I crashed through the reinforced glass into a storm of screams. On the open factory floor the crowd, once huddled tight, trampled over itself trying to flee. My internal countdown ticked at three seconds to the next railgun shot. Two seconds to decide. Staying low meant I could dodge, but the blast would mow through whoever stood behind me.

Zero approached. I made the worst call and sprang for the second-floor gangwalk. Midair offered no course correction; my path was a clean parabola any child could plot.

The railgun fired as my claw closed on the railing.

I almost hauled myself up. Then the impact flipped me onto my back. Overhead, fans and steel beams whirled while my skull rang. Pain surged along my left side. I lifted my hand, my pinky was gone.

Missing a toe, a dead right shoulder and arm, and now a pinky plus a bleeding scalp. How many rounds had they wasted on me? I had only just bumped my stamina; I was barely at a range comparable to a respectable F-class, maybe E. I laughed, a guttural rumble that deepened every bruise. Vaguely I was aware I was suffering some minor shock.

I rolled up, leaned on the good leg, and half-limped to get moving again. The wall behind me blew apart, a spray of dust and brick. Four mercs stormed through and opened fire. Bullets, too small to matter, needled my back. Panic shoved me into another leap, and I cleared the space clean, glad the crowd stayed out of the line of fire. With altitude on my side and no simple path up to me, I put distance as fast as I could, breaking line of sight.

The lack of railgun fire was both a relief and concerning.

Either the original group had lost track, or were repositioning to block all exits. At least, that's what I would've done if I'd been in their shoes.

If it were up to me, I would've put the railgun on the rooftop, aiming down. With how many tight spaces there were in the building, taking the risk of sending someone inside was unnecessary… that is, if it weren't full of people. And that only worked if the mercenaries were cooperating and prioritizing the citizen's safety.

But that was clearly not the case. As I half-limped my way down the corridor, shouts echoing well behind in the main floor, I kept trying to figure out how I could get out of this.

Get out, get to the Well, get AP.

I rounded the corner and stopped short. An office packed with maybe a dozen people stared back at me. Sweat and mold fouled the air, the overhead lights washed everyone in a sick blue. No one breathed.

Behind them a door slammed open.

"It's here!"

A mercenary stepped through in patched-over training gear, smiling with a mouth full of chrome. He leveled a battered Rheinmetall Vortex-40 grenade launcher. I'd put that model on a wishlist once.

He fired. The round thumped across a space much too small for a high-explosive and punched into the wall behind me. The blast hurled me inside, ripped the frame from the doorway, and made the ceiling crack like glass. Screams rose as dust rained down.

My nose filled with the scent of blood, some of the people had been hit by shrapnels, stumbling down.

Concrete began to sag. I lunged forward on instinct, one arm braced overhead as the weight dropped on me like a hammer, my bad leg buckling, knee hitting the ground while the other shook under the load.

I growled in warning at the stunned crowd, pushing up, trying to force the roof back into place. They broke out but not fast enough; slabs pulled free from overhead as the room caved in on itself. Screams rang out and fell silent as the floor gave out under me. I plunged through a storm of rebar and rubble, hit hard, rolled, and finally stopped in the dim room below, coughing in a cloud of grit while debris kept falling in heavy pieces of concrete and metal.

Head spinning, everything hurting, I struggled to breathe, let alone move. I could do nothing but stare at the pile of rubble, at the blood dripping through the cracks, the scent of death and blood sending my mind reeling back.

No, no no no no!

I screamed in my head while my good arm clawed at the rubble, heart locked in a vice. I flung jagged chunks aside as fast as I could until dark stains surfaced. I stopped breathing. Footsteps pounded, voices barked threats from elsewhere in the building, but the heap gave up nothing except the grind of shifting stone.

Bit by bit I lifted the next slabs, trying not to harm whoever might still be beneath. The instant the wreckage parted to reveal what was left of the person, my stomach flipped; I dry-heaved, knees buckling, blood turning to ice.

Images crashed through me: flames devouring high-rises on the evening news, the AI-generated note that told me my aunt had died in the blast and still had not paid her dues to the factory, the apartment I could no longer enter.

The ringing in my ears drowned everything else.

Panic gave me enough energy to stumble my way forward, eyes looking for a way out, anything to get away and prevent more people being caught up in this. Going into the factory had been a mistake, I needed to-

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The system screamed into my ear.

A head-splitting whistling sound that I'd not noticed until it had ramped up the volume into something loud enough to split my head in two. I winced and clutched at my skull, a mild sense of betrayal followed by anger.

It came to a stop when I saw the stat sub-screen currently shoved against my face.

Blinking, I just stared. Was it even possible?

The prompt did the chirp/warble equivalent of "do you have a better idea?".

I didn't.

Ajax had been told the feeling of being in over his head would go away at some point, yet the more things progressed, the less he believed such a thing would be possible. Within the span of two hours, he'd seen more ordinance being used than as a second-district slummer his whole life.

"Shouldn't we fight it?" The newest 'recruit' asked Copper, the massive cyborg holding the railgun against his shoulder and staring intently at the factory building.

"We?" Copper asked with a chuckle as he walked over to the nearest lamppost. The borg reached for the post and, with a single hand, broke the metal casing, exposing the wiring inside. "Bounty's a lot, but it's worthless if we're dead. You any good with wiring?"

"A bit." Ajax admitted, curious. "What do you need?"

"Need the juice."

The request was simple enough, like any other slummer, Ajax was very familiar with some creative "energy diversion". He quickly identified the live wires… or that should be live. "The light's out." He hesitated, glancing over at the buildings nearby, his optics caught the telltale signs of solar generation from the nearby buildings. "Most of these roofs are solar-powered, we could plug into one of those."

"Good call. Cucumber, there any easy way up?"

The mercenary currently fiddling with the wiring on a box-shaped backpack didn't bother to raise their gaze, instead presenting Copper with the middle-finger. They were currently in the process of pulling out several spools of fiber-optic wire, though Ajax couldn't see the reason for it.

"Then it's just us two, c'mon Wires."

"What?"

"It's too late, that's your name now, Wires." Cucumber called out.

Copper yanked him along before he had the chance to comment on the freshly applied nickname. "Why would going into the factory be a bad idea?" He'd heard the explosion inside. Ajax had fully expected a full-blown shoot-out to be going down by now, by contrast, the silence was eerie.

"Never fight monsters inside cramped spaces."

"But you know its location."

Having a first-row seat to the borg behemoth aiming the hundred pound railgun with the grace of a ballerina had been a sight to behold. Just trying to keep up had been a challenge, let alone hand him the replacement barrel for each shot. Copper, while at a dead sprint, would dismantle the barrel and place in the new one with the sort of unwavering stability that would make gyroscopic alignment machines jealous.

The mercenary didn't answer, helmet glancing at the rusted factory building but not saying a thing.

Ajax broke the silence. "Why did you let the mercenaries go in there?"

"Cheapest way to find out its tricks."

"But they could steal the bounty." Not that he was too concerned if they succeeded, he'd agreed to a flat-rate payment, so the only changes to his earnings would be downwards if he messed up.

Copper baked out in laughter. "Its distortions stopped after that blast, so we don't know where it is. Do you think they got it?"

That was… concerning. He pondered the question as they clambered up the building on the opposite side of the road. While Ajax's nimble fingers had no problems finding nooks and crevices for his cybernetic digits to latch onto, Copper created the indents on his way up.

"No." He proclaimed once they'd reached the top. "They would've left by now. The monster is-"

A roar exploded out from within the factory. Ajax froze to stare at the building, chills running through his implants as he tried, and failed, to imagine what might have caused the monster to make such a horrible sound.

Next to him, Copper had stiffened.

"Plug me in NOW!" The cyborg's voice was hard and cold, no longer carrying any mirth, sending Ajax into a frenzy of action. "And here."

"This is a gun," he said in surprise. "I thought I wasn't allowed one?"

"You don't have the specs to fight. This is to survive."

Survive?

Copper pointed at the horizon, and Ajax's augs caught the dark cloud ascending from the district. In horror, he realized the flying monsters had responded to the sound, and were heading straight to them.

It had been a desperate move.

The first mercenary group had been keeping exact track of my location. As far as I knew, there were only two ways of pinpointing a monster even when they were several buildings away and you did not have line of sight. The first was through drones, which had clearly not been the case. The second was through some low-end AI hashing out a location based off fluctuations in the surrounding electromagnetic signals. The second was, ironically, most effective against monsters that passively messed with electronic devices. It was this second one that was not just likely but almost certain, because my F-class Shimmer trait made my body mess up electronics in some way.

Clearly, though I could fool some simple cameras, an AI trained to spot such a manipulation would make me a glowing target.

The obvious answer was to get rid of the trait, but there was one problem: Neither I nor the system knew of a way to selectively remove a purchased trait. Once it was in place, it was there for good until the transformation ended. Which was exactly what I did: I turned back into my human form.

The desperate part was turning back into my monster form with 0 AP to my name.

It was theoretically possible; there'd been that one time I'd very nearly lost control of myself and turned right in the middle of the street. I'd been overwhelmed, the emotion had pushed me forward into this build-up of... something. Something raw and primal.

Fear and anger was pretty primal. I'd hoped I could use them to regain my other form and rush to the Well.

There had been just one unexpected variable.

The instant I'd regained my human form, the hunger hit me like a freight AV. It mixed and exploded with everything else before I could even stop it. The very intent of needing to fight refused to let go, I couldn't stop it. The swell of emotions mixed and swirled within me like an active volcano threatening to explode. Everything piled into me all at once. The disgust at the "forceful suicide" corpo-squad. The annoyance at having my "territory" invaded. The pain from being attacked by a stronger foe. The fear of being hunted down. The anger at the mercenaries killing civilians.

And the hunger.

The re-transformation came like an inferno, lava pouring through my veins and swelling as the process fueled itself not through AP but something else, deeper. And as if to reflect this, something else greeted me, something other than the system I knew.

C̴͕̋ ̴̻͌O̸͖͒ ̷͉̎N̴̯̞͛ ̷̝͓̌S̸͚̾͠ ̶̱̓̍U̶̹̐ ̸̞̗̄M̶͇͌͌ ̷̺̈́̅E̷̺̍̌

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