tried to figure out what was wrong. He tried to deploy the GreatShield again. Nothing. He looked closer at the single lined screen on the inside of the gauntlet.
GORUN MORAB NFELZI: 3%
[https://i.postimg.cc/pTbNj4Fx/Screen-Shot-2022-10-14-at-1-58-55-PM.png]
He had no idea what any of that meant. He only gave the letters a cursory glance as his focus was drawn to the ‘3%’. Was that the percentage towards the Gauntlet working correctly?
He thought ‘GreatShield’ again. Again, Nothing. It was just working!
He wandered around, idly keeping an eye out for anything lurking. He thought over the idea of a ‘shield’.
It defended. Could hit enemies with it. It also blocked things. At that thought, just over his wrist the elongated oval over his forearm expanded into different shaped shields before settling on a slightly bigger-sized buckler before retracting back to normal.
Smaller than the GreatShield but larger than the first buckler he had deployed.
Before he could continue to digest his findings he found Mikey laying propped against the base of a Cryo-Pod.
“Man, you look like shit.”
Mikey twitched as he turned towards Jack.
“You saying I look like shit is about the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.” He laughed then coughed up something that was definitely supposed to remain inside him.
Jack looked Mikey over. He had charred spheres of missing flesh around his body. Jack pulled out his Medjel bag.
“No, no thank you, I’ve seen how your surgery goes, Doctor.”
“You’re gonna die like this Mikey.”
“Is that Kensey’s light-pistol?”
“Yeah I think so, I found Devin all messed up.”
“That fuc-” He coughed again, “He’s the one who messed me up. He wouldn’t let it go.”
“Well yeah I’d agree with you but I don't know how much you can blame him for that, his hand wasn’t really attached to the rest of him anymore.”
“You said you found him like that?”
“Yeah; missing feet, hands, and half of him was flayed in a long strip. It was nasty.” Jack shook his head.
“Jack.” Jack didn’t notice any words come after that, he pulled his eyes from Mikey’s wounds to meet his eyes. “Jack, did you, did you do that to him?”
A stream of images flowed past his vision like each one sat in a train-car as it flickered past his awareness one after another.
“Jack.”
Jack looked him in the eyes again. It was more difficult this time.
“Maybe, I’m not sure.” The things that just spun by, he didn’t dare look at them closely.
Mikey’s hand came up to rest on his shoulder with a grunt of effort, “Thank you.” Jack looked uncomfortable.
“No I mean it. Thank you.”
“Yeah sure, no problem. Let’s get you in a Pod.”
“Keep the pistol.” Jack was about to close the Pod’s glass.
“Thanks, I will.” He wasn’t going to give it back anyways but it was definitely better this way. He didn’t have any problems with the guy.
Jack inserted more Nano than he did with Devin. Still he wasn't about to drain all of his Magno-Tubes. He left on the Scavenging Mode as well.
He headed back and saw Yuma getting to her feet with Jonah’s help. Jack gave her the light-pistol then turned towards the giant dead crab.
He could see from the top of the scrap pile that the blue shield was still up, although, it was flickering now. Something screamed at the edges. He dove into his Affinity and reached out toward it.
“Oh. Shit.”