Chương 93: 2.34 Creative Solutions

Hector didn't have time to be angry with himself for being caught off guard. He didn't even have time to wonder if the reaper had been stalking him or if it had just happened to be on the prowl and picked up his scent. All he could do was react. Despite his speed with aura manipulation, his Aura Blade was still forming when the reaper hit him. The creature was big—bigger than the ones he'd fought with Freddy—and fast and strong.

Hector's body had gone through immense changes since he'd first awakened in it, back when it had been freshly stolen from Paul Chevalier. He'd grown taller, and his shoulders were broader than they'd been. He wasn't huge; when aura built up a person's "attributes" it did so elegantly, interweaving potentia with muscle fibers, nerves, and cells. Hector looked like a filled-out version of his earlier self, but he was strong enough to wrestle with cybernetic limbs—and win.

He was faster than anything a natural human could achieve, and he could take a beating that would ruin an unaugmented person. Despite all of that, the reaper would have utterly dominated him—if not for the boost. Adding the Speed Boost fueled by five aura to the equation meant that Hector was a match for the reaper, but only barely, and that said a lot about how dangerous the creatures could be.

While his Aura Blade took shape—something that only took a bit more than a single second—he deflected two claw swipes and kicked out his boot, driving it into the reaper's hip to keep it from bowling him over. Unfortunately, the creature had four arms and just as many sets of claws. While he fought off the top two, the monster drove its lower set of arms forward, claws out, and impaled him.

The dagger-shaped natural weapons ranged from six to ten centimeters in length, and they punched through his armor, his flesh, and the ribs beneath, perforating several of his organs and intestines. Hector screamed in rage and agony; his foot slid down and the reaper drove him back, raising its other set of claws for another swipe and opening its jaws wide to finish him. That was when Hector hammered his Aura Blade into the monster's chest and ripped it down and to the right.

Hector's blade was long enough to punch most of the way through the reaper's torso, and when he sliced nearly a full meter down its length, he cut through bones, arteries, nerve cords, and organs. The damage the reaper had done to him was a scratch compared to the devastation he unleashed on the monster. It coughed a torrent of purple-tinted blood onto his face-shield, and part of Hector thought it was done; he'd killed it.

Of course, logically, he knew better; the reaper could heal from almost any injury, and it was as dogged as a badger, driving into him, crunching its claws together inside his body, ripping away at his flesh and insides. Hector coughed blood, too, and then the Reaper's jaws were around his helmet, biting down. With everything he had left in him, Hector raised his Aura Blade and hacked down. His weapon hissed with bloody steam as it severed the back of the reaper's neck and bit through its spine.

Suddenly the gnashing of its jaws against his helmet ceased, and the monster fell still—250 kilograms of dead weight that bore Hector to the ground, pinning him to the gray-block floor. Hector coughed, and as the adrenaline burned itself out, he began to realize just how badly he'd been injured. He tried to shove the reaper off, but his muscles were lethargic and it was still hooked into him with those damn claws.

He managed to separate the head from the neck a few inches, pushing the torso down with all his might, but it used the last of his strength to do so. Desperate, barely able to draw fractional breaths, Hector wormed his right hand between himself and the monster, groping with his fingers for the safety tab of his armor's auto-injector. //Hector!

If you inject those nanites, they won't find what they need in your blood because your aura system is already pushing you dangerously close to depletion; they're going to cannibalize your body for nutrients. // I'm gonna die here if I don't. Without further debate, he found the tab, yanked it free and then, groping once more, pushed the injection button.

Heat flushed through him, his vision brightened, and he knew the stimulant packaged with the nanites was having its desired effect—making him capable of squeezing a trigger so he could go down fighting. Grunting in pain, he reached up with his right arm—the only one he could move—to push down on the reaper's shoulder, trying to slide it off him. Even with the combat stim, he couldn't dislodge it. The damn thing had anchored itself into his flesh.

He struggled for a minute or two, then, panting, face sweaty inside his helmet, he stopped.

"I'll just rest. I'll just let the bugs do their work." //You should call for help. // They find me like this, they're going to think I'm an aura fiend. //Not if you don't die! // Hector knew he wasn't being rational; Evie was right. If his team got to him while he was still conscious, they'd have no reason to suspect he'd died and been infected. Even so, something in the back of his mind didn't want him to call for help.

After a minute, it clicked, and he whispered, voice barely audible even to him, "They'll die trying to get over here. Think of everything I snuck past." Before Evie could respond, another thought hit him, and he pressed his hand against the massive corpse and triggered his aura system. //65 potentia gathered. Potentia available: 76. // Hector sucked his teeth and nearly lost consciousness when the rush hit him.

As his faculties returned, though, he tried to capitalize on the endorphins, pushing against the reaper's corpse. His leverage was hampered by the way it pinned his shoulders, and despite all his straining, he only managed to shift the left side of it, spreading the massive cut he'd made and spilling more of its warm fluids over him. In his delirious state, he couldn't help thinking it felt nice. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

//I'm going to halt the aura system's activities. We'll lose the propagation progress, but there's a good chance I'll learn something from the attempt. //"Like hell you are!" Hector growled, suddenly alert.

"I'm not throwing away nearly three hundred potentia!" His vision dimmed, and he coughed—wetly. It felt like drowning. Still, he croaked, "Cannibalize one of my damn arms if you have to—don't stop the system's work." //You may die, Hector. The medical nanites are—// Hector's tongue was sluggish and dry.

"Let the nanites stop the bleeding, then co-opt them." //Technically possible. They…// Evie continued speaking into his mind, explaining how the nanites were compatible with the communication protocols the neurodeck used with its nanites—the ones that formatted "corpus vivum gray matter"—but Hector wasn't listening. He was thinking, trying to plan for the eventuality that he survived. He opened his comm link and subvocalized a message, leaving it to Evie to simulate his voice. Mathews?

"Yeah? You on your way back?" Gotta hole up here for a while—aura system update.

"Are you secure?" Hector squeezed his eyes shut, panting shallowly for several seconds. Yeah. Should be fine.

"Right. Well, we'll hold down the fort." Hector felt like he was floating, drifting toward a sinkhole with greater and greater velocity. Evie, just take charge. Get creative if you have to, but don't let the updates fail. As if it had taken the last of his mental fortitude to formulate the command, Hector stopped trying to fight the pull and succumbed to the darkness, watching as it rushed up around him and he sank toward the center of the universe.

Pain, fever, and the ungentle machinations of his aura system sent Hector's consciousness adrift, tumbling from one fitful dream into another. He relived battles—the ones from his early career as a soldier, those that had left indelible marks on his psyche before he could harden it against the horrors of combat.

He saw with fresh eyes the damage energy weapons could do to human flesh; he heard the screams, and then felt the kinetic bombardments in his bones, rattling his teeth as his entrenched cohort awaited the command to charge. He relived the first time he "awoke," alive again after knowing full-well he'd been killed, the terrible certainty that something was wrong when he stretched out his hand— his, but also not at the same time.

Nothing peaceful came to him in that unconscious haze, just one unpleasant scene after another, building up a sensation of dread, guilt, and unease. The nightmarish memories, made worse by his subconscious, came one after the other, compounding and multiplying the disquiet that made his sleep anything but restful. If he'd woken then, Hector wouldn't have been able to guess how long he'd suffered, exposed to the bright glare of his usually deeply buried trauma.

Something finally broke, though—the dam he'd built up to resist those memories—and with his resistance falling away, they suffused his unconscious mind and, almost as though he and they had come to a truce, or at least an understanding, Hector and the unquiet parts of his mind stopped fighting, and he slipped into a deeper state of unconsciousness. When he finally came awake, Hector was more than a little disoriented, but he remembered where he'd been—the situation he'd been in.

Still, the air inside his helmet was steamy; the cracks made by the reaper's shark-toothed maw had grown as the polymer face shield degraded in the rift world's harsh atmosphere. More disorienting than the steam of his breath in the confined space was the lack of discomfort. He inhaled deeply, and the air felt good. It tasted good. He shifted, aware of a bulk pressing him down, and then his full memory came rushing back, and he spasmed, throwing his arms against the corpse and flinging it off—it was too easy.

//Hector! I was performing last-minute calculations and failed to realize you'd regained consciousness. //"Evie, what the hell is going on?" Hector asked as he pushed himself into a seated position, flexing his fingers and toes; he still had them all. //Well, when you told me to get creative, I did some thinking. Do you recall making the off-hand comment that I could cannibalize your arm? // Hector hastily flexed his hands again— both of them.

He reached up to smear the fog off his cracked visor, but it was on the inside.

"Did you take something?" //Not from you. // Dammit, Evie, don't play coy. //Fine, but don't be angry. When you said to cannibalize, I got to thinking; we were in the midst of several aura system propagations, the most costly of which was Enhanced Bone Density 2. You simply didn't have the resources to complete it. I got to thinking about alternative sources, and then I recalled the similite. // Hector, about to unfasten his helmet, froze.

He stared into the blurry emptiness of his helmet, noting that none of the visor's AUI features were on. Had the processor died? Shaking his head, he refocused his thoughts.

"You didn't… how even could you?" //The aura system uses aura to propagate—to carry building blocks, disassemble or reassemble chemical bonds, and to infuse them with aura potentia. It was a simple matter to direct the flow of aura the few millimeters beyond your flesh to the similite ingots. As you know, similite is naturally rich in potentia—a better conductor and battery than even living flesh.

It was trivial to weave it into the structure of your bones, especially as the pathways were open and propagation was already in progress. // Hector groaned, again fumbling with the latch for his helmet; it had degraded and the clip snapped in his fingers.

"That was a few million bits' worth of ore, Evie. Mathews is going to shit." //When you see the results, I think you'll agree it was worthwhile; I believe people would pay many millions of bits for a similar process if we could replicate it. // Hector shook his head, grunting as he dug his fingers into the pitted alloy latch. He was about to grab hold of the helmet and tug when another thought occurred to him.

"Is that it? I don't see any reports for me to read." //As you know, your body was depleted by the nanites, and though I used the similite to complete the Enhanced Bone Density augmentation, you were still in terrible trouble. I didn't want to have to cannibalize your non-critical organs or muscle tissue, especially since you needed so much, so I was… creative again. // Hector lowered his hands, breathing deeply as he tried to imagine why Evie was being cagey. It suddenly occurred to him that he felt too good.

He wasn't hungry. He wasn't weak.

"Evie, how long was I out?" //Before I tell you, you should know I've been in contact with Mathews. I've explained to her that you were going through an extensive aura update—that I'd had a breakthrough, and it was taking longer than anticipated. //" Evie!" //It's been seventy hours. // Hector gripped his helmet and ripped it off, throwing it to clatter against the wall as he leaped to his feet.

Again, he recognized that something wasn't right; he was too limber, too strong, and the air—why did the thick, moist air feel so good to breathe? He looked around the dim interior of the abandoned bunker or outpost—whatever it had been—and saw that not much had changed. The reaper's corpse, tossed aside by him, had certainly changed, however. It was desiccated, the head shrunken, barely attached to the body by a thread of dried, leathery flesh.

The arms, the two lower ones that had been stabbing into his body, were nearly gone, just stumps of charcoal-colored bones.

"Evie, what the hell did you do?" //Well…I got creative. //