The Circuits are an easy way to get out of the Warrens. Of course, by easy, I an either you get recruited and offered a Guilder contract or you end up dead. Either way, cosang, you’ll be well on your way gettin’ a Soul grafted to you or being burned inside a Soul.
Sa difference, really.
Circuits co with plenty of variety. Largest pool of recruits cos from the drone-jocks since they don’t tend to fucking die the first ti they make a mistake. Getting a second chance at the cost of burning a few thousand imps and all that, but don’t get it twisted, adamantine-hard street squires have and will always be a commodity.
What can I say? Everyone loves a good pit brawl.
-Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens
3-9
Like Dogs on Leashes
If there was one thing Avo hated about these Syndicate types, it was their pointless theatrics. Slaughterman. Rantula. Mirrorhead. Every last one of them had a stupid concept they just wouldn’t let go of. It was like tumbling from into a world where everyone liked buying new clothes for their guns and giving a themselves a new na by slamming two random nouns together or sotis an adjective.
The paths that Rantula led him down were covered in layers of tarp. Bulged pockets inflated with gusts of wind.
Rantula continued. “See the boss decided to get a new pet.” She folded her arms over her chest. They were twice as thick as his, each muscle natural and not. Scaarthians were modded from tis of yore. First by their environnt, then by their gods, now by themselves. With Rantula, it looked like she was just the continuation of a repeatedly botched job.
The ground staggered beneath her weight, each step thumping up eruptions of dust. The patterns of the particulates were strange. Looking up, Avo understood why. Bullet holes and poorly threaded wires ran through the ceiling. Flashes of movent cut over the gaps, bobbing to the flow of thoughtstuff. People were upstairs too, heading in the sa direction as he was.
Eight burning optics flashed in his periphery. Rantula was glaring right at him. “Can’t say I see what's so special about you. You’s just like any other ghoul I know.”
“Can do the alphabet backward,” Avo said.
She spat again. Didn’t know she hated literacy that much.
The hallways they were walking through were cramped. Dim. Avo heard the distinct chitters of aratnids scampering through the vents. The walls were lined with half-molted battle foam. Instantly deployable cover. Probably leftovers from a gunfight so ti back. The walls themselves were lined with an insulating tarp, patches of which swelled with the flowing winds.
The fact that the currents could course this deep into the structure ant a few things. The most likely was that soone–or more likely a wing of drones–put a lot of holes through the block at so point. Probably was a holding point during the last war, now reinfested with gangers and other vermin of the like.
As they went further into the block, two enforcers sharing similar aesthetic implants moved to flank her, peeling out from an intersection they passed. Their inferiority to her was evident: six industrial legs on their backs instead of eight. One was bald. The other had a translucent do lined with twitching antennae. Probably called themselves sothing glib, sothing to do with insects. They were decidedly not-natural born Scaarthians though. They had the scarification but no bones. More evidently, their hearts were beating on the left rather than the right.
Just another questionable piece of Scaarthian biological design. Ca unnaturally with a god who enjoyed molding flesh like clay.
“Jareg, Issig, you see our new pet?” Rantula asked.
Annoyingly, the two decided to add a grunting chorus of laughter to her words. It was like a scene from a trashy academia-setting vicarity: watch the rich vat-grown Guilder gang up on the hardworking womb-born wager who was drafted up from the Warrens on their own rits.
Unfortunately, the narrative didn’t echo here. His "bullies" were closer to genetic refuse or scrap tal, and he was a cannibal created by a terror cult trying to retake a holand that never was. Trying to make a ghoul feel bad from social ostracization was like trying to insult a fish for its lack of wings. Can’t lose sothing you never had.
Turning, she shot him another glance. Her lip twitched, revealing clenched slab-like teeth. “He’s an ugly one–”
He continued, walking past her. “Which way? Being too slow. Got work to do.”
The faint sneer drained from her visible skin, replaced by the building red of outrage. He didn’t know what she was expecting. Banter? Confrontation? He was a ghoul; she was so half-strand working for Mirrorhead–basically a ganger who had to wear a team uniform. The sooner they could move this along the better.
His daily allotnt of patience had long since run dry.
He had no problem getting bloody in the hallway with her, and judging from how her thoughtstuff protruded in oozing clumps from her wards, it was little wonder why Mirrorhead ordered him to keep his mind away from hers.
With how poor her ta’s build was, he might literally be able to crack her just by dumping an overdose of mories into her.
A tal limb hamred down in front of him, tearing the tarp and chipping plascrete. Debris clicked as they bounced along the floor. Avo stopped to study her implant. He could see the servos, the naked hydraulics inside. A poor choice to leave it so exposed. He wondered how many technicians it took to keep her running.
More importantly, he wondered if it would still work if he lodged sothing inside the moving parts. Sothing sharp.
As he studied her limb, she drew closer. He had his new organ tight and prepared to fire. She lowered herself by a few inches to greet him face-to-face, trying to stare him down.
Avo barely suppressed a smirk.
If she thought he was going to look at her and make this a mont, she had another thing coming. These were power gas she should’ve played with a human. His only interest in her was in her eventual pain. And taste.
Scaarthians were such a rare delight to sample.
Next to his ear, she drew close, a growl under her breath. Her two walking skin-tags were leaning in behind her, shadowing her as they puffed themselves up, flexing their implants. It reminded him of how nu-dogs had little contests of dominance. If she tried pissing on him, he was going to crack her mind, didn’t matter what Mirrorhead commanded. Sll of piss took too long to fade.
Rantula hissed. “Listen, rotlick. Mirrorhead said–”
Avo stopped listening at that point. Whatever appreciation he had for Mirrorhead’s hiring standards earlier was rapidly leaving him. From Osjane and Osjack to this. Was this the caliber of personality that he had to deal with in the Warrens?
Her breath stank of so kind of seafood as she spoke. Calamari. She wasted a few more sentences and jabbed him in the chest with a finger. A sting of pain followed. Avo looked down to see one of her jagged nails an inch into his chest. He looked back at her, unsurprised at the return of her sneer.
“Calamari,” he said. The sneer went away again. It was like she had two expressions. Sneer for when she was trying to provoke soone. Confusion when soone deviated from her expectations. A cheap locus was probably more complex than her actual mind. “There’s a cafeteria here?”
Her mouth opened and closed. Now she reminded him of the fish he had in his aquarium. Except he didn’t have the urge to flay and wear the mangled heads of his fish as a makeshift dunce hat. “Let’s get things done. Hungry. Want to eat.”
He took a step back and felt her finger slide out of him. He clotted the wound imdiately, not wishing to leak anymore in her presence. He didn’t know if her immune system was augnted, but he felt obliged to conduct a murder-suicide if she hatched any ghoullings. Their stupidity would be a sha too great for him to bear.
Without another word, he stepped aside from the limb she had buried deep through the floor. He continued walking until she howled a slur at the back of his head to tell him he was going in the wrong direction. Just like the nu-dog she acted, she pushed herself past him to reassert her place in this little march.
Things returned to a state of acceptable boredom after that.
She still shot him brief glares of malice beneath the swirling lights of neon green as they proceeded toward their destination. Frustration lined her posture. Hers and her two companions. Seed they might’ve had a conversation with the boss as well. Not hurting the new rchandise and all that.
And with all the reflections lining the ceiling, Avo was pretty sure the boss could've been watching at any mont.
A day ago, he would’ve doubted his odds in a straight fight against any one of them. Now, the Celerostylus gave him options. Fleeing, at the least, was quite reliable. Burning up more of his ghosts, loathe as he was to do so, to use as thought-shivs was also an option.
The path she led him down felt winding, and their echoing footsteps told him of hollow walls. Suspiciously, Avo eyed every reflective substance around him, always waiting for Mirrorhead to step out, to make a new winding speech that went nowhere and said nothing.
Public DeepNav data filtered into his tamind from the local locus told him this was Mazza’s Junction, another district in the Yuulden-Yang Sovereignty. Maybe only fifty kiloters away from where he landed earlier.
So eight hundred million people lived in the thirty blocks that comprised this district. He frowned. He rembered the captain that nulled him saying sothing about Mazza’s Junction, but he guessed she offloaded him a few hundred levels down.
He made note of that. When he managed to free himself, he would need to go back down for another conversation. See what she could offer. And find out what was calling to him on her ship.
The noise began rumbling through the walls. Loud, rhythmic noise. The strumming of screaming guitars called to him in repetitive frets parted between the pounding of war drums while a synthesizer bled into the mix. Faintly, beneath the main instrunts, Avo heard the gasping pulses of a fusion burner cutting in and out.
Overhead a holo-sign flicked. It told him that he was departing section-theta, and the arrow ahead pointed toward a long walkway leading into a twenty-foot wide man-made entrance awash with strobing light and gunfire. The Syndicate must’ve knocked down the walls beside the door to make a larger entrance.
Curved around the upper corners of the entrance, a massive cog-tag ebbed in the Nether.
WELCO TO THE BRAWL-MALL
Countless scents wafted down from the path ahead, filtered by long-broken air scrubbers. It slled like there were thousands of people inside. More interestingly, he slled sothing familiar. Sothing like him. Other ghouls.
Again, was Mirrorhead collecting ghouls? He thought his kind obsolete for war-making.
“Know what a circuit is, rotlick?” Rantula asked, licking her lips with her twin-headed tongue.
“Yeah,” Avo said. He fought the urge to sigh. Wasn’t exactly the sa as the Crucible, but it wasn’t much better. The biggest change was that most participants were expected to thrive instead of dying in these circuits. Beco gutter-legends; counter-cultural brand nas for bored Guilder kids to stick it to their spawners.
That being said, every now and again, a gutter-legend becos an actual legend by catching the eye of a major player and getting recruited up the Tiers to serve a Guild. Most of the combatants probably thought that they were going to be like the Stormsparrow, with the circuits offering them a straight shot at earning godhood.
With how Stormsparrow fought in her streams, though, Avo questioned if there would ever be anyone else like her. The faint fla inside his chest turned quietly at that thought.
“Can’t go from koi to god,’ Avo muttered. “Was a god to begin with.”
“Hm?” Rantula said, scything a glare at him with three of her many eyes.
“Nothing about you,” Avo replied.
Through the entrance looked to be a vast chamber with the ceiling filled with additional supports of quick-fabbed tal between ugly mounds of hastily sprayed battle foam. Avo realized he was standing in the reused remains of a mall-based gymnasium.
Chrod bruisers loitered here, so cracking combinations against kineti-gel dummies while others sat on grafting chairs as biotechs worked on them. Their sweat stank of excess chemicals and the foulness of over-boosted adrenaline. An over-muscled bruiser benched reps of eight tons by the dozen on a grav-press station. A few of the bruisers were already drenched with gore and dotted with minor wounds; sparring, it looked like.
Against titanium slabs lining a rock-climbing wall beneath the drifting obstacles of an acro-grav course, a dozen disposable Wights bearing holographic targets stood in a loose crowd. Three Conflux enforcers committed to sloppy drills there, firing single bursts from various weapons before switching. Interestingly, they mostly seed to use gyrojet munitions. Low recoil; high explosive. With each shot that struck, flesh scattered and bodies plud into mist.
No gauss weapons. Interesting.
“Thinking if any of your kind ended up as targets, Moonblood?” Rantula taunted.
“Doubt it,” Avo said. “Guild policy was to burn us after.”
Looking at the specins gathered in the room, all Avo could say was that Mirrorhead certainly had the funds for the technical personnel, but the distribution of his resources was uneven, and his enforcers were of a brutal, less disciplined stock.
Specins like Rantula, so to speak. He caught glares from all the other competitors the sa way he did from her. Their half-defended thoughtstuff seethed at the sight of him, rising and falling in little waves of hate.
He understood. They were children of the Warrens. He didn’t doubt that nearly everyone in this room lost family to him and his kind during the war, during the Uprising. He didn’t doubt the only reason why none of them made a run at him.
Mirrorhead.
“Boss said to get you ready for the show now that you’ve been ‘hanced,” Rantula said. She scoffed. “Don’t know why he keeps trying to make snuffers out of you ghouls. No discipline, your lot.” She spat. “Had to kill the last one of you. Lost control. Tried to eat one of my lads. You gonna try to eat one of my lads, Moonblood?”
Avo grunted. “Slls bad. Can find better food.”
The bald peon shot him a look. Avo couldn’t recall which one of them was Issig and which was Jareg. “Hey, fucker. You sayin’ I sll bad or Jareg here?”
“Yes,” Avo agreed.
The bald one glared. “Rantula, this one thinks he got jokes.”
“Didn’t know I was joking,” Avo said, genuinely confused.
The bald one stepped forward, teeth bared. Right into Rantula’s backhand. His head snapped back from the whipcrack of a blow. His nose burst like a fountain. Clutching at his ruined face, he stumbled away, whimpering like the struck nu-dog he was.
Externally, Avo watched the events unfold before him with mock disinterest. Inside, Rantula’s speed–at least her reflexive base speed–had shown itself in part. She was fast for her size. Probably did have so neurachem cooking inside her bloodstream. Unfortunately, all her excess chro was weighing her down, making her unbalanced. She had to struggle to right herself afterward. His sight traced the arc of her blow even without firing his new implant.
The force, however, spelled out a very clear reality. If she hit him, sothing was going to break.
When it ca ti to hurt her, his plan was simple: brick her limbs, hew her heel; work at her from a distance after he found a spear of so kind. No sense in getting into a brawl with her. Still didn’t know how tough she was, or whatever else she had under the cover.
Another reason to sequence an advanced combat scanner into his tamind. Pre-emptive detection of implants and weapons would probably keep him alive better than any armor ever could.
“Heel,” Rantula said, cutting her bloodied “lad” down with a side-eye. Her other subordinate was smarter. Kept his distance while pouring hate into Avo through his eyes.
“So,” Avo said, proceeding like there wasn’t a stench of humiliation in the air, “how are you going to make…”
His voice trailed off as he caught a familiar scent–a familiar heartbeat. Turning, he watched as a Syndicate enforcer led a figure far smaller than them on a leash made for nu-dogs across the gym. They were headed toward the flashing lights and booming music beyond the glazed glass of the automatic doors.
Toward where Avo guessed the circuit was to occur.
Stepping past Rantula again, Avo ignored her curses as he tried to get a better look at the figure. Even from behind, his wretched form was unmistakable. He could still sll it on him: the blood of the boy. It clung to him like a cloud of unbreaking death, the trauma boiling his thoughtstuff into absolute placidity.
Like everything inside him was past the point of ruin.
“Wait,” Avo called out.
The enforcer shot him a look, and, licked their teeth over their incisors, mocking his fangs. The father, neck collared with studded shock coils, only made enough of a turn to reveal the side of his face.
It was as if only then did Avo behold him for the first ti. So hard had he tried to forget the useless man in the Crucible that he cast the father and the boy’s faces from his mind. He had not wanted to burden himself with their humanity, made to dream of them like he did Walton.
He did not feel. Not as humans did. But he knew regret, and the mories of his failures bore him more sour than secondhand injections of emotion ever could.
“Oh,” the father smiled. His lips curled up. His eyes stayed dead. “Artad blesses again this day. You are alive, Avo. Alive and well.”
Avo doubled his pace toward the father, knowing that he would not be able to reach the man in ti. That was fine. He had another goal. Ahead, the enforcer clenched a fist as currents flowed down the wire of the leash. The father did not cry out, but his body did spasm, and his eyes did roll. Cruelly, his overseer held a mont longer than was needed.
Wet stains ran down the father's pant legs. The man had relived himself.
“Flat,” Avo growled, “he’s a flat. Can’t take it. He can’t take–”
Behind him, the ground cracked to a chorus of screaming hydraulics. A shadow shot into the air. Rantula. As expected. Avo fired his Celerostylus. The world brightened, and the gears governing the pace of ti ground against his surging synapses, coming to a near halt.
Spinning on his heel, he dug his claws into the plascrete and dashed toward the impromptu gun range. In the room, all the enforcers reacted with varying speeds, the fastest of amongst only barely on par with him. A faint crackle of pleasure burned inside Avo. For all the pain of dealing with Mirrorhead, this implant almost made it worth it.
Almost.
Bounding on unsteady legs, he ignored a sharp snap in his left leg as he slid knee first into the ankles of one of the gunners turning to shoot him. His hyper-accelerated mass greeted the enforcer’s ankle in a popping crackle. Sothing was broken. Another problem with these gutter types. All bone and muscle, no ligant protection; less aesthetic to have smart-gel cartilage than bone-lacing.
As the enforcer toppled, their face a blooming howl of pain, Avo shook away the spots in his vision as the heat built. He seized his falling prey by the neck in one hand and caught their falling gun in the other. Next ti he did this, he would make his tamind manifest a tir.
Twisting his hip, he launched them backward. They careened, arms whipping wildly from the sudden thursut, and slamd back-first into their other two cohorts.
Avo didn’t press the attack. Not even as they all went down. Instead, he shouldered the only thing that would truly give him so breathing room once he quelled his Celerostylus.
A gun.
Picking up the weapon that his most recent victim dropped, its specs began flashing into his mind, its ghosts lacing with his. It had a small locus embeded, sothing to compensate for his nonexistent shooting skills. Good that he had so experience with the Mirrashard Draus gave him. Would’ve looked a fool trying to figure it out now.
IYYGUA-2O RECOILLESS ORDINANCE RIFLE
Twenty shots. High explosive. Rated to shred nine hundred and fifty milliters of armor in a single shot. Currently condition-yellow: so maintenance needed. These enforcers were filthy.
Avo spun around, raising the gun barely in ti to plant the barrel against Rantula’s throat. Her eight limbs froze scant inches away from closing around him.
A headache spiked, feeling as if nails were erging from his eyes. He stopped tensing his Celerostylus. It took most of what he had not to drop his gun from pain. It took the rest of what he had to hide the fact that he was in pain at all.
The room was tense, but not silent thanks to soone wailing about their broken ankle. The remaining enforcers were standing, weapon implants bared and fists clenched. The biotechs, anwhile, were making as fast they could for the doors.
Rantula’s face broke into a snarl. “Fuck , Moonblood. Boss wasn’t lying when he said he gave you the good shit.”
Avo responded by spitting phlegm on the ground next to her. “He needs to go.”
She backed away from him slowly, hands raised. “Trust , I’m not interested in a soft-belly like him. Not even a little. But the boss has found a use for him so…” She shrugged. “Hey, hey, ghoulie. We’re all dogs here. Nu-dogs, heeding the hand that feeds us. You know you can’t help him. Mirrorhead’s got a use for him now. Best you can do is let him go.”
The headache was receding. Slowly. Avo counted the number of enforcers in the room. More than twenty shots. Good thing he had more than one gun to use. Flicking a glance at the father, he reactivated his Phy-Sim and began estimating impact trajectories. He would have to kill Rantula first. Her threat was clear–
“Avo,” the father said, lifting his hands in a near shrug. “It is well. It is well. I am fine with it being this way. I…I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt. I don’t care.” The man laughed. "I don't care."
“Deserve to be free,” Avo said. “That was promised. You were supposed to get into city. Survived Crucible.”
A crackle of laughter ca from Rantula. “Deserve. Fucking crackling the fuck up ghoulie, shit.” The laugh drained out of her eyes as her voice rose to a braying roar. “What fuck do you think 'deserves' got anything to do with our lives?”
“Doesn’t,” Avo admitted. “Should.”
“Jaus. A fucking ghoul optimis–”
“No,” Avo stopped her. “Not optimist. Just honest. Seen the way you live. He deserves better.”
And there it was. He needed her to understand. This wasn’t her world. Her miserable little life didn’t an any more than he did up the Undercroft, where contracts and agreents were enforced by the Paladins.
New Vultun wasn’t about optimism, cynicism, or any ideology. At its heart, New Vultun was enforcing it. Whatever that it may be.
A dark shadow passed over Rantula’s face. “That gun’s got–”
“Twenty shots.”
“You’re holding it wrong.”
“Linked to the ghosts.”
“You’ll miss.”
“Not this close.”
She glared at him. He stared past her, keeping an eye on the father.
Sighing at the struggle, the man gave him a nod. What was he doing? “I appreciate all you did for my son. I will tell him of you when I see him. Again. Again. Again.”
And so the taphor played on. The father tugged on his leash, and, like a nu-dog asking to be walked, was led out into the flashing neon of the mall proper.
Avo, struck by the sight, just stared, gun frozen in hand.
“All that for nothing, huh,” Rantula said, shooting a victorious grin at the door that the father just left.
Avo grunted his non-answer. For the first ti, he t Rantula’s gaze. “Still need to get ready?”
Her sneer returned. “Nah. You look plenty ready enough to .”
Before this day was over, he was going to make a victim of her.
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