Chương 4: Chapter 3 – It’s not that volatile

After I got into my car, I pulled it out of my pocket. The screen lit up with a notification from V. No text on the preview. I tapped on it to get to the app. The message read: Have you warmed up for some actual work?' I replied:'Send me the address.'

'15115 Kallaste drive needs an urgent full sweep.' One didn't need to read the how-to-agent manual to know urgent meant I had to go now. I put it into navigation, and headed there. The neighborhood got worse the closer I came. Row houses with plywood eyes. A check-cashing place with a steel shutter half torn off its rails. My i30 fit right in, which was maybe the only time in the past year my car had belonged anywhere.

The pin sat over a squat brick building on a corner, three stories, windows bricked in at ground level. It might have been a bar once, or some other kind of social club. There was a dead neon sign over the door, unlit, the letters long since fallen off, leaving only the ghosts of their mounting holes. I parked across the street and killed the engine. This was the only door at the address, so there wasn't any mistaking it. No street cameras, no lit windows, nothing around for a block.

Good, because I didn't have any EMP. I got out of the car, and headed for the door. There were no two ways to interpret a full sweep. And I had experience with precisely one approach to it. I bolted forward and hit the door with my shoulder. The hinges exploded, the door flying inward with me behind it. It hit a man, and then a wall, producing a loud crunch before he could even scream. The smell hit me as my eyes adjusted to the lighting. Salt and rot and something chemical under it, burning-plastic and copper.

All blended together with the ordinary reek of old beer, sweat, and cigarette smoke that had soaked into the walls for years. Stairs led down. Red light bled up them, the pulse of some emergency strip along the ceiling, throbbing in time with a bass line that was still playing from somewhere below. I ran down. The place opened up at the bottom into a low, wide room that had been carved out of two basements knocked together. A bar ran along one wall, mirrored, most of the mirror shattered now.

Booths lined the other. Between them, a cleared floor, and in the middle of the floor, where a stage or a cage should have been, a section of thick industrial fencing lay peeled open like a can. Seven corpses lay scattered around the room, dropped in the boneless way that corpses usually were. With the glance, I counted eight living. All men with more tattoos than clothes. They had scattered across the room, all taking cover, and holding combinations of guns, long hooked poles and nets.

And there was the kaiju, a twisted larva the size of a cow. It coiled up by the far wall, trying to not get herded by the men. The closest of the men glanced at me.

"The fuck are you?" The end of the line. I jabbed him in the throat. His spine shattered, the body collapsing. I moved without wasting a beat. I ran by a man, jabbing his temple in the process, shattering his skull. The next one turned, raising the pistol. Far too slow. Another jab ended his life, and I got to the kaiju. The larva sprang with surprising speed, launching itself at me with a massive mouth full of teeth. I slid under it, caught its tail, and spun. I crushed a man with it, and smashed it into the wall.

The entire building shook, the wall cracked, and the kaiju splattered. I bolted past it, hitting it with a spare punch in the head, blowing it up with the sheer force of the impact. I reached a man with a pole, slipped past it, and jabbed him in the face. His head blew up. The last three men realized what was happening, and darted toward the exit. I kicked the nearby pool table, launching it up, together with the ball and a cue stick. I caught one ball, and threw it.

It swished across the room, hitting one man in the nape and ending his life. I grabbed another ball and threw. That one hit a man on the top of the head, shattering the skull. Finally, I caught the cue stick. I launched it like a javelin. I hit a man's temple as he was about to run up the stairs. The stick pierced through, pinning him to the wall. No visible survivors remained. The place had two more exits, behind the bar and a door to the side. I checked the bar first.

No one was around, and the path led to the storages. No one there by the first glance, plus there was a door, so I closed it, and blocked it to check the place in detail later. A full sweep meant no one survived, with no exceptions, and especially not witnesses. I headed for the other door. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. It burst open in front of me, a man running through. He looked like the others, holding a box with a glowing injection.

"Shit," he threw that toward me. I bolted at him, slipping under the box. He raised his hands, muttering something. A surge of lightning blasted from his fingers into me. I pushed straight through. My skin burned, hair raising up, the electricity moving through me. I reached him, and jabbed. A shield flashed in front of him, blocking my jab. I stepped in, and followed up with three more. The shield shattered on the second punch. The third punch hit his face, bone crunching over the music.

I shifted weight, and hit him with a right straight. The punch nearly decapitated him, throwing his corpse around like a rag doll. Stepping over his corpse, I walked into the hallway beyond. Open doors gaped on the corridor's wall. The first one had a pretty sizeable lab, filled with arcane shitfuckery and trays of blue powder. The kaiju must have produced it. They were better equipped than I expected. I gave it a quick look. The machinery I ignored, but they must have had some ledgers.

I found one under the side table, a bound notebook covered in messy handwriting. I flipped through it. Mostly research notes, mixed in with bullshit about how the kaiju were a gift from Heaven. One line caught my attention:'As far as the notes of Grandmaster Alsen suggest, the kaiju fundamentally combine the energies of the Void with the magic of the divine order. We have yet to distill either.' Who the fuck was Grandmaster Alsen? I had never heard that name. I took a picture of the page so I could reread it later.

And finally, I found the research journal. Not that I cared about the kaiju powder origin, but they had the shipping logs. Dates, times, and what they received. Perfect. I took pictures of it all. This was the type of thing that was useless to me but perfect for corporate. They were going to get the footage of all city cameras from those times, run it through an AI to identify the delivery vehicles, and then run the AI on whole city's camera footage to track the vehicles.

The whole thing was going to take a couple of hours of compute time, plus a couple of days to pass through the corporate approval process that had to be done beforehand. That was V's fight, though. I left the lab. The other rooms held more storage of kaiju parts, and then the kaiju cage, melted at one side where the larva had chewed its way out. A corpse of a half-devoured man lay here. The guard that didn't pay enough attention on duty. I passed the office of the local boss and arrived at the back of the corridor.

The final door had the lock on the outside. I walked into a large double room. My face hardened. To the side of me stood two tables with straps. One was empty. The other held the corpse of a woman, naked, the middle of her body a tangled mess of blood and kaiju slime. Well, sometimes I even killed people who deserved it. Across from me was a very messy sink with a cracked mirror, and a couple of steel tables on wheels. At the other side was a cage, and it held a girl.

She looked barely out of her teens, curled on the floor and silently sobbing. I walked to the cage.

"You alive?" She shrieked with a hoarse throat, curling up against the cage's far side.

"Please don't, please don't, please, please…" Her vision darted around in chaos. She was most likely drugged up. And she watched live what happened to the other girl. She wasn't tied up, so I grabbed the cage's door, and tore it open. The lock shattered, parts falling out. I noticed the mess on my hands. Yeah, I really had to wash them before I touched anyone. I returned to the sink, turned the cold water on, and started cleaning my hands. As I stood in front of the mirror, my mind wandered.

A few moments from my past flashed in the mirror's reflection to my eyes. Dying in a steel bathtub, bleeding out. A couple of steel dog demons trying to tear me apart. Dying in a steel bathtub, covered in anti-irradiation foam. My body getting pieced up or pierced by a various assortment of demon claws, tails, spears. A close friend of mine dying next to me. My mentor getting cut in half, organs spilling out. When I was going through all of it, the adrenaline and the stress kept the thoughts at bay.

I didn't have the time to think about anything. It was later, when I travelled the world with Kallisto, that it fucked me up. My hands were clean enough, so I stopped the water. The girl still lay curled up in the cage. She didn't even try to rise. I didn't see any physical wounds on her, but mentally, she had to be fried. I sighed.

"Do you want to forget all this?" She managed a feeble nod, whispering, "Yes."

"It won't hurt." I reached down, and picked her up. She didn't fight back. I carried her to the free table, and laid her down. I stood behind her head, leaned down to brace my elbows on the table, and put my palms to the side of her head. I pulled on the System. Basic soul manipulation. My consciousness sank into hers. The world around me blurred, and cleared when I stood in a shattered mess of space. Like badly cropped movies, her memories floated on large shards of glass around me.

I had never seen a soul chamber so messed up. Not that I had seen too many of them. I focused and gathered every shard that held a memory from this club. From what I had seen, I realized what they were trying to do here. They were testing to see if they could breed a kaiju with a human woman. It didn't go well for the women, to say the least. I stuffed all the shards into the side, and sealed them away. Everything her soul couldn't reach in the soul chamber, she wouldn't remember.

With a focused thought, I returned back to reality. She now lay unconscious. I picked her up, tossed her over my shoulder, and carried her out. She had enough clothes to be fine outside. I took her a hundred yards away, and put her down by a tree. When the clean-up crew arrived, they wouldn't be looking for anyone, just gathering and removing the corpses from the club. And she would wake up in a few hours, and not remember a damn thing. With a bit of luck, she never would.

I returned to the bar, this time to the storerooms and the laboratory. Corporate didn't need this place. It wanted it, sure, but they weren't getting this particular flavor of bullshit, just in case. By the notes I had seen, the kaiju powder was flammable and volatile. I laid it out in paths, the way I would have laid gunpowder, connecting the storerooms, the main room, and especially the laboratory. From one of the corpses, I took a lighter. At the laboratory, I flicked the lighter on.

I didn't know how flammable the powder was, so I just put the lighter to a larger pile that I used as a center for all the paths. Hopefully, it would burn like gunpowder, and thus be enough to set the whole place on fire. I paused. This could also be way more volatile than gunpowder. I retreated to the main room, and carefully put the lighter to the end of the powder path. The second the flame touched the powder, the whole laboratory exploded into flames.

The explosion passed through the hallways in a split second, blowing a shockwave that carried the heat straight into my face. Pain shot through me. The entire complex was ablaze in an instant. The corridor and the main hall too. Right, explosions spread really fast underground, especially when the ventilation ducts weren't maintained, which they obviously weren't in here. With a grunt, I coughed out a bit of blood, and headed out. The entire place burned around me as I walked through it.

At the same time, the flame scorched my skin, and my endurance regenerated it before the burns got any deeper. The passive life regeneration was the best part of an endurance build. Shame it didn't work for my clothes, because my suit turned into a semi-incinerated ruin. I walked out, exhaled, inhaled, and vomited a bit of blood. The shockwave hit my organs pretty hard. Fuck. And the shit burned hot, too. [LEVEL UP!] [AVAILABLE STAT POINTS: 5] [PLEASE SELECT ALLOCATION] All in shiny green screens.

The new system update sure was aggressive. Not the time now. I thought dismiss. The screens didn't vanish. Okay. I tried postpone, then cancel, abort, delay, adjourn, minimize. No reaction. The screens kept floating in front of my face. I drew a sharp breath. Could I seriously not postpone this stuff now?