Jack hadn’t spent the entire time running in idle thought, he had tested his Viral Gland and that… was a bit horrifying. A spraying splash shot out from his mouth and released the sense of fullness in his jaw, it melted a ManRat that had been running alongside him. Jack had stopped running to observe that death and even the death-obsessed ManRats had been a bit horrified from the gruesomeness and had given him a wide berth.
His attempts to keep practicing it were mostly unsuccessful as it was activated by an unfamiliar series of muscle contractions and relaxations in his mouth that, without the feeling of fullness, was difficult to replicate. The full feeling was thankfully slowly building itself back up.
After picking up Jonah he really didn’t want to accidentally turn him into a pile of fleshy goo, so he abandoned his testing of that Constitutional Upgrade and was focusing on the newfound strength of his muscles, his coordination seemed almost otherworldly, at least compared to before and it was getting better by the minute. Reflecting a bit through the repetitious exercise of running, he figured that his fight with the Tactician had also gone a lot smoother than he had been expecting, although it would have gone even easier if he had sprayed his viral gland on it.
Electrical forms from his brain, initiated by his mind, sent signals and his muscles coiled and coordinated to move his body to the new position with a deep sense of unity and thus, stability. Comparatively it had felt like there had always been some of his muscles that had been working against all of his movements before. Counterbalanced muscles that overcompensated or didn’t compensate enough and wasted energy. Now, it felt like his muscles moved in optimum, or near enough, quantities to accomplish what his mind directed and worked together toward… One purpose. Thinking about the mushroom’s obsession with ‘One’ wasn’t the most comfortable but it was almost assuredly better than the Distributed Intelligence would have been. Maybe mushrooms weren’t so bad after all… at least in small doses. This didn’t feel like that was the end of it though, this upgrade held more secrets. The potentiality was there, in fact-
“Jack! I have a signal!”
The grin widely spread across his face. Finally.
“Tell me where to go!”
“Left ahead. Then… I’m not sure, I will recalculate it from there!”
Jack pushed his slightly aching body faster as he turned left and pushed off the wall to boost his speed again. His muscle coordination meant that he had lost less speed on the turn than the dexterous Rats.
“Slow down, I can’t keep up!”
Jonah banged on the top of Jack’s hand with a fist, it snapped him out of the running high he had been soaking himself in, driving that deep distant focus and a desire to move. He slowed down.
“Which way Jonah! Hurry up.”
“Right…?”
“Right?!”
“I don’t know for sure, this place is a mess.”
“Jonah! Right?”
“Yes yes go right!”
Jack took off around the next corner, his muscles pushing and pulling and moving his feet faster and faster…
“Jack, left here!”
It was a three way split and he had been leaning toward the right so he planted a foot on the wall and pushed off. Midair, he realized that a ‘roll’ was out of the question because he was still carrying Jonah. He redirected his weight in midair to move him toward the edge of the split corridor, he grabbed at it then launched himself forward. He felt Jonah’s feet separate from their wrap around his side as the older man redoubled his clenched grip around Jack’s neck with a flush of panicked strength. He ignored the small spike of pain from a small tear in his shoulder muscle and quickly repaired it with a burst of electricity.
He ignored the grumbling as he continued forward, more slowly this time, and flicked on his Electro-Affinity. The Rats around him had slowed and created distance. He didn’t notice.
There was an alcove, over to the side he walked toward the familiar glowing point but was greeted by a wall.
“My Electro-Affinity says it should be here.”
“The signal is somewhat muffled,” Jonah hopped off and turned back down the hall from where they had come, “The other split.”
They walked back and then into the hall. The Rats were acting strange. They turned and continued down the new path, Jack kept his Electro-Affinity on as they approached the emitted signal that both he and Jonah were tracking from the scientist’s loaned goggles. Jack saw an empty corridor and a small cut out, perhaps a closet at some point. Clearly standing out as clear and relatively complex electrical patterns he looked up and saw a pocket of jagged, rusted metal and reached inside. There were the goggles, a portable, and… a Magno-Tube? He turned off his Affinity sight and held the items in slight confusion. Where was Le-
“Jack.” It was Jonah’s voice. He was standing, looking at-
“Leanne.” Her name came from his mouth unbidden. A flush of emotions swelled from his deepest part and drove his feet forward even though most of him didn’t seem to share that same desire to approach. Unwillingly, yet unavoidably, he approached her.
She looked small. He thought that it was a strange thing to think.
He instinctively tried to push down and away the creeping currents of emotional pain, to compartmentalize it. Instead it only caused it to rebound in swells of reciprocal waves through his mind. Lost in his reflected emotions he didn’t register the snickering laugh that quietly reverberated through his head.
He dropped down to look at her and saw the smile frozen on her face. Leanne… was dead? It didn’t make sense. It seemed wrong. They were going to find her and escape this newest, freshest level of ship-based hell. He felt the weight of his mistakes. Of his inattention. Of his lack of caring. Of a million things he could have done better. Of things he should have done better. How she had helped him when he had been on the edge of losing himself to the ‘One’.
No, that wasn’t right, with a flush of shame he corrected, she had ‘rescued’ him. He would have lost that mental fight against the One. It had infected his body too deeply. How, when she needed to be rescued herself he had not been there like she had for him. He felt the shame of failure burn at him. She had found him and fixed him before it was too late. He hadn't found her. Not until it was too late to do any good.
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For a long second he desperately railed against the fact that his EQ wasn't as low as it had been before. He reached to push the confused jumble of emotions away to a deep dark corner of his mind. It wouldn't do it and a repeated set of snickering laughs in response to his repeated attempts hit on something and seemed to bring with it scattered memories through his conscious mind that felt… like a deadly, poisonous snake. He remembered things.
The sight of Leanne’s body brought him back to the present and he felt the drip of liquid on either side of his face. He touched them, trying to wipe whatever fresh wound that had seemed to open and noticed that the liquid wasn’t the familiar red he had been expecting. An uncontrollable choking sob burst from him and the swell of anger that followed on its heels pushed it right back down. A haptic purr from his Gauntlet brought confusion then a fragile smile to his face.
“You pus-” Jack’s fist, augmented from the Gauntlet, punched the Trash SI from his shoulder. He didn’t notice the strips of flesh that tore from his flesh from the SI’s attempt to maintain its grip.
It still didn’t make sense. He had trouble thinking of the proud, able, sometimes insecure, usually brave, sometimes disagreeable woman as this… broken body in front of him, in a flash of misguided hope he turned on his Affinity. No, her body was bereft of electrical signals, he wasn’t sure what that meant beyond the fact that no living thing he had ever seen was missing them. No, he couldn't lie to himself about that, he did know what it meant.
He focused on her broken body and that helped settle his emotions as a deeply analytical part of his mind kicked in.
She was missing a hand, it looked messy but wasn’t bleeding. Cauterized by something. He wasn’t entirely sure what had done that, a localized explosion seemed to make sense. The Medjel that had covered her broken ribs had been torn through and ripped away. There were other grisly-looking wounds on her other side. Her insides leaked out but instead of disgust it brought fresh waves of anger. Unlike the guilt, shame, and feelings of loss, he was able to stamp down the swelling anger before it sunk too low into the sea of his mind. He applied a viciousness to doing that, bottled up from his inability to stamp down the hurt. He applied some Medjel after pushing her leaking insides back to where they belonged.
He continued to study her. Jack reached out a gentle hand to move aside her blood-matted hair from her eyes. He forced himself to study her face, to feel the pain of loss, of his failure. Fresh liquid dripped down the sides of his face. This time he did not sob. He felt angry at himself, he would have stopped her but he had lost control and chased after the wounded crab then… had apparently been knocked unconscious. He was sleeping and was unable to stop her from going. And now, this was the result. Even though Jonah had made a fool-move and given her the goggles and she had made an even more foolish move by going after Tule... despite their own shares of the blame, it was his fault.
He had wanted to think that he had his mission and that they were just tagging along and therefore were responsible for themselves. Sure, they would fight together or help each other out when they chose to, but mostly they were independent of each other.
He was wrong and now her death was his fault. He had been the leader whether or not he wanted to be and he had not bothered to accept the responsibility, he hadn't wanted it. After all, it hadn't been his choice... but what of any of this had been his choice from the beginning?
He had found himself in a position and this was the consequence of his actions. If it was unavoidable that she would die in the fights ahead, that was one thing, but this death? It seemed... wasteful. It sat sourly on his tongue.
In the middle of her chest was a grossly bleeding piercing and slashing wound. Or it had been in any case. It was relatively clean and went from one side of her chest to her heart.
A flash of recognition and anger swept through, he recognized what caused it almost immediately. An oversized crab’s clawblade. He tried to picture the angle and when he recreated it in his imagination it seemed to him that it came from a somewhat upwards angle. A hybrid then.
He looked around her and saw puddles of her blood had mixed with large amounts of ichor. He smiled wanly, an echo from a rougher part of his mind came through, good girl. She had done some good damage. He stood up, why had they taken the crab’s bodies and not hers though? He knew that crabs ate Humans.
“Why did they leave her body?” He voiced the question out loud, but wasn’t listening for an answer. He picked up Leanne’s body gently and cradled her as he stood up.
He ignored the voices calling for his attention as he swept his eyes through the murky corridor until his eyes caught on something he recognized. Her water-pressure pistol. He squatted to get a better look and saw that it was separated into two halves on a molecularly clean line. Jack’s face twisted and warped as a host of emotions was swept away in a tide of burning anger. He knew only one weapon that could cut like that.
He stretched himself back up and looked down the hall and started to walk before a hand jerked on his arm. He whirled in a cloud of near-madness but stopped himself.
“What.”
Jonah was wearing his goggles now, a series of cords went from the goggles and between his portable and Leanne’s, “She found them, I retraced the route to the Cryo-Laboratory Door. Tule-”
“That bastard!” The snarl left Jack’s lips unbidden, “He murdered her.”
Rattigan was there in his terrible, swollen-muscled mass.
“Rattigan, do you know how to get to the Cryo-Laboratory Door?” He didn’t wait for the Rat’s response, “Jonah, can you figure out the most direct path? Any information on the crab’s formations?”
He busily tapped between the three devices for a few, increasingly-tense seconds before nodding and showing Rattigan a route then displaying it to Jack as Rattigan’s brow furrowed as the ManRat started trying to issue orders. The oversized Death Champion gave Jack a bewildered look before stepping away from him to psychically issue orders to the rest of horde.
Jack reviewed the information on the portable but found himself unable to focus on it. Hate distracted him. It felt good. It didn’t actually feel that good but it was a welcome emotional break from the pain. He welcomed the burning desire to mutilate, torture, and destroy. To cause pain and see a modicum of his own reflected on the flesh of another. That would make him feel better, he was sure of it.
----------------------------------------
Jonah was showing, and reshowing Jack the route as he felt the air heat around him and then start to slightly shimmer, he took a step back before Jack turned his eyes toward him.
“Jack…?”
Jack was surprised and carried a wounded look on his face before shifting Leanne’s corpse to one hand. The other clamped down on Jonah’s shoulder like a vice. It hurt slightly but he could tell that Jack meant to be reassuring by the words that followed, “I won’t let you die, no matter what. Not like…”
Jonah patted Jack’s hand and looked him in his eyes. Uncomfortable, Jonah finally nodded to Jack, which seemed to mollify him and he released his shoulder.
Jonah had thought that Jack was like him and had made EQ his dump stat, but from how hard Leanne’s death seemed to have hit him, perhaps he had miscalculated and it was moreso at a ‘standard’ Allocation. He adjusted his EQ estimate in a speculative copy of Jack’s Stat sheet. All data was good data. Data meant you knew more, knowing more meant you were less likely to be surprised, being less likely to be surprised meant that you were less likely to die.
Sure it was somewhat sad that they had lost Leanne, but mostly it was disappointing to lose her capabilities. And from the data she had gathered, collated, and organized, all apparently while she was on the run? It was truly an outsized loss. She had extraordinarily detailed and organized data, and despite Eilien’s useful healing abilities, Leanne would have been a much more potent research assistant. Extraordinarily so.
He was annoyed that he hadn’t realized it earlier, he would have kept her much closer if he had. Definitely not let her run off like some fool after the clearly feralizing man. He had reached the same conclusion as Jack after seeing the water-pistol.
He felt a swell of gratitude that she had been considerate enough to not lose or destroy his goggles or the data and had silently and gratefully thanked her for that.
It was much better than Jack would have done. Although he would have most-likely survived, it would have without a doubt, come at the cost of destroying everything valuable around himself. The Magno-Tube she had filled created some interesting potentialities. He tucked it into his most interior, and protected, pocket.
She was much more courteous. He paused and corrected himself, she ‘had been’ much more courteous. A shame.