Shadow Runner [LitRPG]

I felt wired. Over-energized. There was liquid fire in my veins, but instead of hurting, it made everything so much easier. I couldn't stop glancing at my status, drinking in the numbers that quantified exactly what I was feeling.

Every last bit of me had been enhanced. Made better. Made more.

And I dreaded it as much as I adored it.

Don't get me wrong, the sense of my own physical strength I felt every time I clenched my fingers was amazing. So was the speed at which I could move, and the sheer sensitivity of my reflexes.

It was kind of hard to forget what Amelia had done to enable all of that, though. Especially considering my increased Acuity.

She'd extracted the eyes of the Shadows I'd made and merged them with my own.

It honestly reminded me of some twisted game mechanic. Got five identical items? Just shove them into the right inventory slots, hit a button, and watch them merge. Sounds harmless, right?

Except, you know, for all the liquefying eldritch flesh dripping into my eye, and then somehow transforming it from the inside out.

The rest of the process was more or less the same. Amelia used the Shadows' bodies for my Stalker cybernetics. The weird Shadow-to-Stalker flesh conversion thing she'd figured out strengthened my arms considerably.

Well, my arms and every single strip of Stalker flesh that had bloomed across my body, marking it like the tentacles of some massive sea creature. You know. Semantics.

After my cybernetics came the rest of me. She could just use regular, non-Shadow flesh for this, so she had no shortage of raw materials. We'd rather thoroughly decimated the local Zerx population, after all.

Funnily enough, when that process was over, I felt more like myself than I did before. Go figure. At least I knew that the human bits being added to me were, well, human. That officially pushed my eldritch/human percentage in favor of the latter!

Probably. Again, I was trying not to overthink things.

Which was for the best, really. Every time I focused too much on what I was doing, I tended to make silly mistakes, like crushing whatever I was holding into pulp because I squeezed too hard.

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It was Grace, ironically, that helped me avoid this. When I just let my body do its thing, the skill kept me in perfect control. The appropriate amounts of strength were applied to every action, and everything flowed as it should.

In other news, Amelia was absolutely inconsolable that I refused to hug her until she was done strengthening herself, too. I was adamant on that point. There was no way I was going to risk getting a bit too enthusiastic and squeezing her to death.

Besides, it wasn't like she didn't have enough material to work with! Sure, she was leery of messing with her own cybernetics. She claimed the conversion thing only went so well for me because my Stalker and Shadow bits were already coexisting. But she had plenty of human material to strengthen the rest of herself.

So that's what she did. Unfortunately for cuddle-time, though, the next part of our plan kicked off just as she finished working on her own upgrades.

It was absolutely adorable to see the insanely capable eldritch ripper pout as I bundled her up in the gear of the Zerx guards we'd killed. So was listening to her complain about how I 'couldn't run from hugs forever.'

The rest of our prep was decisively less cute.

All the things Amelia could now do with flesh made our plan to get to Gatorz much easier. We had Landen, who could hopefully lead us right to the man. Amelia and I could pose as two of the other 'elite' Zerx guards we'd killed. Amelia could even craft perfect disguises for us.

By, you know, removing the faces of the guards in question and turning them into the most macabre masks in existence.

Sure, they didn't even feel like skin and fleshy bits when she was done processing them. They felt more like regular old rubber masks that fit frighteningly well. That didn't change the fact that I was literally wearing a mask made out of a dead man's face.

Landen's accusations rang through my ears as I was fitted and declared ready to head out on our mission by Mela. It felt oddly hurtful that I couldn't deny his claim that I was stealing someone's face anymore.

—

While we'd been stuck in the Cattery, plotting, prepping, and having a few crises of conscience, the slums had degraded further.

Every street we passed, every person we saw scurrying about like a startled rat, bore the signs of the war we'd initiated. An entire building was pretty much melted next to the scene of a battle so bloody, the ground looked like a muddy, reddish-brown mess. Someone's hand still lay out in the street, discarded and forgotten in the post-battle cleanup.

We caught a glimpse of an alley where a pile of stripped-down bodies had been dumped. Just… left to decay and stink up the entire neighborhood. I kind of wished I could say it was the Zerx who'd done that, but seeing as we were still the definitive winning side, it was more than likely one of our hired allies.

I felt my sympathy stir as my Essence let me break somewhat past the jaded eldritch point of view. Still, I couldn't bring myself to feel very guilty.

Sure, there was a lot of death, misery, and destruction sweeping through the place I used to call my home. But those things had always been there.

Mercenary companies and gangs had apparently been running a slave trade out of the slums for who knew how long, and no one had cared. Drugs and murder had been facts of my life long before I got myself into the mess that landed me in this war to begin with. I'd been excellent at dodging all of that, mostly because I'd only really slept in the slums. Even then, though, I was merely repressing and ignoring all the misery around me.

If anything, I could convince myself pretty easily that what we were doing now was for the best.

By the time we were through, the movers and shakers who planted misery in the slums like a farmer obsessing over evil crops would be dead and gone. If we played our cards right, their most aggressive customers would be just as dead.

Including the good old doctor.

I kept my mind busy with these thoughts as we approached the perimeter of the war still raging in the area. When the sounds of gunshots and screams reached us from a few blocks ahead, we dipped beneath the street level. Finding an entry point to those same neglected maintenance tunnels I'd had to stumble through some days ago was easy. Putting up with the smell now that I was fully aware was much harder, particularly since Amelia had strengthened my senses, but I managed.

We had barely been down there a minute when I brought us to a halt.

"Stop. People ahead. Friendlies. They should be expecting us, but let's try and avoid startling them, okay?"

"Right, right. You got that, Landen?" Amelia hissed at her latest enhanced drone. "Regular behavior protocols engaged. And be nice!"

The former Zerx guard captain came alive. It was still odd to see a silent, dead-eyed drone just animate like that, life seeping back into his expression and mannerisms. It didn't even look fake.

Yet we could turn it all off on a whim.

He saluted, his gaze fixed on Amelia with obvious respect. "Yes, ma'am."

I held back a wince. It was an inspired idea for an order, but telling the man to treat Amelia like she was actually Isobel meant I now had to put up with him giving her puppy-eyes whenever he was in 'active mode.'

Which made me feel… off. On several levels.

Our chatter must have alerted the mercs keeping an eye on the tunnels. It didn't take long for them to emerge dramatically from the gloom ahead, assault rifles pointed our way.

"Stop! Identify yourselves!" a guy in the back shouted while I took in their appearance.

All of them wore bulky body armor and some kind of goggles that presumably let them see in the dark. (None of us had that issue, since Landen's cybernetic enhancements had apparently included military grade optics. Go figure.) They also had several more guns attached to their persons. Clearly, the Wild Wolves didn't skimp on equipping their members.

"Patch sent us," Amelia cut in authoritatively, before either Landen or I could open our mouths. "I think you already got the memo? We were told you'd be expecting us."

"Commander did mention that, yeah. Got any proof you are who you say you are?" the same guy in the back demanded, still refusing to lower his gun.

It was a good thing we'd worn bulky raincoats over our current gear ensemble. Warning or not, I was pretty sure these guys would have shot first and asked questions later if they'd caught even a glimpse of Zerx branding.

"Yeah, yeah, give me a second…" Amelia grumbled.

I noted the hunger in her gaze as she stared at the mercs, her eyes briefly flaring a more noxious green. Then she sent off a message request to the guy talking to us. His scroll pinged audibly, since he apparently didn't have cyber optics and didn't think to silence the fucking thing while trying to be stealthy, but he managed to dig out the device quickly enough.

He studied the message, then scowled as he returned the scroll to the large pocket attached to his back. "Identities check out. Still not sure you're not Zerx, but fine… I'm watching you, though! Don't try any fucking funny business until you're out of our sights."

"These little shit-flinging fucks…" Mela growled, startling me. We'd tuned into a call together before we left, yes, but she'd been too busy to talk thus far. "Imma have a fucking chat with their leader. How are ya lot feeling?"

"Fine, Mela," I assured her as we went past the checkpoint, the Wolves still eyeing us suspiciously. "Just fine. Hopefully, in a couple of hours, we'll have this fucker under our thumb. Then we can wrap this up quickly."

"That's the dream, at least!" Amelia chimed in. "So long as our luck doesn't go the way it usually does."

I could only agree. For once, just once, I was hoping one of our schemes would come off without things almost going to shit.

If we could just get our hands on a living Gatorz, and Amelia could rearrange his brain a bit, we could have him order all the Zerx to surrender. The higher-ups would be a little tricky, since they'd been sent to the slums by Titus himself and knew the whole truth about the Zerx, but we'd handle them.

We just really needed step one of the plan to go well.