"Biggest newbie killer for Samurai? I'm sure everyone has their own answer, but I'd say Model Nines. No one survives their first Nine due to skill. You have to be lucky enough for the first strike not to be fatal, or to catch a glimpse of it the moment it start to move. Fortunately, Samurai tend to be luckier than most."
-An interview with Trigger Happy, 2037
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When I jumped into the elevator shaft, I was expecting something more terrifying. Wind whipping against my face. The rapid approach of the ground below as I rocketed towards the elevator car pancaked onto the bottom of the shaft.
What I got was almost anticlimactic. I fell, but the speed I was moving at was so slow I was starting to feel bored by the time I landed. It felt like I was actually riding an invisible elevator, if anything, rather than freely falling from sixteen stories above ground.
Eventually, though, the trip came to an end, and I landed softly on my feet. Just one last trial before reaching my goal. It took me a moment to pry open the basement door of the elevator, but then I was out and into the basement, surrounded by darkness.
There were, of course, no lights down here. I could only see what my flashlight could illuminate, which wasn’t much. In the distance I heard water dripping. The lack of sound was unnerving rather than comforting; Antithesis are quiet at the best of times, and without a Model Six around to emit its droning call, sight was easily the best method of locating them. Silence was not an indicator of safety.
I could smell something, though. And feel something in the air. The basement smelled of smoke and ash; the air was warm and dry. Someone had been here recently, and they had purged the area with fire. That, too, brought me no comfort. I had encountered stragglers in the buildings above even on floors bearing the same signs.
Even so, I walked into the empty darkness, my ears straining and my flashlight darting around to check every single corner. I had been ambushed enough times by now that I wasn’t going to make the mistake of not clearing each room and each hallway before advancing. The tunnels were, so far, empty of anything living, but not entirely barren. As I lit up every inch of the space around me, the light caused shadows to play across the walls, the beam of light broken up by ruined corpses that had yet to be reclaimed by the hive.
I was unbearably tense, and my muscles tightened further with every step, every false positive, every imagined sound. It was enough to make me feel I would have been better off trying to fight my way to safety instead, even if I knew intellectually that would have been a fool’s errand.
An illusion of movement caused me to flinch, unloading a burst into a dead Model Three before I could stop myself. The sound of gunfire reverberated throughout the underground, seeming like cannonfire in the enclosed space. I had to stop and breathe deeply to calm my pounding heart in the aftermath. Announcing my presence will have done me no favors.
I slipped through a narrow maintenance corridor and into the basement of another building, and my flashlight lit up another figure. The recent memory of my mistake caused me to hesitate for a moment before I realized that this time, the silhouette before me was among the living. I backed up as I opened fire, narrowing my field of fire to the meter and a half width of the corridor as a half-burned Model Three rushed me with no regard to its life.
The bullets I fired cut into it as if penetrating paper, and it dropped to the ground, finally dead. My ears were screaming in pain, and I felt a wetness flowing from both sides of my head, but mercifully, ruptured eardrums meant I could no longer hear the report of my submachine gun battering against them.
It wasn’t as if my sense of hearing had been doing me much good down here, anyway.
“The nanites remaining in your blood stream should be enough to repair the damage to your ears, but an additional package of them would make the process faster.”
“Not really the top of my priority list right now, Juny!” Did I merely speak, or did I scream? I could no longer tell. Numerous tentacles invaded my field of view, and I wasted the rest of my magazine just cutting them down. I reloaded as quickly as possible and finished off the wounded Model Four with the next magazine, further blockading the entrance to the next room as a result. Instinct told me to turn around now, and I did so to find another pack of Model Threes squeezing into the corridor from the room I had just left- I didn’t have to wonder how, as the hall I was in was not the only entrance to it.
A single sustained burst shredded them. In the darkness it was hard to tell how many had just fallen, but now the passage was fully blocked off, leaving my back safe for now. I turned back and climbed over the first Three I had felled, almost glad for the action- now I at least had something to focus on rather than the ghosts haunting my periphery since I descended.
Something whipped past my head as I crested the body of the Model Four, now, and I flinched so hard I tumbled backwards. I peeked out through the tentacles of the Model Four, or at least what was left of them, shining my flashlight from another angle to get a better view.
What I saw in the room ahead looked like the world’s worst porcupine. A dire porcupine. It was the size of a fucking truck, and covered in quills the size of spears…one of which it was, at this very moment, plucking out with its tongue and hurling in my direction. I ducked back into cover, shining my light in the direction of the Antithesis until I saw the next spike go whizzing by, then I popped up and opened fire before it could toss another one.
It was big, but a hail of bullets killed it just as dead as any other Model. I could only thank Nonexisto that it didn’t have armor like a Model Six. With that, everything went still, but looks could be deceiving. I wasn’t going to let my guard down just yet.
“How did that thing even get in here?”
“Building plans show the next room to be an underground parking garage.”
Fucking hell. That meant the room was going to be big. I carefully made my way over the Model Four at the edge of the room. As I reached the end of the hallway I carefully checked my corners, not wanting another ambush to catch me by surprise- to one side, nothing but corpses, a door broken off its hinges, and ash. To the other, a live Model Four hanging from the fucking ceiling.
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With a curse, I pulled back before it could impale me with a tentacle, and not in the fun way, then leaned back out to fell it in the next instant. It collapsed to the floor, and I reloaded my weapon as I finally stepped into the room, shining my light in every direction to check for any more surprises.
The thing about surprises, though, is that you never see them coming.
What passed through my leg was so sharp I barely felt it. The tendon in my left leg came apart so suddenly that I dropped to one knee mid stride, feeling more pain from my knee striking concrete than from the bloody wound on my calf. Realizing the creature that did this was still behind me, I transitioned my fall into a roll, spinning around as I came up to aim in the direction I had come from.
Corpses. Nothing but corpses. I examined each of them carefully, trying to figure out which was only playing possum. A long moment passed as I ran my eyes over each body, struggling in the limited lighting to identify clear wounds that told of death. It took me the better part of a minute to realize there was something here that should not have been, its presence so natural my eyes had slid over it entirely.
The entryway I’d come through had no hinges.
Realizing it was caught, the “door” unfolded into an incomprehensible mass of limbs, and I opened fire so fast I couldn’t tell if it had been combat reflexes or fear reflexes. It came apart in midair, its many thin limbs shredded by bullets, and it moved no more.
“What,” I panted,” the fuck,” more breaths, “was that?”
“That was a Model Nine! Stealth-specialized Antithesis. Commonly produced by stealth hives, but I had not anticipated its presence, as we had not encountered any so far, and the area the Antithesis have been active in has little human presence for them to ambush. Would you like a WoundStop for your leg? Only five points!”
Leave it to Juny to segue right into another topic. Granted, this one was kind of important.
I had gained one-fifteen points from that group, but the healing supplies and ammo spent brought me back down a few. Altogether, though, I was up to 404 points not found. At least, that was until I bought a set of sonic suppressors from my armor utilities catalog and ruined my dated joke.
“Hey, is there anything I can do about the, you know,” I gestured towards my ears as I felt my ear drums knitting themselves back together. God that was weird.
“There are a number of possible solutions for hearing protection! You could modify your ears to be more resistant to sonic damage. Many helmets also include sonic suppression. Or, from a catalog you already have, you could purchase the Combat Sonic Suppressors Mark I for ten points.”
“I’ll take that last one, I guess. I want to save up point for decent armor.”
New Purchase: Combat Sonic Suppressors Mark I
Points Reduced to…394
I slotted the suppressors into my ears without much thought.
My enforced break while allowing my tendon to knit itself back together was anything but restful. It spent the entire time glaring into the darkness, painfully aware that anything could be lurking out there, just beyond the reach of my flashlight. Nothing came, but that only made it worse. My heart hadn’t stopped pounding since the last fight, and I think I was starting to develop a fear of the dark.
Eventually the two halves of my Achilles tendon reunited, and I was able to stand up once more. Soon I was leaving the garage and entering the last maintenance tunnel, heading towards the final building. There, I would be able to emerge from the underground and make contact with people.
I left a five point surprise at the entrance to the tunnel and jogged for a moment to get clear of it. That turned out to have been a good idea, as it took only a moment for something to attempt to follow me, only for a rapid-hardening foam grenade to burst and crush them against the ceiling. With that, the road behind me was sealed, and I had gained a handy 25 more points.
The last basement level soon arrived, and I slowed as I approached. I couldn’t see anything here, even bodies or abandoned equipment. But the Antithesis were craftier than I ever would have given them credit for, and I wasn’t about to let them fool me this time. I led the way with an Inverter grenade, with Juny’s assurance that it would have little effect on the stability of the ceiling, and was promptly rewarded with twenty-five points as a mutilated Model Nine dropped from above along with a few fragments of concrete.
Even then, nothing came for me. I checked both sides again, and both were miraculously clear. Just past my last victim, however, I spotted an unidentifiable pile of something at the edge of my flashlight’s range.
Yeah, fuck that. I opened fire.
The Model Nine tried to leap for me the moment I pulled the trigger, but it was too far away and wasn’t faster than a bullet. It died. That’s when the floodgates burst open. From the darkness, an entire pack of Model Threes charged me, and quills flew forth from the shadows behind them as if to provide covering fire. I rolled backwards, coming back up in a crouch several meters back down the hall, and gunned down the Threes as they ran headlong into a chokepoint.
Even as they died, I could hear a rhythmic thump, thump, thump as quills impacted the Model Threes providing me with cover, the Model Fives either unable to see what they were hitting at this distance or not caring that they were hitting their cousins’ corpses. I detached the flashlight from my SMG and placed it on one side of the pile, then leaned out the other side to return fire.
I peered into the darkness, but saw nothing. The Model Fives were throwing quills from outside the range of my light. They began to impact concrete instead of bodies as they adjusted their aim towards the flashlight.
“Juny, do you have anything that will light up the room without blinding me?” I whispered, rolling back into cover. I grabbed the light for good measure, not wanting to buy a new one.
“A Thenosian Flare Grenade should suffice. It is similar to a flashbang, but designed for a species with significantly greater light sensitivity than humans!” I wasted no time in buying the simple five point ‘weapon’ and plucked it from the box it came in. No sense in waiting- I flung it over the mound of bodies and into the darkness, and it was only a moment before the space lit up. I rolled back into a firing position.
That was when I realized the truth of my situation: the Model Fives had not cared if they hit me or not because it was suppressive fire. Even as I started shooting the two of them, I registered the hulking mass behind them. It was a like an upside-down flower, with tentacles reminiscent of a Model Four and tattered wings trailing behind it. It was also horrifically damaged; it was riddles with bullet holes and half-burned.
“Oh my! We’ve found a Model Thirteen! I would normally be concerned, but this one seems to be barely alive. Normally it would have three connected bodies, and it would be much faster. Some of its limbs are intact- do not let it get close, as its tentacles are essentially hammers that strike like whips!”
The second Model Five dropped before it could shift its aim, following the first into the grave as the Thirteen dragged itself past them. I shifted my aim to the next target, but my bullets predictably bounced right off. It was still pretty far away, but it was gradually closing the distance, and bullets weren’t cutting it.
“Juny, give me an Instant Star please.”
“Of course!”
I took the plasma grenade in hand and softballed it towards the Model Thirteen. One of its tentacles intercepted the glowing sphere, but the grenade stuck fast to its limb instead of being deflected. It flailed wildly, trying to dislodge it, but only succeeded in bringing it closer to the core of its body even as the grenade detonated.
This time I covered my eyes in time as the room lit up in a blinding white. When I looked back, the Model Thirteen was collapsing to the ground. Its tough hide hardly appeared more damaged at all, but the perforations dotting its body must have been enough to allow the deadly plasma in.
“Well done! Those are typically very difficult to kill. Unfortunately, the damage it had already received will reduce its point value from one hundred to fifteen. You now have 592 points.”
“One hundred?! I don’t even want to think about how hard that thing would have been to put down if it’s four times the value of anything I’ve killed on my own… ”
At any rate, my trek through the Underworld was over at last. I headed towards the stairs.