The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice CROW.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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Santi's perception of the environment sharpened and broadened at once, his cognitive throughput reallocating to sensory processing at a rate that made everything around him legible in a way normal perception did not permit. Bullets in flight became objects with trajectories. Bodies in motion became vectors with predictable endpoints. And the network, running through his awareness in parallel, resolved into a schematic his conscious mind could read as fast as his eyes read the room.
The netrunner was still alive in the basement. Their throughput had severely degraded from the backlash of their own daemons, and they had stopped attacking Santi and had begun trying to disengage, which was the correct decision, though it was too late.
Santi loaded three Short Circuits quickhacks, stacked them, and fired them at the netrunner. Each one arrived on the heels of the last and hammered the netrunner's already compromised defensive perimeter, letting Santi send in a nasty little quickhack he had made over the past month.
He ordered the other runner to commit suicide.
The command traveled down the network pathway, found the netrunner's neural interface, and delivered an instruction that overrode their own brain. Forty meters below Santi's position, in a hardened basement room with a hardline terminal and a very expensive rig, a voodoo boy took his pistol, placed it under his own chin, and pulled the trigger, splattering his brains all over the place.
The whole thing took about five seconds, but it felt much longer for Santi, who was still under the effects of the Kerenzikov. He then swept the rest of the room and noticed five signatures remaining. Four of them had been wounded after taking cover behind the server racks, only to be hit by shrapnel from Maine's HMG. But the fifth signature was moving away, exiting through a door at the bay's far end.
'Oh, you little rat, you're not fucking running from me,' Santi thought to himself with a smile and deactivated the Kerenzikov, allowing the world to snap back to normal speed.
"Maine," Santi said through the comms. "Stop shooting."
"What?" Maine asked but stopped firing.
"I've got this," Santi said as he activated his thermal monowire. "Time to try this puppy out."
The wire deployed from his right palm in a single fluid extension. It was just three feet of monofilament, but it glowed orange-red as the thermal coating came online, the heat shimmer distorted the air, and he started moving.
He swung in a horizontal arc and cleaved the closest server rack in half around chest height. The monowire went through the soft sheet metal and circuit boards without slowing, and the top two-thirds of the rack slid off the bottom third and crashed to the floor. The woman crouching behind it looked up just in time to see the monowire approach her, and the next thing she knew, she was looking at her headless body crouching against what remained of the server rack.
The cut was so clean that the woman had time to process and understand the fact that she had just been decapitated, and blood erupted from the stump of her neck in a vertical column that hit the ceiling twelve feet up before it toppled sideways.
A second man tried to bring his rifle around, but Santi took both his arms off above the elbow. The man had one chrome arm, but thankfully it was rather junk, so the monowire had been able to slice through it without much difficulty. He made an indescribable sound, and then he fell to his knees and began bleeding out from two arterial stumps that were pumping his blood across the floor.
Santi didn't spare him a second look, knowing he'd be dead within a minute, and dodged just in time as a third and fourth man opened fire. He then swung the wire in another horizontal arc, cleaving their rifles in their hands, and sending the severed sections flying away in pieces that clattered across the floor.
And as he did so, something in Santi's head snapped.
He felt it happen too. The supervisory layer he had written to manage the Mantis Blade firmware encountered a conflict it wasn't designed to arbitrate, and something underneath it surged upward into his motor control, his limbic system, and the parts of his brain responsible for deciding what he wanted.
He retracted the monowire and a manic smile broke across his face as the Mantis Blades exploded out of his forearms. The two curved blades unfolded from their housing along his ulnas and locked into their combat position with a sharp cling. The edges of the blades caught the red alarm light and the reflections of V and Maine as they watched Santi transform.
He slid, and the reinforced tendons in his legs fired, boosting him across the blood-slicked concrete and closing a distance of over twenty feet in half a second. He came up inside the third man's guard with both blades already moving and slashed the man diagonally from hip to opposite shoulder. The blades cut through subdermal armor, bones, and flesh alike with no resistance, splitting the man in half.
But Santi already had his left arm in motion, catching the newly separated section of the man as it fell and cut it again, and then again, and again, and again, and again, and again until Santi was standing over a collection of parts that had been a human being three seconds earlier.
Blood hit Santi's face and showered the rest of his body. The chrome of the man that had also been cut sent hydraulic oil and coolant spraying from severed lines in a fine mist that mixed with the blood and coated Santi's white hair in a slurry of red, black, while, and pale green that ran down his forehead and into his eyes.
And as it did, a low laugh escaped him without even noticing.
The fourth shat his pants as he saw what Santi had done and raised his rifle only to hear a deafening click of no ammo. He then reached for his sidearm only to have a DB-2 Satara go off from five feet away and remove his head from his body, redistributing his skull across the server rack behind him.
Santi looked at the source of the shot and saw Maine lower the shotgun.
"Hey," Maine said. "Kid."
Santi's eyes were wide, and all his teeth were visible. The blades were still extended and dripping with blood, and the expression on his face was one that Maine had seen once before in South America, and the man who had worn it never came back from it.
"Don't get carried away," Maine said.
Santi blinked, and it was as if something behind his eyes shifted and the smile faded. His breathing, which had been fast and shallow, slowed, and he nodded before turning and sprinting down the corridor Thumbart had fled into.
"He's gone after the target," Maine said into the comms, already moving toward the van. "V, we're pulling out. Circle to the front."
"But the party's just getting started," V complained.
They got in, and V took the wheel and reversed the van out through the hole it had made in the wall, its tires spinning on rubble before she swung it around toward the facility's front gate in a reverse drift.
As soon as she did, she noticed headlights coming toward them from the access road.
"Seems like we've got company," V said.
There were three vehicles accelerating towards them. A lead truck and two escorts. The lead truck carried eight armed personnel, and its engine roared in the night.
But as it approached the entrance gates, the van's rear doors flew open, and Maine held his right arm out, palm open, and the projectile launch system embedded in his forearm cycled and fired. The micro-missile left his arm and crossed sixty meters in under a second, slamming right into the lead truck's engine block, exploding and lifting the front of the vehicle over four feet off the ground and tearing it apart from the rest of the chassis.
The truck flipped and rolled a few times, sending three of its occupants flying over fifty feet in the air in different directions before it ended on its side. The truck slid another ten or so meters and burst into flames before coming to rest directly across the facility's main gate, blocking the access road completely.
The two escort vehicles braked hard, and personnel began pouring out.
"Good enough for me," Maine said before jumping out of the moving van.
He hit the ground at twenty miles per hour and turned to hurl the Satara he'd had slung on his back through the van's open rear doors.
"Get the psychotic brat," Maine said as V came to a sudden halt, causing the rear doors to slam shut.
"Fucking Nova," V said as she looked at Maine for a second and then floored it toward the facility's main entrance.
Maine straightened up and took off his oversized jacket, revealing over twelve grenades across a chest rig, four pistols in a harness configuration that put a grip within reach of either hand from any arm position, spare magazines in every available pouch, and slung across his back, a Rostović Kolac.
Maine pulled two grenades, primed them, and threw them into the cluster of men dismounting from the first escort vehicle.
The first one detonated at waist height in the middle of four men and converted them into a distribution of components across a twenty-foot radius. The second one landed closer to the vehicle and took out its front axle along with two more personnel who had been using it as cover.
Maine walked to the nearest parked car and crouched down by the engine block, putting his back against it just in time for gunfire to hammer into the car's body panels. The rounds blew out the windows above his head, punched through the door and into the seats, punctured the tires, and shook the car. All the while, Maine sat and pulled a cigar out of his chest rig and lit it. He took a slow drag and counted down.
"Four, three, two, one, and you gonks are fucked," Maine said as the firing stopped. He could hear the distant clatter of magazines dropping and fresh magazines about to be seated, but he didn't give them the chance to finish reloading.
Maine stood up with the Kolac in his hands and the cigar clenched in his teeth and began putting shots downrange.
The Rostović Kolac was a bullpup precision rifle chambered in a caliber that most manufacturers had abandoned as impractical for man-portable weapons, which was precisely why Rostović had built it. Semi-automatic and bulky enough that the operator's body needed to be augmented to manage the recoil and the weight meant the weapon had a market of exactly one demographic, and Maine was standing squarely inside it.
The first round hit a man in the center of the chest, punched through his sternum, through his thoracic cavity, out through his spine, and continued into the escort vehicle behind him, where it went through the door panel, through the passenger compartment, and out the far side. The round's energy transfer opened the man's chest cavity outward along the exit path, and what came out of his back hit the vehicle's door in a red spray that included recognizable sections of lung and ribs. The man folded like a puppet with its strings cut.
Maine kept on firing, striking another man at the hip as he was moving between cover positions. The round went through his pelvis and disintegrated it, ripping his left leg right off his body. His left leg traveled three feet independently while the rest of him went down in a heap, screaming as the hemorrhaging wound had opened his femoral artery and his iliac artery simultaneously.
Maine then switched targets and fired at a man crouched behind the escort vehicle's engine block. Unfortunately for him, the Kolac had been precision-built for anti-armor engagements. The round penetrated the vehicle's front quarter panel, punched through the engine's aluminum housing, deflected off a cylinder head, and entered the man's abdomen at a downward angle that carried it through his intestines, his pelvis, and out through the back of his thigh. He fell forward against the vehicle and stayed there, sliding slowly down the panel, leaving a wide smear behind him.
Maine then opened fire on the vehicle's fuel tank, which quickly turned it and anything in its vicinity into a fireball.
Maine kept firing, switching targets as soon as he spotted a new one.
A man sheltering behind a concrete barrier discovered the barrier was concrete, and concrete was not enough to stop the Kolac. A man running for cover behind some rubble took a round through the base of the skull that removed the top of his head and carried on for another two hundred meters into the night, probably landing on top of somebody's car.
Blood, viscera, and human meat sprayed across the access road in wide arcs, coating the asphalt, the vehicles, and the burning wreckage. Maine walked forward through it with the cigar in his mouth, bracing the Kolac's stock against his shoulder like the professional soldier he was.
He threw two more grenades over the top of the burning escort vehicle before turning to jog back toward the facility's main entrance.
He arrived just in time to see the front doors come off their hinges as Santi came through them. The doors were sent in two separate directions and went skidding across the concrete outside, and impaled on his Mantis Blades, one blade through the abdomen and one through the upper chest, was Johnathan Thumbart.
Thumbart was screaming. He was still alive, and both blades were through him, and Santi was holding him up off the ground with both arms extended before he started cutting him up.
He twisted the blades, which sent Thumbart's scream even higher. Santi pulled the abdominal blade sideways and opened him from hip to hip, causing Thumbart's intestines to come out of the wound in a slick pink cascade that hit the concrete and steamed in the cold night air.
Unfortunately for Thumbart, he was still breathing and screaming. Maine kind of felt bad for the guy, but Santi quickly retracted the blade from his chest and brought it around in a horizontal arc, chopping off Thumbart's head and sending it flying and then rolling across the concrete.
Santi let out a sigh and straightened up.
He was covered in blood. Red and black clumps clung to his face, chest, arms, hair, eyes, and mouth, and his Mantis Blades dripped with blood as steam rose from his opened arms.
He turned and looked at Maine, and smiled.
Maine had been to war and had killed more people than he had ever bothered to count. He had watched men do terrible things in jungles and cities and villages and had, on more than one occasion, been the man doing them.
Yet the smile on the seventeen-year-old's blood-soaked face sent a shiver straight down his spine.
Santi retracted the blades and jumped through the side door of the van as V slowed just enough so that there wouldn't be any problems, and then kept going and drifted the van to a stop beside Maine. Maine hauled himself through the rear doors and slammed them shut behind him.
"Ghost, you got everything we came here for?" Maine asked Santi.
Santi nodded, and seeing that through the rearview mirror, V floored it. She slammed through another fence at fifty miles per hour and went right through it, the chain-link peeling away from the posts and wrapping around the front bumper before tearing free.
They then hit the street, fishtailed, and straightened out. But they weren't out of the woods yet, as six drones lifted off the facility's roof behind them. They were Militech Griffin surveillance and pursuit units, their rotors spinning up to intercept velocity as their optical arrays acquired the van's heat signature.
Maine moved to the rear doors and raised his rifle when Santi's hand came down on the barrel and pushed it down.
"I'll take care of that," Santi said. His eyes glowed as he locked onto the six targets and burned their optical processing units all at once.
The drones continued flying at full speed, in whatever direction they had last been pointed, and with no functional sensor input or any way to correct. They slammed into light poles and disintegrated, slammed into each other, and into buildings.
The air was suddenly filled with a peaceful quiet, save for the sound of the engine. Maine sat down opposite Santi and stared at him.
"Yo, what the actual fuck was that?" V shouted from the driver's seat.
Santi wiped blood out of his eyes with the back of his wrist, but it only served to smear it across his face.
"The target wasn't connected to Militech," he said. "He was Militech. Mid-level acquisitions officer, fourteen years of service, currently listed as a regional logistics coordinator. He wasn't selling to the black market... The fucker was running a Militech operation that Militech was pretending not to know about after he pissed them off... I found the personnel file when I pulled the data."
"So?" V asked.
"So I needed to let off some steam," Santi shrugged.
"Are you fucking retarted?" V asked, then turned her attention back to the road.
Maine kept looking at Santi, which caused Santi to look back at him. In the privacy of his own head, behind the steady voice and reasonable explanation, he ran a full diagnostic on the supervisory layer he had written to manage the Higurashi 20-13's firmware. Something had gone wrong, and he had lost any semblance of control over his own body and actions. All he could think about at the moment was "rip and tear."
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Cyberpsychosis sneaks up on you, or it doesn't, at least not for this gonk. He's been speedrunning his way to it. Send me stones, and I'll consider helping him out!
You can also go ahead and join the infamous P@treon if you seek the forbidden passages:
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
There you can find everything I've ever written, as I'm writing it.