“What?” I tried to sound innocent.
“Wha… who are you?” He just sounded confused.
“I’m… complicated. Who’s asking?” Finally realizing most of the bear was mulch and all dead I turned my mouth off and glorped off of the leftovers. Retracting the grinder as I went.
“I’m Bomberman.” He hefted a grenade in his hand as he edged closer as if calculating a throw range.
“I’m a new Samurai. And while I think I had a name… I was also a fucked up science experiment for a while there so… I don’t remember what it was.” Pointing up with a pseudopod I shifted the topic. “There are two more shelters in the building I need to check. So if you’re not going to help I’m going to go.”
“Uh. That’s why I’m here. There are three registered shelters. I take it you already checked the one in the sub-basement?” He took the tentacle that bobbed up and down as the nod it was meant to be. “Great. So… one question before we go? What the fuck are you?”
“A shoggoth?” I shifted two pseudopods out in a shrugging gesture. “Though I don’t think the voice is right. Feels like it needs more grit or grime or something.”
“Warble. With subtle undertones of other words in different languages. If you're going for Eldritch Nightmare you definitely wanna get an eerie echo in there of some sort. Wicked gimmick tho.” He grinned at me and flashed some gang signs with his free hand.
“Thanks!” The cheerful tone did not go well with the added effects. [I love the new effects. Did you add both a warble and faint extra sounds, like a Latin chant, in the background?]
<>I did. I’m glad you like it.
[Very much.] Chuckling darkly I turned and started slurping across the floor. “Stairs are this way. The elevators are all out. I kinda blew some of them up.”
“Oh damn. I hate stairs.” He blinked and then grinned. “How did you blow them up?”
“I.E.D. Used an acetylene tank and a timer. Blew up a stealth hive… whatever those are.” I pushed the door to the stairs open and began my ascent. Pausing long enough to use one of my major mecha dendrites to offer a sort of jerry-rigged seat to him. “Ride?”
“Ah. Sure.” After a pause, he climbed on and we started up. “You don’t know what it was?”
“I’m afraid I’ve been contained in an unyielding form for quite some time, unable to keep up on the world around me, enforced into slave labor. I have only the barest idea of what’s going on.” I poked in on the next floor and confirmed it was clear before moving up. “Floor clear.”
“Damn. That… is far too common actually. Well, to catch you up. Plant aliens are invading. Have been for a while.”
“Pricks.” I checked another floor. Empty.
“Indeed. Upside another group fighting them dropped in and passed off a gamified method to access their tech to help as they focus on working on dealing with… well from what I understand more worlds succumb than don't. So they’re busy. And the game stuff is to keep us from going ham on each other and fucking everything up worse.”
“I see.” I checked another floor. “A few little doggy types on this floor. Do you have a bomb to clear it? I can go deal with them easily enough if not.”
“Naw, go for it. You newbies need the points.” I slorped through the door at his discretion and moved in the direction of the supposed dog types.
As soon as we rounded a corner and found them dragging corpses I extruded the muzzle of my machine gun and hosed them down.
Points 20 → 80
“I feel like we shouldn’t leave the bodies?” I hesitated to move.
“Yeah. Just a sec.” He rustled around in his vest of grenades before pulling one out and throwing it down the hall at the corpses. “Okay, we’re good to go.”
“Understood.” I turned and moved away as an unholy noise emitted from the grenade. This prompted me to rush back into the stairwell and go up. “Owe.”
“Enhanced hearing?” He chuckled in an almost apologetic way.
“Full spectrum sensors.” I poked into the next floor, finding nothing, before moving up again.
“Yeah, even at class one those can be a bit… painful. Until you get used to using your new senses anyway.” He patted at the side of my armor awkwardly. “Wait until you hit class twos in something. That gets even worse. It’s kinda exponential at each level.”
“Duly noted.” I fell silent as I checked the next floor. Calling clear on each as we went up. Until, that is, the ninth floor.
“There are multiple contacts on this floor, they appear bipedal.” I kept my voice to a dull roar, blocking the open door with my body armor and speaking directly into the stairwell to my companion.
“People?” He tense and tried to get an angle of view into the room. Pushing at my mass to open space.
“Zombies maybe? Dunno yet. Shall we go check?” I began moving into the room without waiting for a response. He hopped off as soon as there was space, moving quickly to flank the direction I was moving in. “Hello? Is anyone there, Samurai here to help!”
A horrified scream belted out from ahead. It was definitely a person.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Way to go dude. You’re voice scared them.” He chuckled and moved ahead quickly to intercept, knowing that most people wouldn’t react well to me. “Hi! I’m Bomberman! I’ve got a newbie Samurai with me, we're here to help!”
“Oh thank god! We’ve been locked out of the main shelters and antithesis somehow invaded mine!”
“We’ve had a problem with Sevens,” I commented a little less eldrich from the back, not blorping into direct view. “Might wanna take some pills if you have them. If not I think I have a catalog for that.”
<>You should look closer.
[What do you mean?] I did as Naille asked and looked closer at the people, swinging around the wall a bit to get a direct view. [Oh shit. What’s up with that?]
They all had some sort of extra heat source normally not in people near their craniums. The one in the woman is not as active as the ones in the six armed soldiers escorting her. Data ping to the building mainframe said she was the CFO and the guys were her bodyguards.
[I need to tell Bomberman, should I speak aloud?]
<>Yes. Also, you need to stop trying to move while using or otherwise utilize this enhanced state.
[Why?] I sped up again to speak to my new partner. “They seem to be infected with them. The ones in the guards are more active.”
<>Because it’s something built into your old cyber ware that's still installed, human-made. It's likely to do damage considering how much it heats your brain. We haven’t removed it as it is too deeply embedded for current capabilities.
I didn’t get a chance to respond as the woman’s eyes rolled up in her head and she slumped. But her guards jerkily raised their weapons and began firing at us. I shifted to block the rounds from hitting Bomberman, who had pitched a grenade into the group. The bullets hit semi-liquid armor and quickly lost momentum. I lost some nanites to damage, but that’s what they were for. I managed to completely block the following fireball from hitting my new friend when the grenade went off.
The gunfire stopped and I turned my attention that way again. There was nothing but shredded and scorched bodies. I took a moment to extrude the bullets and shrapnel before turning back to Bomberman.
“I have better armor than you and would have been fine, but thanks, kid.” He smirked at me before turning back to the stairs. “Come on, we’ve got a bunch more floors to hit. Though I wonder where the Sevens came from.”
<>They could have been a part of a type seventeen. The whole thing was very out of character for one but, it seems suspicious.
“A type Seventeen?” Saying that aloud made Bomberman stiffen and turn to me with a raised eyebrow. I shifted back to my full eldritch voice. “Naille said it could have been one of those. I figured it was just one that escaped me earlier in the elevator shaft. It’s been a few hours since I had to get an upgraded chassis.”
“You got fancy optics, right? Check. Is there a smaller four-legged plant?” He was suddenly very alert and reaching for grenades while moving to check the bodies for something.
I promptly began to focus more on my sensors, hunting around for a new type of angry plant. I found no such thing, but I did find a small number of hair-thin wires on the ground near the bodies. Tracing them back down the hall, in a circle around several cubicles in a large room, out another door and I finally found they ran to a vent in the ceiling of a room near the outer wall. [What are these? They shouldn’t be here.]
<>Those are control wires for a Seventeen. Reach one of your dendrites in there and see where they go.
I did as asked, wrenching the panel off the vent in the ceiling before reaching in, focusing one of the cameras on the end along the path the cables follow. They seemed to be dangling down from a vent junction near the wall, leading up. Even as I watched several of them fell, as if severed from the source just then, or recently and only just now falling under their weight.
[They go up.]
<>You should tell Bomberman.
“Hey, I found it! There’s a bunch of filament control cables that go into a vent then up a floor!” I turned and found Bomberman dashing into the CFO’s office where I seemed to have found myself. “Dunno if they stop there but they definitely go up. I might be able to stretch and look, but it’s at the edge of my reach right now.”
“Do it. We need to know how far up it might be. Probably already cut the cables at that end and moved, but knowing is better than nothing.” He shifted his weight around from foot to foot, obvious tension on his face.
“Done.” I stretched, shifting my core up, and backed in to give myself the most distance. I barely had enough reach to get a partial look. “Three floors. I think.”
“We need to hurry. Those things are a menace!” He took off at a run.
I had to work a little slower to pull myself from the vent before moving at speed after him. Surprisingly my new form was rather speedy even though it seemed like it would be slow and ponderous. Everyone seemed to be quite worried about these things. Zombies freak me out enough as it is, so I didn’t argue. We rushed up to twelve and started hunting. Twenty minutes of going over the floor again and again got us nothing.
“It’s not here? You find anything?” He seemed pissed, or scared. I couldn’t be sure but maybe both based on the way he was pacing and pulling at his hair.
“I’m afraid not… Although we didn’t check the elevator shafts?” His head snapped up and looked straight into one of my optical clusters extruded from my armor. “What?”
“Check them, now!” He all but roared at me as he turned and sprinted for the bank of elevators.
When I caught up he was managing to pry a set open fairly well, not fast but better than a normal person without tools. Probably has enhanced strength. I simply ripped a set off and leaned out looking for more threads or a four-legged something clinging to somewhere in the shaft.
“Collor me surprised.” I think it was the complete lack of urgency in my voice that sparked his glare. Maybe the lack of emotional response was a bad thing? Naw, I’d be shitting myself if I had normal levels. There it was, shifting around, slowly crawling up the ladder to another floor.
The dendrite that reached in and shot a high-power laser got him to work faster at opening his door all the way. By the time he had his side open enough to get his head in and look, I had cut a large dog-sized thing with hair-fine lines that stretched into two different vents, chopping it in half with my lazer. The corpse fell into the shaft, splatting on a locked elevator a few floors down. No idea why it was still there. It had been moving rather slowly up the ladder. Shouldn’t it have been faster? And where did that second set of cables go?
“Got it.” His glare was definitely from my commentary this time. “What?”
“How can you be so… blasé about this? Those things are dangerous as hell!” He hauled back his head and stalked over to me.
“Because Zombies are bad enough, I don’t think anything attached to them could bother me more. When I was alive anyway. Now I’m a brain in a jar and they don’t bug me so much. Hehe. Bad pun, sorry. Besides, I’m missing a lot of stuff that would have me producing fear hormones. It’s just the basics in here.” I did a gloopy shrug before shifting fully out of the shaft.
“They’re not zombies. Seventeens are command and control units. Most all the units below them are dumber than a brick. Those things are smart, really smart sometimes. That makes them dangerous.” He was tugging at his hair as he spoke. Shifting between relief and glaring at me the whole time. “Why the fuck was it still there?”
“Oh. Yeah, that would be bad. And I have no idea, but there was a second set stretching into another vent?” I pulled my armor in and started shifting optics around, a couple went back into the shaft to see if there were any more in there. “Consider me chastised. Won’t make light of those again.”