Chapter 128: Fear And Anguish
I was in the middle of dangerous enemy territory. They'd almost caught me once. If it weren't for the piece of shit in front of me, I would be struggling for my life, if not already dead.
That didn't stop my mind from spiraling.
Flinn. Like, say… Adrian Flinn.
Me.
I rejected the idea immediately. Surely, Flinn wasn't that odd a surname. Surely not.
Except…
The one thing I knew about my father was that his surname was Flinn. Call her stupid or traditional, but my mother had taken and kept the man's name.
Isobel Flinn. The woman who'd loved me, taken care of me, done her very best to give me an education. The woman who'd disappeared and left behind nothing but a suspiciously large payout.
I felt not exactly nauseous, just… unmoored. Lost. Dizzy.
"You okay, kid?"
The voice made me blink in confusion for a good few seconds before I focused in on Mort. He didn't look concerned or anything. How had he even noticed what was happening to me?
"Your fingers got all tense and are currently sneaking closer to my liver," he groused. "I'd rather you didn't do that."
Ah, that explained it. I glowered down at the idiot, ignoring the way he was looking at me. "Titus Flinn. What do you know about him? Tell me everything."
"Fuck, kid, pull back the claws!"
I did, realizing I'd almost pressed them deeper into him once more.
"I don't know much, okay? He's the 'man's man' kinda guy. Told you already, he's got an obsession with military types. He wants to gather up all of us who 'suffered together' or some shite. I don't know more than that! He just offered to spare me after he saw my record, and stuck me in this little operation."
"That's it?"
"That's it!"
"Then what the fuck am I keeping you alive for?" I hissed. The world almost vanished in my desire to sink my claws into him, or croon at him in Shadow-speak. That ought to motivate him to remember something useful…
Amelia's voice snapped me out of the spiral.
"Adrian! Please calm down and remember where you are. Please?"
She sounded desperate. A glance at the screen revealed she was looking at me with such intense worry, all questions about Flinns evaporated from my brain.
"Yeah, listen to her." Mort was still so very frustratingly calm. "If you off me, you won't be having fun. I've tied some of the defenses here to my biometrics. If those shut down all of a sudden, you ain't gonna have a good time."
I narrowed my eyes at him. Then I gritted my teeth and started looking around as best I could with my claws still partially inside the runner.
At least it didn't take me long to spot what I was looking for.
The main connection cable was already severed from when I'd booted Mort out of the netspace. I ripped it completely out of its setting. Tossing it aside, I quickly unspooled my own and jammed it into place.
Instantly, awareness of this closed server setup bloomed within my mind.
"Keep an eye on him, and let me know the second he tries something, please." I shot another glance at the monitor, receiving nods from Mela and Amelia. "Thanks."
I'd done it a couple of times before, but it was still a challenge to tense my body in place just right so it wouldn't topple over during a dive. I was pretty sure I could only do it in the first place because of the Stalker package side effects.
Regardless, I made sure I was physically stabilized, and then dove into the server netspace.
My eyes opened on total chaos.
Defenses roared to life the moment my avatar formed. Actual knights in full plate armor, wielding comically sized weapons. Some kind of shadow hounds that dipped into and out of existence. There was even an honest-to-goodness military squadron hiding behind it all, ready to take potshots and be general nuisances.
I was, reluctantly, impressed. This was way beyond the defenses I'd encountered when taking over Patch's mercenaries.
I was also grimly amused.
My jaws opened, revealing rows and rows of jagged teeth in a Cheshire grin as my claws came out to play.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
I bowled straight through the knights, taking bites right out of them and shredding their armor. I let myself cackle maliciously as I scooped up one of the dogs. My jaws unhinged far, far too wide, letting me stuff the whole animal into my mouth and crunch down.
The military types, being programs rather than actual people, didn't falter. They did, however, get absolutely torn apart when I appeared behind them with no warning, my previous avatar representation lingering and glitching for a second or two before fading away into smoke.
Through it all, I felt… good. Powerful. In control.
There was no loss of control or mindless rampaging. No impulses that got away from me. Just me, the frightening implications and abilities of my avatar, and the scattered remains of my enemies.
I heard Mela choke a little. Amelia actually cheered. My net diving split their view between what I was seeing and what the monitor's attached camera was showing them.
Preliminary cleanup done, I dove deep into the heart of the server. Right past the data and all that shit, straight to where the control modules were hiding. I wiped all other access permissions and their pre-installed defenses and set alerts, claiming the server for myself like an infection taking over a body.
The remaining defenses, all rushing to converge on me, paused briefly before returning to their regular patrol and scanning patterns. Before jacking out, I sent my attention drifting through all the files I now had access to, and then immediately regretted it.
I came awake with a string of curses dripping from my lips. Mort finally looked a little freaked out, but I ignored him, using what I had seen to shove aside the insistent echo of the word 'Flinn' inside my head.
"Fuck! Fuckity fucken fuck!" I growled. "Okay, we need to do something about the Zerx. Look at this."
I brought up a few of the files I'd found and zoomed in, letting Amelia and Mela read through my eyes' UI.
"Vera Zich, 21, excellent physical condition. Former shop assistant. Defaulted on lease payment and ended up in the slums. Recruited on the 21st of June, shipped out to the buyer on the 29th."
Amelia read the file summaries aloud, one name after another. One Zerx after another. People tempted into joining the gang, pumped full of drugs, and then sold off.
The Zerx didn't need to go around snatching people up. The people came straight to them. They could pick out the healthiest and most promising 'merchandise' and then just send the captives along to interested buyers.
But then…
"The Zerx weren't cut off from the trafficking business," I spat. "The stuff they told us when they attacked us was either straight up lies, or the crap they feed to low-level grunts to rile them up."
My claws itched. I kept thinking of all the other files on that server.
All the other lives ruined beyond repair.
"Which begs the question…" I fixed my eyes balefully on Mort, who flinched. "Why?"
He knew. He had to know. He'd been in the server when I came into the room. If I'd seen all this in less than five minutes, then he had to know.
"Why what?" he asked roughly, refusing to look me in the eye.
"Why what?! Ya fucking — I actually don't know what the fuck to call ya!" Mela was out of her mind with anger. She actually looked like she might start foaming at the mouth. "This is what ya been doing?! Managing their fucking sale records?!"
"Mela, please," I cut in, fighting not to shy away from her anger myself when she turned her eyes on me. "I get it. I do. This is… everything the Kittens were not. But I need to know why they lied."
I turned back to Mort. "Well? Why did the Zerx attack a merc company for 'excluding' them from the trade?"
Mort squirmed a little, stopping only when my claws poked him harder. "Because they don't want more mercs around. I told you, Titus isn't… all there. He wants to change things for the soldiers. I got the recruitment spiel and everything from his rep. He doesn't want to be one of the best mercenary companies in the city. He wants to be the only mercenary company in the city. What he plans to do after, I'm not sure, but… the higher-up shits sure seem convinced he's going to 'change things around here.'"
I just stared. Really, what do you even say to that? Especially with my own surname still featuring so prominently in the back of my mind…
Instead, I latched onto my anger. "And he'll bring his glorious dream about by selling people?"
"Listen, I told you, didn't I?" Mort growled. "I just joined because I didn't want to die. You can judge me for it. You can hate me for it. I don't give a fuck. I didn't struggle and fight and do all the fucking crap I had to do just to get my brains spilled over some stupid fucking gang conflict, or whatever the Nightfall Squad is financing the Zerx for!"
I had to try really, really hard not to just gut him then and there. I was contemplating it, actually.
At least, until another thumping sound came from the door.
Cursing under my breath, I reverted the call connection to my eyes only and shifted to the security cams.
The same gorilla from before was in the lead, except the number of his idiots had doubled. "Mort! Fucking answer, you brainless —"
"What? What now? Are you seriously so incompetent you can't fucking catch the intruders yet!?" Mort snapped, sounding much more irritated than before. Probably, you know, on account of my claws.
Actually…
I narrowed my eyes and looked down. There was blood where my claws were poking him, sure. It was spreading ever so slowly and staining his clothes a little. But there was remarkably little of it for what I'd been doing to him.
"We searched the whole building. Found a train of bodies leading from emergency exit 3, so that's how they got in. Not a single fucking hostile found, though! Not one. Fucking tell me your cams haven't been useless?"
"Only thing I've seen has been your sorry asses trooping through. If you've got a hostile around, they ain't showing up on the cams."
"He walked up to your door and tried to get in!"
"And none of the cams saw him! You've got a proper infiltrator skulking around, and you're fucking useless. How the fuck did you survive deployment? Did you get smuggled out before you even saw combat?"
The gorilla went purple in the face. His fist came down on the door so hard, it fucking dented the metal.
I shot Mort a wide-eyed look, on the verge of asking the idiot to stop antagonizing the clearly deadly gorilla.
"You FUCKER!" the gorilla bellowed. "You fucking useless piece of —"
"Who's the runner here?" Mort sneered. "You? One of your joytoys that stick to your ass like glue?"
The soldiers, because that's what they apparently were, shifted angrily behind the lead guard.
"I fucking told you we needed to retrofit the old security system," Mort whined on. "You gave me these shitty cams and told me to manage! Well I'm 'managing', you fucker. Managing to miss an asshole sneaking around our base!"
"That's fucking it." The gorilla's hands balled into fists as he let the actual assault rifle he had hanging from a strap swing in front of his chest. "Let me in right the fuck now. My guy's gonna be monitoring the cams. You're coming with me for a fucking chat, runner."
Mort looked right at me and smirked.
I felt like screaming.