October 13th

3:27 PM

Diana

I was caught exactly where Belle needed me to be, with the evidence of a burnt out Frame in his hands and knowledge that I'd been out the prior night, he could leverage that against me in whichever way. My fists clenched and my breath turned shallow, but my eyes only hardened against his calm and calculated gaze.

With a simple flick on my ocular display, I sent an upload over to his Frame.

"What's this?" I saw him squint, then his eyes trailed along invisible lines of text to slowly widen as he took a seat back. A horn blared from behind us, prompting Belle to start driving as the light turned green but I still saw his gaze following along the messages I'd sent over.

"Don't scroll and drive." I dryly commented.

"You got a real mouth on you today." He bit down on his words, the car getting a bit more reckless as he swerved over to an empty street. "Metal Heavens is involved?"

"And Lieutenant Ponsky's been keeping tabs on us for Steel Tygers." I added. "Steelgrounds is where they met up, you know the place?"

"Don't change the subject." He got a little bit more firm. "Steel-toothed Jimmy, don't know him. You run a check on him or something and then went looking for him? Or did you just get lucky?"

"Was nothing like…" I rubbed my forehead, thinking how best to phrase myself.

I killed him in cold blood. I killed him before knowing any of his crimes. I…

That was the ugly truth, the shameful truth. I would never lie to myself about that, but I had a career to protect and… a greater duty to serve.

I did do a background check, but that was after-the-fact. "Fine, yeah! I ID-checked him, found him listed as a predator, murderer and high-ranking member of the Tygers! He tried to start something with me in a back alley so I…"

I couldn't say it.

"You killed him?" Belle didn't look displeased at me, it was closer to disappointment. "Diana… I- everyone already looks at us as no better than the criminals we hunt. Judge, jury, executioner, that's what we're known as. What they fear us as. You were the last person I was expecting to-"

"You think you know me so well, huh." I spat out. "You, and every other cock-skulled brain-rotten 'police-friend' of mine. None of you know a damned thing about what I've been through! The sacrifices I've made and what I've lost! You all just see me as some high-performer beauty who should be put up to a better standard, but this city has no standards. Jimmy, or whatever his name was, deserved to d-"

"Die." He gritted. "I'm on board with that, I'm pretty sure a single lens on these messages would make any jury agree, but that wasn't your sole decision to make."

"The end result would be the same." I put my foot down. "Actually, this way we got evidence much quicker than…"

What was I doing? Why was I… debating Belle about the morality of my actions.

I was wrong. Founders knew I was wrong. I just couldn't let myself be proven wrong.

"Are you going to put me into prison?" I asked with a sharpness slipping from my tongue.

"Like hell your father would let that happen." Belle sighed. "Look… I just- at least tell me it was in self defense."

"It was." I lied.

Belle locked eyes with me for a second, then turned his head back to the road. "I'm choosing to believe you."

"Right."

"The Steelgrounds…" Belle bit his lip. "It's a term we used to throw around here, back when I was younger a bunch of us called the old railway station by the lake by that name. Got torn apart by the earthquake and the city built another one, but it's half what the old place used to be capable of according to the adults at the time. Place was a horror story, ghosts, MALs, that's what they used to scare us off with. In reality, it was just a place for junkies and now… storing children."

"A horror story come true." I let out, electricity threatening to burst out of me.

"Lockheed…" Belle sighed. "How do we handle him?"

"Following us on behalf of Ponsky, right?" I thought of something. "Keep driving. Fast."

Belle, for what he was worth, followed as told. He slammed his foot on the pedal. Gripping that same broken listening device that Lockheed had planted in the car, I charged a thin voltage of power within it before extending my Electromagnetic Domain beyond myself. Its range was limited, but this car Dryder had sold me was modified to be a little more resistant to electricity. It also had one hell of a generator hidden in its trunk.

A tap on the console pumped it into activation, sending a rich and dense flow of electrons within the car's circuitry. Following that circuit's own electromagnetic field and expanding my own into it just about expanded my range to its limit of several meters reaching the car behind us. Lockheed's car.

I had two plans in mind.

The first was a more complicated procedure, but one I was determined to master: the art of short-circuiting electronics without sending a violent snap of sparks down my fingers. Theoretically, it was possible. I was even brushing up on the basics of electrical engineering. But there was a difference between knowing that you could manipulate electrons and knowing the exact method to get them to act the way you needed them to.

Reaching with my Domain, I saw my car's console sputter into glitches and could feel the vehicle was beginning to sputter strangely, so I switched to plan two.

Reeling my window down just slightly, I put the small listening device through and focused it onto the metallic rims of Lockheed's car. I could just about generate a magnetic polarity between the two. The small scrap falling down looked like nothing but a fly, but it moved at nearly 90 kilometers an hour. I wasn't confident in being able to speed it up quickly enough, which is why I had Belle compensate for it.

It punctured a small hole through Lockheed's tyre, scattering flakes of rubber as his vehicle began to rattle behind us. In a few seconds, he veered off to the side while we sped on ahead.

"I can see why you're in SIO." Belle blew between his lips as we quickly turned corners to lose sight of him. "But I'm one too. Going forward in this car is a no-show. We'll circle around and-"

"Do we really have the time for that?" I interrupted.

"Depends. Do we really want a bunch of Ponsky's pawns following us there? It would only make things messier. They wouldn't say no to a Gold Implant. Plus, fewer cop bodies, less paperwork." He made a good point.

And so we detoured, aiming to lose track of them.

———

4:56 PM

Belle ended up getting his Aunt to pull a favor and drive her car over to a derelict parking lot. There, we had switched cars and now drove over to the Steelgrounds in a car the Fourth Precinct weren't expecting us to be in. I was worried about Victoria getting into trouble with the police, but she assured us that she would be fine. She was more worried about us ruining her car.

———

5:45 PM

The evidence of changing seasons was in the sky, as the sun was just an hour away from setting. We'd gotten out of the car several blocks beyond the Steelgrounds, taking stock of our weaponry. If the Fourth Precinct actually was on our side, we would have been able to organize a STRIKE raid and perform preliminary reconnaissance of the den. If we had time, we could have gotten First Precinct support, but we had to act quickly.

They were sending the children away today. If we let that happen, it would be significantly harder to gather evidence and, more importantly, save them.

Belle used a basic drone, so we had to scout around, but since none of us were Shard Adapters, our information was limited. All we could see was a simple ferry being docked and several tens of guards shouting and moving stuff around. Raiden acted too quickly; information was everything in this city.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Attached to the dock was a small warehouse connected to a faulty railway line. Once upon a time, it would have been used to transfer goods between here and the rest of Westcrook. It seemed like Steel Tygers intended to keep that facet running. It must have been after around 20 minutes of scouting that a new car pulled up, some beaten pickup truck, and who stepped out appeared to be a man covered in metal.

His appearance sent everyone there into high alert. I couldn't tell if they respected this newcomer or feared him, he wore nothing but a thick trench coat and what looked like… a cowboy hat? Yet, every step of his left an imprint in the dirt. Forget being covered in metal, he was made of it. From head to toe, he appeared more machine-like than human. Glowing red eyes and a cigar in his mouth were the only things that registered him as something of a living person.

Only one gang loved steel that much.

"Metal Heavens," Belle answered for both of us, a worried nod coming from him.

"Let's move." I couldn't let this get any further. If we could capture and interrogate a Metal Heavens member, then we'd be able to track this to the source. Belle sighed, picking up his gear, which consisted of several vials of growing plants or seeds. He placed several of the seeds into specific compartments of his suit and clicked a button by his Frame.

With a grunt, I felt a wave of Warp Energy wash over him. His 'bulwark' he called it, a series of vines that drank his blood and connected to the meshwork of plant fibers his suit was made of to create a second layer of musculature that was both his shield and strength.

Beyond that, he had a special assault rifle that could shoot either energy pellets or bullets coated in a weak neurotoxin capable of paralyzing almost any Adapter below the second Tier. As for me, I had my Braceshocker and Leizhou pistols. The first was capable of rapid-firing dense electric-bursts while the second could unleash powerful charged shots that could completely fry Iron Shardware.

In my back pocket was a third pistol.

A Magna Gresault, courtesy of Dryder. It was a powerful ballistics weapon with ammunition capable of piercing Iron-Grade materials and with the unique Burst-Point ammunition, each precise bullet could explode into a thick kinetic explosion that was the equivalent of a close-range shotgun blast. The ammunition was known to be… exceedingly illegal and was meant only for the Swarm.

Even Belle didn't know what ammo I had loaded in it. Hopefully, it would stay that way.

Finally, my Spec-Ops suit also had the perk of being both an auxiliary generator and storage for my electrical usage. I also use a sniper rifle, a SynTec Winter-Hawk capable of both electrical and ballistic shooting, but for the purposes of this specific operation, I wouldn't need it. We needed to get in as quickly as possible.

We approached, creeping in closer. As much as we wanted this to be sneaky, without any tech-support disabling their communications and security systems we had to be a bit more rash in our approach. I sensed the security cameras around us, crunching their internal circuitry which would no doubt cause them to be alarmed. Belle stuck close by me. Other than plants, he also had a keen sense of vibrations through the ground.

"Three of them past this corner. Frame shots."

He plugged in a silencer onto his rifle, and my Braceshocker hummed as its Bronze-based circuitry whirred. With a simple flick of his fingers, we moved in synchronicity. My blue pellet sparked across a single Frame, while his burst of blue rendered the other two to fall down unconscious.

Taking cover by the growing shade of the sunset, we were all too conscious of the growing clamor among the Steel Tygers. Assuming they'd communicated with Ponsky, then they'd know we were off-the-radar. The Metal Heavens man had been led much deeper into the main building, and he'd dragged much of their security forces along with him so the outer perimeter was largely unguarded.

I detected a sudden pulse of Warp Energy, the faint resonance of Bronze surging up. Searching deeper, I knew they were a Mutant. Biting my lip, I contemplated telling Belle, but my deeper secrets of Soul Harmony couldn't be shared so easily. "Frames moving closer in our direction."

"Up that container," He pointed. With surprising ease, Belle leaped up into the air and landed softly inside of a metal container half-suspended by an unpowered crane. I leaped after him, a light veil of sparks powering me into the air and landing me into the crane which rocked slightly with my landing.

Belle was planting something into the inner wall of the container, a tube the size of his forearm latched onto the wall. "An explosive?" I commented, to which he shook his head.

"A distraction. Can you disable the magnets holding this container?" He asked, to which I confidently nodded. Belle unlocked the other door of the cargo container, opening it slightly to reveal an open gap between here and the roof of the railroad's building. We both hopped to the open roof, cameras snapping at my approach.

Then I raised my hands over to the crane. It held the cargo container up with a magnet and I sent a small surge of electricity into the thick metal. With a stress of mental effort, I bent the flow of the electromagnetic field through a method that was more imagined than calculated.

Either way, it destabilized.

The large container dropped to the floor, a loud slam that sent nearby birds flying into the air and elicited more than a few foul-mouthed screams from the surrounding gang members. They clamored towards the crash, almost everyone on guard duty, and that was when Belle smirked as he clicked a button on his forearm.

From within the container, a thick purple mist spewed out and blanketed the ground in seconds. Fits of coughing erupted from the grunts, which then turned into belly-aching laughter that rolled them onto the ground as they hardly contained their euphoria on their two good legs.

Belle looked very pleased in himself. "Those spores should get some of the guards from the inside to come out, we'll slip in through the chao-"

I jerked him away at the last moment, as something struck the gap where he'd been standing. It was like a hairy tentacle, except at its very end were a pair of bulbous eyes, and snarling fangs — like a puma's head with the jaws of a crocodile.

A second 'tentacle' crimped into the steel railing beside us, pulling and reeling in the Mutant I'd sensed before. A woman wearing the blue and orange of Steel Tygers. She was still coughing, as were those beast-headed tentacles of hers, but something in her metabolism rendered Belle's toxin ineffective.

"I knew I sniffed something rotten! I'll roast you like the pigs you are!"

My ID-scan quickly got a name for her.

Medasi

Known Crimes:

Six counts of first-degree murder.

Tax Infringement.

Narcotics possession with the intent to sell.

Adapter Status:

SIM, Tier II: Mutant with the ability to form bestial sub-organsims using her hair.

Three more bestial heads twisted out of her wild black hair, I wasn't sure what combination of Mutagen gave someone a power like this, a sentiment that only grew more confused when one of them spewed fire onto me. It tickled, the heat instantly converting into electrical energy as I gripped one of the beast-heads by the mouth and burnt sparks which dissolved it.

I'd dealt with worse beasts just a month ago. Belle had taken it worse, three of those snarling jaws had clamped onto his arms and wrist to prevent him from firing his rifle. She was taking me as the lesser threat, but then realization drew upon her eyes as she took stock of who I was.

"You're fuckin' Silvereye!" A swarm of hairy beast-jaws unraveled from her hair. Thunder boomed through me, my weapons firing towards her twisting body as I darted away from the tangling mess of hair and flame. Shit, the fire. I could handle it, but what about Belle?

I tore my eyes away for just a second when an invading beep pressed through my skull.

Incoming call: Ripley

Not now! I dashed through the message, towards Belle who…

…was perfectly fine. He was coated in a thin veil of purple mist that spewed out from tiny holes in his suit, around him were countless heads that were all coughing so hard they began to untangle into frayed strands. His arms finally free, he gripped his rifle and began firing a stream of thin iron towards Gorgon. She dodged through most, others were caught in the wild shield of her mane but a few struck and broke through flesh but not bone.

"Don't worry about me!" Belle shouted, his fire now turning to disintegrate the jaws sneaking in from beside us. Heeding his advice, I thundered towards her, voltage lathering my body as I gripped into the bullets lodged into her flesh. Focusing on them, I called for my electricity to do the same as serpentine vectors of blue erupted from my hand.

Be as fast or as shrewd as you want, there was no beating the speed of lightning. The toxins in his bullets had already slowed her down, and a flash of light digging into her leg seized her movement into my hands. She screamed, her tendril-heads doing the same as I shot out a final charged blow with my Leizhou pistol.

It singed through the flesh of her clavicle, her eyes rolling back as I reached and grabbed her by the head. A single punch broke through her jawbone, and I'd readied a second when it was held stiffly by Belle. "She's done, get a move on, Silvereye."

Gazing at the blood on my knuckles and hearing her pained groans, I bit my teeth down and turned back. The distraction was successful. Many people began to filter out of the building to figure out what was happening. Now was the time for infiltration.

———

Diamante

Deep inside the building, a certain steel-built man with a cowboy hat stood in front of quite the audience. All of these punks were committing some serious crimes for a bunch of wanna-be's.

He raised his voice. "I'm assuming you know who I am."

Raiden responded, his body covered in blue-plated steel that concealed his very much organic body underneath. Only his blue eyes and hair were visible above the face-mask he wore. Who did this bastard think he was, the R0N1N?

"Metal Heavens warned us about you." Raiden's voice slithered through. "You look different than I assumed… good. If you had come under your Iron Devil suitt then-"

"Then you would all be dead." Diamante finalized, his steel voice dense with threat. "Now you can either take my money, or you can-"

A loud bang erupted from outside, Raiden clicked his tongue as his voice sharpened. "Go figure out what that was!"

Diamante sighed. "Like I was saying, you can either take my money and send all these kids my way and tell me which bastard in Metal Heavens orchestrated this suicide mission of yours… or I can scrap it off your Frame."

"You claim we are pawns-"

"You are fucking pawns, pussycat. I know how they operate."

"We have a good deal that assured us-"

"They sent Spec-Ops' dick down your throat."

Raiden gripped his chair tightly, the groan of wood ending with a snap. "Who do you think we are?"

"Children." Diamante growled. "No different than the ones you're experimenting on. A small boy playing a grown up's game. That type of weasily kid who gets told by his big cousin that slinging cheap joints makes you a criminal. 'Cept turns out they were black-laced and now the big-boy cops are here for you because someone's had a bad trip. You're in over your head. Metal Heavens. The kids. I want them both. Now."

Raiden took a deep breath, his eyes wandering to the grunts who were all looking like they would piss their pants if Diamante twitched a finger. Finally, a voice arose in his head. Medasi spoke through a Neuralink.

{B-boss! Fightin' s-some spec-ops! One o' them's the girl with the Golden-}

It cut out abruptly, but Raiden's eyes widened. Metal Heavens had a sworn enemy in the Iron Devil and had a bad run-in with Diana 'Silvereye' Ulrich just a few months prior. With this one move, he'd prove himself irreplaceable.

He'd prove himself as the Tiger of Houston Yards.

"Here's the deal: you take care of the two Spec-Ops upstairs, and I'll give you what you want for free."

Diamante scowled, but there was a certain amusement here. Still, he was annoyed. Had Diana not received Ripley's message? He specifically told Ripley to do it as soon as he was done with his therapy session. Oh, he was going to gut Ripley some new insides when he got back.

Craning his neck towards the exit, the Iron Devil snickered to himself.

He'd always wondered how Dreadwire and Silvereye compared.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.