"Where did she get that thing from?!" Chief Tarikan exclaims as he watches the scene unfold on the screens. The panic within the prison is mirrored in the command module, as the guards scramble to gear up in preparation to storm in and get the situation under control. It is not because they care for the lives of the incarcerated, but because Prisoner OS69 has somehow obtained a weapon that could compromise the structural integrity of the entire station, if she is not stopped. He turns to the staff member sitting at the control desk. "Flood the station with sleep gas!"
"I have been trying to do so, but the remote controls are not responding!" The Aphilean in question exclaims, his voice replicator unable to do the urgency of the situation justice. "It must have been sabotaged!"
"... don't tell me..." An Elorian guard mutters as he runs his long and bony fingers over the control panel before him. Reflected in his mechanical lens eyes is a screen displaying the footage from when Prisoner OS69 was first brought to the station. There had been a temporary system shutdown when she entered the Reclothing Booth and it had to be pried open manually. She had emerged half-naked, her remaining clothes singed and her body covered in soot. Apparently that had been the result of her underwear being made of the newly synthesized material called Plexatoom, which explodes violently and releases an EMP burst when hit with the booth's particle annihilator. "She must have done something at that time!"
The footage shows her entering the booth, before the camera cuts out and then comes back online moments before she is freed. At first glance, there is nothing special about it, but the Elorian puts the footage into holographic feed, with a before and after comparison of Prisoner OS69's physical appearance in the most similar pose possible. The Elorian's eyes zoom in on it and realization hits him.
"She had something inside her body! See here, there is a small bulge around her stomach, but it's gone afterwards." He points at the difference in the footage and everyone immediately sees what he means. The fact that she did it in plain sight causes anger to rise up within them; she wore a skintight bodysuit that accentuated her curves at the time, even though more baggy clothes would have hid the bulge perfectly.
"Commence docking! We are going to go in and shut her down. This facility is not going to see its first breach on my watch!" An enraged Chief Tarikan growls and puts on his enforcer helmet. "Set vaions to kill." Grasping his gun, he makes sure to follows his own order and turns the switch from stun to lethal.
Lowering the command module onto the station, the automatic guided docking mechanism locks, before air and power are connected. The instant the lamp denoting a successful attachment lights up in green, the power goes out throughout the entire station. Panicked voices resound in the guards' room as everything shuts down and the artificial gravity disappears. Moments later, the backup lights come on and barely illuminates the interior in a dim orange.
"That must be Prisoner OS69's doing!" The chief shouts, as his anger boils over. "Find that whore and kill her! This is not an execution, it is to prevent a prison break." He does not really need to justify killing anyone under the given circumstances, but if these actions are called into question by a higher authority, that is the response all his men are going to give. It is only a measure to cover his bases in case public criticism over this incident mounts.
The guards activate their magnetic boots and regain their footing, before gathering in front of the blast door leading into the prison quarters. Powering the door's automatic mechanism with the backup battery, which can only be activated with one of three master keys, Chief Tarikan and his men move out to eliminate this troublemaker and regain control over the facility.
Senka turns the corner and nearly runs into Olethea, bottomless and with her shirt open, carrying a cat-sized creature that could only be described as an oversized maggot. The latter squeezes the thing and from a circular, teeth-studded maw, emerges a screech followed by a shockwave tearing through the corridor behind the former and blasting away several prisoners that were pursuing her. Silence follows as the two stare at each other for a moment.
"What is that thing!?" Senka is the first to speak, as she points at the creature in Olethea's hands. She has seen her fair share of strange beings, but this living weapon is bizarre enough to elicit such a response from her. It quivers and wiggles weakly, as if trying to escaped the eldar's grasp.
"This is a Sendarian Tunneler." Olethea holds it out as if to gesture for her new partner in crime to try and hold it. Senka shakes her head with an expression of clear disgust. After all, its surface is covered in slime. Then again, the red-head is also covered in slime with a very distinct and familiar smell.
"Ugh, you stink... But really, where did you get that thing from?"
"From in here." The eldar points at her abdomen, suggesting that it was smuggled into the prison inside her womb. The flabbergasted expression from the doll-like girl causes the red-head to laugh. "Their eggs are only as small as a marble and they can lay dormant for many centuries, until exposed to the right mixture of proteins."
"... that?" Senka's eyes move to her completely soaked crotch.
"Oh no, not just any sperm cuts it. And within this prison, only the Zenoshan had the right stuff~ ♪" Olethea corrects the misconception with a grin. Holding the Sendarian Tunneler in one hand, the eldar picks up a piece of meat from a prisoner she blew apart earlier and dangles it in front of the creature's half-open mouth. With a blindingly fast snap, its maw extends forward and swallows the offered food instantly. "Good girl~ ♡"
Senka watches in bewilderment as the creature's body seems to expand slightly after that meal. Apparently it has an extremely fast growth rate. Before the eldar can bend down to pick up another piece, the entire station shakes from an exterior impact and a second later, the power goes out, causing the emergency lights to come on. Everything begins to float.
"So, what's the escape plan?" Asking in the dim orange twilight, the doll-like girl puts her hands on her hips with little care for the absence of the artificial gravity.
"Remember that the command module can detach from the station?" The eldar replies with a question of her own.
The two exchange a glance and no more words are needed. Kicking off the walls, they begin to move down the corridor, making their way towards their escape vessel.
"How did you get your hands on something like that in the first place?"
"It involves falling into one of their tunnels during breeding season and the fact that they have needlessly large ovipositors~ ♡"
"... I was the dumb one for asking..." Bringing a palm to her forehead, the stitched girl mutters in exasperation.
"Ahaha~ ♪ But it's all to finish my job."
"Halt, Prisoners OS69 and OS72! Drop your weapon!" The voice coming from a replicator announces that an Aphilean guard has spotted them. Spinning around and squeezing the creature without hesitation, Olethea splatters the insect-like humanoid against the wall. Senka recognizes who it was despite the mess he has been turned into; the guard who led her to her cell and was going to retire soon... or something like that.
"Wait, all of this is part of a job?" Ignoring the fact that her opposite just killed a guard without blinking, the doll-like girl asks curiously. The former notices the complete lack of moral apprehension in the latter and smiles. She must have been through enough carnage for a lifetime to become so desensitized that it does not emotionally register, even in passing.
"Yes, did you think I'm doing all this just for fun?"
"To be honest, I did."
"To be honest, I am." The red-headed nymphomaniac admits with a sideways glance. Then she turns the Sendarian Tunneler towards a sound coming from the other side of a closed blast door at the end of the corridor. "I mean, all my jobs are for fun, I don't really need any more money than I already have."
"Yeah, thought so." With a sigh, Senka turns her head towards the door with a shrug. She was not the type to judge people for their hobbies.
In the next moment the heavy bulkhead slides open and four guards emerge, guns blazing. With a single screech from the living weapon, they are swept off their magnetically secured feet and slam into the walls of the corridor. However, it appears that the force was not enough to kill them all; two of them are still conscious and flail their limbs to regain their footing. Olethea and Senka kick off the wall, fly forward and each hit one of the guards to induce an even more erratic spin to them in midair to keep them distracted, before continuing onwards.
"The tunneler's attack is really hard to control, and the larger it grows, the bigger the stimulus for it to cry out has to be." The red-head explains as they run towards the entrance to the command module. "At the same time, it has to grow to nearly half its adult size within about an hour after it's born, or it'll die. That's why they're not used as weapons normally... but you take what you can get."
"Like one of their laser weapons?" Senka shows off the gun she took from the guard she hit just earlier.
"Those are locked to the chips in their palms, so it's useless to us." Olethea responds, but shows a fascinated expression at how quickly and unhesitatingly her opposite appropriated the weapon under these circumstances. "Well, you could go back and ask them for a helping hand, but..."
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"Nah, I'm fine." Tossing the weapon aside carelessly, the stitched girl responds. "That thing should be enough."
"This baby's not going to do anything to my actual target. Well, maybe tickle it a little."
"What kind of monster is your target?" Senka stares at the red-head questioningly.
"Chief, the noise came from there!" One of the guards speaks over the helmets' inbuilt communicator and points forward and a little towards the right. He is a Halyxian, a race of green-skinned humanoids that have incredible hearing, which allows him to pinpoint the source of sounds through walls. The noise caused by the biological weapon that Prisoner OS69 is carrying is very easy to spot, so as long as she keeps using it, they will know her exact location.
"That is the cantina. Each team take the entrance from the block corresponding to your call sign and we enter on my command. Shoot anything that moves, we do not need to be conscious of the other prisoners." Chief Tarikan speaks his orders. "Move quickly, before she leaves the cantina." The guards split up to fulfill his commands and rush through the corridors in teams of four. With overwhelming firepower from all sides, they will kill this troublemaker instantly.
"Team Aspina in position."
"Team Bratu in position."
"Team Gindo in position..."
One after another, the six teams report in over the communicators and soon, the cantina is put under lockdown. All the while, the noises from the living weapon continues unabated, denoting that Prisoner OS69 has not left. She is now trapped and will face the shooting squad with no means to escape her fate.
"On my command, prepare for entry!" The chief begins, but realizes that something is off. Why did she not move for all this time even though, according to the Halyxian guard, the weapon has discharged more than thirty-four times while the teams were setting up their encirclement? However, that thought comes too late, as his mouth already finishes what it started, before his mind could put a stop to it. "Go!"
All doors open at the same time and what greets them is the interior of a slaughterhouse. The cantina is filled with blood and gore, with a dozen dismembered prisoners performing a dreadful dance of death in midair. Floating in the middle of the room is the maggot-like creature, which has grown to the size of an elephant and sprouted countless stumpy legs. There is no sign of Prisoner OS69. The huge, eyeless beast seems to have heard the sound of the bulkheads opening. It turns its head towards the closest group of guards and with a screech, practically evaporates them.
"Fire at will! Fire at will!" Someone shouts and all hell breaks loose.
"DAMN YOU OS69!!!" Chief Tarikan screams at the top of his four lungs as the beast turns towards him and opens its maw.
"You what?!" Senka makes in disbelief.
"Yes, that's why I needed to get into this prison." Olethea responds nonchalantly while opening the blast door to the command module with a key she appropriated from one of the guards along the way. Since there is nothing of importance left in it, and due to the power outage, it has been abandoned temporarily.
"You're insane!"
"Don't worry, we'll be able to escape and people will be none the wiser~ ♪"
"Who gave you this job?"
"I have a policy to never reveal my clients, unless they want me to do so before the targets die. You know, some people have that kind of sentimentality about them. But that's impossible this time." Waving Senka off, Olethea moves to the control panel and places her hands on them. She closes her eyes and breathes in and out a few times.
Then she opens them again and begins to sing, her voice taking on an ethereal pitch as ancient sounds pass through the interior of the room. Senka watches in wonder as a glowing blue aura surrounds the eldar and begins to flow into the buttons and screens. With a flicker, the power comes back online and the entire station hums to life.
"There we go. Now, for the repurposing of the anti-matter reactor." Olethea says and licks her lips.
"... how does an anti-matter reactor get short-circuited in the first place?" The stitched girl asks in skepticism.
"Rather than short-circuited, it shuts down as a safety measure in case of an error in the system. But this is now running on my song, so it's fine."
Senka's expression suggests that she does not really understand what she means, but her concern lies more in the fact that the next step of this plan feels like the shortest route towards a gruesome death - or in her case, a gruesome eternity of torture.
"That is, if the author doesn't just choose to deus ex me away to my next story..." She mutters in annoyance. Then she sighs and an almost mad grin stretches the stitches holding her cheeks together, as something inside her clicks. "What the hell, I'll just enjoy the ride!"
"That's the spirit~ ♡" With a toothy grin of her own, Olethea welcomes that shift in the little girl's attitude. She begins to sing once more, the otherworldly melody vibrating the very air, until Senka realizes that the entire station is actually shaking. Crystalline pillars erupt from the control panels and screens around them, and glow rhythmically to the eldar's song. With every moment, the intensity of the shaking increases, before it ceases completely with the sound of metal locks disengaging.
"What happened?"
"We separated from the station. It's done. Now, let's enjoy the show." With a touch of one of the crystals, the shutter to the windshield opens to reveal space before them. The command module is floating away from the Blackpoint Maximum Security Bastille, which is overgrown with crystalline structures caused by Olethea's song.
"Really... couldn't you have just done all this while inside the cell?" Senka asks, wondering about the necessity for everything leading up to this moment. She could have controlled the rest of the station from there using this strange magic, and maybe locked out the guards from the command module, before creating a path for herself to get there without the need for all the chaos involving the Sendarian Tunneler.
"The cells don't have any physical connections to the command module, so that would have been impossible. And where would be the fun in that?" The red-head shrugs and watches as the prison implodes on itself as it travels towards the black hole. From within the ruined structure another black hole emerges, which rapidly grows in size, while their ship speeds away from it. "Enjoy it, you don't get to see a warp gate every day~ ♪"
The warp gate begins to suck in the corona of the much larger black hole at an incredible rate, and grows quickly. Within minutes, as if mocking the scale of cosmic lifetimes, the latter celestial body disappears completely, and the gate closes on itself. The scenery is replaced by the stars and galaxies behind it, which become visible for the first time in billions of years. Senka's mouth is hanging open at witnessing this phenomenon, before she turns away and stares into space.
"Hey, you sure you want to do this? Something like that is hard to top, you know?" Her expression is filled with bewilderment.
"Oh, don't worry. Size isn't everything, technique is important, too~ ♡" Olethea puts a hand on the tiny doll-like girl's shoulder and smiles.
"Of course, you need to make it an innuendo..."
"Always, my dear~ ♪"
" Leaving aside the fact that this method seems to be just way over the top and will result in a massive amount of innocent casualties just for that one kill... how do you know that it worked in the first place?" There is one last question Senka needs an answer to.
"Oh, no, that's why I used this method in the first place. There won't be any other casualties, as long as my target keeps to her schedule. And this is pretty much the only way she can be killed." Olethea touches a crystal and it glows softly, upon which one of the remaining screens flickers and shows a television program. "Any second now..."
"... breaking news! The vice president, Zyxxxas Yyyhozyx, on the way to her inauguration to the position of the President of the Galactic Republic, was caught in an inexplicable phenomenon, wherein a black hole spontaneously burst from inside her vessel. Yyyhozyx's fate is unconfirmed, but given the circumstances, the likelihood of her survival is..." The screen flickers out at the eldar's command and she turns to Senka with a smug expression.
"I'm fairly certain the next President of the Galactic Republic, of all people, won't be flying her own ship..."
"Oh, those ships were steered by robots..."
"Alright, I know where this is going, so I'll stop you right there." Massaging the bridge of her nose, the stitched girl gestures for Olethea to drop that line of thoughts. "In either case, are you sure your target is dead?"
"I am, but my client will confirm that for me." She shrugs, sits down on the pilot's seat and puts her feet on the control panel casually. Flopping down on the copilot's right next to her, Senka sighs once again and looks out the window, at where the black hole used to be. This is the first time that she has witnessed something on such a grand scale and the realization still has not fully settled in. This woman next to her just transported a celestial body many times more massive than a sun to another point in the galaxy, just to kill the vice president, who is apparently from a race of star vampires that are invulnerable to all known weapons.
"... Red Mantis." A deep rasping voice comes from the screen before Olethea, as it buzzes with white noise and switches to the ghastly gray visage of a man with no mouth and four eyes. They are filled with an intensity that may cause people of lesser mental fortitude to look away immediately, but the red-head responds with a smile. "The client's observer transmitted the presence of the target inside the vessel until the moment it was swallowed by the black hole. Your job is complete."
"Aha~ ♡" She makes and turns to Senka before whispering. "That's Paznik Snerod, my inter-dimensional middleman. Despite appearances, he's actually quite happy right now."
"Who is that?" Paznik turns his four eyes to the doll-like girl, who is undecided on which pair to look into. She settles on the upper pair, a relaxed expression on her face despite the intensity in his gaze.
"My new partner." Olethea states in a matter of fact tone, causing both Paznik and Senka to spin their heads around to her in bafflement.
"Wait, I never agreed to that!"
"The infamous Red Mantis taking a partner... just do not let her become a weakness." The four-eyed alien speaks, his feelings about this revelation impossible to glean from his lack of expressiveness. "I will send you your pickup. A list of new jobs is already waiting."
"Thank you~ ♪" The screen cuts out and the red-head turns to Senka almost ceremoniously. "So, to introduce myself once more. I'm Olethea Sykoria - among other names - but best known as Red Mantis, the inter-dimensional assassin."
"... I'm Ootsuki Senka." The doll-like girl responds with a resigning smile. "I used to be called Avenger Doll." After a short moment of contemplation, she turns her head around and stares into space in exasperation. "Wow, way to shoehorn the title in... fuck it, roll credits!"
"Bye bye~" Olethea waves in the same direction. "See you next week~ ♡"
Spoiler: Image
http%3a%2f%2fi.imgur.com%2fqfzNDlt.png [http://i.imgur.com/qfzNDlt.png]