Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.3 (Patreon)

1.3

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Two targets. Neither knew I was here. One was busy, downstairs, behind soundproofing, and working with a loud tool. The other was upstairs, probably watching something other than the cameras, and was expecting to be bothered by the other guard.

It was an easy choice.

I turned around, and walked right back out the door that I had come in through.

Down the hall, turn, and then down the hall again. I pulled the doors open, the sound of the grinding wheel continuing behind me, and then I closed them quietly.

I went up the stairs two steps at a time, my sheer height and long legs making it much more comfortable than trying to do them one at a time.

And then I was standing at the entrance to the first guard’s little office.

I eyed up the hinges, and... Huh. They’ve been oiled somewhat recently. I can tell by their condition that they must have been just this side of disintegrating before it happened, though.

What was the point of letting things fall into such disrepair?

Well, whatever.

My talons closed around the handle, and I pushed the door open. Despite the oiling, it still made a rather distinct creaking noise as it did.

I moved quickly, the world around me again sharpens. I pushed through, rounding the brief corner, and-

And the guard is leaning back in his chair, entirely focused on what he’d been watching before.

My step halts in an instant. For a few seconds, I simply stand there, feeling only pure disappointment that this was the quality of their guards.

Then the door I’d gone through slammed shut, and the man just about jumped out of his skin, flinching in his chair. He sucked in a sharp breath of air, and it was the absolute last thing he did because I snapped his neck a moment later.

His body twitched, falling to the floor from the force I’d used.

“I’ll soon have as many kills as I do hours in this world.” I sighed to myself. “Practically a native already.”

The computer’s screen shifted in colour. I glanced up just in time to watch a relatively simple scene take a sharp turn into shock snuff. Even that brief glance was all I needed to see that no, it hadn’t been a cybernetic body, and the suddenness held its own implications on the victim’s consent in the matter.

Inside of my chest, I felt something heat. A sensation of... I wasn’t sure how to describe it. Whatever it was, it was sharp, dangerous, and would be undoubtedly thorough.

I closed my eyes, and forced myself to remember that everything I’d seen so far was not norm for this universe. Scavengers were the bottom of the barrel, without a doubt absolutely fucking awful, but they were not a representative of the average.

The heat faded away.

My eyes opened, and I reached forwards to hit the escape key just as the camera started to zoom in on the gore.

The video closed.

A quick look through the computer showed that there wasn’t much of actual interest on it. Again, an email was open, full of advertisements and not much else. The desktop didn’t show much more than a few apps, none of which meant anything to me.

It was... very distinctly not as user-friendly as I was used to. Actually, it seemed actively hostile to the very concept of being useful. It was painfully dated, the entire thing set up like something from the late nineties and early aughts. which had never been updated.

The internet as I knew it didn’t exist, here. It had never truly existed here. What existed was the Net, and the difference was both obvious and quite painful.

I only took a few minutes to poke around before I got back to work, though. I would not want that last target to find out what had happened to his friends.

I stood up, and walked back to the door. Out, then down the stairs, then that door, and right there, halfway down the hallway is the door to the main theatre.

Hinges... Will definitely squeak, but might not actually be that loud if I happened to exercise a bit of care. The motor was still whining, though, and these doors were quite thick.

I tapped against the walls next to them. The thunking noise that came told me that they were also quite thick.

Mmm. Nothing to it, then.

A talon pushed the handle down, and I opened the door.

The scent of blood that slammed into me was very nearly physical for how utterly dense it was. The air of the room was heavy, a sickly kind of humid that was well and truly beyond unpleasant.

Red covered the walls. Red covered the floor. Even most of the ceiling was splattered with flaking, faded spots of blood.

In the center of it all was a raised slab, standing on a single telescopic pole that was raised in the air. A woman stood leaning over it, covered head to toe in something that looked like a butcher’s outfit, which was, itself, covered head to toe in red. In one hand, she held a simple spinning saw. In the other, a multitool. There was a holstered gun at her right leg and a knife at her left.

On the slab, and splattered on the floor on the opposite side of the woman, were pieces of a thing that had once been a body, and now stood as nothing more than discarded meat and harvested metal.

I stepped in. The woman didn’t look up from her work. She seemed entirely too busy focusing on cutting the body up even further.

A single glance at the pile was all I needed to see the efficacy born from long experience. Quick and fast, though no care was given to being clean. Cuts made at joints, around pieces of cyberware, focused on simply extracting them whole at as fast a pace as possible. Entire sections of the body had been literally simply cut out, and the rest of it tossed aside once the valuable metal had been taken.

She moved with a level of speed and precision that wasn’t organic. Her motions were smooth, in a way that lacked the micro-twitching born from the normal nervous system. Limbs turned and twisted in sudden, sharp movements, without hesitation, without even the most minor faltering.

It’s the spine that makes it the most obvious. All along her back are raised sections, visible even through her outfit. They’re regular, consistent, and a faint light shines through the relatively thin cloth.

She’s got quite a bit of chrome installed.

I had to wonder how much of it had been taken from her victims.

She shut off the saw right as the door closed, the thick metal falling back into place loudly since I hadn’t bothered to stop it at all.

Her head snapped up. I watched her muscles twitch, ligaments expand and contract, neck twisting with the same abnormal, controlled speed that the rest of her body had moved. Her eyes met my form, and before she’d even completed the movement, her fingers had slackened and both arms began to move down to her legs.

It had to be a Reflex Booster. The smoothness of the movements was surely cyberlimbs, but the speed of it... A Kerenzikov?

If so, that was quite the heavy loadout for cyberware.

Her thumbs flicked open the holster on her weapons. The rest of her fingers began to close around them.

And I finally bothered to move forwards.

Her eyes stayed on me as I did. I watched her brows shift, widening. Her optics pulsed with light, jaw opening just slightly. Her gun came up, knife settling in place in front of her torso in a reverse grip.

I stretched out a finger as her gun settled towards my chest, letting myself be guided into the proper place. I was less than a metre away when she finally finished pulling the trigger.

I watched a little puff of gas exit the barrel first, followed shortly by the bullet itself in a flash of expanding smoke. It was unerringly aimed, going straight towards my stomach- were it not for my talon already in the way.

The bullet met my talon. I watched as the metal deformed before splitting, first in two from the sharpness of my talon, and then into four as both halves fell apart into the jacket and core.

The slide was still pulling back as my hand came close, talon still extended. I cut just above the trigger, peeling the handle from the grip. It took markedly little effort, and so I continued forwards to grab her neck.

My fingers closed around false skin. I felt the armour weave around artificial muscles, ligaments, and bones. I trusted the guidance, and lifted.

Her entire body rose into the air, lifted clean off of her feet. I rose to my full height, stretching my arm out and bringing her head nearly to the ceiling to meet my gaze. She, of course, wasn’t done, and so her knife lashed out, going towards my arm.

My other hand rose before she could get there. I grabbed her forearm, and then simply twisted.

Her elbow squealed as the metal shattered. False skin was punctured by metal fragments, and black, brackish oil dripped from an internal reservoir, spilling towards the ground. Her arm fell limp, the knife dropping harmlessly to the floor.

Then she tried to kick me, and so I promptly broke both of her knees, as well, two quick taps exerting more than enough pressure to shatter them entirely.

She barely reacted. A Pain Editor, no doubt... Or maybe her Cyberlimbs simply weren’t configured to carry pain in the first place.

Left without any other options, her right hand started going towards my wrist, and I promptly caught it before breaking that elbow, too.

I didn’t want all the blood staining it to drip on me, after all.

Time resumed its more normal pace now that the threat was completely over. The woman didn’t choke in my grip, her neck clearly keeping the air and blood passages a little further from the surface than normal. The simple fact that her increased weight hadn’t snapped the spine entirely spoke to the extent of her augmentations, though.

“Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with?!” The woman spoke. Not through a voicebox, but an internal speaker, clear despite the immobility of her jaw. Even so, the accent was thick, downright stereotypically Russian.

“Do you have any idea how cliché you sound right now?” I asked in turn, feeling... honestly just disappointed.

It was all so... uninspired.

Why had I not taken her head off entirely? A question I wasn’t even sure of the answer to myself.

“All of this cruelty and there is nothing original about it.” I said. “Really, it’s-”

“What the fuck are you saying?!” She interrupted, and...

That was a genuine lack of comprehension in her eyes. She didn’t understand me.

My head tilted to the side.

Hmm. My mouth opened, and this time, I listened to the words I was saying.

“Man ana mabor- Ah. I am.”

The first three words out of my mouth had been no language that had ever been spoken by Humanity.

“I suppose one good thing came out of this.” I nodded. “But it also means I don’t really have other matters to care about.”

It would have been terribly awkward if I had been wandering around using an unknown language without even knowing it.

Oh well.

I squeezed.

Advanced composites and durable metal gave way to my strength easily. Her neck collapsed, false skin bursting under the pressure. Wires and coiled black bundles of myomar spilled out, and then blood to join it as I finally punctured veins and muscles. She twitched, but was in no position to stop this.

Circuits and bone were crushed, and the lights of her optics went out alongside the life of her body. I dropped the corpse in the pool of its own making.

For a few moments, silence reigned.

I turned away, and left the room. The scent of blood lingered, but it faded into something that wasn’t utterly cloying when I went back upstairs.

The office was dark by the time I got to it. The computer screen had turned off, but I had no problem seeing through the dark. Against the corner was a sink, and I approached it, briefly testing the tap handles.

Water flowed. Clean enough.

I washed my hands, cleaning off the results of my efforts. None of it had spilled anywhere else.

The hand towel was definitely not clean enough, so I simply flicked my hands free of water after I turned the sink off.

The mirror was cracked, and filthy from dirt and smoke, but it still served.

A bird-like face looked back at me, glowing eyes cutting through the dark. Blue and gold mixed with silver accents.

I considered what I knew.

My beak opened, and I spoke a name in the language I now knew better than my own mother tongue.

“Chozo.”

The word echoed oddly in the room, as though it was more than simple sound. It was.

I hummed.

“I’m going to need a plan.” I murmured to myself, turning back towards the computer. “But that does change things.”

I grabbed the chair and shifted it into place. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but that was mostly due to my own bullshit biology rather than the chair itself.

“This city is a pile of garbage.” I continued. “But I might just be able to make something of it after all.”