Ignoring Phillipi’s questions about his appearance and changing size, Eight walked down the street, whistling a tune and kicking a can. People knew him, and even the thugs left him alone. In the past, he used to be a frequent guest at their headquarters, treating many of their ranks for various ailments. Not anymore. Those days were gone forever, with any luck. Eight whistled a tune, pulling himself up and keeping his shoulders square.
For all the misery that befell the city, there was a certain beauty to it. Sunlight danced, reflecting off the broken windows. Cancerous growth and unnatural grass left behind by Chosen Prince have started shivering and dying. Refugees and the locals gathered in abandoned buildings, sharing supplies and trying to remodel the wrecks. Several surviving priests wandered across the streets, untouched by the thugs. These strange people lent an ear and a hand to anyone in need, often bringing the wounded to the hospital. In the ruins of a vandalized community store, a young refugee taught several children how to count, while older kids dragged several bright posters and pretty lights and tried to decorate their makeshift home.
But this was all a facade of civility, and Eight scowled, hearing a faint woman’s pleadings and the laughter of thugs. A group of them, wearing iron collars with orange dots, emerged up from the dark alley and came upon the kids, demanding payment for the right to stay. After a brief argument about the need to pay the tribute a day too soon, the kids handed over most of their found possessions, and a girl cried when a teen gently took a puppy off her hands and handed it to the criminals. Eight observed the scene in disgust. There was a reason no rats, dogs, or cats rummaged through the city. People used food as a coin, too.
Humans. Could there be anything more disgusting than them? A life trusted them, and they cast it aside so freely, faking regret. He was so caught up in his thoughts that he almost missed a sudden glint of steel charging at him from the dark alley. Before the blade could slice his cloth, Eight side-stepped the edge, and his assailant fell face down on the road.
It was another member of the Insectoid Commune. The wretched being thrashed, crying and howling on the ground. Her blade slammed with a flat side against cracked concrete as the others ignored the scene. Eight had taken a step when the woman sprang to her legs, loudly sucking in air and trembling with her entire body.
A black carapace covered her entire body, thinning around six limbs that served as her legs and arms. She once had two clusters of darkness, the twin sets of compound eyes, but her left knot was lost to life, leaving a hole covered by dried blood. Despite similarity to an insect and mandibles for lips, the woman had rather human-looking fingers at her hands, and she clutched the blade with two hands, pointing its tip at Eight.
“You are in my way.” Eight informed the reject. He noticed a series of badly healed wounds on her arm. The fool had cracked her own carapace to inject herself with a drug.
“Crests... Need.... Fix... Must… Keep the purple…” The junkie convulsed. Tears flowed from underneath her good eye, and her mandibles clanked again and again. A black carapace was unusual this deep into the Oathtakers’ lands, where most of the insectoid Commune had brown carapaces or no chitin at all. But this color was common on the fridges, a result of hardening to survive the scorching sun. “When… Purple veil’s gone… Memories flood…. Don’t wanna! Need to see purple again! Please!”
“What you need is a detox. And medical attention, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to offer you any of it. Off. My. Path.” Eight had had enough of the filth populating his master’s world.
“Crests... Let me forget!” Her mandibles opened wide, and the woman charged at Eight.
“As you wish,” Eight said, thrusting an arm forward. His palm closed around the woman’s cranium, and the carapace cracked beneath the pressure. With a flick of the hand, he tossed her aside, and the woman flew across the street, slamming into a stone wall between the shocked teens and the thugs. She slid down the wall, leaving a long trail of crimson mixed with bits of chitin on the back of her head.
“Doc…” The thug checked on the woman, holding the struggling puppy by the nape. “You almost killed the bitch!”
“So?” Eight glanced at him. “She irked me. Do you want to irk me?”
“No, sir!” The thug stood at attention, nervously clicking his mandibles.
“Then hand over the puppy back to the kid.” Eight inhaled, feeling anger at the happiness in the children’s eyes. And that damned faint scream in the ruins tormented his hearing.
“But what about our tribute…”
“The what?” Eight arched his brow.
“Tribute, we own this district…”
“And you let the trash like her.” He nodded at the body. “Bother me? Have you forgotten who sews your goddam bellies?” The thug hiccuped as he backed away from Eight’s advance. “These kids can live here rent-free for your incompetence. Scram and find whoever is busy going through women in my territory and shoot them, before I tear out your guts for this insult!” Eight hadn’t even finished his words when the thugs retreated, noticing something in his eyes.
Eight ran a hand through his hair, calming himself. Metal flowed across his arteries, coating and merging with the skin, seeping even inside the strands of his hair, strengthening his muscles and making his heart racing faster and faster. The change was granular and was about to be over, but the price of the rapid change was a slight strain on his psyche, a minor nudge toward rash actions. With a series of wet pops, his fingers elongated, and he moved them, testing the agility. Good as new.
“Thank you, sir! Are you a hero?” The girl ran toward him, carrying the puppy in her small arms. Eight would’ve skinned the creature here and now, but the animal seemed to love it, judging by how eagerly the puppy’s tongue licked the girl’s cheek. And animals are cute.
“He is a local doctor,” another kid said, and Eight recognized a boy whose nose he had fixed. The creature came to him with a gunshot wound, and Eight couldn’t restrain himself and rearranged the badly healed nose by shattering it while the patient was under sedation. Ten was quite angry about the wasted medicine later.
“Was,” he corrected him. “Today, I am a pathologist of sorts. Keep a low profile for a few days and you might be surprised.”
“What do you mean, Doctor Ulli?” The boy asked. “And what should we do about the woman? Should we carry her to the hospital or…”
“Eat her for all I care.” Eight stormed away.
His morning walk led Eight to the city’s hall. Much to his displeasure, the place seemed to lack the usual crowds who had gathered to admire the gladiatorial massacres. The melted wreckage of the police cars was dragged aside; scavengers had stripped the corpses, bringing the Crabs their due and selling the rest. Butchers then chopped up the bodies, grilled them, and sold the meat to the locals. Almost nothing reminded about that massacre.
But something else reminded of another amusing scene. Whimpers, sobs, encouraging whispers, and pleas could be heard across the ruined square leading to the city’s hall. Eight walked through the destroyed fountain, sliding his hand down a statue of a dancing stone kid. This kid was supposed to have a pair—a girl. The kid was a Troll, and the girl was a Normie. The unknown architect perfectly captured the emotionless features of a troll and the happy smiling of a Normie and created a symbol of unity. Water flowed over the duo, making them glisten like angelic spirits. They survived the war. They survived the police massacre. And then a Crab broke the girl’s statue down. For fun. Eight scowled in disgust. Humans value nothing. They are mad and unsane. For the sake of everyone, the Creator must eliminate them. Art can stay. Food must stay. But humanity has to go.
Eight walked directly to the shattered walls, ignoring the workers’ cries. In one leap, Eight covered sixteen meters and buried his shoes in the stone surface, appearing among the hanging cages. Waves passed over his forefingers, turning them into blades, and Eight slashed, cutting through the chains and sending the cages toppling down. Dozen. Two dozen. He cut down all eighty cages and leaped from the wall, landing nimbly near the rolling steel cages. Frightened and hopeful eyes looked up at him from inside. Mothers and parents begged for their children to be saved, while others wailed and cried, despairing that the help came so late. Eight couldn’t care less about any of that, but he freed them all, just to spite the Crabs. If there is any justice in this world, this rabble will perish when Chosen Prince awakens.
He ignored the workers’ cries and paid no attention to the hobbling prisoners. Some of them reached the fountain and hungrily drank the filth at its bottom, along with stone dust. The Number kicked open a cage containing dead people who had tried to assassinate Tulio. The bastard was Abnormal and had a power to boot. This much Eight knew, no other could keep a band like his together. But what was his power?
The bellies of all the victims were swollen. Their hands bore signs of skin pallor, but that could be because quite a time had passed since their demise. Eight examined the open stomachs. Judging by the torn wounds, the flesh bulged from within, rather than someone cutting them. He sniffed the wounds, sensing water. Curious. Clean water was in short supply in the city, nearly as valuable as medicine. Alcohol was much cheaper. One corpse still had its belly intact, and Eight popped the ballooned flesh, examining a streak of blood mixed with water that gushed from it. The Number took himself by the chin and checked the victim’s nostrils and mouth. No teeth. He could bet that it was inside the stomach. Something, at great pressure, hit the woman in her mouth and filled her up. The stomach ruptured, then came the heart, and the lungs suffered the same fate. But how did it happen?
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Torture wasn’t something unknown to Eight, but he mostly used it to teach the Doubles and the Triples a thing or two. Psychological torture served his needs far better than getting the correct information. Still, he continued to inspect the body, not finding any bruises on the hands or legs where the rope or cuffs would’ve bitten into the flesh as the victim thrashed for her life. He lifted the head and noticed several scratch marks near the mouth and across the mouth. So that’s what it is… A car roared behind him, and Eight dropped the body.
His hopes of facing the crew from before were dashed. A dirty SUV covered in a layer of rust raced across the square, knocking down the kid’s statue and running over several prisoners. The car stopped in the fountain ruins, and its door opened, releasing billows of narcotic smoke into the air. Three unwashed goons clawed out of the car, pointing machine guns at Eight.
An arm showed up from the car, landing an impressive palm on the ground, and an Orais, dressed in a crimson red leather coat and carrying the Crabs’ “coat of arms” on his shoulder, climbed out of the rusty car. Orais were a rather brutish type of Abnormals who lived in the Reclamation Army. They had short legs and often used their arms for knuckle-walking, swinging their bodies around. This one’s body was covered in thick, matted black fur; his arms and legs were bulging with muscles thicker than a human waist. He grabbed a captive who was too weak to escape and swung the man like a whip, breaking his body against the ground.
The last of the group, a man who filled the car with disgusting smoke, rested an arm on a steering wheel and giggled like an idiot at the desperate screams and pleas of the people trapped beneath the vehicle’s wheels. Their bodies contorted, bones snapped one after another, and Eight found himself disappointed at such a quick demise and the fact that so many more had escaped. More. More needed to die.
“Hey! Doc!” A woman approached him, planning to shove the barrel of her weapon beneath his chin. “Have you gone cuckoo? This flesh belongs to Mister Monzon!”
“I know,” Eight sighed. “Therefore, I released them. And now I plan to deprive the fucker of a few more kilograms of flesh, if you don’t mind.”
They did, in fact, mind. Eight hadn’t had a doubt that his insinuation flew over their heads, but the insult worked like a charm to whip the Orais into a frenzy. He bared his square-shaped fangs and snapped. Bullets speared Eight’s afterimage and crashed into a piece of stone lifted into the air by the explosion of his movement. None of the shots hit him; the Number weaved around the bullets, tracing their trajectories with his enhanced senses.
Eight’s speed brought him into the midst of the thugs, and with a single sweep, he kicked the footing off the female fool. He spun her in the air, and the screaming woman held her finger on the trigger all this time. In her panic, she riddled both of her helpers with bullets, splattering the brains of one on the ground and killing the other when a bullet pierced his heart. The Orais stumbled back, grabbing himself by the chest.
Not all the air had yet left the woman’s lungs when Eight slammed her headfirst into the stone, fracturing first her face and then her skull. He stood up, shaking blood off his hand and a smile on his face, when a scraping of metal against metal alerted him to a new bother.
The Orais wasn’t dead. The man scratched his chest, plucking at a bullet stuck between his fur. His iron fur. Every visible centimeter of the man’s body was now covered with a smooth, steel surface, perfectly covering every curve without restricting his movement.
“Ouch. It almost tickled,” the Orais said. Eight picked up a machine gun off the ground and fired at the bastard. The thug merely spread his arms, enduring the hail of gunfire, not even closing his eyes when a bullet bounced off his pupil. His clothes got tattered, and faint streaks of smoke rose in the air in places where sparks had burned the fabric. But the body underneath was unharmed. Undamaged and covered in steel. “How’s that for a surprise?” The Orais crossed his arms. “Can’t hurt me, cuckoo. Ya know, doc, ya weren’t one of those. One of the useless. Had you kept your head down, ya could’ve lived peachy. But nope, had to get a screw loose in yer head and go all bloody on us. Guess I’ll eat you now. Waste.”
“Don’t lose your head over it.” Eight tossed the emptied weapon aside as the Orais lunged at him.
The Number dove, evading a crisscrossed strike aimed at slicing through his neck. The Orais turned to face him the instant his steel forearms missed the mark, and a fist the size of the Number’s head flew for his face. Eight dodged the clumsy flurry of blows, refusing to retreat from the challenge. The Abnormal kept punching with his left, sending gushes of air across the ravaged surface and pushing the dead aside with each missing blow. But his right hand was open and held tight to his body. When a fist missed Eight’s face by a hair obscuring his vision, the Orais made a disemboweling thrust with his right. And it missed, for Eight had already anticipated the obvious trick.
He let the momentum carry the buffoon forth and punched him in the back of his knee with enough force to drop him on a knee. A thunderous boom spread across the square, and the impact of the landed knee shattered the concrete. The Orais tried to stand up, but Eight didn’t give him a chance. He turned his thumbs into sharp daggers and buried them in the Orais’ temples, rupturing the brain matter. He grabbed the lower jaw with the rest of his fingers and stepped on the shoulder. Without a haste, the Number wrangled the Orais’ head off the thrashing body, tearing the metal coverage, cracking the skin and muscles, and leaving the bones broke. He threw the head aside just in time to hear a roaring engine.
The remaining Crab accelerated his car, heading straight for Eight. The Number raised his left arm, tensing his muscles, and waved at the fool with his right hand. Just before the car could ram him, Eight made a crescent-sweeping motion with his left, tearing through the metal and pushing the engine out of the car. The car itself flew up, made a single turn in the air, and landed on its roof.
With a cough, the thug opened the door and crawled out of the car. The idiot shouted in pain upon trying to stand up. During the fall, the car briefly squeezed both of his knees, shattering the bones. It was only because he was still under the effects of whatever delirious substance he had ingested that he didn’t notice it sooner.
“No way…” He tried to crawl away and went pale as he heard Eight’s calm steps. The Crab shrieked like a little kid, begging someone, anyone, for help. And no one answered. Eight could see other people—the workers on the wall, civilians hiding in the ruins, even some rival gang members. Everyone waited. Watched. “Stay away! Stay the fuck a…” He reached for a pistol on his belt.
Eight has covered the distance between the two in three steps and turned his fingers into blades. The man first saw a blur before his eyes and then thrashed in pain, noticing that his hands were missing at the wrists.
“This can’t be happening,” he whimpered, lifting the stumps. “No way! How am I supposed to feed my family…”
“Tell me,” Eight asked. His fingers touched the man’s face, cutting the skin. “Where is the walking dead man known as Tulio Monzon?”
“In the palace,” the Crab whispered with suddenly dry lips, making Eight twitch his blades next to his ear, almost taking it off. “I am telling the truth, man!”
“And I believe you,” Eight assured him. He sighed, annoyed at the cocktail of smells made from smoking vapor, sweat, and shite scents. “But every whoreson in this city names his base a palace. Be specific! Platinum Palace. Bitch’s Palace. Drug Palace. Walled Palace…”
“Walled Palace!” the thug screamed. “Mister Monzon has decided to grace the Walled Palace with his presence to check out the newest boys…” Eight’s hand turned to flesh. He grabbed the man’s face, piercing the skin with his fingers and feeling the bone beneath.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” the Number said and pulled, turning away before the blood could stain him even further.
He shook the pieces of the human face off his hands, while the Crab behind him howled his pain to the world, rolling next to the flayed corpses in the cages. Eight found such a demise befitting of a rabid creature. And it served a purpose, too. He was making a point and eroding Tulio’s influence. Ideally, any government should hold a monopoly on violence. But in the pseudo-feudal state that little Tulio had built, the rules were a little different. His “vassals,” other gang leaders, could do as they pleased, but Tulio’s own men were off limits. Even if the lowest member of his freak show insulted another gang leader, only other Crabs could mete out the punishment.
Eight had shattered this illusion. By releasing the prisoners, he spat in Tulio’s face. By killing his men, he proved himself stronger. And by staying and collecting two machine guns and their mags, he showed full confidence in his abilities. Other thugs observed the situation, deciding that they were more afraid of him than of Tulio’s wrath, even if only on a subconscious level for now. And most importantly, he staged the whole thing in the place of Tulio’s triumph, where the man had massacred the police.
The Crabs insulted him, and Eight, or rather Doctor Ulli, returned the favor in blood. The seed of future dissent was planted. Now he needs but to remove the kingpin, and the Crabs will disappear in the infighting between other gangs. All would hunt them out of a desire to show their brazen courage. Eight would’ve liked to find the bastard who took his earring and eviscerate him, but he wasn’t going to search the entire city. Let others do the honors; his business was with the Crabs’ leader.
Without a hurry, Eight picked up two machine guns, reloaded them. These fired 7.62mm rounds, a pepper spray against Abnormals, but would do quite nicely against Normies. They lacked straps to carry them, but Eight solved that problem with the thug’s belts, fastening weapons behind his back. Then he found a canister in the car’s trunk. Unlike the elegant wireless power designs of the Iternians, or even the pitiful imitations working on the energy cells used by other nations, the refugees brought with themselves cars that used flammable fuel. These allowed them to evade the invaders, but the gangs later took them all, and judging by the occasional explosions at night, they did not have a lick of self-preservation. Eight filled the canister and spotted a single brave soul brave enough to appear in the open.
“Hullo, friend! Sudden activation’s a bitch, huh?” asked an Abnormal from the Insectoid Commune, leaning against the wall. Three orange dots adorned his iron collar. This specimen lacked additional limbs of his kind, but thick chitin covered his body. Tattoos marking his affiliation with the gang covered every millimeter of the chitin around his neck. The man himself wore a blue t-shirt, shorts, and sunglasses. “I know the feeling—thinking you are invincible and all. But Doc, lemme give you some advice…” Spikes started growing out of his knuckles, but Eight was faster. He sprang to the Abnormal, pressing an index finger to the chitin above the carotid artery. The Abnormal gulped, chittering anxiously through his mandibles. “What’s it’s gonna be, boss? A turf takeover?”
Eight held the killing blow. Activation. An excellent cover. Such things were rare; you were either born an Abnormal with a power or didn’t. People could become an Abnormal in the biomedical labs of Iterna or through excessive mechanical augmentation, but a power was much harder to come by. Activation was one of those things. The good doctor got beaten up, went crazy, massacred some peons, and escaped. Yes, let the Oathtakers think of it rather than believing that a Number was here.
“Nothing so grand.” Eight plucked the sunglasses and put them on, leaving the confused thug behind. “Merely a community service.”