I took my time driving back to the north side of Portside. There seemed to be some kind of ball game going on today, so the roads were packed. Not that it mattered too much. I had an appointment, but it was more of a suggestion than anything. It’s not like I sat down and told her I’d be over at an exact time.

Eventually, though, I made my way in the right direction. The Jagged Clover Pub was as… inviting as ever. The stench of alcohol puked back up in the alleys burned at my nose as I found a safe enough spot to park my bike.

I headed over to the door, noticing the sign had been shot several times since I was last here. It used to say 'Authentic beer and cuisine better than your mother's milk'. Now it read ‘your mother’s’ and someone had spray painted ‘so fat’ after it in the bioluminescent spray paint vandals seemed to love.

The tiny-handed bartender waved as I stepped in, his massive girthy arms rippling with muscles. “Welcome back in lass.”

Ah, he recognized me. That made this a bit easier… though it also meant the guy had the memory of an elephant. I’d only been here twice. “Athena in?” I asked as I walked over.

”Aye.” The bartender ran a towel through a glass. Pretty sure he just did it for looks since I could hear a dishwasher running in the back of the place. He eyed the ceiling, from which I could hear a faint, rhythmic impact. “Bit of a bad mood, that ‘un.”

I eyed the place. The bar had seen some upgrades since the last time I rolled through the place. At least on the inside. The outside could still use some work. The guy even got a holographic tip jar at some point. I’d never seen such a thing before, but it looked like a typical mason jar with a mound of holographic coins in it.

“Thanks for the heads up.” I tapped on my phone, sending a tip through the tip jar. A hologram of a coin appeared from my direction just above my phone. It flipped into the jar to join the batch of holographic coins. “Cool jar.”

”Thanks, lass.” The bartender waved at me and then moved down the bar to a customer.

I headed back the same way as last time and walked upstairs. I moved past the rest of the private booths to the room Athena was in last time. Several deep groans came from behind the door, making me hesitate momentarily before I finally knocked on the door.

Athena’s rage-filled voice called out gruffly, “Come in!”

I slid open the door, taking a step back as my hand instinctively went for my pistol. The room reeked of blood with seven people tossed about the place. All of them were bleeding profusely, though not one of them looked as though they’d tried to defend themselves. Athena stood over one of the unfortunate saps, ramming the defeated man’s head into the ground hard enough to send spurts of blood from his crooked nose. Somehow, she still managed to look pretty even surrounded by the gore.

”What did I tell you, Calle? Don’t fuck this up. What did you do?” Her expression looked half feral as the servos and synthetic muscles of her chrome arms ruthlessly slammed the man’s face down into a pool of his own blood.

The man groaned as his head was lifted back up. He sounded entirely defeated as if he had given up on life. “F-fucked… u-up.”

Athena slammed him down one last time before standing up and glancing toward me. Her chrome eyes pulsed with a wrathful red light as if to show her heartbeat. Her gaze stayed for a few moments as the red light faded back to mostly calm gray eyes. Damn intimidating that… I should take notes.

She stepped over toward me, slamming her chrome leg into the back of the guy’s head just as he started to push himself up. A hollow thunk echoed as several bloody teeth flew out. The man gave one last half-groan before he fell completely unconscious… or dead. There was a fair chance he was dead. He wasn’t moving, and he definitely suffered quite a bit of brain trauma. None of the other people in the room looked as though they fared any better.

After a moment, I decided they probably weren’t dead, just heavily injured. At least, they were still breathing. It was a bit hard to tell on some of them, subdermal armor made some of the lung compressions harder to see, but I was, like, thirty percent sure.

“Ah, hey Zuku…” Athena brushed her hands, shedding drops of blood from the chrome. She cast a look around at the several people who were collapsed all over the place as she wrinkled her nose. She looked a bit offended as if it was their fault they bled all over her room. I mean, how dare they bleed while she beat them up, right? “Damn gonks… Let’s uh- let's go somewhere else to chat, yeah?”

“Chek.” I backed out of the room, hastily getting out of her way. No way in hell did I want to give any reason for the wound-up fixer to go off on me too. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea. “S-so… how’ve you been?”

“Nova.”

…

…

We entered another private booth, this one on the opposite side of the building from Athena’s typical room. The place was absolutely loaded with boxes of weapons and explosives. There were even a few launchers hidden amongst the mess of firepower. The Blue Crusade would have a field day if they raided this place. “Sorry ‘bout the mess… I usually only use this room for selling ‘trinkets’.”

The tables and booth were entirely covered in guns to the point there wasn’t any spot to sit down. I decided to just ‘casually’ lean against the wall close to the door. It was one of the few spots not covered in danger. “No problem. About the job?”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Athena walked over to a box of grenades and kicked the lid closed before sitting on the explosives like a maniac. She ran a chrome hand through her blue hair, pulling off a few flakes of dried blood. A sigh escaped her as she looked around the room. “Look, I’m going to be upfront with you, this one's personal. I’ll pay you seventy-five hundred Rayn to take care of it.”

”Take care of what?” Seventy-five hundred Rayn was a big gig… not a really big gig, but a big gig for me. If I had that kind of money… I’d actually be pretty close to getting my printer with that and the gold I still had locked away. And I had some Rayn coming in from Carone as long as he didn’t screw ‘Mr. White’.

Athena sighed yet again and flicked her hair out of her face. She reached over to the table and snagged a tablet. “There’s this corporation that’s been hiring mercs through me for the past year. Usually, they hire a bunch of mercs to go find and retrieve some kind of artifact, most of which came from Cwalu.”

“Like the Leper-Khans?” I asked as I got a foreboding feeling.

Athena eyed me a moment, her beautiful chrome eyes seemed to attract all my attention. She twisted her head slightly as if deep in thought before finally nodding. “Yeah, like the Leper-Khans. Just that- the mercs hired tend to disappear without a trace or wind up dead before completing the gig. Then the corp doesn’t pay up and I’m out Rayn and solid workers.”

”Do you suspect the corp is getting… involved?” It wouldn’t be too strange. Those corpos were idiots like that.

”Chek chek.” Athena drummed her fingers across a rifle to her side and passed me the tablet. I glanced over it to see hundreds of pictures, most depicting dead mercs though the later pictures were of a familiar destroyed camp. Only, it looked far more brutalized than when I passed through that section of the desert.

“The Leper-Khans are dead. They went silent a couple of days after you returned. Once is unlucky, twice is a coincidence, but six times? Normally, I’d just blacklist the corp and get on with it, but I think this one in particular is using shell companies to hire me out and screw with me.”

Damn, sounded like these guys were tired of living. Everyone knows not to screw over the fixer unless you were damn sure you could get away with it. ”So… what is it that you want me to do then?”

Athena paused her drumming, letting a few moments of silence stretch on. “Find solid evidence of what’s going on. If what I suspect is right-“ her hand gripping the rifle tensed, shattering it into little pieces, “I want you to break into their main HQ and cause as much destruction and devastation as possible. I can get you some guys and weapons-“ She waved her hand around the room, “for a frontal assault. Or, if you’d rather, you can take a quieter approach and sabotage them.”

Damn, what a risky gig… pissing off a corp, eh? Hmm… I could take a look at it first. Sabotaging them wouldn’t be all that hard, and I could klep some goods while I was at it. If I decided sabotage was too risky, I could always just take Athena’s offer for a strike squad… Yeah, if I was smart this would be an easy gig. Just the pay left a little to be desired. "How much devastation are we talking about?”

”Enough to hurt. I want these bastards to feel my wrath.” Athena gave a bloodthirsty smile.

“Chek… leading a strike squad isn’t really my thing though… I can definitely look for evidence.” I was more of a stealthy scout than a squad leader. And while I like mass devastation as much as the next person… yeah, not my forte.

Athena chuckled, slapping her hand on a rocket launcher sitting next to her. “That’s fine. Just find what I need to know. Contact me after and we’ll figure it out from there. Fifteen hundred for evidence.”

“I’ll be risking my life here. At- at least four grand.” Damn, that didn’t sound as imposing as I wanted it to. Almost forgot she was sitting on a crate of grenades for a moment. And the scene of her beating an entire group senselessly...

Athena arched a perfectly sculpted brow. “Don’t push your luck, kid. Two grand.”

Fine… it was just an initial check more than anything. The bigger problem was with the full pay. “Seven thousand isn’t all that much if you want me to break in and sabotage them myself.”

“Oh?” Athena leaned back against the wall, idly cleaning out a bit of blood in between her knuckles. “I was expecting you to call in the strike squad, which I’d be paying for. Seven thousand is more than fair enough for that… if you do it yourself though… hmm… okay, fifteen thousand. More depending on which corpo it is and who’s backing it.”

“Where do I start?” I handed back the tablet.

She messed around on it for a moment before a message from her popped up in my HUD. "Here’s the list of contacts that hired me. You’re the first I’ve hired to take care of this. Don’t make me hire someone else.”

I looked through the six companies on the list and nodded my head. “I’ll take care of it.”

”You better,” Athena said with such finality that it left no room for my imagination. She was definitely kicking me out.

— — —

As I entered back into my apartment, I decided now would be a good time to spend one of my Perk Points before I really get started on my investigation. I had a free Perk Point which could be spent on any Skill and one for Tech. For now, I decided to go ahead and cash in my Tech one.

I laid down on my bed and entered the pavilion with just a thought, arriving in front of Tech’s shelf. The faint flickering of fire illuminated each of the scrolls on the shelf as I looked around.

As usual, I looked through the bunch. This time around, I narrowed it down to just three of the Perks.

「Corvid」

「Bionic Engineering」

「Material Identification」

Of the three, the weirdest one was Corvid. Unlike every other Perk I’ve seen so far, its description was quite unique. It simply said ‘Corvid, the Scavenger.’ Yeah, that was it. What was I supposed to do with that? Although… I was tempted if only for the fact that it was related to Crow. Or at least, I assume it was related to Crow. Crow had yet to let me down.

Bionic Engineering seemed like one of those learned Perks with a focus on, well, bionics. It would probably greatly help me in learning about and creating chrome of my own if I wanted to get into that. Not so sure about it though.

Material Identification seemed the most straightforward out of the bunch. Its description was quite long, but it basically boiled down to allowing me to identify any kind of material in a single glance. Pretty simple. It seemed like a learned Perk, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. It could just as easily be an ability-style Perk.

It took a while before I finally settled on Corvid. Stuff from the interface related directly to the eidolons had been the most powerful without a doubt. It would be stupid to pass up this opportunity, even if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what it did.

I tossed the scroll onto the easel. It unraveled, revealing a masterfully painted crow sitting in a black void. Although the crow was black too, it somehow seemed to stand out against the void.

I stumbled out of the darkness back onto my bed as a searing pain arced up through my hand. I groaned deeply as I stared down at thick black lines inking themselves into my skin of seemingly their own will. The black lines grew blurrier and blurrier till I all I saw was darkness.