Stray Cat Strut

Somnus Deus Ex - Chapter Five

Somnus Deus Ex - Chapter Five

Daisy wasn't... quite satisfied with what she had.

The armour she'd bought was fantastic. She could admit to that much as she stared at her image in the bathroom mirror. She looked like a samurai. Someone riding the technological edge, more than human.

She had never been a big fan of samurai stuff in general. She saw it the same way others saw sports fans who gushed about their favourite teams, or gamers who liked one game a little too much.

It was, to use a word from her dad's generation, a bit cringe.

Still, samurai were real in a way that sports and such weren't, and now she looked like one. The suit made her look lethal.

But she didn't feel lethal beneath it. She had one eye that was brand new. Its weight was ever so slightly off, and when she looked around the room, things were in a strange contrast. Her flesh eye unable to make out the faint details hidden in shadows that her cybernetic eye could see in perfect clarity. Her flesh eye had to focus. Her new one was focused on everything in its range, all at once. It was sharp. Almost painfully so.

That was it. One tiny bit of her that was better than anyone else.

It wasn't enough.

How are you feeling?

"Alright," Daisy said. She adjusted her grip on her Pillowfriend. "I want more points."

That's a reasonable desire for a Vanguard. Fortunately, you're in the right place for it. Though you should be aware that once this incursion is cleared out, making more points may take some time.

"Right. Plan for scarcity," Daisy replied with a nod. It made perfect sense to her. She was vaguely aware that she'd be receiving some daily allotment of points as well, but those were a

pittance. Certainly not enough to get what she wanted. "Where's the biggest source of action?"

Two blocks away from your current position is a team consisting of several soldiers currently on retreat. It's not the largest source of action, but it's close.

She hummed, then with a shrug, abandoned the washroom. Lynus had provided her with a small in-aug minigame that she could play. It was very simple. A sort of Simon-says game where she had to repeat a sequence. The sequence was made up of arrows and colours. The trick was that she had to hit them using the new neural mesh they'd just installed.

It was giving her a low-level headache, trying to think hard about 'up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,' while doing other things. It was a way to split her attention that she wasn't honestly sure she could keep up, but her AI assured her that it would become easier as she went along.

Stepping out of the building she was in, Daisy found herself looking at the wall again. It was much clearer now, thanks to her new eye. It compensated nearly for the glare of the floodlights, and she could make out individual faces.

She couldn't wait to have two. "Mark this location for me," she said.

Done.

"Thank you," she replied. There was a machine in the bathroom, a brace used to hold her head in place and remove her eye before inserting the new one. She didn't feel like buying a second such machine.

The plan was simple. Get into trouble, kill lots of aliens, make lots of points, then get back and improve herself.

It was the kind of plan that was almost certainly going to work out perfectly.

Looking for trouble meant finding it or making it, after all.

Daisy took off, following Lynus' directions. This part of the city was unfamiliar to her, at least from the ground. She'd lived here all her life, but she'd never been so low before. Maybe from above things would be different. It didn't matter. A turn later she discovered an entire street that was in ruins.

One of the nearby mega buildings had shattered. The three hundred metre tall stub of a building was sheared along a third of its length. That entire section of the building had collapsed down and onto the street. A mass of steel and concrete large enough to block the entire road.

The dust was still settling, even though the collapse must have happened hours ago. She could see the interior of homes, split in half, with more jutting up and outwards.

A thousand homes, exposed to the elements. A thousand homes that had been inhabited. Her new eye let her pick out ripped and shredded and crushed bodies dotted across the heap. But it wasn't just the dead. There were some survivors as well, and they weren't doing so well.

A squad of some two dozen soldiers were rallying atop one jutting surface of the building. A gunner had set up there, with a couple of collapsed walls at their back where others were moving from cover to cover and pulling dust-covered civilians out of the wreckage.

Some of the civilians were helping. Some looked like they'd come out of nowhere to help too. Some were shivering and staring around them as though they were caught in a living nightmare.

The soldiers had created a small camp to one side of the wreckage where a few of them were herding the civilians that could still move.

"We need to evacuate them," Daisy muttered the obvious. This entire area wasn't safe. It would be best if the civilians started walking towards the wall. It was only a couple of blocks away, where a whole force was sitting pretty.

But that was two blocks of unsecured, unprotected space.

"Ah," she said, replying to her own question. With a shake of her head, Daisy started towards the encirclement. There was a constant rattle of gunfire as the soldiers within took potshots at approaching aliens.

The antithesis were taking their time. She saw some deeper in, using the cover of dust to rip corpses out of the homes they were caught in. Some didn't look like corpses yet.

She reached the encampment. A wide-eyed soldier, a young man who barely looked like he had to shave and who was swimming in his helmet, looked at her, blinked, then his eyes changed.

Daisy felt her stomach churn with disgust at the hope she saw there. "Keep pulling civilians closer to here!" she snapped before she walked past the injured and dying and lost.

She climbed, almost tripping, over a pile of rubble that gave her a vantage. Her new eye let her see the monster skulking in the dark, and the swarms circling far above, still kept away by dust and smoke, but growing braver as more warm bodies gathered.

Her Pillowfriend came up, and she snapped a few shots into the dark. Aliens died. Most scurried back.

"They're not charging mindlessly," Daisy noted.

That might be bad.

"Bad how?" Daisy asked. "Harder to make points with?" She took another shot, nailing a model three in the eye and killing it with only that one strike. She made note to aim for the eyes in the future, to save on charge.

The antithesis rarely operate intelligently unless directed. There are only a few models that can do tactical thinking of this sort. None of them are models you're necessarily ready to handle.

"Worse case?" Daisy asked.

A model twenty-seven. That is unlikely. You're far more likely in the influence range of a model seventeen. You're going to need to look out for model sevens.

"Shit," Daisy said as she glanced back at the refugees. How many of them were infected? She hopped down from her position, then gestured one of the soldiers closer. "Who's in charge here?" she asked.

The soldier pointed to another with some stripes on their back and shoulders. The antithesis didn't pick out officers, there was no reason to hide who was in charge.

Daisy ran over to him, and the overworked, clearly tired man turned her way. "Yes?" he asked.

"We're evacuating."

"We're not done pulling people from the rubble," he said.

"We're moving anyway," Daisy said. Those left behind would feed the hive. It was better than losing those they'd saved. "Once you get to the wall, quarantine everyone. There are model sevens here."

"Shit," he swore, but noticeably, he didn't argue.

Daisy nodded, then glanced back at the refugees. "Stay back, or escort," she muttered.

Only one of those would feed her the points she wanted.

"Tell me everything I need to know about that model seventeen," Daisy demanded.

They're relatively small models, smaller even than model threes, with an exceptionally tough carapace lined by eyes. The model is able to lay small eggs that almost immediately hatch into worms, including the model sevens so commonly worried about. They also create small worms that can lay down silken communication lines, and models similar to model sevens which are given to weaker models to assist them in coordinating.

"So it's small and easy to kill?" Daisy asked.

And worth a number of points. But they're unlikely to be loud, or visible.

"That can't be that hard to fix," Daisy replied.

She liked having a target.

***

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