Chương 184: Chapter 177 - Haul

The hallway was expectedly empty, the three remaining members of the team having already rushed into the smoke room at our prompting to wrap up the gig. I slipped into the room myself, making sure Misha's scarf was pulled tight across my mouth and nose before I'd even fully crossed the threshold. Whatever that smoke was, I had absolutel y zero interest in finding out what it tasted like from the inside of my lungs.

Mercifully, it was already starting to thin out by then—someone had clearly tracked down the source and dealt with it, because the room was visibly clearing, the haze retreating toward the ceiling in lazy, dissipating ribbons.

"Anyone alive in here?" Reina called out as we pushed further in, then tagged on almost as an afterthought, "Well—anyone that should be, at least."

"Somewhat," came a strained reply from somewhere off to our right, voice tight and controlled in the way people got when they were working very hard not to sound as bad as they actually felt. The smoke was still thick enough that visibility was garbage, but I could just barely make out a silhouette leaned heavy against the far wall in that direction.

"Kaito and Takeda-san need medical attention." Higgins' voice carried from somewhere deeper into the room.

"We have to wrap this up quick—take what you can carry easily and get ready to move. Fleece them and then we go. Ripper, asap." Part of me really wanted to go poke around at my handiwork first. I'd put a lot of rounds through a wall at a target I couldn't even see, and there was this deep-seated itch in my blood to go find out what the aftermath actually looked like up close…! I shook my head hard to clear it from the errant thoughts and made my way toward the pained voice instead.

Takeda was where I'd roughly pinned him—back against the wall, jaw set, one hand clamped hard over his left forearm where a nasty slice had opened him up. Blood was seeping steadily between his fingers despite the pressure he was applying, dark and a little too free-flowing for comfort.

"You alright if I patch you up a bit?" I asked, already shrugging the DuraPack off one shoulder and digging for the Combo Kit.

"I'm not exactly a trained surgeon, but I know enough to keep a bleed from getting worse."

"Appreciate it," he said, through teeth that were very much still clenched. I tugged on a pair of the medical gloves, crouched down beside him, and reached for his arm to get a proper look at the wound—and immediately noticed that [Vital Sense] hadn't fired.' Huh. Gloves, I guess.' Made sense, actually, now that I thought about it. The Perk had mentioned " touch", specifically.

And latex—or whatever this glove was made out of—sitting between my palm and his arm was apparently enough of a barrier to kill it entirely. I filed that away for later and let my arm drift just slightly, letting the back of my exposed wrist make brief, incidental contact with his skin—casual enough that it read as accidental. The report hit immediately, dropping into my thoughts like a stone into still water. [Vital Sense Report] Vitals: Stable, deteriorating.

Main Injury: Slicing-wound, Left Arm, Stark Severity—Brachial artery nicked. My eyes went a little wider than I'd have liked. The brachial artery ran the full length of the upper arm—major supply line, not the kind of thing you wanted leaking if you had plans that extended further than the next ten minutes. A full severance and Takeda would've already been in serious trouble, but even a nick left untreated had a way of turning into a very bad situation faster than people expected.

The pressure he was applying was buying time, but definitely not solving the problem. I started pulling items from the Combo Kit with a bit more urgency than before.

"Going to hit you with a Coagulant," I said, keeping my voice even.

"It's not going to close this on its own—looks like your brachial artery took at least a partial hit. Lucky it's not a clean severance, or this conversation would already be over." I glanced up at him briefly.

"Pain levels—can you handle working through it, or do you want something for it?" The answer was a short, guttural sound from somewhere behind his teeth that communicated exactly nothing in words and everything in tone. I took it as a "yes, just handle the bleed, stop talking".' Fair enough,'I thought, setting the painkiller injector back into the kit.' Saves me having to restock it later, at least...'

I worked quickly, keeping my movements clean and deliberate by relying on my [First-Aid] muscle memory more than my own skills—which were effectively non-existent. The coagulant injector went in just above the wound site—a short, firm press against the skin, the soft mechanical hiss of it discharging, and checking the liquid that spread visibly up Takeda's forearm as the smart-clotting agents hit the bloodstream and got to work. He didn't make a sound.

Just watched with those dark, evaluating eyes of his, jaw still locked, breathing measured in the way of someone who'd decided pain was simply a variable to be managed rather than something to actively be felt. I gave it a few seconds to start taking hold, then reached for the thick gauze roll. Wrapping it was methodical work—firm enough to maintain some real levels of compression, loose enough not to cut circulation outright.

I layered it in overlapping passes across the wound site, working up toward the elbow and back down, tucking the tail end tight before pressing it flat. Not pretty nor clinic-grade. But solid enough, and that was what mattered right now.

"That should hold until we reach the Ripper," I said, sitting back slightly on my heels and giving the gauze a last press to make sure nothing was shifting.

"Just don't go swinging that arm around and we won't have a problem." Takeda looked down at the wrapping, then back at me. Something in the set of his expression shifted—still tight and controlled, but marginally less like a man holding a structural collapse together through willpower alone.

"Thank you, Ela-san," he said quietly, with a grimace that I chose to interpret as a smile. Then he let himself slide down the wall, exhaling slowly through his nose as he settled onto the floor, the hand that had been clamped over the wound finally dropping to rest in his lap. The relief of not having to actively hold himself together was visible in the way his shoulders dropped a half-inch. I straightened up, stripped off the gloves, and turned back toward the room.

"Anyone else need patching up before the Ripper?" I called out into the dissipating haze.

"Negative." Kaito's voice came back from somewhere to my left, rough still but steadier than earlier.

"Already handled the basics. Gunshot wounds are stuffed. Ripper gets the rest." I nodded even though he probably couldn't see it, tucked the Combo Kit back into the DuraPack, and swung it over my shoulder. Then I went looking. The anticipation crept in before I'd even consciously decided to go—that low, electric hum of wanting to see, the kind that bypassed logic entirely and just existed as a pull in the chest, somewhere behind the sternum.

Edge was doing its usual quiet work, smoothing the sharper edges down, keeping the feeling at arm's length. But it was still there, unmistakable. I'd put rounds through a wall at a target I couldn't see, and that certain part of me wanted the receipt. The smoke had thinned enough by then that picking my way across the room was easier, and it didn't take long before I found what I was looking for.

The smell hit first, even through the scarf—copper and something fouler underneath it, the specific combination that no amount of prior exposure ever really made normal. Then the dark, spreading stain across the floor, wider than it had any right to be, soaked into the grime and cracked tile like the building itself had been punctured. And then the body. I stood there and looked at it.

I waited for the thing I'd felt earlier—that cold, satisfied click that had followed the other kills, the quiet, horrible glee that I'd been shoving into a box and dealing with later since forever ago. The rush that I'd been both dreading and, if I was being completely honest with myself, half-anticipating. It didn't come. There was just… nothing. A ruined body on a filthy floor. Meat and mess. I catalogued it with the same flat detachment I might've given a broken piece of furniture.'

Not seeing it happen kills the fun, huh…?' The thought surfaced so casually that it took me a full second to register what it had actually said. And when it landed, it did so badly. I shook my head—sharp and hard, like I could rattle the thought loose and watch it fall out through my ear. It didn't work. It never worked. The thought just sat there, perfectly comfortable in the architecture of my own skull, and waited. This wasn't me. Except—it clearly was, in some sense.

It had come from inside my own head, in my own voice, with the easy cadence of something that had been living in there long enough to get comfortable and make itself a home. It wasn't an intrusion, but merely just another resident. And that was the part I couldn't get my footing on.

I stood over that body and tried to locate the version of myself that was supposed to find this disturbing, the one that was supposed to feel something appropriate and human about a dead person on a floor, and instead kept running into this quiet, evaluating blankness—and worse, the ghost of sheer disappointment that the viewing hadn't been more interesting. Nothing that happened before I became Sera mattered anymore.

That was the line I'd been holding onto since the beginning, the load-bearing wall of the whole structure. The old life, the old history, whatever had fractured in that person long before they'd ever ended up here—none of it was supposed to follow me. That was the deal. New world, new body, fresh start. The slate wasn't just wiped, it was replaced entirely. So why was all of this mess still here?! Why was I still carrying something that had no business surviving the translation?

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.' I can't even fucking remember my own name, but this shit gets to stick around? Why?!' It hadn't been luggage I'd packed. I hadn't chosen to bring it, much less even had a choice in the matter. And yet here it was—intact, functional, apparently perfectly capable of reasserting itself the moment the right conditions showed up.

I pressed the heel of my palm hard against my forehead, jaw tight, the kind of self-asserting pressure that didn't fix anything but gave the frustration somewhere physical to go that didn't involve smashing the nearby furniture to bits. I didn't want this. That much I was certain of. I didn't want to be the person who stood over a corpse and felt cheated by the lack of an entertaining physical or viewing experience.

I didn't want the quiet, predatory part of me that had found the earlier kills genuinely satisfying, not in the clean, adrenaline-soaked way that you could maybe write off as survival instinct, but in a way that had felt downright personal and perverse, like some sort of animal being fed after weeks of starvation.

But the problem was that wanting something and being it were apparently two entirely separate operations running on different systems entirely, and I didn't have the fucking manual for either side of things. I dropped my hand, exhaled slowly—shakier than I would've liked—and made myself look away from the body. Somewhere in the deepest parts of my mind, I could feel it happening. The dark thing retreating, folding itself back down, slipping behind the bars and pulling them shut with a quiet, almost polite click.

Putting its shackles back on. Weight settled down onto the floor where it had been before I had "unshackled" it. The familiar, horrible patience of something that knew it wasn't going anywhere and didn't need to rush.' Like that doesn't completely prove how little any of this actually means to you,'I thought, watching it go with the kind of tired, rueful clarity that showed up after the adrenaline finished burning off.'

Like the cage is anything more than a picture you drew so you wouldn't have to look at it directly, Sera...' And that was the thing, wasn't it? The cage wasn't real. The shackles weren't real. They were nothing but a coping—no… denial —mechanism dressed up as containment—a story I told myself so the shape of what lived in there stayed manageable, stayed something I could point at and say"that, not me" without my own brain immediately calling me a liar.

I let out a sigh that came from somewhere deep and tired, dragging myself back to the present by sheer necessity. The room was still there. The crew was still there. There was still a gig to finish and loot to grab and a Ripper to get Takeda and Kaito to. Whatever this was—whatever I was—it wasn't a problem that was going to get solved standing over a dead Scav in a smoke-damaged room on the fourth layer of Neo fucking Avalis.

Probably wasn't a problem that was going to get solved at all, if the last several decades were anything to go by… So I shelved it. Same place it always went. Same shelf that was continuing to creak and crack under the continuously accumulating weight, every time I did so. I got moving. The metal beads I had thrown were scattered across the floor in roughly the direction I'd expected.

I did a slow sweep of the immediate area, eyes tracking the floor methodically, and came up with four of them nestled in the grime and debris. Not the full haul, but better than nothing. I pocketed them without ceremony and turned my attention to the dead Scav. This one was Reina's kill. Her gun, her rounds, her handiwork—I'd just been the one pointing it in the right direction— officially. But Reina was somewhere on the other side of the room doing her own fleecing, and I was already here, and time was a factor.

If she had opinions about it later—which I had a feeling she wouldn't, unless somebody else asked her about it—I'd tell them all I'd done it on her behalf. Time pressure and all that. Practically a favour, really. The body wasn't in great shape at all, as I had previously already realized. Reina's pistol wasn't subtle about what it did to soft targets, and the Scav's clothing had taken the worst of it—shredded and completely soaked through, utterly useless for resale or repurposing.

I checked his pockets anyway, turned out what little there was, and came up with a sum total of absolutely nothing worth mentioning. No cred-shards. No loose hardware. Not even a decent knife. I reached for his neck on reflex, fingers finding the slots just underneath his ears, and came up empty there too. No datashard, nothing. I clicked my tongue, already straightening up, already writing the whole thing off as a wash— And then I stopped as the thought hit me, like a key turning in a lock.

'The smoke…!' I crouched back down, reached out, and pressed the Scav's eyelids open with two fingers. The irises that stared back at me weren't biological, as was usual in Neo Avalis. The telltale ring of a heat-sensitive optical array, however, was. It sat embedded in each socket—a faint, residual amber glow still clinging to the lenses even in death, the kind of passive retention you got from cheaper thermal units that didn't have a proper shutdown cycle.

The housing was scratched and the calibration had probably drifted years ago, but the units themselves looked very much intact.

'Thank fuck I didn't headshot the guy…' I took a closer look and almost immediately recognized the make, much to my own surprise.

'ThermoSight TS-9s, huh? They already existed this far in the past…?' They were low-end, limited range, and the kind of gear that turned up in salvage markets and back-alley augmentation shops rather than corpo catalogues back in the game. One of the earliest "upgrades" you could spring for, if you were going for a stealth-heavy playthrough using smokes and darkness as your playstyle.

The important part with them was, of course, that thermal was thermal—even a budget implementation cut straight through smoke, darkness, and most soft obstructions without breaking a sweat. That was how the Scavs had acquired their initial targets through the haze—namely, Kaito and Higgins on their initial attempt to breach the room. I glanced up briefly.

The sounds of rummaging and the occasional scrape of furniture being shoved aside told me the rest of the crew was still working the room, each of them doing their own version of the same calculation I was running.' Good… That buys me some time.' I pulled out my Raz, flipped it to a comfortable grip, and got to work. Somewhere in the back of my head, a small, detached part of me noted with something approaching smug satisfaction that the gore wasn't a problem.

No flinching, no hesitation, no stomach trying to stage a revolt at the prospect of what I was about to do to a dead man's eye sockets. Just a task with steps, and hands steady enough to execute them. I'd add it to the running list of things to hate myself for later. Right now, however, it was strictly an asset.

Now, [First-Aid] didn't exactly cover ocular extraction as a standard module—the relevant information was tangential at best, lifted from sections on eye trauma, emergency treatment protocols, and the kind of improvised field surgery that showed up in worst-case scenario guidelines. But the anatomy was there if I looked for it, and the principle wasn't complicated.' Just remove the eyes. Not that hard in theory, right…?'

I followed the housing's natural seating to the best of my ability, rather than trying to force anything. The optic nerve and the surrounding connective tissue were likely the most problematic variables—rush it and you risked cracking the lens housing or compromising the interface ports, which would tank the resale value instantly, or straight up trash the piece. I worked slowly, jaw set, keeping my breathing even.

The first one came free with a faint, wet resistance after around a minute, which I filed firmly under " things I was not going to think too hard about" and moved on. The second followed around half a minute later, cleaner than the first now that I had a feel for the geometry. I held both units up briefly, turning them in the low light to check for cracks or obvious damage to the port housings—somewhat clean.

Scratched to hell on the exterior casing, but the lenses were seemingly intact and the interface contacts looked functional.

'Fuck knows if they actually are…' I wrapped them carefully in a strip of cloth torn from the least destroyed section of the Scav's jacket and tucked the bundle into the most padded and protected corner of my DuraPack. They were going to be my payout for this gig. The TS-9s weren't exactly high-spec, instead sitting firmly in the budget tier of thermal augmentation, the kind of unit that got installed when someone couldn't afford anything better and needed something over nothing.

But specialized moved differently than generic on the market. Primary or secondary. Thermal capability commanded a premium regardless of grade, because the use cases were specific enough that demand stayed consistent. A halfway decent Ripperdoc or augmentation reseller would know exactly what these were worth. Probably slightly more than my cut of the gig, if I found the right buyer. Likely quite a bit more, if I found the right buyer and knew how to [Negotiate].

I stood up, rolled my shoulder to settle the DuraPack back into place, and turned away from what was left of the Scav without looking at it again.

"I'll go check the Scavs in the other room," I announced, already moving toward the door.

"Let me come with you." Takeda's voice followed me out.

"Better than sitting around doing nothing but bleeding like a stuck blank..." I paused just past the threshold, running the options quickly. Having him at my back wasn't a bad thing under normal circumstances, but the storage room at the end of the hall was a different calculation. Whatever was in there, I wanted a first look without an audience, if possible.

"Actually," I said, turning back just enough to catch him, "I want to check that room at the end of the hallway as well. We can split up, cover things quicker to get you to that Ripper. You go ahead and start on the Scavs in the first room—I'll catch up after a quick look." A short grunt came back at me. Acknowledgement, maybe mild disagreement, impossible to tell the difference with Takeda. Either way, he didn't argue, which was good enough for me.

I turned and headed down the corridor toward the storage room, the one I'd clocked during my Cyberspace scout earlier and quietly flagged for exactly this moment. The storage room was exactly the kind of disaster I'd expected—a dense, unstable mountain of accumulated junk that the Scavs had apparently been using as both overflow storage and a general dumping ground for anything they couldn't be bothered to deal with.

Old clothing in various states of decomposition, tangled into broken chair legs and splintered cabinet doors stripped out of the building's other empty rooms. What might have been a mattress at some point in its life, compressed down to a sad, stained slab under the weight of everything piled on top of it. I dug in without ceremony, working from the top down, moving things aside just enough to open a path without fully committing to a proper search.

I didn't have the time for that and I didn't need to—[Spectral Scanner] had already done the work in Cyberspace, and I had a rough enough sense of where the datashard had been sitting to aim for it without turning the whole pile inside out. It took maybe two minutes of rummaging before my fingers closed around it. Small, standard form factor, no visible labelling on the casing.

I pocketed it without stopping to look at it properly and did a fast, cursory sweep of the rest of the pile—eyes more than hands, just enough to confirm I wasn't walking past something obvious. Nothing else worth the detour. I straightened up, gave the room one last glance, and walked out. The story, should anyone ask, was simple: Last room had been empty. Random trash, not worth the time.

Easy enough to sell, given that the alternative was admitting I'd gone in there specifically because I'd clocked a datashard during a solo Cyberspace scout I hadn't mentioned to the crew. The living room hit me with noise the moment I stepped back in—the television still going at full volume, blaring out what appeared to be the single worst film currently in circulation anywhere in Neo Avalis.

The dialogue alone was genuinely painful, delivered with the kind of conviction that suggested the actors had also never seen a script before in their fucking lives. Gabe would've been absolutely riveted by it, no doubt. Probably would've watched the whole thing with a snack and defended it afterward with complete sincerity, the absolute blank.' Hope you'll get better soon, Gabe…' Takeda was already working the bodies on his side of the room.

I crossed to mine and got started, and we fell into the same rhythm without discussing it—no real accounting for who was technically owed what, just two people moving efficiently through a room full of dead Scavs and hoping the collective haul made the effort worthwhile. It mostly didn't. Pockets turned out light, gear was either broken or too low-grade to bother with, and the few items worth a second look didn't survive closer inspection.

I was already mentally writing the whole thing off when I reached the last body on my side. One of mine—Scav I'd put down, already half-forgotten in the general accounting of the fight. And floating roughly six inches above his chest, completely unbothered by gravity and utterly indifferent to the laws of physics, was a datashard. I stared at it for a half-second, genuinely caught off guard.' Another System drop—!'

The thought hit with a spike of something close to delight, immediately wrestled back down before it could show on my face. It had been long enough since the last one that I'd quietly stopped expecting them, the possibility drifting to the back of my mind somewhere behind more immediate concerns. I palmed it smoothly as I crouched over the body, folding the motion into the natural flow of looting, and had it in my pocket before I'd consciously finished deciding to take it.

Then I kept going, fleecing the corpse for anything else worth noting, expression forcibly neutral to not show the sheer delight I felt at the absolute haul I was pulling from this gig.

By the time we finished, the combined haul from the room came to 178 Credits across a handful of cred-chits, four knives of deeply questionable manufacture that would probably fetch something at the right market stall if I didn't look too closely at the welds, and two datashards that Takeda set aside without comment—flagged for Higgins, almost certainly gig-related, which meant they were of precisely zero personal interest to me.

The others were wrapping up around the same time, the sounds of rummaging tapering off into the quiet of a room that had been thoroughly picked over. We regrouped near the door without much ceremony, Higgins and Reina moving to the front of the formation to clear the hallway, freeing Takeda and Kaito from having to push through on injuries that had already asked enough of them today. The apartment door swung open. The hallway beyond was empty and still. It was high time to visit the Ripper…